Club Foot, Big Mansion

A series of posts on /x/ around 0200GMT, 30/4/11:

"Okay, the story I'm going to tell you happened to me this year in March, the night before my birthday. I can't give any more details than that, because this is a true story, and I am extremely worried. Please tell me what I should do. I should explain: I was at home, like usual, up in my room drinking. I knew that I'd be drinking, so that morning I had only pretended to take my pills (prozac and diazepam). If I drink after taking my pills, I get drunk and pass out much easier. Without my medicine, I tend to get visual and sound hallucinations (hearing voices) that give me delusions. I can only identify which things I saw and heard, and which things I did that were irrational, when I'm medicated. I should make that clear."

"Alright, so by around 7pm I was already a bit wasted, getting ready to go out. I snuck out the back way of my house. My parents weren't letting me leave the house alone, since my psychiatrist said that although I hadn't been diagnosed with anything yet (still haven't been), it wasn't safe for me to be out alone, or to be drinking. But alcoholics find a way, don't they XD I headed down to the town square to meet up with a some friends, and we hit the pub. Anyway, after a couple of hours, we got chucked out, and a few hours after that, we'd been kicked out of another two pubs. That kind of gives you an idea of how fucked we were when my friends bailed out on me. I was left with a long walk home alone."

"Seeing as I was almost blackout-grade shitfaced at that point, I wasn't frightened to be walking back into town that late at night. It's a smallish rural town in D...., England, the type where everyone's friends (and possibly relations). Halfway home, I was passing one of the pubs I got chucked out of earlier, and I decided to pop back in for one last drink. I went into the beer garden, which was empty, apart from one guy standing by the fence with a beer and a cig in his hand. He made a gesture meaning that he wanted me to come over, and when I did, he said something like, 'You thirsty, sweetheart?' Obviously, I was, and he let me take a couple gulps of his drink, I think it was Guinness. He was very short, I mean, not a dwarf, but a bit shorter than me and I'm only 5"2. Despite that, I remember thinking he was alright looking, cute, posh kind of face, blonde or brown hair, and an expensive looking shirt, black coat, and a nice tie. He was a fair bit older than me, but not too old, about 27 at the most. I guess we started talking, but I can't remember what about, and he was buying me drinks whenever I wanted. I came with him to and from the bar and never let my glass out of sight, so I absolutely know he never put anything in the drink. Remember that.

I noticed he had long fingers. Actually, that's the only solid, definite fact I remembered about him: his fingers were disproportionately long, considering his height, but even if he was six foot tall his fingers would have looked just a tiny bit wrong. The palms were narrow and normal sized, too, and I told him something like, "Your hand looks like a lizard foot!" I guess because I mentioned feet, he told me that he had a club foot. I remember him limping, so I guess it was true, but I don't remember seeing the actual foot."

"He persuaded me to take him back to my house, presumably for sex, but what he actually said was that he wanted to 'see my house'. That's not as weird as it sounds; in my town, there are only two big houses, my house and the house next door. The local kids call our house the Little Mansion, and the house next door the Big Mansion, which has been empty for about 6 years now. Our house isn't really a mansion, it's just bigger than the local council houses, but the house next door genuinely could be called a mansion. Not a manor house or anything, but it's still huge, and Georgian-looking, painted duck egg blue. Builders were (and still are) working on the patch of land that would otherwise have separated the the two houses, redoing the border of the property, since it had recently come up for sale. Since the builders had destroyed the hedge, it was now possible for the first time to cross the building site and see, and even enter, the Big Mansion's garden. I'd never been over there before."

"Club Foot and me were almost at the driveway leading to my house. Looking down it, though, I noticed the lights still on in my house in the distance. There was no way I could bring a guy home and walk him straight past my parents, who were no doubt already hugely pissed off by that point. I spose he'd figured this out for himself, and he said, "Did you know there's a pool next door?" I was surprised by this, because where I live it's extremely uncommon to have a swimming pool in your garden, but after living next door to one for 8 years, I was only just finding out about it. So, in classic horror movie style, we stumbled across the building site, across the Big Mansion lawn, over to their pool, which was surrounded on three sides by a high concrete wall."

"The pool was full, but luckily I decided to check it was clean by the light of my mobile phone. It was covered in a thick green scum, no skinny dipping for me. We both slumped down by the wall, and he got out a can of beer. He also got out some tiny white pills which he said were ritalin, and he took what I thought was a lot of them, like seven or eight. I had two. Then he started texting someone, and said he was arranging someone to come and meet us. I suppose at the time I assumed he was calling a dealer for something, so I didn't ask any questions. Looking back, there's no way that could have been the case, not in a small town like mine, but when I was in Florida and London I could call dealers so I spose I had just got confused. Things started to get too sharp to be in focus and surreal, kind of cloudy, and I remember thinking to myself, 'I I've blacked out, I'm going to black this out, not a memory in my head in the morning...'"

