If you see a man with a red notepad, you need to read this as a matter of life and death.

I don't know his name. I don't know his age. I don't know where he lives and I certainly don't know how to find him. All that I know is that he's dangerous, and he's on the move.

I'm a government employee. I work in a research lab that develops experimental weaponry, primarily of the biological variety. I don't want to say much more than that, as this is already at massive risk of exposing my identity, but I will say that I'm not exactly an intern. I've seen things. I've studied things. I've created things.

I created him.

Or, better put, I re-created him. Confused? I don’t blame you. If you're reading this then you're well aware of the concept of legends and mythology; things that feed on our collective imaginations to grow more powerful, that live on our tongues as we utter their names and speak their stories, growing and evolving until they become a force of their own. Unstoppable. Unforgettable.

The man with the red notepad is one of them. I'm not positive, but I think his legend began in an e-mail chain from the late 90s. You know the type: forward this to 20 people in the next hour or some asshole is going to hack you to pieces with an axe. Except his went a little differently. In his, he would find his victims and draw them. Sometimes he would draw them drowning to death, other times he would draw them wasting away in a hospital bed, and other times he would draw them being cut open and pulled apart. It was a coin toss what version of the internet myth you'd encounter, but all of them had one thing in common. He would draw you, and you would die.

The thing about the man though, was that his sketches were thorough. It wasn't enough to simply make a stick figure labeled Sally and have that stick figure being impaled by a flagpole. No, in his sketches, Sally was a detailed work of art, with immaculate shading and perfect lines. There were exceptions to the rule of course: wrinkles, makeup, long hair, short hair -- things that would naturally change over the course of a lifetime. These never needed to be exact. As long as the core of the individual was on display, his nightmare worked its magic.

As such, his sketches would take hours. Sometimes they would take days. It was only after he was finished his sketches and signed them with his messy initials, that the death sentence would trigger.

When I received the assignment, I laughed. "Give life to a legend?" I remember saying to my boss. "You know April Fools was six months ago, right?"

She wasn't laughing though. I remember the way she took a deep breath, straightened her blouse, and sat down in the chair across from me. I remember the steeple of her fingers, the nervous twitch at the corner of her mouth, and the smell of cheap coffee gently steaming on the table between us. "Fear," she said carefully. "Is a weapon more powerful than bullets and bombs. We need that right now."

That was six years ago. I've grown since then, mentally and physically. So has the man. He started life in a test tube, shapeless and helpless. Before long though, he was walking, talking, and after not much longer than that, he was killing. At first it was prisoners. People we'd pulled from black sites. We'd sit both of them in a lab we called the Red Room, the prisoner chained, and the man behind a plexiglas divider. He'd draw them, and they would die. Sometimes they'd catch fire. Other times they'd break out in hives, scratch their own skin bloody and flay themselves alive. Always though, they would die.

Needless to say, we didn't permit him his notepad when the experiments weren't running. In the time between, he'd sit alone in his small cell, hunched over in the corner with his head down. I suppose I couldn't blame him, with only a thin mattress, a bowl to shit and piss in, and two meals a day there wasn't much else for him to do. We kept two cameras pointed at him at the front of the room just in case, monitoring the man at all times. We even made sure to cycle the guards, on the off chance he managed to coax one into becoming sympathetic. Hell, thanks to some clever genetic work on the part of my science team, he rarely even needed showers, so he was virtually always under lock-and-key.

We took steps, is what I'm saying. We covered our bases.

Despite it all though, he escaped. I got the call last week and when my boss broke the news. At first, I called bullshit. It wasn't possible. Nobody escaped the Facility. Hell, I remember the day it'd first opened, when I was still a young woman with stars and stripes in my eyes and fantasies of helping my country defeat the 'bad guys.' I remember the contractor who'd overseen the construction, a round and hairy man with breath like garlic sausage and the fingers to match. He'd called the Facility state-of-the-art, proudly boasting that "Sherlock-fucking-Holmes couldn't break out of here."

And yet the man was gone.

