Strawman

Three days ago, I received an Email from a friend of mine Brendon Ledgerwood. I had gotten a lot of Emails from him, but nothing quite like this. He told me about a nightmare he had, rather than tell you I’ll just paste in the email.

“Hey Ash. i need to talk to someone, i think i’m going crazy. i had a nightmare last night that i don’t understand. i don’t know where to start, I can’t remember how it started, it just dosent make sense. It started out with me at some huge house, I remember there was a line of people, it was weird cause in the front row there were chickens, in the second row there were people crouching, in the third there were people standing up, in the fourth row and then on people got taller and taller, and i was in a tank fireing eggs at them. The next thing i remember is me with my brothers I can’t remember what we were doing all i remember is that i saw a flight of stairs, thinking that i would be playing a joke on them i sliped away up the stairs. When i got to the top of the stairs there was a hallway, the hallway was surreal with architecture you only see in Tim Burton movies. I entered the room i saw there was a wall with stairs leading up it. The stairs coverd the entire wall all the way across. At the top there was a five foot tall gap in the wall, i climbed the stairs to the five foot gap, when I got to it i fell throu to a room on the other side. The room was dark and unfinished, insulation on the floor, ratty half-assed wallpaper job. I noted something scratched into a piece of wallpaper, “FORGIVE THY SINS”. In the room there yet another door, i entered the room, it was huge, the room was huge. I only notice this now, but the room was light, it was the kinda light you see just before dark, yet there were no light fixtures or windows. And then, it’s as if though my brain flicked on the nightmare button and I felt the need to get out of there… but there was no door, I sat there pulling out the insulation and busting the drywall when I looked behind me. Behind me were cardboard cutouts of my family, they were perfect. you know how in dreams when you see a close friend or family member they never really look like them, you just perceive them as the person in question. these weren’t like that, they were perfect. my mom, my dad, my sister, and my two brothers, I picked up my mom’s cutout. I wiped the face off, it scrubbed off like wet paint. i gazed at it for a moment and then i shifted it out of my view only to notice a very small door at the end of the room, maybe 900 feet away from me, it wasn’t there before. I watched as it slowly opened, something started to crawl out. i frantickly started busting out the drywall when i looked back this thing was standing just watching me. It was a scarecrow, some sort of strawman. At that moment I flipped out, closing my eyes insure disbelief, only to open them and find he wasn’t there. then i heard a voice, I didn’t know if it was coming from the end of the room or right behind me, “Are you entertained?”. It repeated it over and over again, “Are you entertained?”, until i knew it was right behind me, i could hear it, right next to my ear. “Are you entertained?”. And then I woke upsbg  dngbbbbbbb hjhjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjb vb hbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbdsjjgjggggggggjfjghf”

On the first day I thought the Email was fake, it looked like something he would do, but by the second day, I knew something was wrong, something was off. By that time he would be gloating about it, but he wasn’t. So I sent him a reply email saying:

“Ha ha, very funny, just so you know I wasn’t scared at all.

P.S. Work on your grammar”

I got a reply from him the next day simply reading:

“strawman”

Still thinking this was a joke I went to his house. I knocked on his door…. Nothing happened, I knocked again, still nothing, and his curtains were closed so I couldn’t pear inside. After an hour I called the police, they arrived and busted down the door after 30 minutes of pointless knocking. As the door fell to the floor, we noticed a man just turning the corner into the next room. We ran after him, as rounded the corner he wasn’t there anymore, as the cops continued to search the house my attention was turned to a room. In the six years I had been coming to his house I had never noticed this room, it looked half finished with a laptop sitting in the middle of the floor, so I entered. The door vanished; I’m using the laptop to write this. I’ve been locked in here for hours, I don’t know how many cause my watch stopped at 12:00. I would go in to more detail but a small door just appeared at the end of the room.