"I had lost all sense of time, or even the order of time. I can't tell you for sure that this is the order that the events that follow happened in (or if they even DID happen), but I think what I have here is right. I saw a man walking across the lawn towards us, and the security floodlight switched on behind him, making him like a silhouette. He had his arms raised, like he was showing us

he was unarmed, like in a movie. Club Foot was telling me that this man was a friend, and 'he discussed it with us and he loves the idea', whatever the 'idea' was. When he reached us,

there was possibly a brief conversation I didn't hear, and Club Foot told me to give him a cigarette, which I did. He took a loose scalpel blade from somewhere and split open the cig, and put something inside it (weed, I spose, but the way he sprinkled it made me think it was a powder), then somehow sealed it up again, maybe with a rizla. I remember walking sideways around the perimeter of the house, laughing, with my cheek, breasts and palms pressed against the wall. (I was still wearing my bra but my shirt was around my elbows.) I was erasing a chalk line that Club Foot was drawing on the wall as he walked in front of me, singing song in like german or dutch maybe, and the other man was following behind me, walking half-upright like a chimp or a caveman, smoking the cigarette Club Foot had made. I figured it was good and I asked for a toke but Club Foot said I definitely couldn't have any of it." "The only light now was from the floodlight, and I remember it was light three times, so I suppose we must have circled the house three times as well. The chalk was red or maybe orange in the light. On I guess the third time round, he gently pulled me away from the wall so I wasn't damaging the line, and he put the other man's hands in my hands, so I could lead him around. I could barely see the man at all, but I remember feeling that he was gorgeous, and my age, if not younger, and I was happy to lead him. I think I thought we were dancing."

"Then, more things happen, but I can't describe them, in my head they're like random images from a dream. I can distinctly remember Club Foot handing me some kind of tool with a handle. It might have been a knife, as I held it in my fist, but I don't think it had a blade. Maybe it was a switchblade or something, but I don't know as I've never seen one. He told me to 'stab the window', and I did. It was, I think, the window in the living room of the Big Mansion, and it broke, making a hole about the size of my head. Then, there's a long blank bit of memory where it seems like I was blindfolded, or had my eyes closed, but there's a feeling of movement. My next memory is of standing in the carpeted front hall of the house, and trying one of the doorhandles, and finding that the door is locked. Footsteps going up the stairs, I'm following excitedly, calling out the name of Club Foot Man which I've now forgotten. At the top of the stairs, I see them turning a corner at the end of the landing. I had the knife type thing, or whatever it was, in my hand, but in my next memory it's gone. I hear someone breathing heavily, or maybe just whispering quitely at someone, the pipes in the house tapping, and the creak of mine and Club Foot's limping steps. Where had the other man gone? I think I asked Club Foot that aloud, but I'm not sure. He was pressing me up against a metal chainlink fence- the one that's around the building site, we were now outside again- and I think maybe he was kissing me, or licking my face with his cold tongue. His saliva tasted rusty, like brass and salt, and thick."

"Then I was alone, trudging exhaustedly up the back stairs of my house to my room. I woke up fully clothed, and on top of my covers. Luckily, I hadn't puked in my sleep. My cheek, hands and chest were almost black with dirt and pinky-red chalk, and the black boots I'd been wearing were caked with mud and a sticky brownish-orange substance I couldn't identify."

"I dumped them in the bath and sprayed them with the shower, the water ran red for a bit, then I got in the shower myself and washed. I didn't feel hungover, just under-medicated. I noticed half moon shaped marks on my lower arms, probably marks from fingernails, wide scratches on my chest above my boobs and on my wrist. There was a bad taste in my mouth and one of my incisors felt different shaped... I could remember a man. Suddenly I was terrified that I'd been raped. But I wasn't in any pain, I wasn't bruised, and there was no... residue, if you know what I mean, so I quickly relaxed again and put it out of my mind. Then I heard my mother screaming for me to come downstairs, and I spent the rest of my birthday in tears, getting yelled at, and promising never to go out drinking ever again."

"Over the next couple of weeks, I wasn't allowed out of the house at all, not even into the garden for fear of what I might get up to. I had no idea what it was my family thought I was going to do that was all that terrible, apart from drinking. Maybe they thought I was also shoplifting or harassing people, something like that. So I stayed inside and studied for my exams. Then the weather suddenly changed and it got unseasonably hot for a British April, it was actually hotter here than it was in Rome. My parents gave into my begging and let me go outside to sunbathe while I worked. From our front garden, I can see across into the Big Mansion's garden, but my view of the ground floor is blocked by the walls of the swimming pool. I was looking over in that direction, and thinking about the weird night I had, the night the day before my birthday, specifically Club Foot Man and his long skinny fingers, which was the only definite thing I could remember of him. As time had passed, I'd come to remember brief images of the night, but still hardly anything at all."

