I’ve made my decision. I’ve locked myself in the makeshift studio where I made the first recording. I’ve piled all the equipment against the doors, so nobody can get in or out. The media have dubbed it ‘The Summer of Murder’, but in reality the killings have been happening for a year or so prior. If you trawl through the blogs and imageboards, you’ll see the trail of violence.

It had started last June. Sealed inside their panic room, a wealthy family’s mutilated bodies were found by a private response team. If you looked in the right places for it you could find the last transmission from the house, or what was claimed to be it at any rate – a mash of squealing and crying, the father bellowing hoarsely down the phone. He screams to the coldly professional operator. There’s a man in the house. He’s been following them for weeks. He’s been stalking the children. He’s been watching them in their sleep. Nobody believes them.

The call terminates with a hefty burst of static. This seems to disturb the operator, because the next thirty seconds of audio are her heavily distorted pleas as she watches something happening on the panic room camera.

It was mostly dismissed as internet schlock, another creepy story making the rounds. But it was well-read. The mythos expanded rapidly; if you found good sources, sometimes you’d get a few pictures along with the audio clip. Mostly these were just scribbled sketches of a shadowy man drawn in faux-crayon. Every once in a while though, if you waded through the crap Photoshop jobs, you’d find a few decent photographs. A bit blurred, but clear enough to show a stockily-built man in a charcoal suit. He wore black gloves, and a white mask over his face. Sometimes he’d be standing behind the trees by the roadside. Sometimes he’d be standing at the back of a crowd, or in a deserted parking lot late at night. Sometimes he’d be hovering over an empty bed. He would always, without exception, be looking straight at you. Most of these, of course, were dark and noisy security stills. You couldn’t make out much, but you probably didn’t want to anyway – the mask looked to be featureless, save for two dark depressions that served as eyes.

The legend of this man grew. People shared stories and evidence amongst themselves, passing on clippings and reports from peer to peer, community to community. The kooks who had banded together to track him down eventually gave him a name.

i.

i was the killer in all of us. i was the ever-present threat of violence. i was the feared.

It took a few months before the murders attracted mainstream attention. In the beginning, it had all been about people looking for spooky stories to keep them up at night. Once the public got hold of it, the focus swivelled squarely onto the police. How could they allow this dangerous killer roam free? Why hadn’t they found any concrete evidence yet, were they that incompetent? What were we paying our taxes for? The police spent weeks and weeks trying to fight a public relations battle, stepping up patrols, and showing people how to make their homes safer. i responded by escalating the improbability of his crimes. A lady, killed in her cubicle at work during the lunch hour. No witnesses. A man, murdered in a crowded shopping mall. No witnesses. A paranoid politician, messily executed in the middle of his own security cordon.

No witnesses.

The cult sprang up soon after that. People worshipped this sick killer, this man who stalked and murdered without regard for laws, physical or otherwise. They considered his crimes to have a certain purity about them, that he was a godlike being to be feared and revered. You would see clumps of them parading up and down, passing out badly photocopied flyers to anyone careless enough to make eye-contact. i heralded a glorious end, they said. i was death, and i had come to deliver us all to eternal rest.

Oddly enough, the cult weirdoes were the first to frown upon the copycats. While it’s conceivable that i was an organisation of killers, these morons were certainly not they. While i stalked and killed with impunity, the copycats were caught mostly by their own greed and vanity. Robberies, revenge killings, insurance jobs; all of them shoddily disguised with puerile locked-room mysteries to look like his work.

But i was impossible. Impossible cannot be re-enacted. Impossible cannot be dissected, or comprehended, or imitated. The copycats had failed, and many who had found themselves locked up safe and tight in their jail cells had the opportunity to meet the real master of their craft.

I think it’s time, now. i had a good run, but now that people have begun to copy his work and take it for their own, it’s gotten old. In truth, I never really expected my story to succeed as well as it did. It was an interesting little sideline, something I threw together over a weekend. I released the tale here and there, picking my sites carefully, framing the fantasy with just enough reality to be credible.

When the news stories started coming through, I was ecstatic. I had written something so real, so believable, that somebody somewhere had trusted it enough to turn it into a proper article. It set off a flurry of creativity within me, and I spent weeks, months, crafting and drip-feeding more stories into the internet. The news stories kept on coming. It took me a while longer to figure out the fact that still tugs at the bottom of my stomach.

I hadn’t created something believable.

I had created something that was real.

I’m going to leave it on an authentic high note. I’ll close my eyes, and imagine him for one last time. He’ll be there, standing in front of my screens, silhouetted against the icy glare. It’ll be the last tale I craft, my own final entry in the mythos that I’ve given birth to. In this story, i will appear to murder his creator. He thinks he can stop himself from harming anyone else. He thinks that when I die, he will be absolved of his duties and that he can rest.

I think I’ve built up too much of a following for that to happen.

I am only mortal. I will die and be forgotten.

i will live forever.