Fifth Post

'David quickly got concerned when he called her and received no answer. He phoned the police, and with what she already told them about Angel, a search began for her.

Apparently she had gone outside to have a private call with a relative early in the morning. The relative reported her cutting off abruptly during the middle of their conversation and hanging up.'

'The police had already tried to contact Angel, but they couldn't find any sign of him. Like, he had gone. Quit his job, gotten rid of his phone, stopped talking to all of his friends. Completely vanished.

David did whatever he could to help the police look for Franny. He went a bit beyond that, too, doing his own private investigating. He talked to everyone who knew Angel, looked through what remained of his things at his apartment. He struggled to find more than traces of evidence of the monster hiding behind Angel's perfect façade.

Despite his best efforts, he could find absolutely nothing about where Angel might have taken Franny; he wasn't even sure if she was still alive. Though as it turned out, he wouldn't have to wait for very long to find out.

A few days after Franny went missing, Angel sent David a private message telling him to go to a particular location where he claimed he was keeping her. The message said that if David didn't come alone, Franny would be killed.

David agreed immediately. The location wasn't too far. It was an abandoned warehouse nearby.

When he was close to getting there, David tipped off the police. Of course, they told him to wait for them and stay out of the warehouse, but David wouldn't listen.

He went inside alone, as Angel had requested. Angel let him into the warehouse. David said he looked totally nonchalant and greeted David like there was absolutely nothing wrong about the situation. He guided him to a small room deep within.

The room was dark and barely lit. It was somewhat bare, except for a tray of surgical equipment - visibly used surgical equipment, and a mattress with straps attached to it. The room was splattered with blood and… Other fluids. The way he described everything, the detail which he described it in, you could tell just from hearing it this part was all very real.

Franny was there, curled up against a wall. David called out to her. She didn't respond. David said she looked horrible, wearing nothing but rags. She was frighteningly emaciated.

After seeing the scene before him and it's obvious implications, David grabbed Angel by the throat, attacking him with a vengeance. Angel knocked him down with little effort and nonchalantly pulled out a gun on him. He did it all with almost complete detachment. He didn't even seem to mind that David tried to attack him.

Left helpless at Angel's mercy, David pleaded with Angel, asking him what he had to gain by hurting him and his family.

As he waved the gun around and talked, Angel said he always wanted to destroy a family. He insisted he was just doing it for fun. He made it clear he didn't have some complex hidden motive for David to figure out. It was as simple as that he didn't care; and he enjoyed it. David said he kept trying to look for some sign of humanity inside Angel. He found nothing. No shred of remorse or emotion at all. Angel was utterly cheerful and nonchalant, acting the same way he would if they were chatting at a bar over some beers, as they often used to do.

David knew the police were coming, so he thought all he had to do was stall until they found him. Angel started taunting him, asking if he would rather see Angel slowly kill his sister or whether he would prefer to take the gun and do it himself, fast. David played along and suffered through Angel's abuse as best he could.

Then Angel said he knew David had called the police. And just like that, he turned and shot Franny. When David tried to help her this guy just casually turned the gun on David and shot him too. Then he shot Franny again, and started laughing. He told David he actually would have spared her if he had obeyed him and come alone.

Minutes later, the police arrived, Angel was gone, and Franny was dead from blood loss, despite David's best efforts to help her. Apparently David had been more lucky because his gunshot wound wasn't nearly as fatal as the ones Franny suffered. David said later he suspected that was intentional.

'This whole thing traumatized David a lot. He and Franny survived so much together. They endured a whole abusive childhood with only each other to rely on, so they had been much closer than even most regular siblings. Losing her, on top of his niece like that, it really hurt him. It was worse that he had been unable to protect them, and he blamed himself for their deaths. That was what I thought ultimately turned him back to alcoholism later.

David said what Angel did never really left him. Angel had completely disappeared after that. Police tried and failed to track him, or find any clues to his whereabouts. David always claimed he had never really gone though, and he expected he was going to come back one day and finish what he started.'

'It wasn't long after he and his wife moved into the new home - (my home). Apparently David met up with Terry again and apologized to him for not believing him about Angel, and Terry offered to sell them the house as an opportunity for a fresh start. Tracy and him agreed, hoping it would help them distance themselves from David's experiences.'

At this point, Patrick described David's mental state during the first few months of moving into the house. It was here I brought up the room my neighbour had mentioned David became obsessed with.

'Yeah, David started visiting the room soon after they moved in,' Patrick said. 'The room was a product of his worsening delusions, a manifestation of his symptoms. He said something about the room not belonging to the rest of the house. It appeared, to him, like a disturbing replica of the room in his father's house he and his sister were frequently abused in.'

'There was a reason he kept going back into that room. He said the voices made him. Sometimes, he heard Franny's voice. Sometimes he said if he listened hard enough, he was convinced he would be able to figure out where to 'find her'. He knew she wasn't happy, or at peace; instead she was somewhere full of fear and pain and darkness. He said he thought he saw her in such a place sometimes. He also claimed to have relived the final moments before her death in the room countless times. Later he became convinced she was there because she was punishing him for failing to save her and her daughter from Angel's cruelty and then leaving her to suffer in such an awful place.

Of course, after a time, it was the alcohol that drew him back into the room, that and the sense of worthlessness and self hatred the voices from the room he claimed to hear instilled in him. Every time he came into the room, he said there was a half filled whiskey glass on the desk. It reappeared in front of him when he tried smashing or getting rid of it. Before long he was drinking from it instead. No matter how much he drank the whiskey glass was always full after he put it down.

