Reddit Collection (Fresh-Short #10) by DeYtH Banger (books to get back into reading txt) 📖

home. It was starting to get dark, so it was a bit difficult to see through the woods. I spotted the light from his treehouse lamp on through the window and, as a dad should, began silently creeping up the short ladder nailed into the tree to scare the crap out of him. When I reached the top, I quickly swung the curtain-door open and let out a roar in an attempt to scare my poor, unexpecting son. However, after scanning the small room, Wesley wasn’t sitting in his beanbag chair as he normally was. In fact, the chair and his entire collections of rocks, bugs, comics, and games were completely gone off of the wooden shelves.

The only things in the room were the lit citronella camping lamp that we had given to him when we built the treehouse, and a single Sketcher’s sneaker lying in the middle of the room. The shoe was facing the doorway. I walked over to pick it up and examined it in the light of the tree house lamp. Nothing was unusual about it, but it was Wesley’s. I peeked out the window, wondering where my son could have run off to with only one shoe. The darkness had started to creep over the entire forest, and it would be very dark in no time. I called out into the twilight several times, with no response. He was probably waiting in hiding to scare me, and it was working. I was terrified already. I left the lamp on and descended the ladder of the treehouse, continuing to scan the dim area for my son. I called and searched for thirty minutes in the dark, getting no response. I was beginning to panic. Sprinting back in the direction of our home, I noticed that the light in his room was on. A wave of calm and relaxation washed over me. He must have snuck home while I was out here searching for him, little bugger.

I opened the back door and entered the kitchen, immediately greeted by my wife, asking about the shoe in my hand and where her little Wesley was. I explained what happened, and she told me he hadn’t come home. Once again beginning to panic, I sprinted down the hallway to his room and flung the door open. The light to the room was off, and the interior was completely bare. I know that I saw his light on when I was returning home from the woods. I flipped the light on with my right hand, still clutching his sneaker with my left. The room was completely empty. His bed, dresser, posters, rug, and bookshelf were completely gone. My wife heard my scream and came instantly rushing to my side, then she screamed too. We didn’t scream at anything we saw, but by the complete lack of something that was before us.

Wesley and his possessions were nowhere to be seen, besides the shoe that I clutched. Examining it once more in the bare light of his room, a single word had appeared on the sole of his shoe, but only when viewing it in his room. The word didn’t appear anywhere else in the house, only his room. The word "DON’T" was clearly visible in black block letters on its bottom. Kim immediately called the police and reported a theft, kidnapping, missing child, breaking and entering, everything. I had already grabbed a flashlight and was combing the woods, looking for any signs of my missing child. The police arrived, and I told them everything that had happened. The police helped us search the woods and surrounding area for hours. We searched for days. Then weeks. Months. Wesley never returned to our house. Once a week I would visit his hideout in the woods which was now overgrown from the months spent untouched, and I left food and water in hopes that he was hiding somewhere in the woods, but the food just sat on the floor, rotting and filling with bugs. The time blended together, and we began to gradually lose hope of ever seeing our boy again.

An entire year passed, and I continued to make weekly trips to the hideout just in case he would someday return. August 23, Wesley’s disappearance anniversary, landed on a Saturday in 2014. I reclined in silent mourning on my loveseat while I recalled the events of exactly one year ago. As I sat on the couch, my cell phone rang. The caller ID was our home landline, but I looked over to see our clunky phone set in its home on the dock. No one was using it. The time on the clock next to it read 12:33. I frantically answered the phone, hoping to hear something, ANYTHING. Dial tone. Just like one year ago. Today I had brought Wesley’s favorite snack, Cheetos and an Arnold Palmer Sweet Tea to bring to his hideout, but I forgot them on the counter as I sprinted out of the house.

It didn’t matter.

