That last night I did the best I could to prevent the monstrous abomination from coming for Hannah. I did my best to save her, but for Hannah my best wasn’t good enough. Now it’s coming for me which is exactly what I deserve for failing Hannah at her most dire hour of need.I’m not as brave as Hannah was. I can’t face that horrific creature of darkness.Everyone at this wilderness camp is wondering why I moved my RV to the far end away from all the other travel trailers, cabins, and tents. They know something’s odd about my behavior and they’re worried about me, but their worries won’t be of any greater help to me than my most strident efforts were to Hannah.I’ve sealed myself inside my camper, put out the pilot light on the stove and turned on the propane. I’m already starting to feel lightheaded from the accumulating gas. I hope I have time to write this ominous account before I start to lose consciousness. I want the world to know the awful truth. When I’ve put down on paper the horror of this creeping insidious curse, I’m going to seal it inside my steel safe so it will survive the blast and the ensuing flames….then I’ll strike a match.Hannah was a good person. No, that doesn’t quite do her justice. Hannah was the most patient, generous, understanding, helpful, friendly person I ever had the pleasure of knowing. Hannah was the best.In order for me to tell you about the diabolical fate that overcame my most valiant struggles and claimed Hannah’s precious life, I must tell you about the sad forlorn situation Hannah was in - I must tell you about the Nightmare Curse.It wasn’t her fault, you understand, it was just one of those things. When Hannah was a little baby, barely one year old, both her parents were killed in a tragic car wreck. The events surrounding the crash are still somewhat of a mystery to me, but I do know this much - the hour was late and it was raining hard; huge drops pouring down in torrents. Visibility was drastically reduced to further worsen the hazardous driving conditions. Crash investigators surmise that Hannah’s father must not have seen the fully loaded log truck barreling down the highway when he pulled out from the parking lot of an all-night diner.The big-rig hit the brakes but there was no way of slowing, much less stopping, all that hurtling weight. Hannah’s parents were crushed to death under the steel-belted tires of the massive eighteen wheeler. It drug them in the screeching smashed wreckage for a gruesome 200 feet down the slippery rain-slicked pavement.Even though the trucker wasn’t to blame, that poor guy was never able to get behind the wheel of tractor trailer again. No one knows for sure what his eventual fate was. Some say he drank himself to death on a Section 8 disability. Others claim he ended up in an insane asylum. There are even a few who whisper macabre allusions about him joining a Satanic Cult because the carnage of the tragic accident destroyed his faith in God. There’s a waitress at the all-night diner says he committed suicide by eating a hollow-point slug straight from the muzzle of a large caliber revolver.I mention the eerie story of the trucker’s mysterious fate to demonstrate how potent Hannah’s nightmare curse is. It moves like a silent predator through murky water leaving death in its diabolical wake.After her parent’s death, Hannah’s closest living relative was her maternal grandmother. Grannie Sommer raised Hannah with love, but in the first winter after Hannah graduated high school, her dearly beloved grandmother fell ill with a case of the flu that deteriorated into pneumonia resulting in death.So there Hannah was living all alone in the faded gray house - clapboard exterior with board and batten interior - that had been lived in by her mother’s side of the family for nearly a century. It was a dreary little house with a sagging aging porch and an enormous live oak looming in the front yard. There were azaleas all around the house which Hannah kept pruned and fertilized, but under the shade of that broad-sweeping oak, the azaleas never did flower to their fullest.Over the years there had been talk of cutting down the live oak but the old tree was tremendous reaching up to a towering 80 feet with a sprawling crown spread that made it as wide as it was tall. Those rough gnarly limbs were laden with long drooping strands of tangled silvery witch moss. Some thought it was hideous, some thought it was beautiful, but whatever the case, the massive old live oak remained the dominant horticultural feature of that antique homestead.There was a meager back yard containing a rusty red-handled pitcher pump, two fig trees, and two pecan trees. The weedy grass grew in ragged patches that meandered out to the edge of a gloomy dense forest.Those woods were rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of some Confederate