Okay, first things first: I'm Eric Heisserer. While I've been a lurking reader here, I've been more active on Imgur for the last year or so. Ten years ago, I wrote an online epistolary story called "The Dionaea House" that caught some attention, including here on reddit, and it launched my screenwriting career. Since then, I've learned some brutal lessons about working for studios, and I've had some rewarding experiences, too, but the most interesting are the potential horror projects sent my way for adaptation, either as a movie or a documentary.
The minute you succeed with one scary story, everyone calls you "the horror guy." So for the past years I've been a kind of catch-all for weird and creepy stuff. Sometimes I'm approached by a friend or extended family member with a disturbing experience, and they just want someone to listen to them and not say they're nuts. (Also, having worked in supernatural fiction for a decade, I've become friends with a paranormal investigator, whom I occasionally introduce to people asking for help.)
Most of the projects are, well, kind of boring. They're derivative, or too subjective to the person's own life. But now and then something truly unsettling crosses my desk. Those projects tend to get made, or at least get some traction. But now I'm in an odd position on one that began last month, when a friend-of-a-friend named Kevin asked for a meeting to discuss the disappearance of his sister.
Since then I've put in countless hours on this thing, time away from my home and my wife, digging around in an empty house, working with Kevin to trace his sister's last week before vanishing. Then, on Friday, her estranged husband shut everything down and denied us adaptation rights, even threatened to sue me.
I understand his position, but it still pissed me off. Because this is a true story people need to hear about, and not in a "I want to be the one to break this news" way, but more of a "what the hell is really going on" way. So I checked with my lawyer at Jackoway Tyerman, and while I might not have the film or documentary rights, legally there is nothing to stop me from sharing my own personal experience on this thing plus whatever Kevin volunteers, as long as I don't use the last names of some of the people involved. So that's what I'm going to do.
It's still tough, regardless. While the writer-brain in me tends to think, "This is unnatural and bizarre and we should show it to others," I'm also aware that I'm intruding on the lives of real people. This isn't a group of fictional people I've invented for a Final Destination movie. I've come to some conclusions about Gwen and Robert and their son Dash, and I'm dumping a lot of that here for context, but it still feels awkward (at best) for me to discuss the lives of other people, especially when some of my assumptions could be way off base. So: grain of salt.
Gwen and Robert have been married for ten years. They had their son Dashiel a year into their marriage. Two years ago, in July, when he was seven, Dash disappeared from their house overnight. They tucked him into bed, then woke up the next morning and he was simply gone.
Police investigated. I haven't delved into the cold case reports or contacted the IIC on this yet (and I don’t have much authority to do so, really) but Kevin tells me that whole year was "emotionally vampiric" for them. His sister began developing OCD habits like checking locks on doors, and Robert had to deal with an invasive police department that refused to rule him out as a suspect before going elsewhere. Added to this pressure: A lack of ransom call or note. Zero signs of a break-in at the house. And a head-scratcher for evidence: Dash's bed had been moved from the wall, as if to vacuum behind it. That's the bit Kevin remembers.
Eventually both Robert and Gwen were dropped as suspects, but Dash was never found, and they joined the sobering ranks of families burdened by unsolved crimes.
(As an aside, this past month I've learned that a staggering 800,000 children are reported missing in the United States each year, and upwards of 115 cases each year wind up as 'unsolvable riddles' like this one.)
I will say this: I'm surprised they stayed married after this ordeal. Well, I guess I am and I'm not. My second cousin lost her 12-y/o child to a DUI driver in Florida and the death fractured her family, I think she's divorced now. That's not unusual. But maybe Gwen and Robert clung to the idea that one day Dash would come home, but they couldn't really work as a couple in his absence anymore, so they separated last October. Gwen remained in the house and Robert moved across town. This was the situation. Gwen lived alone, in the home where her only child disappeared one night.
And then last month, Gwen vanished as well.
Since she's a 38-year-old woman who lived alone, it doesn't garner the attention of an urgent missing persons case, although the detective working the case would argue otherwise (and honestly I think he's doing a good job so far). Before I stepped foot in that house, I even posited to Kevin a crazy scenario, partly because I wanted him to be aware how easy it can be to imagine a scenario like this: Gwen wanted to start a new life with Dash somewhere else, without Robert, and waited two years to finally make her move to join him. But a lot of circumstantial evidence weighed against that scenario, honestly, and the fact that both mother and son have gone missing from the same four-bedroom house is disturbing.
