The Soggy Man

Back then I had not found my feet as a writer yet, and if my own memory serves, I put that short story together solely to play with a concept that excited me. The Stranger in the Memories. who the character refers to as the soggy man, got closer to the character every time he recalled a memory from that place. The idea was that this soggy man was really a conscious entity that had somehow come to inhabit the character's memories.

Like many okay, most of my early episodes, memories ended without any resolution. I wanted the concept to linger. I wanted to warp the listener's reality since I know memories are so malleable. I hoped that some listeners' memories might begin to distort, leading them to wonder if something like the entity from the story could stalk them through their own memories. By not supplying any resolution, I didn't give anyone that might happen to a way out.

Why would I have wanted to do that to people? It's simple. As a massive fan of horror, long before I ventured into creating it, I understand what horror fans crave. We like stuff that gets under our skin and festers there. We like unsettling ideas that last. Fear makes our lives more flavorful, and we love the taste, the texture. But truthfully, there's another reason I didn't resolve the story memories. I didn't know how.

I rarely dove into a story with a preconceived ending back then. I still don't, usually. I probably thought I'd figure it out as I went, and the ending never came to me. Now I wish I'd taken the time to slap together some type of conclusion. Because all these years later, that story was has come back to haunt me. I recently considered revisiting that episode to see if I could flesh out a fuller story with more character development, a heartier plot, and maybe just maybe an ending.

I listened to it and was appalled at the tinny sound of my first microphone. I really had no idea what I was doing back then. It brought me some nostalgia though, recalling my old desk crammed under the window of the spare bedroom where my girlfriend, now wife's rabbit lived. The desk itself was from her old room at her mom's house, and we'd moved it one too many times. The particle board top was breaking down.

I did what I could with extra long screws and wood glue, but the whole desk still shifted a couple of inches to the left whenever I accidentally leaned too heavily on it. On the wobbly desk sat the MacBook Pro I'd bought with my high school graduation money, the same laptop that got me through college and on which I wrote my first two novels. I don't remember how I plugged the microphone into the laptop back then.

Probably with the crappy four channel mixer I used to record songs that sounded like Nirvana outtakes on. But I can also picture the focus right interface I used for years after that. Did I already have it that early on? See, that's the thing about a memory, you can alter it, and if you're not careful, you can accidentally change it for good. Soon you can't remember which version is real and which is the one you changed. Or maybe you don't remember changing it at all.

Anyway, before listening back to memories, I had completely forgotten about the soggy man. In the episode, each time the character remembers his family's vacation home, the soggy man looks a little closer. He's also more rotten and bloated. He appears in multiple memories of that place, but there's one particular memory of a birthday celebration, which the character recalls enough times to bring the soggy man right in front of himself.

In the episode, I make a pass at explaining who or what the Soggy Man is by mentioning a guy who went missing in the area years before. But I think you'd agree that the Soggy Man doesn't sound like an ordinary ghost. Perhaps he's some kind of demon masquerading as the missing person to throw the character off. You might be thinking, Well you're the author, just make up your mind. The problem is, I'm not sure I actually created the soggy man. I think he found me.

In memories, the character describes the soggy man starting out as an ordinary, albeit soaking wet and filthy, man with dark hair and an average build, wearing a green Oregon ducks sweatshirt and blue jeans. The character can't remember his eyes. As the soggy man gets nearer to the character, he also takes on a greenish hue and looks puffy, like someone stuck a balloon pump in his face.

I was trying to say he looked bloated, the way a drowning victim might look, right? This was perhaps further evidence of his identity and most definitely a bit of misdirection. Just a few days ago, when I re-listened to memories and pictured my old home studio, I also pictured my backyard.

Like I said, that wobbly desk was crammed under a rear window, so the audio gear and backyard show up in the same recalled image. Besides a rusty old clothes line, there wasn't much in our old backyard, at least not in twenty twenty one, Our property manager had two trees back there cut down after the twenty twenty Duracho that ripped through Ames and left us without power for five days.

Our neighbor behind us had a short wire fence around her yard, which is how I knew the memory was accurate. She replaced that fence with a taller one to keep the deer out a couple of years ago. Standing behind the clothesline, which I'd love to say was draped in sheets to make this reveal even creepier, but alas, in the memory, it was empty. I saw the soggy man. He was already green, already bloated. His Oregon Ducks sweatshirt and jeans were gone. My soggy man was completely naked.