I climbed the ladder of the fort and flung the curtain open. It had smelled bad because of the rotten bread that I had left last week, but I would take last weeks’ meal back to the house whenever I left. Half expecting to see the bare room as I had every single week following his disappearance, the long burnt-out citronella lamp flared on with my entrance, revealing the object sitting in front of me. Wesley’s other shoe, once again facing the door. In stunned astonishment, I scooped up the shoe, examining it for another word. Once again recalling one year ago, I sprinted as fast as I could back to the house. The light of his room was mysteriously on. I blazed past Kim in the kitchen and beelined straight to Wesley’s room. I paused for a moment outside the door, noticing that no light was visible under it, the same as it was one year ago. I opened the door as Kim ran down the hall and followed me. She realized what I had discovered, and together we shared the same mixture of anguish and hope as I flipped on the light switch. The empty sole of the shoe now displayed another single word, “BOTHER”. We looked at each other in silence as the tears streamed down our faces. I placed the shoe next to its partner in the center of the room, reading the phrase “DON’T BOTHER”.

Each year since, my wife and I have found another piece of Wesley’s clothing in the treehouse. The clues only appeared on August 23, after I received the phantom phone call from our home landline at exactly 12:33. When I received the call in 2015, I had requested the day off from work. I waited, with phone in hand, at the bottom of the ladder of the treehouse. As soon as my expected call rang, answered, and repeated the dial tone, I flung myself up the ladder into the treehouse. Same scene as before. Curtain open, light on, and object in the middle of the floor. This time, Wesley’s pants lay on the floor, feet facing the door. Grabbing them and sprinting to his room felt all too familiar. I flipped the light on once again and read the next word on them, printed this time on the butt of the jeans. This year, the word was “LOOKING”.

August 23, 2016. It became tradition for me on these days to miss all other obligations. I wanted to figure out this mystery of my son. The time was 12:32, and I sat cross-legged in the empty hideout, waiting as the seconds ticked by until the inevitable phone call. To my surprise, my phone clock ticked to 12:33, and no call arrived. I waited for another minute. Then five. Then ten minutes. Giving up, I descended the ladder. Once my feet touched the ground, my phone instantly rang. Home landline. Repeat last year: the curtain, lamp, and object. This year was Wesley’s shirt. The same striped, long sleeve t-shirt I had last seen him in. In his bedroom, I read the next word, printed across the back: “FOR”. I already dreaded what next year would bring. I knew that the next word was going to be “HIM”. Some sadistic asshole had kidnapped my son and stole all of his possessions, and now they were toying with me, throwing in my face the fact that I completely failed as a father.

August 23, 2017. I waited outside the hideout for the call once again. I stood on the tiny deck in front of the curtain until I received the call, but it never came. It seemed that nothing would happen until I was completely on the ground, away from the treehouse. I climbed down the ladder, received the call, and returned to the fort. Wesley’s underwear. This was a bit messed up, if you ask me. However, each article of clothing I had retrieved from the fort was completely clean, as if it was washed that day. The underwear was no exception. Returning to his room, my hunch upon the next word was completely proved wrong.

“ME.”

Placing the underwear next to the rest of the clothing, I read the words in order.

“DON’T BOTHER LOOKING FOR ME.”

Now, it’s 2018 and my son’s disappearance anniversary (if you can call it that) was three days ago. Nothing showed up in the treehouse. No phone calls. No clothing (I checked). Nothing new was added to this puzzle of his disappearance. I checked his room last night, to see the five pieces of clothing in the room as I did quite often, but nothing was there. On the sixth anniversary of his disappearance, all the articles disappeared. No one could have taken them, I had boarded up the window to Wesley’s room and locked the door three times over. Those clothes were the last mementos that me and Kim had of our little boy, and now they were gone, too.

Someone is skulking around my house and trying to intimidate me.

 by ann1er

 

This whole thing started around a year ago. I tried to post it back then but got rejected because “wall of text”and I was too busy to fix it. I was only reminded of it when last week the first occurrence in several months reminded me of the entire thing, and of course sharing it with you all.

I live in a ranch style home in the middle of Missouri on 1.8 acres of nothing but woods. We bought the house almost 2 years ago. The house was vacant for over 8 months before we purchased it, and the realtors had problems with squatters about three months into the house being for sale, but said nothing had happened since. My elderly grandmother lives with me as I am her caregiver. It’s just the two of us and our dogs. We moved into the house in early October of 2016. The first incident occurred in March of 2017.

We started seeing a bunch of plastic bags and trash around the back of our house, further out than either of us go. Didn’t think much of it but did make a mental note that raccoons or something could be getting into our trash, I put some bungee cords on the cans to