This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Theeaglestrikes on 2024-10-01 15:34:16+00:00.
My name is Kai Martin, but I went by a catchier moniker on YouTube. It was about privacy as well as branding. You might’ve seen my channel back in the day, but I’m not going to provide a link.
Anyway, by December of 2021, it was profitable enough for me to quit the day job. That month's YouTube ad revenue was equal to a year's worth of earnings from The Daily Shitstain — not its real name, believe it or not. My local newspaper was an endangered medium. Eyeballed by greasy bundles of cod and chips more than humans. Let’s put it that way.
Moreover, freelance journalism comes without restrictions. I reported on whatever so pleased me. In the name of a scintillating story, I’d faced war criminals, traffickers, and next-door killers. As a young, steel-balled, investigative journalist, I felt invincible. And that sort of adrenaline blinds a person to danger. It’s why I wasn’t frightened of Cedric Roberts.
I should have been.
Cedric was an ordinary man. An outwardly dull fellow, whose profession I don’t remember. He was interesting in only one way. The man claimed to have been misdiagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He claimed to perform rituals which really did stop bad things from happening.
Now, that’s a typical claim from sufferers of this illness. The atypical thing was that he claimed to serve something outside of him.
He called it tall crawl.
- Do whatever he bids, and do it twice if you doubt yourself.
- Walk no fewer than eleven steps per hour.
- Don’t walk in the shade of a backwards tree.
- No artificial light between one and six in the morning.
- Snap the bird when it sings.
Those were the five rules of life by which Cedric Roberts lived. Not rules imposed by an oddball employer. Not rules pencilled on a scrap of paper. Rules whispered to Cedric in his head. Rules that I scribbled on my hand whilst doing research on his case.
Everything started three months ago.
In late June, my brother dumped a dollop of waste onto my lap. Dressed it up as a vanilla sundae, and I swallowed it with ease. Why did I entertain him? Well, I always entertain him. I always support his crackpot ideas. Besides, it shouldn’t have been possible for my brother to keep shovelling through that rock-bottom floor. But Andreas always found a way.
I sighed, scrolling through my YouTube channel’s analytics. “Views are down this month. We really need to come up with an exciting video for next week.”
“Well, did you hear about Cedric Roberts?” my brother asked.
I nodded. “Sure. The monster who killed his family.”
Andreas nodded. “He braked at the town’s train crossing, stepped out of the vehicle, and locked the passenger doors. Then he placed a brick on the accelerator and let the car roll through the barrier into the oncoming train. Witnesses said his wife and two daughters were banging on the windows and screaming, but it was all over in seconds. The train pancaked the car, and—”
“Okay, Andreas,” I interrupted, feeling nauseated.
“Anyway, he ended up in a psychiatric unit,” my brother said.
“It’s a horrible story, but I have nothing to add that wasn’t already covered by the paper,” I said.
My brother smiled. “You do now. I was talking to our source at the station, and she—”
“Just call her Holly,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Right. Well, Holly revealed something interesting,” Andreas continued. “And not just that you’re absolutely smitten with her. I heard about your date to—”
“Get to the point,” I said, blushing.
My brother smiled, then returned to a solemn expression. “Cedric Roberts said that something else killed his family. Said that a higher being was punishing him for getting a compulsion wrong, Kai. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and OCD.”
And that was it. I had to interview this man. Without even arranging an appointment, I slumped into my car and set off.
It was about more than our connection to case. Andreas and I had lost our mother to suicide seven years earlier. She had been broken by her obsessive-compulsive disorder. It wasn’t even about Cedric’s murderous rampage. It was about the itch on my nape. One which burrowed deeply, like the tarmac snaking through grooves in fields and mounds. A long, country road that ascended towards a secluded psychiatric hospital.
The ward was a grey blot atop a hilly landscape. One with three storeys of tall, glass panes lined up far too squarely. The building pained my eyes for a reason I did not know, yet trusted with unwavering certainty. It was a clearer warning than any I’d ever seen, heard, or felt. My mind was telling me to turn back.
Something watched me from one of the windows. Something I didn’t see. Something that didn’t belong.
“I’ve been his psychiatrist for less than five days,” Dr David Pendleton said after I entered the building and introduced myself. “Dr Rosetta Wright would’ve been more helpful, Mr Martin. She was Cedric’s specialist for eleven months.”
