So, he's definitively dead.

Good fucking riddance. Stupid rat bastard gets me tangled up in all of this supernatural shit, and doesn't have the common courtesy to leave a final goodbye, a last will and testament to alleviate my concerns and settle his own affairs. I'm fucking out of here now - Mexico seems ten times a better place to stay than this horrible, stupid house with that constantly ringing forest. Jesus fuck, I don't know how Michael ever managed to catch a few winks under these conditions. The birds are always screaming and squawking, to say the absolute least about that racket, and I don't know if its just my paranoia or something but I can hear the god damn foliage shifting just outside the door. Well, I won't be here long, so I might as well get down to business.

He's right next to the fucking computer I'm typing on, dead as a doornail (his body smells like maggots, which is sort of disgusting). He never left his fucking house, and he never got trapped in some mystical rain forest in another dimension with a Dr. Seussian patterned sky above his head, I can tell you that. He slit his wrists with a huge fucking dinner knife and bled out on the floor, chest all puffed up and maudlin about his heroic sacrifice. At least, that's what I assume happened. Frankly, at this point I can't even begin to give a damn about his issues and his dilemmas and his psychotic tendencies, but I suppose you all deserve to know about Lucy and what happened between him and her, the events that contributed to this arduous final leg of the journey. I see he didn't properly explain our trip to Los Angeles (or was...interrupted), so I'll elaborate on that issue too. To those who are concerned - yes, I will be burying the bastard in that forest, and yes, he will be appropriately commemorated for his deeds and struggles. That is, he'll get a stick through the mud and nothing else. That's all he ever really wanted, a meaningful memento to the impact of his existence.

Firstly, how did I find him, but the police didn't? Because I'm sure that's what you folks will ask before all other questions. Suspicious lot, and I'm not condemning you for being careful. Most of the city doesn't even know this house exists. In spite of all his teeny faults, Michael could actually handle himself, at least on the physical side; he scrounged up this little cottage deep in the forest from the wood scattered around him and managed to build it all up on his own. Of course, the assistance of Donato and his construction background sort of facilitated Mike pulling this stunt off, but hey, I won't blame him none. Gotta use what you got at the moment, and he was the king of opportunity in all instances. Nonetheless, this city probably doesn't even realize he lives within its borders. The house is off the grid, the water is rerouted through a wellspring of underground river water a couple of hundred yards inland and his sewage filters right into the Atlantic Ocean. Pretty slick, I gotta say, and kept with his low-profile attitude. I suppose you pay for some advantages with others, though, and that's what got him where he is today, dead as a doornail.

Second, why is Lucy such an important factor? To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure of the nature of the connection between them, and I doubt I ever will be. She was a...very special sort of individual. An individual who comes around once in a thousand years and heralds a paradigm shift, a radical reworking of the global mind's eye. I'm not one to inflate somebody's importance or ego beyond what is necessary, but she...the spark in her eye could convince the sternest general to relinquish his command to her flimsiest whims, the finest chef to depart from the kitchen, a satisfied soul, with confidence in her ability to handle the comestibles, the grandest king to abscond from his throne and gracefully place the crown on her forehead. Then she would proceed, with aplomb and dignity, to execute their duties with a far greater appreciation for the minutiae and a much more streamlined approach than they ever could or would use. She's so god damn special I just waxed poetic about her for a whole paragraph, and I'm not a guy who elongates words like Mike did. Everybody recognized those qualities in her, and it showed. She directed the course of this journey just as much as we did. A lot more than we did, I'm starting to consider.

She and him, though, she and him went beyond that simple fact of her innate superiority in their time together. He made himself, more than any other person she met, and that fascinated her, a woman so thoroughly invested in her natural talents. They fell for each other quickly and stuck together fast when it turned official, but when I occasionally noted their interactions they never matched up in my mind to those that qualify as a couple's. They always probed deep into one another, harnessing their energies in dramatic, covert duels of the mind in pursuit of the most minuscule conflicts, and although they did have fun with me and their friends and my friends, to put it politely we never came first in their long lists of obligations and responsibilities. Well, her friends didn't, and I didn't until she attempted to murder Mike. Looking back, that's clue number one that this whole fiasco was heading towards bad, bad country.