Thankfully his troll-like belly hung low enough to hide the parts of him I don't think I could have forgiven my mind for forcing me to imagine. His dark hair clung to his jutting forehead which stuck out far enough to cast a shadow over his eyes. Since the concept was obviously powerful enough to affect even me, its handler, I decided I should definitely revisit memories and try to expand it into a story worth the listener's time.

I imagined the soggy man finally reaching the character and speculated about what might happen next. What would happen if and when he finally caught up to the character? I could only picture him vanishing, though. Almost like he passed by or through the character. But that's not the way I wanted the story to go.

I didn't just want the soggy man to journey on to somewhere else. I wanted him to have some lasting effect on the character, and preferably one which also explained what the soggy man was. Eventually, I decided to start writing and see where the story took me. Sometimes it's best for me to explore characters and settings for a while to see if something puts itself together organically. It often does.

I wanted to reinvent this Augyman and make him scarier like the version that showed up in my memory, so I recalled that memory of my old studio to take a snapshot of him. He was now standing in front of the clothesline. I didn't put him there. That's just where he showed up. I tried to put him back by the fence, but he wouldn't move. As a test, I put my neighbor's new tall fence back there and replaced the trees. Those changes happened easily, and I could turn them on and off in an instant.

yet the soggy man remained unchangeable. He stood almost statuesque, save for nearly undetectable twitches and pulses in his narrow shoulders and hanging hands.

But choosing to cancel the new story didn't free me from what it imprinted on my memories. I'm sure you're aware that the harder you try not to think about something, the more impossible it becomes to ignore. In psychology, this is called ironic process theory, or the pink elephant paradox. I'm sure you've heard of it before. If someone tells you not to picture a pink elephant, what is the image that immediately comes to mind?

So you can guess how telling myself not to picture my old backyard went. and each time I involuntarily recalled the view through my old window, the soggy man grew closer. His progress correlated with the length of time between my recollections. If I viewed the memory twice in the same day, he wouldn't be more than a step closer to my window. But after a full night of sleep, When I'd be standing in front of the coffee maker and the memory would creep into my foggy thoughts.

he'd be five, ten feet nearer. It felt like a game of red light, green light. I took that concept and tried something a little silly, but I wanted to see if it would work. I was sitting at my computer designing episode artwork for the Fairfield Railroad Phantom when the memory intruded. I noted the soggy man's distance, about twenty feet away. I prepared myself and switched my attention back to the artwork on my screen.

I took a couple of deep breaths, then abruptly recalled the memory again, hoping to catch the soggy man moving. Maybe my inner child thought I could send him back to start like in the game. But if he'd moved at all, it wasn't far enough for me to tell. He remained perfectly still, besides the subtle pulsing of life or whatever force animated him.

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This sent me into a late night frenzy at my keyboard searching for anything about an entity that crawls through your memories to get to you. Before I found anything particularly helpful, I was struck by a realization. The soggy man started moving through my own memory after I'd begun playing with ideas about where his unresolved story might lead. I had imagined the thing I hadn't bothered to in 2021.

I'd imagined the soggy man catching up to the character. I don't think it was ever up to me what happened next. I fell asleep in front of the computer wondering how it was possible for something to have escaped a world I had imagined and enter my true memories. I've always said it feels like my characters have minds of their own and I'm usually just following them through the story, but that's never really applied to my monsters.

But here's the thing, when I'm writing, I have a backspace key, control Z, that's the keyboard shortcut for undo in case you didn't know. And I can write multiple drafts. I can change things retroactively. in stories. But after he escaped, if I got anything wrong while dealing with the soggy man, I couldn't hit delete. I only had one chance to get it right, or

I have a family. Would he come for them next? I want credit for my first plan even though it failed. I still think it was worth a shot. Remember how I could alter anything in the memory except the soggy man? I weaponized that ability. The next time a drifting image of him rolled in with a wall of

Wave of thought, I recalled my old studio memory with some drastic alterations. For one, I pivoted my desk to face a wall instead of the window. I kept my view of the memory zoomed in and moved the wobbly desk and each piece of equipment without. without looking out the window once. It was easier to do than you might think, because not too long after I recorded memories is when I started upgrading my gear and actually did move my desk to face the wall. But I didn't go far enough.

