CAMPFIRE: Knowles

What a scream! We installed telephone wires across rural Britain over a century ago, and you're still paying to use them for your broadband today! Ha ha ha! If it ain't broke, what? Stop! Your days of selling phone age broadband are over! Plyah! Stop spilling the beans! Upgrade to 100% full fiber! Gigaclear, faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds a month! Price may rise during contract. Teas and seas apply. Check availability at gigaclear.com. Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Britt break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice. Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode was produced with immersive audio. For the best experience, we kindly recommend you listen with headphones. He should have brought bug spray. Blood was in the air. His blood, sending his skin like flypaper. The little lampreys latched on, planting their hives. Another swam by his ear. Brain suckers. Or so Granny Max would say. They dodged his hand, circling from one ear to the next, and around his nose, the next best gap. He thought he caught it, but then the bug changed course, near the thin lid of an eye. Jake lands a useless pat, and the brain sucker retreats. For now. They must love you. Yeah? Well, I do not consent. Can I have a go? At the story, I mean. Really? You want to tell a spooky story? Maya felt her chair decline. For a moment, the embers rose. An old dog ready to greet another face. Unless someone else wants to. No, please. It's all yours. Yes, come on, Maya. Tell a story. Well, all right. Like a baton, Jake still held the torch. He was fighting another mosquito. This one was plump, drunk on his sweat and buzzing for more. Huh? Oh, sorry, Maya. Batter up. So you're always asking, does anyone die in your story? Um, not exactly. But someone does go missing. It's, um, how do I say this? Well, it's not exactly a scary story. There are no serial killers or bloody paintings. Although, there is a drawing. Back when I was in foster care, there was this other girl. She was older than most of us. Much older. High school age. She was a bit more standoffish. Never played with us, probably because we were little. She mostly just kept to herself and her journal. I don't know where the rumors started, or if they were only rumors or something more. But some of the kids said that inside her journal, there was... There was what? Yeah, what? I think I'm getting ahead of myself. But if you want to know what was inside, um, Matt, can I... All right, go ahead. Thanks. Gather round and listen close. My mother left us when I was seven years old. There was no note, no call, no nothing. She was supposed to pick me up from school. And when nobody came, the front office called my dad, and he came to get me. When we got home, the house was empty. Mom's beat up Volkswagen was still sitting in the driveway. Dad called 911 to alert the police. They searched the house, the town. They put out an APB. They did everything they were supposed to. In the end, they never found anything that could tell them what had happened to her. My dad never got over it. He pined away over her and whittled down to a twig of a man by the time he died. After a year of hoping that she would come back or that her body would at least show up, he decided to get rid of her things. He said it was how we would get some semblance of closure so we could move on. I'd spend a lot of time with her stuff, her shoes, her clothes, and makeup. It reminded me of when I'd watch her get ready. She used to let me help her pick out her dress, and I always liked how precise she was in covering up the dark birthmark under her chin. But no matter how much I wanted to hang on to her things, in the end, it all went. Or most of it, rather. My mother's office was the last thing to be cleared. It had been a place that neither my dad and I ever touched in the long year after her vanishing. The initial police search was the last time either of us had gone inside. We'd shut the door and left it as some sad memorial to her. I thought it was sacrilege when he said we were going to clean it out. Next to her desk were several boxes of pictures, papers, and notebooks, most of which were filled with her stories. She was an aspiring writer and had carried around notebooks since she was in college, long before I was born. She'd always told me, you never know when a good idea will strike. You must be ready. As dad cleared out her things, he left the books for last. I watched as he sifted through a litany of journals. Each one was different, either in shape or size or thickness. Just by looking at them, you could see wear on the spines, ruffled pages, or wet marks on the covers. Mom's desk had been infested with tea and coffee cups while she was still around. I was sitting on the ground, mournfully watching the discard pile grow larger. What happened next? I can't really recall for certain, but