soldiers who were betrayed by a Spanish spy and subsequently died in an ambush when Union troops marched south, but according to the old timers in those parts, it wasn’t the Union troops who killed those Confederates because just before that fateful eve of disaster, the blue-bellies had seen something terrifying that sent them high-tailing all the way back to the Mason-Dixon line.Tribal legends echoed with warnings about those imposing woods. The grisly portentous lore was rife with vague references to a fearsome thing of unknown origin that had been lurking in that shunned timberland since long before any human foot had made its print in the region. During Prohibition bootleggers would put up moonshine stills in any place around that part of the country except for in those ill-omened woods.It was general knowledge that full moons conjured strange sounds out of that dark avoided haunt of the horned owl, the rattlesnake, and the venomous brown recluse spider. Hannah grew up dreading the full moon because on those long harrowing nights she would lie awake in terror as eerie sounds wafted like the foul odor of death from the shadowed thickets that lined the backyard of her grandmother’s old house.By the time Grannie Sommer passed away leaving Hannah all alone in the time-worn abode, all the neighbors near and far had either moved away or died tragically in freak accidents. When Hannah inherited that little house at the edge of those foreboding woods, she was the only living human being for many miles in any direction.When Hannah’s grandmother died odd things started happening during and in between full moons. This is how I first came to know Hannah. I was a renowned investigator of the paranormal. I had a reputation for succeeding where others had failed. I had a number of victorious exorcisms to my credit and it was popular buzz that I had purged no less than 13 haunted houses of violent poltergeist manifestations.Celebrity psychics turned to me when a reading for one of their wealthy clients suggested the portent of future calamity. In 100% of those cases I managed to divert the omen of threat so those worried and high-paying patrons could move forward without fear of impending catastrophe.When Hannah sought me out to assist her it was because of increasing mysterious, and even terrorizing, circumstances that were closing in around her on all sides. By the time she began pleading with me to help her it was no longer only disturbing sounds being emitted from those grim woods - spooky events were taking over her entire life.Hannah would wake in the morning to find the broom she used to sweep the back porch out in the yard as if it had been spitefully thrown out there. A washtub that had been hanging from a nail on the back porch would be turned upside down near the pecan trees with a dead rabbit under it.Hannah had gotten into the habit of eating early so she could go to bed early. She lamented that she had to be asleep before nightfall because she couldn’t stand to be awake after dark. I didn’t know at the time that she had been drugging herself with over-the-counter sleep aids. She told me she was being tortured by a brutal godawful recurring nightmare about some ancient thing of darkness crawling out of the spooky woods to get her, but I had no idea she was drugging her brain in an attempt to drown out the stalking psychic horror.Her grandmother’s old rocking chair was out on the back porch and many afternoons while Hannah was preparing her early supper she glanced through the kitchen window to see the chair moving slowly back and forth as though some invisible entity were sitting in it.The nearest town was several miles west down the narrow strip of highway that passed in front of Hannah’s isolated gloomy residence. She said the people in the little town were starting to look at her with strange expressions. In the email and telephone consultations leading up to the fateful moment of our doomed first face-to-face meeting, Hannah swore to me that the townsfolk had changed. She spoke nervously of a distant look of malice that had crept by imperceptible degrees into the townspeople’s eyes so that it eventually came to pass that when they turned those haunted eyes upon her she could feel something sinister in their menacing vacant stares.On the day I had arranged to meet with Hannah at her lonely evilly-shadowed abode, my schedule had been planned so that I would arrive at midday, but I was plagued with numerous unexpected and totally inexplicable delays. My alarm clock didn’t go off so I woke up a few minutes later than I had intended. The water was off in my building while the super performed a plumbing repair. By the time the water was back on so I could shower, I was running half an hour behind. Traffic backed up from an accident on the expressway caused me to miss my morning