Something happened that night. I dunno what sort of conversation or altercation went on between them, but I'm not entirely sure it was a natural occurrence. In fact, I'm pretty damn sure it wasn't. All I know is that on that night, Mike called me, panting, voice raspy and wavering, as if some horrible creature had just chased him all the way to Hell and back again (shit, I'm inheriting his penchant to pontificate right now). He kept blubbering and stuttering and couldn't get a damn word out on the phone, which startled me more than anything else. He was the go-to guy for levelheaded and sensible resolutions to corkscrewed and ridiculous problems - the fact that he couldn't even compose himself at the time struck a chord in me deeper than any other sign of danger would have. We had both been through traumatic times before, me with the death of my family in a spontaneous combustion and our flight from the little hometown of [REDACTED]that brought us to New Jersey, specifically Newark. What he told me next...well, shit, I can't really remember most of it. But I recall him rambling on about "she and the tall man, she and the tall man, her and Sticky are getting together again", and then some terrible screeching noise reverberated out of the receiver and the call disconnected.

I hustled my ass over there faster than you can say Aunt Jamima's sweet buttermilk pancakes, but I didn't arrive early enough, it seemed; the police were already at the scene, and the incident was resolved by the time I burst through his front door. Mike didn't look so hot with a few stab wounds in his chest, but Lucy. Jesus fuck, what he had done to Lucy...I can't call it incredible, because that implies some sort of jovial outcome, some beneficial resolution. He marred her beyond repair, beyond anything I've ever seen a human being do to their peer before. A nearly unrecognizable body, shredded and torn to reveal jutting pipes of bone and drooping ligaments torn away from her musculature. The police just stood there, completely flabbergasted by his decadent display of destruction, as he dropped the red coated weapon and sunk to the floor, crying about "the lights, the lights, the maddening piercing lights!"

At that point, I looked to Lucy for guidance.
Her eyeballs had been sliced into ribbony chunks, scattered haphazardly across the room. Looming above her mangled corpse, embroidered into the walls with blood-stained knife strokes, were the words "THIN AND WIDE CONQUER DIVIDES".

We never talked about what occurred in his house that night. The police filed it away under a manslaughter charge, and Mike pulled a lot of strings to get himself off the hook without a lawyer. To think he's an innocent kid thrown into this vexing world, out for his guts on a platter, would be laughably delusional. Some part of him snapped that day, when she descended into madness. The man couldn't take the pain of a real, human loss, and so he receded into this shell of a hero, this facsimile of an underdog champion. He started this blog right after that happened. Only a few days later, to distract himself, I think, and that's when this fucking mess began. That's when I got mixed up with you atrocious scumbags. That's when he was
killed.

About Los Angeles: We were chased by one of those horrible creatures he was talking about in his last blog posts. I -know- that shit is real, because I experienced that...bizarrity. There's no other word for it (if that's even a word). We managed to kill it with a trash can lid and a wooden plank, and that is the end of that story. I will refuse to elaborate. It pains me slightly to write this down, to be honest with you. We put that behind us, and split up to guarantee our own personal safeties. He needed to come back to Newark to talk with his old friend, and I needed to get the fuck away from him to lose the monster's grip on my psyche, or whatever hodge-podge nonsense he fed to me to make himself alone again. I don't exactly recall, and I don't exactly give two hooting damns anymore.

To those who'll call me callous or a rat bastard after all's said and done: Look, I've gone through your blog posts, and I'm not surprised that this other thing is stalking you guys, and I sincerely believe and would love to help in any way I can, but I'm not going to be like you fucks, alright? I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life on the run from some infinite, omniscient abomination whose only purposes lies in hindering my ability to fuck women or garner cash or write or whatever else I want to do with my life. So take this as a god damned warning: Do not come near this house ever again. Do not rile up this cocksucking "obelisk" that tortured Mike in his lifetime. And do not, for the love of God, ask any questions after this post, because I won't be here to answer. I'm out, permanently. I suspect that's what Michael Blightwell always wanted for me, to go out and leave him to the whim of fate. Maybe I'm just projecting or some shit, like some of you psychologist folks may say. I doubt that.

Well, I satisfied your last wishes, pal. Time to put you to rest.
Regards,
Marley

P.S.
Is there any particular reason why all the beginning tags in Mike's first post here start with "noah" and "tree" and "ark"? Dunno if I'm right about this, but aren't those symbols for that guy who's stalking all of you folks? The Slender Man or whatever his name is?