Alright, I'm back, I'm alright, no need to fret.

Though yesterday was no weirder than you'd expect.

People showed up for work about an hour after I got that call. I told the chief, he sent me over there with a couple of officers to investigate. I could tell the whole place was worried, but I just tried to keep a cool head.

Eric lives in a house on the west end of town, not too far from where Jessica Albright's family lives. It's more of a two-story shack than anything else, but it's pretty homely, at least, on the outside. Blue paint, green shutters, even a little garden out front. I never took Eric for the type, but then again, you learn something new every day.

We tried not to make a scene. We just went up to the door and I knocked. They stood on either side, ready to go in on my mark.

“Eric? It's Zeke, you home?”

No answer. I open the door, my gun's out, and we all but storm inside.

Eric's place was a wreck. The couch was overturned and the stuffing was torn out of one of the cushions. The TV was smashed up, the vase was shattered, and almost every single picture that was hanging on the wall had the glass smashed or was hanging crooked. The only picture that wasn't in shambles was the one on his table, the one of him and his old partner, Mickey Scott. I'm still not sure why it was the only one untouched.

I must have searched the entire first floor twice before I moved upstairs. The rest of downstairs was just as big a wreck. The kitchen lost every single dish it had had all over the floor, the bathroom was just unrecognizable (not to mention flooding somewhat), and the dryer in the laundry room had actually been overturned. Over-fucking-turned. Now that's something I've never seen before.

But no Eric.

His bedroom was a mess. The mattress was flipped so that it was leaning against the wall, the springs on the underside twisted and broken. His dresser was rummaged through, and clothes were all over the place. His alarm clock was on the floor in hundreds of little pieces, and the mirror on his door was cracked so bad you couldn't pick your reflection out of it.

The whole place is just a fucking mess. Some of it is just too extreme. This wasn't a robbery or a kidnapping, somebody waged the Vietnam War Part Two in here and bombed the shit out of it. And still, no sign of Eric. No wallet, keys were found under one of his jackets, no visible sign of him anywhere.

Something new happened here. None of this matches the patterns we've been seeing so far. The other kids were taken with almost no effort, and yet here it looks like a fucking rhinoceros charged through here to grab him. Conaghan couldn't have done all this without help...so who else did he have do this?

I told one of the officers to call the station and get more people over here, and I told the other one to start marking outside, make sure no one decided to come snooping. The first one immediately took off, but the second one just stood there looking up at the ceiling like he had mental issues. I snapped my fingers in front of his face to bring him back down to Earth, and he just looked at me for a minute and then went right back to looking up at the ceiling again. Annoyed, I looked up to see what had him so damn transfixed...and saw what was quickly becoming the most redundant part of this whole fucking case. A damn message:

OEW HES OIN RYO UTR EUO PIN TKN GHO OFI IXN EPR MEC UFI XSU NEG HHE LLE TYO USE PRW EEN NER LIV GA

THE ANGEL OF DEATH COMES FOR US ALL

Yeah, I am officially getting sick and tired of that fucking line. If I wanted a preacher's quote, I'd go back to church.

Well, at least it wasn't ALL blood writing this time. But the letters...assuming my memory hasn't gotten fuzzy, because I haven't thought about it much since we discovered it... those are the letters from Albright's diary, right? The capitals from that freaky-ass rhyme-thing she wrote? Some of it's written in what I'm guessing is paint or tar or something...and then the specific letters and the last line are written in blood (for some reason, there's no color options on this damn thing, so I just bolded them so that it would be easier to understand).

I guess there was a message in there after all. Though I don't if it's intentional or just coincidence.

The rest of the department got there and immediately got to work, taking pictures, dusting for prints, all that. Someone was going to take a blood sample, but based off of experience I believed it was safe to assume we weren't going to get anything off of it. Lizzie got here, and when she saw the writing on the ceiling she just gave me that look I knew all too well.

This just got personal.

I'm back at the office now. Eric's face is being printed on a million “Missing” posters as we speak. I look over at his desk, thinking about the conversation we had had barely two weeks ago...and wondering how the hell he got targeted.

He wasn't a threat. He wasn't a major player. He was just doing his job.

And I know what I'm going to hear; how this coincides with the latest Marble Hornets entry. Yeah, well, fuck you. You're saying Eric was kidnapped so that it could be in sync with a fucking video? Kiss my ass. I don't know how you'd plan something like this around a fucking video; especially one that just got put up hours before.

Eric is missing. I don't care what happened in the stupid entry. I care about finding him and the others.

So Slender Heads, piss the fuck off.

I'm finishing this entry before I get angry.

I'll write again when I know more.