To the Reader of This Work:

  To begin, I did not write the story you are about to read. I merely discovered it.

  A little over a year ago, I bought a small farmhouse in East Texas. The house had been abandoned and, because of unpaid property taxes, was put up for auction by Nacogdoches County. As the saying goes, I won it ‘for a song’ as I was the only bidder on the property.

  Once I got out to see the place (I bought it sight unseen), I understood why no one else bid on the house. It was tucked back in the piney woods of east Texas, and only accessible by traveling through one dirt road after another.

  But I wasn’t unhappy with my purchase. The house was small, probably smaller than a one-bedroom apartment, but it was still in fairly good shape. It was situated in a clearing among the trees, which is exactly what I was looking for. I wanted a place that I could visit when I wanted to get away from the hectic life of a big city.

  The house wasn’t in great shape. It was completely empty of any furniture or appliances. Some walls were rotten, and part of the roof had collapsed, so sleeping in the building was more like a camping trip than a restful stay indoors.

  After going into town for supplies and tools to start making repairs, I spent all day ripping out rotten lumber and all night sleeping in a hammock in my new front yard. I was halfway through my first day of demolition when I discovered the story you are about to read.

  I used my crowbar to pull a long board from a wall that might have once been a bedroom. The board fell away, and a thick plastic garbage bag fell out of the space behind it. It was the first thing I found inside the wall that wasn’t a black widow spider or a mouse skeleton. Inside the plastic bag was a journal, and in that journal was the story of Stephen Jensen written in his own handwriting.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Everything about that moment was strange. The board that I pulled from the wall, along with the wood surrounding it, was obviously very old, as decades of rot and dust had settled in. As far as I could tell, no one had done any prior renovations or repairs to the house, as the nails used to build it also seemed to be antique. The presence of a plastic garbage bag, like one you could buy at any modern grocery store, was completely incongruous with the old, dilapidated state of the house.

  The journal was also strange. It wasn’t an old leather-bound book like you might find in a museum. It was obviously store-bought and modern. Hell, it even still had the barcode sticker on the back. The handwriting did not look old at all and appeared to be written with a ballpoint pen, which weren’t common in the US until the 1950s. The house was significantly older than that.

  The contents of the story seem to fit the house itself. Both are small, remote, and located in east Texas. But that is all. I searched throughout the house and could not find a basement. The date listed in the story is in my past, but not by much. According to the county records, the house has been abandoned much longer than that.

  As for Stephen Jensen himself, I discovered very little. Unfortunately, the name is pretty common, and I found too many listings for people with that name. The closest tie I could find to the name and the person described in the journal was on a website listing the stats for high school baseball players. But that Stephen Jensen would be too young to be the author of this story.

  So, with no other ideas of what to do with the journal, I have decided to publish it under my name. If the actual author, Stephen Jensen or otherwise, wishes to claim the story, then please step forward and present your evidence that you are the actual writer.

  I have a lot of questions for you.

  And you, Reader of This Work, I hope you enjoy the story as much as I did.

  Sincerely,

  Cliff Hamrick