I didn't change anything else about the room, including the artwork or sound treatment I had on the walls. Have you seen that old Max L high-fidelity tape ad with the guy wearing shades sitting across from his speakers and getting his hair blown back? My mother in law gave me a print of it for Christmas one year because she knows I'm a big music guy, and I put it in a frame with a glass cover. That print happened to be just above eye level behind my desk's new position.

I should have taken into account its reflection. The next time my brain errantly triggered the memory of my old studio, I successfully recalled my altered version instead of the original. I felt so tempted to turn around and see if I'd halted the soggy man's progress, Or only turned a blind eye to it, but I decided it would be best to ignore him. if I starved him of my fear, I thought maybe he might fade away. Then my eyes caught the reflection on the Max Lading. It reflected my window.

The backyard. and standing in the middle of the frame, The soggy man. His features looked even more shadowed in the dim reflection, but I could still feel his eyes on me, burrowing in like claws and driving in to make sure I knew I could not escape. I shut off the memory immediately and tried to plan my next step, but strategizing without accidentally picturing the memory proved quite difficult.

I walked into my present office slash studio, which at that point no longer resembled the twenty twenty one version in any regard. I had a new desk, computer, speakers, microphone, new chair, additional artwork and guitars. And I considered how I might structure the studio in my memory to counter the reflection problem. The simple solution struck me almost immediately. Close the curtains. If I wanted to shut the Soggy Man out of my view, why hadn't I just closed the curtains?

It would have been a hell of a lot easier than altering the entire arrangement of the room. Feeling stupid, I sat in my chair, closed my eyes, and imagined my old desk again. This time I was careful not to look up at the Max L ad. I imagined the scraping sound of the curtains drawing closed and watched the office get dark. Then I reached up to the light switch behind my desk and flipped it on. I'd hidden the soggy man from view.

Satisfied, I returned to the memory multiple times that day, in hopes that my continuous visitation without looking at him might drain him of his power. I thought my seeing him was feeding him somehow, and that if I forced him to exist without being seen, he would starve. Since he was a creation of my own mind, I thought this would work. I thought I could retroactively put rules on him as if he was still in one of my stories. But remember? He'd escaped my imagination.

It doesn't matter. Unfortunately, even though the dream respected my alterations, it was still a dream. I attempted lucid dreaming in high school but never found much success and gave up. This to say I had no control over my actions in this dream. My dream self saved his file and shut his laptop down, leaving the screen open. A reflection took the place of the light grey power down screen. And in it, I saw a single green, bloated hand hanging next to a matching leg.

My dream self spun in his chair and came face to face with the soggy man. He was close enough that I could finally see his eyes glaring down at me with rage, amber orbs encasing tiny black dots in their centers. I startled awake, jerking hard enough to wake my wife as well. I told her I had only had a nightmare and she could go back to sleep. It didn't take her long. I felt like I had a hangover, I was so tired, but I could not fall asleep again that night.

I avoided conjuring any memories of my old office for hours. The looming thread of the soggy man made me so afraid I think my brain blocked the memory for me like a trauma response. But just before lunch.

He didn't move. But he was close enough he could have reached out and grabbed me. That was the last time I saw the soggy man. The next time the memory returned, he'd vanished, just like he had when he reached my character in memories. I found no relief in his absence. It only made me wonder where he could have gone next. He'd escaped my imagination first, then entered my memories. I feared the next stage might have been my reality, but I haven't seen him appear anywhere. Not yet.

I tried resetting the memory of my old office, opening the curtains, putting the desk and all its gear back in place, making sure the fence in the backyard matches the one from twenty twenty one, But the soggy man is nowhere to be found. I can barely even picture him anymore if I try. As I've been writing this, it's been a struggle to describe him. I've only been able to reach one conclusion about where he might have gone. And it's the reason I'm sharing this with you all now.

This story comes with a warning And a heavy apology. I think the soggy man may have escaped my mind altogether. And unfortunately. I fear he may have spread to one of yours. I am So So sorry. You made it out. Congratulations. If you enjoyed the story, please rate, like, review, or subscribe. For early, ad-free episodes and behind-the-scenes episodes called Into the Woods. Become a patron at patreon.com slash the warning woods.

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Beck's End is a new folk horror audio drama series about isolation, radicalization, and asks the question if redemption is ever possible once all hell has broken loose. Now funding on Kickstarter.