According to Kevin, who kept in touch with his sister throughout the whole mess, she went to a therapist to manage her emerging OCD. For two months after Dash's disappearance Gwen was losing her hair; it would fall out in clumps of strands. The doctors said it was psychosomatic. She finally got past that, and a year or so later stopped taking klonopin regularly and instead took a therapist's advice and picked up a hobby. Kevin had been pushing her to try an art class like painting or sketching, but instead Gwen took up amateur photography.
From what I've seen in her house, and stories Kevin's shared, Gwen is one of those people who gets a dozen books on a subject that interests her, and so there was a shelf of reference material on photography and lighting in her home office, many stuffed with colored Post-it flags.
But conventional photography wasn't quite her pursuit. As Kevin put it, she became more and more focused on a way to make a living at it, primarily by carving out some niche that hadn't been oversaturated in the market. Some artistic application of photography she could sell and claim as unique or at least rare. This drove her to more eclectic books on the subject, including one on infrared photography she may have purchased from eBay. Friends and family were always on the lookout for new material on the subject.
At some point in July, she acquired a book. I'm still looking to see if it was an online purchase or something from a local reseller who set it aside for Gwen since it mentioned photography.
This is the book that got me involved in the case.
I don't physically own this journal right now. Robert has it, who's moved back in as of last week and has demanded Kevin provide any and all material he may have taken from the house before Robert arrived. (And look, I get it, this guy is probably scared to death that police and/or Gwen's family will want to pin this on him somehow, so it's partly a defense mechanism.) But whatever, point is, I do have a series of scanned photographs of the thing, courtesy of Gwen's home computer. The recently-saved files and browsing history on her hard drive was the first place Kevin looked when trying to track down his sister.
Here is the journal where Kevin found it on her kitchen table:
Some things to know about this book:
- It's old. This was someone's work journal.
- It's been beaten up and even chewed up during its lifespan.
- It's in a foreign language. My guess is some Filipino language.
Gwen must have made these scans to send to a translator, but Kevin doesn't have her gmail password so we don’t know what those results were. But here are some of the images from her drive:
Here's what we've figured out so far, after walking the house and sifting through stuff as carefully as we can:
Gwen had been testing some homemade camera that uses film that looks like oversized Instamatic sheets, plus traditional film cartridges and a flash strobe with a bulb etched with a thousand little bevels, akin to the surface of a cut diamond. We think she purchased most of it online. In her downstairs darkroom plus the master bathroom, which she converted into a second darkroom, we found eight trays marked with different number sets, and sealed jars of chemical solutions. The place smelled vaguely of ammonia and toner.
Something from this journal gave her an idea. Kevin says she'd told him a week before she had been working non-stop on a new "groundbreaking" project, and had asked him to take a look at her progress and let her know she wasn't going crazy. (The regular check-in from Gwen with the question, "Am I going nuts?" has been recurring for two years. Kevin has helped her find her keys, replace batteries in her smoke detector, and other tasks, but mainly he just listened to her. Whenever she would lose something in her house, he'd have to come over and calm her down.)
When Kevin went to her house, she was nowhere to be found.
He did eventually find a set of photos she'd developed. One version, she developed normally, as far as I can tell. It's a color photo of Dash's room.
But the other one has been taken with some special process.
And this is what's been keeping me awake at night.
I hope to share more information as I get it from Kevin, but for now this is what we have.
UPDATE: Some news. Some good, some frustrating.
First up -- I'm told the language in the journal is Ifugao. I don't have any translations yet, but I'm reaching out to friends to see if I can find someone to a) confirm this and b) work on reading it for us.
Next: Some people have been asking about that photo with the door. I don't know what to tell you. I can say that when Kevin and I inspected the wall where the door appears in the grainy image, we didn't find anything unusual. No invisible handle, no hinges, etc. It felt colder to me, like just in that area, but that may be psychosomatic.
Gwen apparently tried several times to get the exposures right, and I have some of the ones from the same batch that the first one was from. Kevin lent me all that. Here they are.
(And yes I'm drinking this early, don't judge.)
The real kicker this morning was my email with Kevin. He went over to retrieve some more photos (developed or undeveloped) from Gwen's rooms, and Robert was there with a locksmith. He's moved back in, and doesn't want Kevin or me around anymore. He claims it's because we're making her disappearance a "tourist attraction."
