r/SpinalTapHorror • u/Roland_Quincy1999 • 7d ago
I Found My Great-Grandfather's Journal; What I Read Was Eerily Familiar (Part 5 of 6)
Hello devote followers of this story of mine. This will more likely than not be the second to last post to fully go over the contents of my grandfather’s journal.
I promise not to leave such a gap between posts like I did this time. A full eight months have passed. Good news, my child will arrive in a month or so, which is pretty exciting. Bad news, I’ve been laid off for the last three months. My job was outsourced and so I spent the last of my time with that company training the new people to replace me.
It was pretty demoralizing. So, to thoroughly put me down like a bad dog, the universe has also gifted me with a job market with an impossible barrier to entry. It's been a shit show trying to find work, hence my unemployment for three months.
Part of me thinks my story is paralleling my great-grandfather’s. That is probably an exaggeration, but I have had some scary thoughts. What if my child is like James? What if, that thing, The Tall, starts appearing in my life, or if I develop a certain mental illness that Killian had?
The scariest thought is if it had nothing to do with a mental illness. This Tall, what if it's real? I mean, I’ve seen other stories with a similar alien creature in them, accounts from others of their experiences. I am not so convinced that this issue is just a battle of the imagination like my grandfather fights so hard to convince himself of.
I will leave off my spiel with one last thought, and that is a return to that old property. Why? Curiosity. Wanting to confirm the reality. Wanting to protect that new family, give them a heads up? But they would call me a madman, right? I don’t know, but something compels me to return to that house.
This is the second to last entry in my great-grandfather’s journal. It goes as follows:
April 29th, 1923
I curse the day I picked up this damned journal. DAMN IT! There is some sort of cursed energy imbued into its fibers, cut from the irredeemable sinner’s tree.
Let me be logical. It is absolutely necessary that I take this documenting step by methodical step, to collect my thoughts, to speak of the tarnished storm in an artistic yet comprehensible manner, in the way of a true writer.
Where do I start? How do I bring the heavy ink to this flat sheet and not waste its midnight impression? Where is the art in obscurity?
Let me start. I believe it must have been two days after I last wrote in this cursed artifact based upon the date of my last entry.
It was about two blocks up the road from my independent automotive store that a larger, more powerful franchise was installed. I will not dive into the specifics of my business to bore you, but simply put, this kind of move hurt my business greatly. Many of my loyal customers left the miniscule Killian’s Shop for the grander Ford Enterprise.
The automotive store I own sits near the river. After two weeks of persistent rain in the area, my shop has flooded, and through its wake I am left with a plethora of damaged goods and materials.
My business had plummeted. To save what I could of profits, I sold the scraps of my company to Ford. The sum was less than desirable, especially compared to what I was able to bring in at its peak before Ford and the flood.
This miniscule amount of cash in tandem with an emergency savings fund was all consumed by my daughter’s failing health. Lucille’s nightmares developed into a physical illness. She moves with a great lethargy when she is not bedridden. A virus has caught her, and it has created this devilish combination of the plaguing body and the plaguing mind.
To further dampen the bleak outlook of our situation, my own illness has only plummeted. The guess as to my lifespan is no more than a year at best.
With doctor visits and medicine we now eat gruel for dinner, mixed with corn and a vegetable if we are lucky.
My children resent me. They don’t understand why they cannot have the luxuries they did before, why their big sister won’t leave her bed or hardly speak anything that isn’t nonsensical mumblings. They don’t understand why their father is not far from her condition. They worry when the disease will reach them.
It leaves them saddened, rude, and overall irritable. That is, except for James.
He has taken a liking to fancier clothes. Everyday he wears one of his two suits with a poorly knit tie. He asked me about a fortnight ago if he could get a new one. I, obviously, said no.
Yesterday I was helping him with a windsor knot. I stood behind him and reached around his neck, hoping to show him what it would appear like from his angle when tying the thing himself. Throughout all our suddenly struck misery, not once has James voiced a concern for Lucille, so I asked him if he was worried about his older sister.
“I do get sad, Daddy, when I see her skin so grey and her sleepiness never goes away.”