flight and the ticket agent had given me a one-way so I had wait while she upgraded me to round trip. It was afternoon before I finally got out of the city.The municipal airport the puddle jumper flew me to was miles away from Hannah’s place. There was no landing strip any closer or I would have chartered a single engine from a fixed base operator to prevent me having to drive so far. I was obliged to rent a car. I had no idea at the time that what was going to happen at Hannah’s would make me glad I hadn’t been dropped off there by a cab or bus. After renting the car and driving the considerable distance out into the boondocks my nerves were strained and my patience was exhausted. By the time I made it to Hannah’s, the sun was going down.Of course she had been watching for me. The moment I pulled up under the looming live oak, Hannah flung the front door open and motioned frantically for me to rush inside. When I stepped into her living room I noticed an odd and slightly offensive odor. There were no lights on in the house. She slammed the door behind me, locked the deadbolt, and held a finger up to her lips admonishing me to silence. On the back of her hand I noticed an irregular shaped birthmark.In spite of my many years of experience with paranormal phenomena, I found myself eerily unnerved by Hannah’s unsettling behavior and the initial impression of emptiness in the old house. The place felt dead. I listened intently because that’s what it seemed she wanted me to do. Straining my ears into a focused beam of sonic sensitivity my emotional frame of mind began to morph from anxious to a feeling of being made a fool of by an overreacting client. Then I heard it.In all the graveyards, haunted houses, abandoned insane asylums, and morbid locations on highways or railroads where gruesome accidental deaths and violent bloody murders had occurred, I had never sensed such a strong aura of the supernatural as I did standing just inside the front board and batten door of Hannah’s old clapboard dwelling.There was suddenly a very strong essence of something insidious from an unhallowed abyss that lies beyond time and space. The uncanny sound that had been detected by my tensely acute hearing was the rhythmic creaking of the old rocking chair on the back porch.Hannah gazed up at me with genuine terror in her watery gray eyes. I motioned for her to be calm. I whispered for her to stay put right where she was, then I slowly, and with great caution, made my way through the living room and on down the short hallway to the kitchen. I gently pulled the floral lace curtain aside and peeped through the small glass partition of the backdoor out to the porch.The rocking chair was moving slowly back and forth, then it stopped. I don’t know what made me do it, but an irresistible impulse to unlock the door and step out onto the back porch overcame me - Imp of the Perverse Edgar Poe called it. When I opened the door I could have sworn I heard a sickly voice whisper my name, but in spite of this ominous ghostly warning I proceeded out to that dismal back porch.The sun had gone all the way down by now and the soul-subduing gloom of dusk was gathering all around. The grim shadow-shrouded woods lined the irksome backyard like a wall of dread. I was staring straight at the brooding woods that had borne a bane of ill-repute ever since there had been people to whisper about such secretive dangers. I walked across the squeaky time-worn boards of the antediluvian porch and was about to go down the crooked steps to set foot in the scraggly yard when I felt a rush of cold - an intensifying of the presence.Many times had I experienced the hazard of spectral harm, but in all the cases in which I had been consulted over the years there had always been a little something, if not good, at least pitiful. The paranormal presence stretching forth an unseen force of menace from those encroaching woods was not pitiful and it certainly wasn’t good. I was for the first time in my life standing in the subjugating midst of pure unadulterated evil.Horror turned the blood to ice in my veins, then when I thought of the fact that Hannah had been living in this loathsome pit of vile wickedness all alone, my heart nearly stopped beating in my chest. Without another thought I turned, dashed back inside the house, slammed the door closed and shot the deadbolt into the locked position.All I could think of at that moment was getting Hannah far away from that accursed lair of fiendish malevolence, but when I returned to the living room, poor Hannah was nowhere to be seen. I heard something thump from down a dark hallway that led into another part of the mute old house. With a lump in my throat that choked me and wouldn’t go down, I tiptoed in stark terror toward the source of the mysterious sound.The house was now heavily draped