I really don't want it to be that, and Kevin knows I haven't shared addresses or locations, but okay. The thing is, I don't believe Robert buys into any of these weirdness. And I'm worried he would rather just get rid of anything that looks unexplainable than try to look into it further. It's even more agonizing because Kevin said Robert confronted him with one of Gwen's photos, demanding to know if he "let" his sister do these crazy art projects.
The photo, as Kevin described it (copied from his email):
"It was a shot of their house, from the street. Done in that weird development process, black and white and weird shadows. Only there was another goddamn house fused to it on one end. Like someone left a really old house standing and built a new one attached to it. It was on the side of their house where Dash's room is."
I really want to see that photo now, but things are tense now.
Oh, and one more tidbit: Robert did admit to contact with Gwen, two days before Kevin went to her house and couldn't find her. She left Robert a voicemail, telling him, "I found his car!" She was ecstatic. I asked Kevin what that meant, and he said he thinks it's the toy car Dash loved, it went missing when he did. One of those little McQueen cars from the movie. Gwen replaced it a year ago and left it in his room, and then started adding new bits of Disney merchandise, particularly on Dash's birthday. (I think this is what drove her and Robert apart the most; the way Gwen kept adding little touches to his room as some lure to bring him back.)
I have not seen any photos to suggest a car toy in them. But if Kevin can get into her gmail, we might find it.
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Final Post
In case some of you followed this last week but missed the update, there’s more to that second link now, at the end.
And that brings me to tonight. Where I’m a little drunk and a long way from being drunk enough. So let me tell you what ruined this day. And why I’m done with this whole thing now. This is it, I’m out.
It began with Kevin texting me, asking if I’d heard of some chemist, and gave me the name. It didn’t ring any bells. He said the chemist called because Gwen had reached out to him for a research question, and he didn’t get around to checking it out until this week, and Gwen’s voicemail now just gives Kevin’s number as a contact (this is something Kevin set up a while ago).
Kevin’s out of town this whole weekend, spending it with his own family, and I don’t blame him. But it meant he wanted me to follow up with the guy and find out what kind of research he meant.
The call was cordial enough, but I think the chemist became increasingly uneasy with each follow-up question. He said Gwen had sent him a set of pages from a book, containing some chemical diagrams, and wanted more information about them. I asked which pages, and he replied, “72 and 73.”
Here’s the thing: that’s the blank spread near the end of the book. The one I mentioned we recovered with the two other spreads. I told him, there’s nothing on those pages. I even pulled up the recovered image Kevin sent me last week.
This is what we had:
He responded, “I’m looking at them right now, what she sent me, and it’s here.”
So I asked him to send me what he had. And he did.
I can’t tell if Gwen used a similar developing process or some special lighting/exposure, but it’s clear she suspected there was content on this spread and knew how to access it. I feel like if I had even just the previous two pages, it would help give me a bigger sense of the procedure here, but this is all she sent the chemist.
I must have stared at this for an hour or more, working over in my mind what this even suggests -- this partial sketch in what is likely a series of secret notes. I mean, WTF is on the other pages? Do I want to know? Why is it I always want to know?
Here is what I know, and it’s just based on my analysis of the evidence: Salazar’s sanity appears to have taken a decline in the later entries, especially once Masferre left him behind. I see that in the handwriting, the difference from the first entry and the last ones. But it seems he also began working much more intensely on what he calls the “exposures.” He photographed the whole village. Then began following signs of this missing girl beyond the village. Even followed a road or path otherwise unseen. The list on one page (0047) could be a series of objects he found in his special exposures that he couldn’t see in normal reality.
And then he continues, by theorizing what this place is. I found this particularly interesting, since I expected him to link it to the afterlife or the spirit world, considering all the spiritual significance of that culture at the time, and the mythology behind elements like the Balete trees. But Salazar talks about it as simply an “in-between,” like a crack in reality where things and people can fall.
The less I think about Long Fingers, the better.
One thing seems certain: Salazar had become obsessed with this invisible place, and even posited the question of enabling himself to physically see it with his own eyes, rather than after-the-fact, in a dark room, with a series of photographs. And I look at that image Gwen sent the chemist, and I see what I think is an eyedropper. A goddamn eyedropper. Tilted over an eyeball.