'A perpetually refilling whiskey glass.' Patrick shook his head. 'It was like the most laughable excuse for an addiction I ever heard. But it was how David said his alcoholism returned, after nearly two decades of staying completely sober.'

It almost became like a ritualistic punishment to go in there, to remind himself of how he failed to save his sister and his niece, or to simply catch Angel and bring justice for the things he did. '

Patrick met my eyes. 'I suppose you have to be wondering what the hell what I told you about Angel has to do with the fire, and the murders. What all of this adds up to.'

'It did cross my mind,' I admitted.

Patrick proceeded to explain David's account of what happened that night, which David told him and a few others, including the police, before he confessed to his guilt.

'Tracy was planning on leaving with David's child, since his alcoholism had gotten worse, and he became violent with her on more than one occasion. She was afraid he might hurt their kid if she didn't do something.

Somehow, David found out about it. He says the voices in the room told him. I suspect he overheard one of her conversations over the phone with the relative she was planning on staying with, or something close to that.'

'When David came out of the room, he emptied the contents of a couple bottles of whiskey over the floor of the hallway and through each of the rooms upstairs. When Tracy came out of the bathroom and asked what hell he was doing, he confronted her about her plans. They got into a fight. A really bad fight, possibly the worst one they ever had. David came very close to starting that fire. He had a lighter in one hand at one point, he was poised to throw it. But Tracy told him she never believed he would do it.

And according to him, David didn't. He couldn't throw a match on the floor, couldn't bring himself to start that fire. He put the lighter down carefully, calming down and really realizing what he was about to do. Shortly after this he broke down completely, telling Tracy about the room, and how it had been driving him crazy, how he thought there was something alive in there that found pleasure in tormenting him. They went back to the bedroom together and talked for a long while. David agreed to get help, and go to rehab, as long as Tracy agreed not to take their kid away from him. David said he felt like a big weight had been lifted off his shoulders when he finally opened up to her. It wasn't so much her believing him - or at least believing what he thought he experienced - as him no longer being alone to face the demons he was struggling with, real or imagined.'

I asked him who had killed David's wife and child if David claimed he was innocent.

'Well, David says it was Angel who did it, Patrick told me. 'This is where his story gets even more crazy. He says Angel walked out of the wall, kind of emerging from it, his skin rippling and tightening on his face as he did. This took place just as Tracy was about to make a call about getting David help for his alcohol problems.

He seemed very disappointed. Said something about David having 'outlived his value, without living up to his potential.'

Angel was closer to Tracy, and he hit her right in front of David, hard enough to knock her out. Then he turned back to look at David, almost as if curious to how he would react.

David didn't hesitate. For the second time, he attacked Angel, smashing the whiskey glass against his face. They got into a fight. It didn't last long. David said he could hurt Angel, but he didn't show any sign of feeling pain. Not when David dug his fingers deep into one of Angel's eyes, or when he was sure he broke three of Angel's fingers. Pretty quickly, Angel managed to get a knife out with his uninjured hand and stabbed David with it. That ended the fight, Angel knocking David back onto the floor. David refused to give up, yelling at him, saying he wouldn't let Angel hurt his family. Angel started laughing uncontrollably, maniacally, like he just heard the funniest thing in the world.

Then David said he just kind of raised his hands, and the fire lit up around him, rapidly spreading around the house yet barely touching Angel's body. The fire was unnatural in its intensity, and seemed to spread only where Angel wanted it to.

Tracy was caught in the middle of it. She came to as she began to burn, screaming. David tried to help her, but Angel grabbed him with one hand and dragged him back, making him watch as the flames engulfed his wife while he heard his child shrieking in fear from downstairs. David said he would have dived into those flames and burned with them if it meant he had the slightest chance of saving either one of his loved ones, but he couldn't break free from Angel's grip, not weakened as he already was. He said by the time the flames started to die, Angel was gone, and there was nothing but silence. Tracy was little more than a charred corpse, and the house was in ruins. He was still dragging himself through the burned up house on his hands and knees, looking for his son, when the police arrived.

That was the end of Patrick's story. He discussed how David initially tried to prove his innocence but then gave up. Angel left the knife he attacked David with upstairs. There were no fingerprints on the knife except for David's. David claimed Angel must have put the knife into his hand at some point while he was holding him, as the fire burned, and that was how his fingerprints were found on it. The police suspected he stabbed himself to try and make it falsely look like someone else had been involved.

David claimed Angel visited him in the hospital sometimes, taking on the guise of a nurse. It was Angel who convinced him to confess, according to him. It seemed like even more proof David was crazy in Patrick's mind.

No one believed David, yet he did demonstrate himself to be criminally insane, so he was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life inside a mental hospital instead of a prison.

Patrick asked if I believed David was innocent. I thought for a moment, then said I didn't. He nodded like that was the response he expected.

'I want to believe he didn't do it,' Patrick said. 'I really do. But I think it's more likely all that trauma from his past got to him, and combined with the alcohol use to cause a seriously bad episode of psychosis. I've thought about it over and over again and I just don't see any way his story holds up.'

That was about as much as Patrick could tell me. I thanked him for his time and promised I would be in touch.

I left him not knowing what I was going to do next. Yes, I suspected I might really not be crazy. The alternative: I wasn't, instead I faced something which was intent on driving me insane.

The thought I could prove my house was haunted actually frightened me. It raised the question; what kind of thing was haunting it, and now me?