“Right. I’d like to speak to her then. May I have her details?” I asked.
“No,” Pendleton replied.
I nodded. “Because she’d rather not speak to a journalist?”
“Because she’s dead,” he bluntly answered.
I felt it again. The primitive urge to turn back. The same instinct that had detected something worse than eyes watching me from the hospital windows.
And I also inferred, from the tone of David’s voice, that Dr Rosetta Wright’s death was linked to Cedric Roberts in some way. I feared that it might be linked in the worst way.
“Did he kill her?” I near-silently asked.
Dr Pendleton shook his head, then winced as if coming to his senses. “I’m not myself at the moment. I really shouldn’t be talking to a journalist about any of this. Rosetta was a dear friend of mine, Mr Martin. You’re taking advantage of my grief by poking your nose into this.”
“I’m not trying to take advantage of you,” I promised. “This story means a lot to me.”
“I imagine it’ll help your career,” the doctor cynically said.
“It’s not that. My mother was an OCD sufferer,” I replied, teeing up for the winning stroke. “Her illness led her down an awful path, Dr Pendleton. She eventually took her own life.”
There came a long pause as the doctor cautiously chose his next words.
He finally said, “If you really have no exploitative intentions…”
“I don’t,” I promised.
“Fine,” Dr Pendleton said. “I’ll have to ask for Cedric’s permission, of course.”
The patient, surprisingly, was keen on the idea of talking to a journalist. Given his volatile nature, however, Dr Pendleton thought it best to have members of staff physically restrain the man before I entered his room.
“I’ll let you conduct your interview privately,” the doctor said as we stood outside Cedric’s room. “He’s been docile today. That’s the only reason I’m allowing this interview. But shout if you need me. I’ll be right outside, Mr Martin. Less than five yards away.”
Sure. Separated from the family-killer by a wooden door and a plastered wall, I thought, envisioning all of the ways in which the patient might butcher me before help would arrive.
But I inhaled deeply, summoned every shred of my courage, and entered the white-walled cell labelled 307.
Cedric Roberts was constricted by a taut leather belt around his midsection, but nothing could have restrained his untoward grin. The man sat cross-legged on a neatly-made duvet. He was a strange sight. A forty-something-year-old sitting like a monk or a well-behaved schoolchild, but neither was the case.
I knew what this supposed family man had done. A heinous act driven by a mind either evil or unwell. I still wasn’t sure which, and that was what I wanted to investigate. I wanted to disprove his claims of supernaturalism and grandeur. I needed to disprove it. Since I’d first glimpsed the hospital on the horizon, a prison which barely held this imposing man, I’d felt something I didn’t know how to explain. A terror I desperately wanted to explain.
Cedric would give me answers, but not the ones I wanted.
“Kai Martin? The Kai Martin?” he mocked. “May I have an autograph?”
I sat on a chair opposite the bed. “Nice to meet you, Cedric. Do you know why I’m here?”
“This is a ‘collab’ for your YouTube video,” the man replied, snorting with an entirely static face.
I smiled uneasily. “Honestly, I just want to uncover the truth.”
“Honestly?” Cedric repeated disbelievingly. “Yes, we must always have honesty, mustn’t we, Kai-Kai?”
Something stirred violently in my belly as Cedric uttered a nickname I’d only ever been called by my mother. That fact, alongside the oppressive sensation of 307’s watchful walls shrinking, filled me with a foreign strain of fear.
“I know what happened on that afternoon, Cedric,” I said. “Who made you kill your family?”
He smiled. “My beautiful Isabelle called him tall crawl. He crawled up my body, you see. When you do what he says, he crawls. Grows. Feeds. Until he is tall.”
“Tall crawl,” I softly said, sparking a sharp chill on my left forearm.
It was only a child’s bemusing name. As bemusing as my feeling of being watched by unseen things, not quite eyes. But some perplexing anomalies are borderline inexplicable. Some oddities are funny, like four buses arriving at once. Some oddities are terrible, like the foetal shape of a body that rose beneath Cedric’s duvet. A shape that the patient roughly flattened with a thump of his hand, before massaging the bed slowly. Uncomfortably.
My heart throbbed sharply at the sight I knew I...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1ftr0j2/im_a_journalist_who_follows_a_strange_list_of/