So what the hell are we to make of that? I don’t know what to make of the two structural diagrams the chemist confirmed. Psilocin and phenidone? He told me what they were, and some of their more common uses, but it didn’t mean much to me. All I can conclude, based only on what I have here, is that Salazar experimented with a way to adjust the photochemicals or mix them with others in order to drop them directly into his eye and attempt to see the “in-between” without his camera. And that’s crazy, yes, of course, no argument here, and I don’t even know how he’d go about testing it out especially when he was already unstable by that point.
But it brings me to Gwen. And something Kevin said at drinks last Tuesday, about Dash. Dash was a good kid, but he had his quirks. He was often easily spooked, his blood pressure typically ran high, to the point Gwen and Robert thought he might become diabetic in his teens. And he had a habit they couldn’t break: He ate paper. Chewed on it. Notebook paper, 3M notes, magazine pages, you name it. Dash would surreptitiously tear off a corner here or there and chew on it in the back of his mouth. It was bad enough their dentist showed them how Dash had stained his back molars.
If there is some kernel of merit to the idea that you can rewire the chemical composition in your eyes to see what you don’t normally see, then maybe you can also affect it by ingesting certain chemicals for an extended period? I’m not sure.
This brings me to where I went tonight. What I just did.
Armed with this information, I felt it high time to go to Robert and call a truce. I boxed up all the materials I’d accumulated, including the printout of pgs 72-73, and most of my correspondence with Kevin. It just felt like the right thing to do. Even if he refused to see me, I’d know at least I did what I could to find some closure.
Surprisingly, he was fine with my visit. He let me in, and we sat down at his (well, Gwen’s) kitchen table and talked. He’d been drinking some red wine and continued drinking as we went over everything.
I got up enough nerve to tell him what might have happened. Gwen concocted some very bad-for-you shit that she most likely dropped into her eyes. Because she had the really sad idea that their son was somehow caught in this in-between and she was going to Get Him Back No Matter What. It may have been hallucinogenic or maybe it just slowly turned her blind, but odds are she is in a hospital somewhere or, worst case scenario, she didn’t survive this self-experiment, and pretty soon someone will find her body. I told Robert this not because I wanted to hurt him, or stir up some emotional reaction, I just wanted to help him make sense of it. And maybe help myself make sense of it at the same time.
Robert nodded along, listened quietly, didn’t ask nearly enough questions, which suggested to me that he felt my theory was either spot-on, or it was entirely bullshit. Regardless, he was calm with me. Even a little apologetic. I asked him if he wanted to talk to the chemist, to follow up, and he told me he didn’t need to, which I had thought at the time was him simply saying he believed me.
Lastly, I told him I hope he might one day get some closure to all of this, and I urged him not to let Gwen’s last message to him hang on his conscience. He told me it wouldn’t. And then he showed me two photographs to help me understand why. He even asked me to take pics of them and send to Kevin, so all of us would have the same information.
The first is a shot Gwen took from a step-ladder on the side of the house, with her back to Dash’s room. “Her back to that door, really,” Robert had said. She wanted to look inside that second house fused with their own, but it meant using a different camera she could carry up the ladder. Robert said her notes were detailed, and discussed things like using black-and-white film as the base, plus a new type of push processing to get a clearer development of the “in between” photo.
The normal outdoor photo is here:
The second is what happened to that same photo when Gwen used Salazar’s exposure/development process. This is what it looks like in the “in-between” world:
“That’s his car,” Robert told me. Dash’s toy. On the floor. That’s what Gwen meant when she said she’d found it.
After I drank a full glass of that wine, I asked Robert where in the hell he found these images, since Kevin and I scoured Gwen’s house for anything like it. He told me, “They were on the flatbed scanner.” And I silently cursed myself for never looking there.
I didn’t know what else to say to the man. He seemed at peace with everything, but at the time I thought that was the wine talking. I shook his hand, and he pulled me into a brief hug, and all I could think to say was that I’m sure Gwen knows he loves her. And Robert said to me, “It’s okay. I’ll see them again one day. I’ll find them.”
He walked me to the door and we shook hands a second time. But as he closed the front door, I noticed the half-bathroom across the foyer, behind him. Its door hung open. And while it was only a glimpse, I got a clear look at what was sitting on the vanity counter.
An eyedropper.