"As I said, I was sunbathing outside, while revising biology. Then I saw my parents in the car, driving down the driveway and off into town. I spose they'd forgotten that I was outside, not locked in the house like they probably intended. I was really excited, suddenly having freedom for at least a little while, but I didn't know what to do with it. I just started wandering, at first onto the building site, and then into the Big Mansion's garden. I walked around one of the concrete walls and into the swimming pool area, where I messed around a bit, lazily tossing stones into the murky green water. I was sitting with my back to the wall, and I realised that this was exactly where I'd sat with Club Foot a couple of weeks earlier."

"The mark where we put down the beer can was still there, in the dust. I thought of him, and for the first time also remembered the other man who was there. I wondered if we'd had sex that night. In a dreamlike state, as I often am when I've taken my medication, I got up, and walked around the pool, dragging my feet. I remembered dragging my body along the wall of the house, and before I knew it I was halfway across the lawn, walking towards the big empty house."

"I tried the back door, shaking the doorhandle, but it was locked. I heard a clinking sound, like metal on tile. Looking through the letterbox, I could see the key that was in the lock now lying on the floor inside. Wasn't it strange that it had been locked from the inside? Wait... wasn't I inside? And sure enough, I had a memory, standing in the hall with a smile on my face, calling a name I couldn't remember, holding a hard object in my hand. I looked again through the letterbox, kneeling down so I could see more of the hall, to the part with carpeting. There were a series of marks on the floor, footprints, the ones on the right normal but the left feet dragged, the person was limping. They were in mud or some other oily, sticky looking substance, and brownish. I thought, the soil round here is kind of a reddish brown."

"I walked anticlockwise around the house, following the semi faded chalk line that Club Foot had made, trying all the doors, and they were all locked. The wind was starting to get a little cold, and I mentally checked whether I'd had my medicine, but I had, so there was no reason for me to be feeling like I felt. I came across the window I had broken, and it was different from how I remembered it. The hole was bigger, almost the whole windowpane gone, and on the ground in front of the window were pieces of broken glass, spotted with browny-orange stuff, the same stuff which had seemingly dried running down the wall from the window. I touched it, and it flaked off on my finger, leaving behind a red stain on the wall. Now there was a cold feeling just below my lungs. The glass crunched under my boots as I carefully leaned my head through the window and looked to the right. The door to the room was open. I was halfway back through the window, indending to knock the rest of the glass out so I could climb through safely, when I noticed something else. The footprints I'd seen in the hall ended at the entrance to the room, and now I saw a mark on the door. I rummaged in my bag for my glasses, and put them on. It wasn't a mark, it was a print, in the rusty substance I'm starting to fear is blood. The dripping print of a hand. A hand with very long, and very narrow fingers."

"I twisted my ankle in the sprint back to my house, upstairs, to my bedroom where it's safer. I haven't had a single drink since then, and I've been meditating, and I just can't remember what I did that night, in that house. I can't find the men I was with. Nobody knows who they are, in this town where everyone knows everyone, and nobody's heard of anyone who knows a man with a club foot. I know that everything I've forgotten is in the house, upstairs, around the corner. I could even get a whole set of keys from the estate agent, if I wanted, and go in and see for myself. If only I wasn't so deeply afraid of what I'd find there."

What appears to be a self-bump, around 0400GMT

"I don't know what to do. I know this all sounds like a bad story, and it is. But it's all completely true. I need help, please. I need to know how I can escape from this."

The same day, around 0700GMT

"Im going back to look before people wake up. gotta dump bottles too lol. will take pictures if I cna find USB for my phone."

"on bildng site nw"

"doors stll loccked goin in window"

"fuck fckin my heads bleedin fuck@"

"think theres glass in my head cant get back out"

"print's gone, looks like its bin scrubbed with something still a mark on the door. gotta get out"

"wtf theres no key in the fuckin hall, footprints been scrubbed as wel"

"heard something upstairs. going up to see. stairs scrubbed (see photos in a min)"

"can't use camera anymore phone alsosmt out of battery, will keep you guys updated. wish me luck lol"

"there's a mark on the wall at the end of the hall. another handprint, looks fresh"

"all doors locked cept end of the hall, trying it now."

"help me"

"help me"

"HELP ME 50.713004,-3.054801 HELP ME"

0758GMT

"Help her."

"Come and help her."

"We need one more."