I remember hearing, just faintly, a heartbeat. I looked at my father who acted like he hadn't heard a thing. Granted, he was so wrapped up in my mom's old books that he wouldn't have noticed a car plowing through the house. But then I heard the heartbeat again. Except this time, I felt it stronger on my right side. My breathing shallowed and I had the sudden sense that I was being watched. I turned around slowly and I saw nothing but the office door slightly ajar. Rising cautiously, I inched closer to the doorway when I felt that heartbeat tug again. I froze in front of the desk and cast my eyes down to see a book splayed open on the chair, almost like it had fallen there. I stared, waiting for the heartbeat to return and when it didn't, I reached out. The journal was pristine, the cover and evergreen campus. Even though it had been sitting open for nearly a year, the striped gold bindings were hardly creased and the pages unsoiled by the humidity of the office, which was odd because all the other books were beginning to wear. My father noted the book in my hands with a curious look. Perhaps seeing my wide eyes, he asked if I wanted to keep it. Of course I did. It was beautiful and mysterious and it was my mother's. From then on, I held the journal dear and began to write and draw in it as often as I could. It was around that time, after a long year of loneliness, that I met my imaginary friend, Nulls. It's easy to see now how she came to be. I was a child in a state of grieving, separated from kids at school by emotional trauma with a father who was barely holding it together. I'll spare you the therapy lesson. I'm sure you get the picture. I don't remember exactly how I met Nulls. Maybe she walked in through the door with us as I got back from school, or maybe I woke up and she was playing in my room, but I was glad she was there. I loved drawing her in the notebook, and as I did, her features became more and more vivid, clear to me than an azure sky on a crisp bottom day. We played in my room when I was sad or bored or angry, which was more often than not back then. Nulls always knew how to cheer me up, and I loved her for that. Another year went by, and then another, and I held on to her still. Some would say are far too long. I bet you'd say that too. I bet you're probably thinking, God, what adult needs to have an imaginary friend, but Nulls is far more than that, and I think you figure that out by now. When I was 11, I was playing with Nulls in the playground after school while I waited for my dad to pick me up. After I got tired, she sat next to me on a bench, and it was then that she told me she was sad about something. Something had been on her mind for a while now. I of course could tell she'd been acting odd all day, but I knew she would tell me when she was ready. She told me she was going to leave after tonight. Did she had fulfilled her purpose? I'm sure I looked insane when dad pulled up to the parking lot, a tween girl screaming at an empty park bench. He had been concerned for a while now. My teachers had told him that Nulls was having a big impact on how I interacted with other children, and that I should have grown out of having an imaginary friend by this age. When I got home, I went up to my room and Nulls was there, waiting. I asked her, what could I do? What could I possibly do to keep her with me? She paused for a moment before finally saying, I need to write about her. For her to stay with me, I had to make sure I could never forget, because once I did, she would be gone, flung into the universe like a lost angel. I had to write about her somewhere she would never be forgotten. So I dug around in my closet and I found my mom's old journal. I skipped past the old melancholy poems and cartoons of Nulls right into the heart of the book. I grabbed a pen and began to write. I remember a feeling like an electric current was running up my arm. My breathing became rapid and my body trembled uncontrollably, like I couldn't break a fever. I had never written so quickly and cleanly, but by the end I could feel beads of sweat just staining my eyes. I described everything I knew Nulls to be and how I saw her, the sound of her voice, the color of her hair, the softness of her skin, the way we made each other laugh, and I wrote about how she would never leave me. I pressed the pen deep into the pages, almost carving through them. Then I drew her as best I could, far better than I ever have before. As I shut the journal, the madness broke. I shuffled to my bed and collapsed. The next morning, I woke up holding my breath and searching. Nulls wasn't there. My eyes began welling. She was always right next to me when I woke up. I sobbed, thinking that I didn't write enough down that I didn't describe her in every detail that I had failed. I could hear Dad walking around downstairs getting breakfast ready. He would want me to come down soon. I opened the