30 Reasons To Read

Episode 14: The Date

There was an old homeless man who lived in our village. He was mentally ill, with no family to speak of. The villagers took turns feeding him occasionally, but otherwise, he was largely ignored. He was a familiar part of the landscape, fading into the background of our lives. Until, one day, everything changed.

A young couple from the local high school decided to sneak away for a romantic date by an abandoned, filthy lake on the outskirts of the village. They were looking for privacy and a bit of adventure. But they never came back.

The last person to have seen them was the old man. Naturally, the police took him into custody for questioning. But all he did was repeat a single, baffling sentence:

"She killed him. He killed him."

Nothing more. The police assumed he was mixing up the pronouns, and they tried everything to get a clearer statement from him. But no matter how hard they pushed, they got the same cryptic words.

“She killed him. He killed him.”

It made no sense.

As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, the police grew desperate. They harassed him, tortured him, anything to break his silence. But nothing worked. Eventually, the villagers lost interest and the couple was declared missing. The old man, forgotten once again, was released, returning to his invisible life on the streets. The mystery of the missing teenagers went unsolved and the lake was left alone.

Years passed.

Then, without warning, a young couple moved into the village. The villagers immediately recognized them. They were the very same couple that had vanished years before. The police wasted no time and brought them in for questioning. What the couple revealed left everyone in shock.

That night at the lake, they had been followed by the old man. At first, they tried to ignore him but as he continued to harass them, their irritation turned into rage. In their anger, they shoved him into the murky water. When he began to drown, thrashing in a panic, the couple realized what they had done. They quickly tried to save him but it was too late. The old man was dead. Terrified that they would be arrested, they tied his body to a rock and rolled him back into the lake before fleeing the village.

The police, stunned, organized a search of the lake. Sure enough, they found a decaying corpse tied to a rock. The autopsy confirmed it was the old man, but something was off, the body hadn’t decomposed nearly as much as it should have in all that time.

What disturbed them more was that the old man had been seen in the village, alive, long after the couple had fled. He was even investigated regarding their disappearance. In fact, he’d been seen just days before the couple reappeared. But now, after his body was discovered, he was never seen again. The villagers, at last, buried him properly, hoping to put the strange events behind them. But some whispered that the old man had never truly left.

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