in the creeping shadows of the coming night. From the far end of the hall, a faint smudgy yellow light seeped from an open door. With the blood pounding in my temples I eased up to the door and leaned my head forward to see what was in that mortifying room. A blurry figure came rushing at me. I had no time to avert its swift approach.The unknown shape collided with me head-on. I was knocked flat on my back. Looking up I saw Hannah standing over me with a tightly packed suitcase in her hand. As I was clambering to my feet she said six words I knew I would never forget, “Let’s get out of here, now!”She flicked the yellow light off in the room behind her and led the way down the murky hall. She got to the front door, unlocked it, then paused with her hand on the knob. She motioned with her head for me to go first. I nodded, she turned the handle, opened the door, and out I stepped onto the front porch.I heard that ghostly derisive disembodied voice whispering my name in warning again, but I fought against my fear by reaching back to grab Hannah’s wrist and pull along her with me. I heard the front door slam shut. I dragged my client behind me. I could feel her racing pulse beating frantically at the place where my fingers closed around her pale supple arm.We were almost to my car when suddenly I stood still. Hannah stumbled into me and I knew she was terrified beyond words. I shouldn’t have stopped so abruptly. It wasn’t fair to her and maybe it wasn’t the smartest decision I ever made, but something about my car had alarmed me.Had I forgotten to lock the doors? What difference would that make? It wasn’t the condition of the car doors that tightened a knot in my guts. It was the sneaking suspicion that whatever foul abomination had been rocking the chair on Hannah’s back porch was now waiting for us underneath the automobile we were about to climb into.After a moment to recover from some of the shock, Hannah seemed to intuitively understand what was worrying me which obviously frightened her even worse because I felt her move up until her shivering body was pressed against mine. With an iron-stiff spine I willed myself to bend over just far enough to see under the vehicle. Sure enough, there was a mound of something lumped under the car. What was it? Had I seen it move? Had the thing been sleeping and we roused it with our hurried footsteps as we approached?I was within a stretching arm’s length of the car door. I whispered to Hannah that I was going to push the button on the key fob but that under no circumstances whatsoever should she attempt to move around to the opposite side of that silent car. I explicitly and quietly explained that the moment I had the driver side door open she was to leap in first and make room fast because I would be diving in after her.How she did it while lugging her heavy suitcase I didn’t know then and I don’t know now but as soon as I managed to get the door open Hannah was in and on the passenger seat in the blink of a paranoid eye. I flew in after her, slammed the door and hit the lock. It was at that inopportune moment I realized I had forgotten to check the back seat before we got in.It seemed like forever before either one of us could muster the courage to look back there because I felt something breathing down my neck and I knew she felt it, too. Red eyes were staring at me in the rear view mirror. I had the feeling I was about to meet the side of horror that is never revealed in books or movies. My whole life didn’t flash before my eyes, I just saw a sinister evil clown mocking me from the cavernous entrance to a place of darkness and fear.My skin heated with rage and I jerked around hard stabbing my car keys at those hideous red eyes behind me, but facing the backseat I saw nothing. A hand touched my arm and I screamed. It was Hannah. She spoke softly. Her words were eerily knowing. “Don’t be tricked,” she whispered, “it’s invoking witchcraft to create hallucinations in your mind’s eye. If we don’t get out of here now, we’re both going to die.”That’s all it took. I started the engine, slammed the gearshift into drive, spun tires steering wildly around the thick trunk of the gargantuan looming live oak, and burned rubber speeding along the highway with the aim of rapidly getting far, far away from Hannah’s old accursed homestead.Some miles later we passed the dilapidated weathered sign of the little town Hannah had told me about. The narrow highway we were on turned into Main Street as it passed through the hole-in-the-wall. There would only be a couple of blocks to pass through then we’d be on open highway again. Hannah warned me not to stop but there was an intersection where a side street crossed between the centuried brick buildings. The light was red. I placed my foot on the brake pedal and the car came to a stop.It was fully nighttime