journal to read everything I had written last night. Maybe I missed something, anything. Maybe I could still get my friend back. The pages were blank. Not just the pages I wrote yesterday, but the years old entries too. My eyes went wide with terror. My pulse pounded in my veins. My skin grew cold. Starting at the back cover, I flipped through the pages looking for even a pen mark that saw nothing. Nothing until I hit the front cover. That was when I saw it. In the top left corner was the exact same drawing I had made of Nulls last night. Except now, she was winking. I slammed the book shut, dropped it on the ground, and kicked it under the bed. I stood there in a daze, unsure of what to do. When Dad called my name, I backed away slowly and then bolted from the room, shutting the door behind me. The day passed in a blur. I couldn't stop thinking about the empty pages of the journal and the drawing that I didn't draw. I started to question if sleep scribbling was a thing, but that didn't explain how everything else had disappeared. Thoughts were somersaulting through my mind, but it all came back to the fact that I felt so alone. I'd lost the best friend I'd ever had. My only true friend. When I got home, I snuck upstairs to my room, worried the book would hear me, but it was there, half open, spread across old toys and still underneath my bed. Blood rushed through my ears and the world zoomed in. Dust tickled my nose spiked with the stale stench of dirty, forgotten socks. I reached under the bed, fingers trembling, shut my eyes, and felt the canvas cover. I expected the journal to explode or start shining or spring from my hands, but nothing happened. I pulled it out and flipped through the pages. The book was completely blank. Even the drawing I had seen this morning was gone. I grabbed a pen from my desk and plopped onto the floor, thinking carefully about what I was going to do next when my breathing stopped. Letters appeared, written from nothing, appearing from nowhere. It was almost as though there was an invisible pen swiftly jotting along the paper. I stared at the fully formed message for almost a minute before I even had enough sense to read it. It said, why didn't you take me to school? I thought you wanted me to go everywhere with you. It was nulls. I couldn't believe it. Slowly I began to write back. I told her that I didn't know what happened. I thought it hadn't worked and I was sorry for leaving her. She and I wrote to each other all night and then again in the morning. It was like nothing had changed other than my wrist getting sore. Each night our conversations span the course of pages and each morning I woke up to everything crisp and in English. I had my best friend back and she wasn't imaginary, not anymore. Now she was real. Just like before she came everywhere with me. I told my teachers and dad that I was just writing stories, that I wanted to be like mom. I stopped talking about nulls which I think made everyone less uneasy. I wasn't lonely and that was all that mattered. A year later dad decided that he wanted to move a few towns over. I had begun to move on from my mother's death, not forgetting but adjusting to life without her. Dad however was still having a hard time living in the house they had bought and shared. He ended up with a new and better job. We moved closer to family and we both got a fresh start. At the time I hated it. I raised hell but there was nothing to be done. I would tell nulls my frustrations and she'd always find some way to make me laugh, to make it easier. She often asked if I wanted help to stop us from moving but her being there talking to me was enough. And what could she do anyway? I started at my new school in October 2nd. It was almost twice the size as my old one and with no one I recognized. I didn't have many friends per se but I had people who knew me and what I had been through. At this new school I stuck out like a missing tooth in a wide smile. I was small, quiet and always carrying a stack of books. I was an ideal target for teenage tormentors. Kids at my last school didn't want to bully the girl who'd lost a parent. But here I didn't have that luxury. Alistair Timon was the first real bully I had ever encountered. She was tall, slender, with a chin-linked hair, cut almost like a boy and always wearing loose unbuttoned flannels over her tank tops. When I introduced myself to the class she whispered something to the girls next to her and they all started to laugh. Later when I spoke to nulls about it she said she could hear their cruel snickering. She didn't like that I was here all by myself, that there was no one here to help me if I got into trouble. She said she'd protect me if she needed to but I told her there was nothing that she could do for me. Real or not, nulls was just a friend in a book. But anyway, there was no reason for her to be concerned. At least, not yet. I avoided Alistair and