PART TWO: JUNE OF 1994

CHAPTER SEVEN:

LIMA: THE FIRST PARALLEL

These references below are a series of journal entries drawn from Lima: An Unpublished Town Historical Journey by, a Mr. Matt Rutherford. These entries were found in the archives of the Lima Public Library: Shawnee Main Branch. An accompanying layer of manuscripts was also found, the work within referring back to itself as Lima: Hell's Back Door Re-Opened.

A number of accompanying Xeroxed manuscripts from a similar working title were also found, written by a Mr. Mike Hanlon. These are the findings.

February 3rd, 2018

Can an entire city be haunted?

Not just like in a scary movie, but really haunted. Every building seeping with it, the ice cream trucks, the park on Meyer Road, the Libraries. Everything. Can something like this really happen twice?

Looking through the notes of a man that I myself have not come to know, I've discovered similarities in his manuscripts and journals. A trip to Derry, ME for answers in my adulthood that I simply could not fathom whilst still trapped in Lima. The words in italics here are his, and his alone:

"Haunting: 'Persistently recurring to the mind; difficult to forget' Ditto Funk and Friend.

To Haunt: 'To appear or recur often, especially as a ghost.' But – and listen! – 'A place often visited': resort, den, hangout…

And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of haunt as a noun, and it's the one that really scares me: 'A feeding place for animals.' "

The bold in the italics is of course my own highlights within Hanlon's original manuscripts. But something there struck a chord… "A feeding place for animals." Like the werewolves and bats that chased us so long ago now? Like the animals that ate away noses and ears and limbs from the bodies of the children that have so far been found? Animals.

"What's feeding in Derry? What's feeding on Derry?"

That's a good question Mr. Hanlon, because if I had my wits about me…I'd be asking the same exact thing here in this little town of Lima. And why won't whatever this thing is…why won't it ever be sated? Why did it come? It's interesting how scared I've grown to become in my middle-age. I'm barely thirty-five and can already lose count of the gray hairs lacing my scalp and chin stubble, my mustache should I choose to grow it out. I'm always scared nowadays it seems, and I can't help but wonder if people can tell, if they've noticed? Perhaps not, I've always been rather reserved I suppose. It's almost like I'm living in a dream, cataloging death like an undertaker, and running from things that have no business being here at all. It wasn't until the death of the Kilger boy on Rockateer Bridge that I realized the gravity of my situation…of Lima's situation.

It was like a dream, waking up and reading the Lima Chronicle, of having that feeling in my bones despite gaps in the news reports. The idea that the clown that killed Samantha Fabray twenty-five years ago…could possibly be back. My duties here in Lima, as an archivist at City Hall have led me to some interesting discoveries, and perhaps it was never Freddie Kilger's death that led me onto the path…I think this began some years ago, like a fire blazing deep within my bones.

Maybe it was The Turtle…it always seems to be the turtle.

Five years ago I began this archival journey. Scouring through the city archives, and spending weeks and months in between laborious hours at work drawing parallels to a small town in Maine, that now seems to shake my dreams. A small town called Derry. The internet is a wonderful place, and what I've learned, by perusing online archival databases, is that our fear, this place – is not alone, it is a deep seeded haunting that has simply relocated for means unknown. I spent hours in old books and databases cataloguing horrors and events that still haunt me in my sleep. Of things in Derry, Maine that have only seemed to triple their efforts here in Lima.

Of deaths and murders…. haunts and fears…clowns with rotting teeth, perhaps?

There is a part of me that can relate to Mike Hanlon's manuscripts, perhaps we have more in common than necessary – perhaps that isn't a coincidence at all. And it is with a heavy head that I have come to pause at a decision. A part of me wants to make these phone calls – a part of me realizes that it needs to be done. The turtle always being my voice of reason in the difficult times… Quinn Fabray, where she here, would urge me onto the phone, urge my fears to still. But can I hold that responsibility? Of reminding them all of something so foul, so dank, so haunting that it could kill them to learn the truth? Could the thing that killed Samantha Fabray on that cold wet afternoon of 1993 really be what killed Freddie Kilger at the bank of Rockateer Bridge?

Yes.

But I wait; I wait long days and weeks, as the death toll rises. A slow burn as it begins its feeding. I need to gain my bearings before those calls can be made. I need to build up my own resolve. It is with sleepless nights and a beating heart that I live my days now. In worry and in jolts, my cell phone resting in my palm, urging me everyday to make the first one. But God, will they even survive it? Kurt always seemed like the most emotionally burdened, maybe even Tina…Artie perhaps? Their lives will crumble and fall into a myriad of puzzle pieces once my voice pierces through them – relaying the haunting that has for so long plagued me. There is a death toll hanging over all of our heads – the reaper waits for us as we live our lives straddling the thin balance.

I think over and over that maybe I won't have to do it. Maybe I won't have to make the phone calls at all. Perhaps it was all simply coincidence.

Coincidence. That's a funny word.

But then there was Devon Sawyer, and the trail of blood to a clogged bathroom drain. Or Mia Wittier, who disappeared from the Middle School. Since then there have been over ten others. Ten. All between the ages of two and fourteen, all dead…but not all of them found. And it is with this knowledge that I can no longer wait, biding my time. It is with this, that I pull out my old address book, and stare into the keypad of my private cell phone, and begin typing out numbers onto the old keys, waiting for an absolution.

And here I am, writing this journal in order to make sense of my musings, my findings, my thoughts. All of the ambiguities of this haunting muddled together into something far from nonsensical.

And so, in between my calls and my dying time, I've begun to piece together a story. Because you can't not start a story anywhere else than from the beginning,

"To know what a place is, I really do believe one has to know what it was."

And that is where I began, with Mike Hanlon's records, and his beginning into the foray of a Derry town history. He began with the old timers – the men and women who've seen things. And as I read, I learned that things in Derry, had been bad for a very long time. 1906. 1879, 1851, 1958 all of these years having far too many things in common. A town that small having much too high a death rate – a cycle that eclipses itself anew every twenty-five to twenty-seven years or so…

A cycle that ended in 1985 for the townspeople of Derry…only to resurrect itself almost ten years later in Lima. A cycle that is only just beginning…

In 1993/1994 a staggering total of twenty-seven children within Shawnee Township had gone missing – and no one said a thing, as haunts unseen settled deep within the roots of our poisoned town. No one batted an eye as our group of thirteen waged war beneath the foundations…seeking out the root of evil that had consumed us. And thinking about all of this now, I really don't want to have to make these damn phone calls. They will all drop like flies at the truth – because the truth is a scary thing. Haunting within it's own twisted right.

And so here I sit, at my dusty old archival desk with twelve phone numbers in my hand, and a few pre-paid calling cards. And I wonder silently as I begin to press the buttons to a Mr. Abrams in St. Louis, Missouri…if we will even come back this time around?

Would we even survive?

And as my finger taps out onto the keys, I pray that he won't pick up. I pray that none of them answer. But as the line cuts on and I hear his voice for the first time in twenty-five years, I know that this is real.

I know that some if not all of us won't even make it back alive.

And please, God…

Please God, have mercy.