now. A cop car was parked beside one of the ratty worm-eaten storefronts. Hannah said it was the sheriff. We could see him sitting behind the steering wheel of his police cruiser. A local yokel in bib overalls was leaning his elbows on the door of the the sheriff’s car. The window was down and the sheriff and the yokel seemed to be talking quietly about something.Hannah said not to look at the sheriff so I glanced up at the traffic light. It was still red. In a rush of panic triggered by all the terrifying inexplicable calamity that seemed to be crashing down all around me, I forgot not to look toward the sheriff. When I did, the yokel straightened his back and looked in my direction. Then the sheriff looked at me. My eyes jerked up to the traffic light. It was still red. Hannah spoke out of the corner of her mouth, “I told you not to look.”Her words cut me like a knife. Why wouldn’t that hateful stoplight turn green? There were no cars approaching on the side street. Why was the only traffic light in a middle-of-nowhere one-horse town stuck on red in the direction of the most traffic? Of the only traffic?Hannah whispered again that if that light didn’t turn green in the next thirty seconds I should step on the gas and get us out of there. She said if the sheriff pursued us that, no matter what happened, I should not stop.The thirty seconds didn’t take long to pass. The light was still red. The sheriff was still looking at me from the driver’s seat of his police sedan. I saw him move his arm toward the steering column. His engine started. The light turned green. With a violently shaking foot I forced myself to accelerate very slowly.After passing the next block of cruddy tumbledown buildings I saw the posted speed limit go up from 30 mph to 55. I continued to accelerate smoothly. I glanced in the rear view mirror expecting to see red and blue flashing lights, yet there was nothing but empty highway hauntingly delineated by the few dim street lamps of the creepy little town. I watched with no small amount of relief as that dreadful place faded out of sight.For what seemed like hours I kept driving westbound into the deepening night making sure to remain well within posted speed limits. Scudding diaphanous racks drifted in silence across the ghostly face of a mocking full moon. Hannah was reclined in the passenger seat - quiet, resting her eyes. It was nearly midnight when we arrived at the municipal airport. I dropped off the rental car, handed my return flight ticket to the agent at the airline counter and purchased a one-way for Hannah just as the last plane out began boarding. We sat beside each other but did not speak one single syllable between us for the whole two hours. There was heavy turbulence during that flight. The other passengers were as quiet as Hannah and I.Being back in the big city didn’t make either of us feel any safer. A shadow was hanging over heads. I think at that point we both knew the end was near. Looking back on it, I suppose the lurking feeling of immutable destiny, more than the turbulence of the midnight flight, was why we didn’t talk on the airplane.When we entered my apartment there was a noise outside on the fire escape. A moment later the lights went out. Hannah let out a bloodcurdling scream, then, for the very first time, I heard it - I heard the voice of animate evil. Have you ever seen a pine tree after it has been struck by lightning? The bark blasted off and chunks of yellow pine meat sticking out jaggedly from the gaping wounds in the bole? That’s what evil sounds like…. the silent wailing of a mortally wounded tree as its sappy life blood oozes irretrievably from its dying heart.The next morning the sky was covered with lowering iron-gray clouds. Thunder boomed in the distance. It hadn’t started raining yet, but it would soon. You could feel that telling chill in the still air, the calm before the storm that warns of a coming flood.I don’t know how long I had been unconscious. When I woke I discovered that the building super had let the cops into my apartment. They weren’t the kind of cops who wear blue uniforms. They were wearing suits and ties. They were homicide investigators.There was a dark red substance splattered all over the walls, ceiling, and floor of my studio apartment. The stale air was fetid with the strong coppery smell of blood. The paramedics that were leaning over me moved quickly aside as I jumped to my feet and started shrieking in a voice broken with emotion, “Where is Hannah? Where is Hannah?”The plainclothes cops ordered the paramedics to restrain me. They didn’t manage very well with that order, so one of the murder investigators clunked me on the back of the head with something dull and heavy. My knees went weak. I was suddenly calmed down. The paramedics helped me to my sofa, one of them scolding the cop for hitting me. The EMT said that if I wanted to press charges for police brutality he would testify on my behalf at the trial.I didn’t care about brutality or trials, all I wanted to know was what had happened to Hannah.