her click at all costs. I stuck near the teachers and found a quiet group of kids who accepted me at their lunch table. We were defensible in numbers. But no matter how hard I tried, Alistair and her friends always found a way to corner me. They pushed me around. Through my school books and the trash, there were also times in the middle of class where she would trip me, pinch my sides, or get boys to turn when she saw me looking at them. It was a terrifying time of my life and the longer it went on, the more nulls was upset. She kept suggesting ways we could get even or even threatening to hurt Alistair. I was always against it but I was starting to take her side. My boiling point was two days before Halloween. We were in between classes and I was swapping out books from my locker when Alistair came up behind me and whispered in my ear. Your mom didn't warn you before she died, did she? I looked over my shoulder. She and her friends were pointing at my pants. Suddenly, every health class I had ever had came flashing through my mind. My stomach had felt like pin cushions all morning and it wasn't until now that I knew why. She's bleeding so gross. Go get a pat. I met Alistair's cruel black eyes glinting with delight. Her mouth was pulled back in a wide smile but to me it looked like she was burying her teeth. The girls behind her were laughing like banshees and chirping to one another but I couldn't hear them. Blood was roiling in my veins and it took every cell in my body not to throw a punch. I'm not an idiot. I knew I wouldn't win a fight with a girl who's a whole head taller than me. Not to mention Alistair was wiry. I'd see the coiled muscles in her arms that had beaten up so many girls and even some boys. I stared daggers at her letting the hate flow to stop myself from crying. When their mouths finally stopped moving, Alistair smacked the books out of my hands and walked away. Someone handed me my things and a teacher came around the corner. Quickly deducing the situation, she walked me to the nurse's office to be sent home. As I waited for my ride, furious and hand-tumbling, I ripped open my notebook and wrote, I'm in Knowles. What did you have in mind? Knowles' face appeared on the page. She was smiling. We waited until Halloween to execute our plan. Before first period, I walked through the halls squeezing between lanes of students and searching for Alistair. I found her with her gang in the science wing, leaning against the lockers, eyeing everyone as they walked by. We both had the same first period, so I quickly planned my route. I went around the corner of a connecting hall, halfway between the classroom and Alistair. When the bell rang, I waited around the corner and I watched the girls dawdle. Two minutes later, they began to clear out. That's when I struck. I drew around the corner, heading off the girls, right in front of Alistair. I caught her by surprise, a smirk on my face. Alistair looked at me, puzzled, and opened her mouth to let loose an insult. When I screamed and threw myself backwards onto the floor, I spun around and landed on my stomach, letting my books scatter down the hallway. One of the teachers came out and saw a poor defenseless little me lying on the floor and starting to cry, while Alistair and her goons hovered over me. The correction was swift and without question. It was plain to see that a few girls with a bad rep had pushed the small, quiet kid. All the girls were escorted to the principal's office. I acted like I was shaken up, tears pooling in my eyes as the teacher picked me off the floor. I snuck a glance at Alistair before I headed into first period. She paused at the end of the hall and met my eyes. She looked murderous. I went into class, feeling better than I had in weeks. The hook was baited and now all I had to do was wait until last period. Alistair would try to corner me after school, either by the buses in a bathroom or an empty hall. I didn't know where she was going to get me, but I knew it would happen. But of course, nothing ever goes to plan. I was sitting at my lunch table writing to Knowles. When someone sat down across from me, I looked up and my breath stopped short. It was Alistair. As a frequent flyer to the front office, she had an extra long stay in detention, but not long enough. She was released early, before lunch, and now she was here. She stared at me with those killer black eyes. Neither of us said anything. We just sat there until the bell rang. My mouth was dry. My hands slick with sweat. And finally, I grabbed my things and stood up at the behest of whichever teacher was ushering us to the next class. Alistair grand and wrapped her arm around my neck like we were just the best of friends. When we left the cafeteria, I tried to run, but she wrenched her grip and pulled me down a long empty hallway. She was whispering incessantly to herself, and I began to get scared. This wasn't part of