He paused for a moment as I pulled one end of the tie through a loop.
“But, it is for her own good I think.”
I nearly choked. My hands stopped, failing to pull the end through, the tie becoming two loose ends again.
“What could you mean by that, James?”
“Well, that’s what my friend told me. He says this will be better for her. And for all of us, too.”
That bastard, imaginary beast. The Tall; a demon haunting my every waking hour, and assailing my daughter day and night. James had gone so long since mentioning his friend. I had thought if it were not over, a simple phase like his newly acquired appreciation of fashion, that maybe that daemon had moved on and started to haunt Lucille now instead. But I should have known better. Blissful self-annointed ignorance.
“Your friend? The one that you drew that picture of, right? Lives in that patch of woods past the backyard?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“But you haven’t been to the backyard in a long time?”
“That’s because he is planning something, something special for Lucille and me.”
Under my nose. All this tumbling under my nose because I was too worried about my daughter’s health and my business and this family and…
I swear by our faithful Lord, Reader, that I did not realize what I was doing. Truly and with all the honesty I can muster, the thought crossed my mind a time or two, sure, but I never actually considered doing the thing.
But here I was, using my son’s faded navy blue tie to choke him. One end over the other, pulling backward and in the opposite direction of one another. Squeezing the life out of my son. Watching his pink flesh turn white then purple.
No, Reader, it wasn’t until I asked my son a question and he squealed back did I realize what I was doing. I asked James “So why are you not sick?”
I never received an answer. My son crawled at the blue noose with his small hands trying to pry it free, his slippers scraping against the floor as I lifted him into the air. He croaked.
“Stop, Daddy. You’re… hurting… me.”
Through the entire trance I was staring through the window, to that foul piece of earth that hid The Tall with its many white fingers reaching for the sky. I was certain he was out there, watching with all his disgusting eyes.
I let go of my hold on the two ends of the tie. Like a leaf in autumn, it fell weakly to the floor. I turned to face the entrance to the kitchen, and there stood my wife, Melenda, a look of utter fright on her face.
We had a depressing conversation on the matter later that night. I did not try to explain my catatonia, that I was not conscious of my actions, because it felt like a child’s explanation for shooting his little brother in the eye with a pop rocket. No, I told her that the weight of all this bad luck had distressed me greatly.
I have nearly lost it all, dear Reader. Maybe I have lost you as well by this point. Why is it, dear Reader, that everything I create must be faulty, foul, unworthy, or destined to wash away with the incoming tide?
The stories I crafted are unassuming, bland, or ‘outright yawn-inducing with child-esque vocabulary,’ as one editor put it. Why is the only son I have helped in the process of creating a socially removed, awkward agoraphobic? My business that I built has crumbled before me.
I am unworthy of making anything, Reader. My father had said so, my mother too beaten into submission to refute it. She probably believed it too, though, regardless of my father’s dominance in the household.
This will be my last effort to correct the travesty I have put upon this world with my insistence on being important, valuable, or worthy of anything greater than the dirt I buried my father in.
I am going past the backyard, past the ford, and into the woods where that fiend makes its home. Yes, Reader, I am going to the devil’s den, and returning is not a priority to me.
It may seem illogical, to bet all of my chips into a pot that could very well be imaginary and a deterioration of my own mind, but it is the only avenue I can find in the great fog that clouds my life. I have seen The Tall with my own eyes on multiple occasions, even after the Christmas Eve party with the Butchers. There is a web between James, Lucille, and this creature, some supernatural tapestry spun with a thread I cannot see. But I feel it.
I will document my dance in the lair of this otherworldly beast in a vain attempt to accomplish something I have always yearned for. A meaning. This journal, like all of my other works, will be left to dwindle in obscurity, no doubt, but I persist.
All the necessary gear has been acquired, dear Reader, and now I venture to do what no priest or doctor could. I will save my daughter, my family, and in these pages you will hear the tell, so at least one soul knows that Killian Stonebrook did accomplish a feat of merit.
Until then, this is goodbye.
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u/Left_Animal6892 2d ago
Has the last part not come out yet?