Ryan's Story

It’s been a mostly quiet week. No more attacks from proxies, but the faceless bastard has been doing double time staring contests outside my house. I guess because there’s two of us staying here now, it must be some kind of a treat for it.

Yes I said two of us. Ryan is currently taking up residence in my guest bedroom. Which is not fun to say the least. He tries very hard to be kind and I do my best to remember that he is in even worse of a situation then I am, but I just can’t be the kind and compassionate woman that the whole world expects me to be 100% of the time. Sometimes the bitch needs to come out.

I’m getting ahead of myself again. You guys are probably wondering what kind of insanity I have picked up to be letting this guy stay at my place. Allow me to fill in the blanks.

After he made his little announcement about using me to track down the monster, he proceeded to have a nice little bout of hysterics in my passenger seat while I stared at him like an idiot. My brain did not want to process what he had just said. Someone who actually wanted to see it? What the bloody hell was wrong with him?

I had every intention of kicking him out of my car and doing my best to forget about his existence, but it appeared again. Standing in front of my house watching us. He may have been an ass, but I couldn’t throw him out when we were sitting in my driveway only a few steps from my back door. So I grabbed him and dragged him inside. I thought that when it did it’s teleportation to wherever it goes next I would throw him out then.

So I brought him inside and he had finally managed to calm down. He asked if I would let him explain himself. I didn’t want to at first. I called him some rather unpleasant names and threatened to send him out to it after all. But he kept begging and finally I gave in.

His story broke my heart. Ryan is the father of a six year old girl named Olivia. His ex-wife had primary custody but he got to have her with him for most weekends and one or two nights a week. He didn’t date but that was ok by him. He had a very good job that let him give his daughter everything she wanted and she was his whole world.

I think you guys are smart enough that you can tell where this is going to end up. About ten months ago, Olivia started having nightmares, screaming in the middle of the night about the man with no face coming to hurt her. She drew hundreds of pictures of the faceless man in the business suit. Her parents were afraid she was somehow being abused, but nothing came out with the therapist they brought her too. Two months later her mother took her to the park and she disappeared.

The police worked hard at first to try and find her, but Ryan didn’t think they were trying hard enough. He started his own investigation, hired private detectives. While doing some research into Olivia’s bad dreams, he accidentally came across our mutual stalker. He shrugged it off at first, but as more and more time went by and the police’s trail grew colder, he became convinced that his daughter had been the victim of the monster.

Slowly, but surely, he lost everything while trying to find his daughter. He left his job because he needed more time to research and try to track it down. He bought cameras of all types and quality and broke his lease so he could travel around the state trying to find it. By the time he was telling me his story, he was down to less than $500 from what had once been a very prosperous bank account. But no matter what he did, it never showed itself to him.

As to how I got involved, he discovered my blog and recognized part of my story. When the kids were killed and I was kidnapped, it made headlines around here. And when I killed Tom it made headlines again. Ryan lives in the same state as me. He thought that it was perfect, having someone that had survived it for months now that close to him. He became convinced that if he found me I would be able to lead him to it and in turn find his daughter. He went and reread the articles, found out what town I lived in and started haunting local areas like the grocery store and parks, hoping he would run into someone that matched the little bit of description on my blog. To quote him, “I introduced myself to four different women before I finally met you.”

I can’t hate him. I’m still angry and hurt, but I can’t hate him. All he wants is his daughter back. I’m letting him stay here because he has no money to keep staying at hotels and I couldn’t throw him into the street after he showed me Olivia’s pictures. I don’t approve of what he did to me, but I can’t judge him for it either. Who can say one of us wouldn’t have made the same decision if thrust into those circumstances?