the plan. This wasn't how it was supposed to be happening. I glanced up and down the hall looking for anyone, a student or teacher or janitor. The hall was empty. She shoved me into a storage room, throwing me onto the concrete floor before turning to shut the door. We were right next to the band room. I could hear them playing their numbers through the wall. No one would hear us in here. I jumped to my feet and backed into a folded cafeteria table. The room was filled with broken school things, outdated projectors, rusted music stands, desks too rickety to use. The walls looked almost slick from how damp it was, and everywhere there was a pungent sour smell. Quickly, I opened my journal to the page I dog-eared last night and threw the book on the ground, face up. Alistair looked from me to the book, then back to me. Nothing happened. As she started forward, a light-headedness washed over me. This wasn't how this was supposed to go. Noll said she was going to protect me. She said she was going to take care of this part. My brain short circuited more and more with every step. She was two steps away, when I closed my eyes and waited for the beating I had coming. But it never came. There was a distorted growl of a voice that sounded familiar, but I hadn't heard it in years. When I opened my eyes, I saw Alistair frozen in place. She was staring at the journal. Black lines of light flung out from the center of the book. I whist at the blinding flashwell of fierce torrent of air through around the room. I held my breath, waiting and waiting and waiting. After what felt like an eternity, I opened my eyes and I found myself alone. I looked around for Alistair, but she was gone. I glanced down at the journal. It looked the same as it ever had. With hardly any more coordination than a newborn deer, I wobbled over to the journal, slammed it shut and ran out of the room. I went back to class and the rest of the day passed by in a daze. When I finally got home, I took nobles out of my backpack and just like years earlier, tossed the journal under the floor and I kicked it under my bed. It's funny how things come full circle, isn't it? There was an investigation into the disappearance of Alistair Timon, but nothing ever came of it. It seems at some point during the day she decided to play hooky and left the school. Where she went next is a bit of a mystery. There was no note, no call, no anything. She was just gone. Her parents called the police and they searched the house, the town, and put out an APB, but they never found anything that could tell them where she had gone. It was a week later when I dug the journal out from under my bed. I held the gold binding in the palm of my hand and let it fall open to a page with two drawings. One was of nobles. She appeared in a side profile. From this angle, I could see parts of her features that I hadn't noticed before. Her face seemed older somehow with a dark birthmark under her chin. She was grinning gleefully, staring at the petrified face of Alistair Timon. Or rather, you. I'm not sure if you can read this, but your eyes look just the same. Mean, black, and cruel. Except now they're also terrified. They're fearful and confused, just like all of the people you tormented. Not anymore. I take the time to write the story so that you know why you were here, shuffled away like a forgotten bookmark. I'm sorry that this is how it ends for you, but I won't pretend like you don't deserve it. If it helps, this book, this story, you could think of it like your memorial, or maybe your obituary. PS, say hi to nobles for me. And that's the end. So this girl, the one you knew in foster care, is she? The same girl as the girl from the story? At least that's what the other kids say. But why was she in foster care? What happened to her dad? Well, the same kids who told the story say they got in a fight. And then she wrote about him. They said she'd write about anyone who got in her way. That she already wrote about other kids. Kids in the foster system who weren't around anymore. But really, I think those kids just moved out. I think the kids who made up the story were just being mean. And I think that girl, the older one with the journal, I think she was just lonely. Well, that's sad. Sorry. Maybe this story wasn't appropriate. What do you mean? I thought it was great, but I feel bad for that girl. Take that, you little brain sucker. Yeah, I really like the story too. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Everyone's told a lie. But what happens when one lie becomes a life, a movement, a conspiracy? I'm Josh Dean, host of Chameleon, and I uncover true stories of deception scams so intimate and convincing they fooled the people closest to them. These aren't strangers. They're lovers, friends, and trusted allies. Because the most dangerous cons don't feel like crimes, they feel personal. Listen to Chameleon wherever you get your podcasts.