My wife and I did not know why it started to follow us, and we did not know what to call it. In our defense, we hardly saw enough of it to think of a name. This made it very hard to find comfort in the Internet and its infinite wisdom, because an incredibly vague search seldom yields results.

However, when we did catch glimpses of our stalker, it would send chills up our spines, and our blood would feel as cold as ice. It's body moved like something that had been mangled, someone's whose limbs were all broken but were not set right by the doctors. It was lanky and tall, it almost seemed fragile. But when we saw its eyes, when we looked into them and they looked back through us, such an assumption seemed absurd. This yellow glow would pierce the nights it would visit us like a knife through the heart. Or a straight razor across the throat.

So that was our stalker. No other features and no color of the skin, just this dark figure and its eyes. We had no children, and we had no family, thanks to the backwards thinking of those old bastards. It was pointless trying to reach out to our friends because, they could not see it. We even had my wife's closest friend agree to "stand guard" while we slept, and when our stalker made an aggressive and horrifying appearance she could see nothing of the sort.

It was so frustrating. We had each other but we were alone in this. If we didn't see it we heard it, if we didn't hear it we felt it, and if we experienced neither we would always see it. We felt like we were going insane, but of course there was nothing medically wrong with us. Shit, we were health nuts if ever there were any.

So there we were, with no answers, no way of finding help, and with a stalker. But I haven't said what is absolutely the most terrifying thing about this entity. As the nights went on, as the weeks crawled by, as the months stretched on, it got closer to us. Finally, for less than a second, it sat over us while we slept. We awoke to see it hunched over our bed, limps stretched out and digging into the walls.

We moved. Perhaps that would've solved things.

It didn't. If anything, things got worse. Never before had it physically harmed us, but now it started to leave marks, like the scratches from a small child. But these marks would stretch down our backs, across our chests, and even on our faces.

We decided not to be victims anymore. We each wrote our own notes, and then we found the largest knives we had at our disposal. At midnight, when we saw it watching us through the window, I slit my throat, and she thrust the knife into her chest. I saw my beautiful wife bleed to death, and she saw her husband do the same.

We didn't know what would come next, but we prayed we would see each other. We did not. We died, but we did not find peace in an incarnation of heaven, or even a grisly eternity in any version of hell. Instead, I woke up in a forest. The trees were all dead. The moon and the stars were gone from the sky, but there was still light coming from somewhere. A thick layer of fog swirled around me. That was when I noticed my wife wasn't there. I called out for her, and she answered me.

That's a lie. I turned and almost started to run, but it was standing there instead. It was twenty feet away from me. I didn't feel the chills or the ice. My body seemed to be numb, I couldn't feel anything!

The one sensation was pain, when I blinked and the stalker was standing right in front of me. The limbs were stretched far out into the forest, but they raced back into its body to send razors through my body. It was the worst kind of pain I had ever experienced. With every drop of blood that left my body, it felt like fish hooks were being torn from my flesh.

I woke up again, but now I was in an abandoned building. I was moe confused then than I had ever been in my entire life.

Then it dawned on me as though someone had explained it to me in my passing. My wife and I had given our stalker what it wanted. There was a barrier it could not pass while we were alive. The simply state of being alive was not enough to protect us from it, but it was enough to prevent it from taking that life. By ending our lives, it took our souls to its domain.

This is not heaven, this is not hell, and it is not a place in between the two. This is a monster's playground. I am not in the abandoned building anymore. That was long ago, when death came quickly and I couldn't find my wife. Now and again I may have her by my side, but only when my death comes in a particularly violent way, after much buildup and pathetic hope that this time it may be different.

But it is different, isn't it? This notebook was not in any of the others, so perhaps we are reaching some kind of climax, or a turning point.

Then again, that's what all these others thought.

I heard it.

No, no. I can see it.