Not only was he gone, but he had left a bloodbath in his wake. All in all, there were over ten security personnel dead. One of the guard's was found outside the man's cell, her skull cracked open and brain matter gently oozing from the fracture. Another was found in the camera control room, a bottle of drain-o at his side and vomit covering his chest. Another was a personal friend of mine and head of the overnight guard detail, and he was found draped over the woman who ran the front desk, a bullet in both of their brains.

It was horrifying and mystifying all at once. How could this have happened? The man's cell was entirely enclosed and didn't allow him to see any of our personnel. The most it had was a tiny slot on the bottom that we passed food through, and he passed his shit and piss through. Each week, when we'd retrieve him for our experiments, we'd even dispatch personnel to scrub the room and ensure he wasn't drawing on any of the surfaces. Of course we tried consulting the camera footage, but the camera's had been disabled during his escape. There was nothing. He was just gone.

A few hours after the escape, I got a call from the IT department. They'd been going back through old footage of the man, trying to determine if there was some hint of what was to come. Something that might indicate exactly what had happened. They showed me footage of the man in his cell, and it looked like the same routine I'd seen a thousand times before. He sat in the far corner with his head down, silently waiting for his next meal or bowel movement. There was the sound of a latch opening, followed by a woman's voice calling the man to supper, and then a covered plate of food slid across the floor. The man shifted, getting up to retrieve the plate and when he did I saw it.

A tapestry of red was written upon his flesh, detailed and intricate, markings covering his stomach that looked to have been carved by the edge of a fingernail. He quickly readjusted his shirt, taking care to tuck it back into his waistband. My jaw dropped in stunned silence. "Can you play back the footage with his shirt up?" I said quietly. "But take a still-capture and zoom in?"

The IT technician nodded and did so. That's when it all came together. The markings in the man's flesh were his escape plan. His sketches. Each one an immaculate carving of the Facility's guards. Each one a piece of the puzzle. One showed a guard unlocking the man's cell, then caving in her own skull with the heavy steel door. Another had a guard disabling the cameras and then swallowing drain cleaner. The last sketch was of the man I knew, the head of the nighttime guard detail. It pictured him shooting and killing seven other security personnel and then turning his sidearm on himself.

There was also another sketch. I recognized that face as well, and my heart sank momentarily before realizing the subject of the sketch was still alive. She was a secretary in our archives, a young woman who had tragically lost her arm in a traffic collision two months ago. She hadn't been back to work yet, but it pictured her burning down the archives and all the local research we had of the man, before walking into the flames herself.

In the man's flesh though, she still had two arms. My mind turned, and I realized how the man had pulled it all off. It was in the time between experiments. It was during the walks we'd take to the Red Room. While he made his way along the corridors in chains, he'd catalog faces. Features. He'd store them away in his memory, taking care to notice small details of their schedules. He'd grown up here, after all, spent years in the Facility. He had plenty of time to grow familiar.

At first my boss refused to believe it. She argued that he never indicated any such capability in the email chains we'd pulled his legend from. That he'd always needed his red notepad, and once he had it, he needed his subjects present to sketch them.

It was, of course, our mistake to forget that legends evolve.

Now, that mistake has cost people their lives. I see it in the news reports. They're easy to miss if you don't know what you're looking for, but I know that the man is on the move, and he's killing again. The Facility and the government refuse to comment on it, they refuse to come clean about the things we're doing and the danger the public is in. My boss died two days ago. A day before that, a member of my research team passed away. The day before that, two other members died. I'd probably be dead myself if I hadn't seen the writing on the wall and taken one of my own fingers off.

So now I'm taking matters into my own hands. I'm raising the alarm to you, the public. The man with the red notepad is out there. He may be sketching you. You might not even see him doing it. Maybe he'll just say hello to you in passing. Maybe he'll just take a memory. But if you do catch somebody looking at you a little too carefully, or glancing your way before putting pen to paper, then it's time to run.

It's time to run, and maybe leave a finger behind for good measure.

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