“Who’s Hannah?” the cop that hit me on the back of the head asked. When I didn’t answer the big tough detective unzipped a black body bag, pulled out a stiff human arm and held it up, “Is this Hannah, you murdering psychotic degenerate freak? We found this mutilated body part in the alley directly below your balcony. So, come on, you scum-bucket, come clean! Tell the truth! What did you do with the rest of your victim’s bloody corpse?”If there would have been anything in my stomach I couldn’t have stopped it from spewing out of my mouth. The arm the hostile detective was brandishing had a female hand on it. On the back of that hand, I saw the same irregular birthmark that I had seen on the back of Hannah’s hand at her old house by the curse-haunted woods.The next words the big suit-clad detective spoke carried a decided air of finality, “Bring him out to the balcony.”The EMT helped me up and guided me through the sliding glass door where, dangling from the rusted fire escape like a blood-soaked rag doll, I saw the overcoat Hannah had been wearing. It was like some horrid scene from a gruesome nightmare. Hannah’s nightmare curse.The homicide detective said that a wino bum who had been sleeping off a hangover in the wretched alley had been rudely awakened by a clattering racket on the fire escape. Looking up, the wino saw the silhouetted figure of a woman as she tossed something over the railing of my balcony, then the mysterious female climbed down the fire escape and disappeared into the shadowy gloom.The whole ghastly scene bespoke a fate worse than death. It was one of Poe’s depraved drug-induced mad hallucinations made manifest in the reality of my present life. I was sickened, yet I was more terrified than nauseated because I knew the ancient evil from those loathsome woods had somehow been waiting for Hannah in my apartment. In the pathetic blindness of my arrogant conceit I had thought I was rescuing her when, in fact, all I had done was deliver her into the gaping fanged jaws of a ruthless merciless sadistic unspeakable horror.Hannah’s arm was in the body bag, but where was the rest of her? Had the monstrous evil abducted her and dragged her screaming all the way back to her grandmother’s ill-omened house at the edge of the horror-shrouded woods? Who was the woman the wino saw climb down the fire escape and disappear into the dark alley? Or was the bum hallucinating? Isn’t that what Hannah said the evil thing did - trap its victims with misleading visions?The homicide detective said he didn’t buy the wino’s story. Had it not been for the fact that there was a witness making a statement that seemed to indicate I was not implicated in the criminal brutality of the unidentified disembodied arm, the big plainclothes cop would have bashed my teeth out of my face and thrown me in the slammer post haste.As it was, he tongue-lashed me that I was a person of interest in the case and that it would be wise of me not to leave town any time soon. That crude aggressive detective had a stony face that was pock-marked from where a perpetrator’s sawed-off shotgun had blasted him during a raid at an abandoned warehouse that was being used as a drop by a human trafficking ring.With infinite loathing the hard-boiled streetwise murder investigator gave me his card and told me that if I remembered anything I should give him a call. I told him I wasn’t going to talk without my lawyer present. The big bullying cop laughed and told me that was fine. He said he would be in touch with me again soon, and that one way or another he was going to find out everything I knew. He assured me with an expression of snide sarcasm on his detestable sweaty pock-marked face that he would find out the truth and that if I was guilty, as he was sure I was, he would guarantee I got the death penalty.The paramedics wanted me to go to the hospital for a complete medical examination. They wanted me to remain in the hospital overnight for observation, but I thanked them and politely declined. They treated the lump on the back of my head with some cooling cobalt blue gel that was supposed to keep the swelling down, then warned me that I really should go in for a CAT scan or MRI or some such thing. I thanked them again, then dropped back down on my sofa and sat quietly as the cops, paramedics, coroner, forensics team, and camera flashing news reporters slowly filed out one by one and left me alone in my stained disarranged violated apartment. As soon as everyone left I broke down into tears.The images of Hannah’s bloodied torn overcoat, her mutilated lifeless arm zipped into a black body bag and hauled