THE COMPLETE KNIFEPOINT HORROR BY SOREN NARNIA Copyright 2007, 2012 by Soren Narnia All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 978-1470164294 A NOTE ON THE TEXT Knifepoint Horror is designed to present narratives utterly gutted of their emotion and conveyed by witnesses greatly weakened by their experiences. To this end, even the format of the text is altered throughout, from its persistent use of the lower case to its lack of titles to its minimalist delineations between breaks in thought and action. The ultimate intent is to create a lifeless, uninterrupted monotone which cannot telegraph when the narrator’s next grim revelation, the next terrible shock, is about to reveal itself. my name is william roydon. in october of 2005, i was checking the local paper for job listings, looking to make a few extra dollars with my video camera between wedding gigs, when i came across an ad from a man looking for a videographer for a day. he was offering five hundred dollars to anyone with a high quality camera who was willing to sign a confidentiality agreement about the job. i sent an e-mail explaining why i was suitable for this task, and two days later i got a response. i was to meet this man, who said his name was forsch cording, in the town of robin song, virginia, where i was born and lived until i was twelve years old. i return there from my home in annapolis two or three times a year to visit my grandfather. according to cording’s deal, i would be paid in cash and i would be asked to turn over the tapes i had made at the end of the day, never speaking of them again. another e-mail assured me that there was nothing illegal or distasteful about the job, and i was intrigued. before the day i met cording, he asked me to call him so he could explain what we would be shooting. i dialed a number with a pennsylvania area code and he told me very little, other than that we would be on our feet all day long, and i would be expected to keep the camera rolling continuously. the footage he needed to acquire was for a personal research project about the area. mostly what he wanted to know on the phone was my history with the town of robin song, and if i had been aware growing up of just how many unexplained crimes and disappearances there had been in the town. i truly was not. he told me i might think of it very differently after the ninth of october, and he did not want me to do the job if what i saw and heard there could irreversibly damage relations with anyone there or my childhood memories of being raised in robin song, which were all happy ones. i didn’t understand what he meant, but i said i didn’t think it would be a problem. when i got off the phone, i looked up the name ‘forsch cording’ online to make sure i wouldn’t discover any information which would keep me away from the job, which as described left the door open to any number of troubling scenarios. i could find out very little about my employer other than that he had apparently been a professor in the ancient studies department at the university of toronto within the past five years. his name also came up in vague relation to something called the projet du méridional, an urban legend among fringe academics having to do with a privately funded group of five men, one of whom was named forsch cording, who had traveled the world for two years researching a supposed curse that had stricken an irish family. the details were sparse. / on the morning of the ninth, i took the train from maryland to the western edge of robin song and walked from there to my grandfather’s house at the end of brian lane, carrying the sony digital 8 camera i had used to eke out a living for the previous three years. in fact, i had been in town with it ten months before, shooting some preliminary location shots for a very friendly independent movie producer named trent. i had met him through a friend of a friend of mine, and for several hours we had driven around town as he looked for locations to film part of a low-budget horror movie. that day’s casual shooting of churches, parks, and cemeteries had turned into more of a private documentary for trent. he had grown up nearby in hasham, and he had me get shot after shot of the nicest parts of robin song in order to convince his wife to move there so they could raise their children in a pleasant suburb. / the ninth of october was the day after my grandfather’s eighty-fifth birthday. i spent a couple of hours with him before i was to meet cording. he had gotten visibly more frail since i had seen him in march. we sat on his front porch on the quiet nine acres where i had spent much of the fifth through thirteenth years of my life. without mentioning what i would be doing the rest of the day, i asked him if he regretted never really leaving the town during his life except to fight in world war two, where he had been severely wounded by a japanese bayonet in the pacific. he told me he loved this place, and the only time he had any doubts about it was during a period of five years in the nineteen seventies when he said things had gotten ‘very sad, and very painful.’ when i asked him what he meant, he shook his head and said he was sorry, he didn’t want to explain it. i left him at about ten a.m. / i met my employer for the day, cording, at the robin song commuter train station. he was younger than he sounded on the phone, couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. he was tall and gaunt and his jeans had holes in them. he shook my hand without a smile and immediately took me aside to hand me the money i had been promised, in twenty dollar bills. he pressed the confidentiality agreement against a fare card machine so i could sign it on the spot. after asking me a few technical questions about the specs of my camera and the duration of the blank tapes i had brought, we walked out of the station into a very light drizzle. then he began to give me some instructions. i was to tape cording and our surroundings constantly wherever we walked, which would probably be all over town, often doubling back if we had to. if i began to come close to running out of tape, i was to alert him and we would stop for a moment. there would be a short break in the middle of the day so that i could recharge the camera battery. though we wouldn’t be talking to anyone specific or venturing into any places that were illegal or dangerous, he said i would most likely see or hear things that unsettled me. the important fact for me to remember, he said, was that these things absolutely could not touch me. it wasn’t possible. so whatever my fears were, i was to just keep going and recording. i said i understood, though inwardly i was quite confused. / cording spoke almost not a word to me after our initial meeting at the train station. he walked along in silence. i hung back a few steps and trained the camera on the widest shot i could in order to get as much of the surroundings as possible. having grown up in robin song, i was clueless as to what cording was possibly hoping to see. he seemed unfamiliar with the layout of the town, and it became obvious he had not been here often. he would walk in one direction for a quarter mile or a half mile, then stop to think for a moment and go in another direction, seemingly at random. he turned again and again, never telling me why we were going toward any particular place. he walked quickly and i had some trouble following him while keeping him in the camera frame. he seemed to be looking for something, but i couldn’t tell what. he did not enter any stores or go onto anyone’s property, or seem very interested in the faces or the traffic that went by us. from schuykill road i remember we went toward allen street, then rosanda, cutting across mabry road to dovetail lane. after five minutes or so on the cotton branch trail, which is a bike and foot path that runs for eight miles toward richmond, cording left it and walked over into a small thatch of trees which seemed to have no particular meaning. he stood there, seeming to concentrate, for such a long time that i was about to ask him why we had stopped completely. before i could, he said, sort of testily, ‘i need to just listen, i need to just listen,’ and he closed his eyes for a full two minutes. i pointed the camera up the trail, having nothing better to shoot.