unceremoniously away to the city morgue, the horror of how the insidious thing knew where I lived so it could be waiting for me to bring in poor trusting terrified Hannah like a lamb to slaughter. She had reached out to me for help, yet I had been the courier of her ghastly doom.Moping around my ill-fated apartment weeping like a helpless child wasn’t going to do me any good. Hannah was gone and that was all there was to it. Surely, she couldn’t survive with her arm torn off? But who was the woman that disappeared into the gloaming alley?Mind tricks, hallucinations - Hannah warned me about the cunning traps of the lying evil.I had failed Hannah miserably and now I had the feeling that the diabolical evil was coming for me. I wasn’t as brave or as noble as my desperate client had been. I couldn’t just wait there for who knows what terror from the deepest darkest pit of gore to come hunting me down like an animal with its foot caught in a wicked snare. The idea of what I was going to do began to form in my mind, but how was I going to get out of town?I knew that barbaric homicide detective would be watching my apartment, but I also knew it was obvious to anyone that I couldn’t stay there with the place a crime scene defiled in what was presumably Hannah’s spilled blood, so I let the hateful murder investigator see me leave the building. The rain was beginning to fall and I hailed this as a rare stroke of luck. If it rained hard enough, I might be able to elude my pursuers in the reduced visibility.A block down the street I turned into a squalid alley. I could feel my tail following me, but just then a shoot-out between some drug dealers started. I saw fire from muzzle flashes. Even in the rain the ricocheting blasts from the handguns recoiling off the bare brick walls of the dirty alley was deafening. I heard screams and profane language being shouted with genuine lethal animosity. A pack of flea-bitten stray dogs scarred with sores and lesions from mange were growling and barking and fighting. One of them was howling with the wail of approaching police sirens. Somebody threw a Molotov Cocktail and dark red flames leapt skyward in a plume of oily black smoke.I took advantage of the melee to evade my pursuers. I hopped a cross-town bus to a friend’s place. He’s a faculty member at the local tech-college. He’s got all sorts of surveillance electronics with which he managed to make sure we weren’t followed as he drove me out of the city.I left him at his sister’s house in the suburbs. He gave me all the cash he had so I couldn’t be tracked from using my credit card to refuel his car. Stopping just long enough to sleep for a few fitful hours in dive motels off the beaten path I drove for four whole days to get all the way out here to my Rocky Mountain hideout. This is the cherished site of my favorite trout streams and everybody at this rustic fishcamp has chowed on spicily seasoned fillets with me around many a cheerful campfire, but all that is over now because I can sense the stalking evil.It’s right outside my camper door. I hear its heavy footfalls crunching pine needles. It has come for me. I can hear the sappy life-blood oozing out of the dying pines amid their piteous wails of horror drowning in the shock-waves launched by lethal blasts of sharp blinding lightning. The evil has found me as I knew it would.I’m extremely dizzy. The propane gas is heady in here. I’ll lock this dreadful written account inside my steel safe then strike a match. I know I’m dying the death of a shameful coward, but I cannot face the evil entity. I saw what it did to Hannah. Oh how I tremble at the unthinkable pain and horror she must have suffered. I’m terrified that this relentless merciless supernatural predator will invoke witchcraft to prolong my agony. That’s what Hannah said it does - casts spells of witchcraft aimed at deception and unspeakable acts of treachery.I have no idea what the monstrous thing would do to me if I don’t snuff out my own life before it can sink its maddening ghoulish claws into my soul. Why did I foolishly pursue a deadly career as a researcher of the paranormal? Why did I willingly walk down a morbid shrouded path that led me step by fateful step to my own doom?If you ever see a house all alone on an outlying stretch of rural highway or if an unknown voice should whisper your name in a strange place, don’t let the temptation of curiosity lure you to linger in the grim mystery of the unholy spot. Run away. Run away as fast as you can and don’t dare look back or else you might find out something about horror you really don’t want to know. You may hear the jagged lightning woefully striking the waling pines, remorselessly draining them of their sappy life blood. You might look in your rear view mirror one night and see the staring burning red eyes of Hannah’s Nightmare Curse.