The touch is a gift to our family, but an unreliable one. If the Stranger touches you, even for just a second, you will get the worst rotten meat smell in your head for the next several minutes. I say rotten meat, but it is worse than that. Nothing else quite like it. It’s a great warning system, but the major flaw is it doesn’t help you until it’s already touching you. It’s not really a smell at all, you see. That’s just how your mind processes the feeling that something so wrong is so near.

Ideally, the Stranger would never touch you. But nothing is ideal, and the reality is that despite my best efforts, as I write this I still have no idea how to permanently kill this thing. The only things that work temporarily are stabbing it as I taught you or completely obliterating the body. While obliterating the body can be very effective, it does seem to cause less of a delay in the Stranger coming again compared to correctly stabbing all five sites in the proper order.

Which brings me to my second major point—it does not have a set pattern. The most frequent I’ve ever had the Stranger come for me was twice in one day in the same form (I had to run away the first time that day) and twice in the same month in different forms. The least frequent I’ve ever had the Stranger come for me was once in two years. Different bodies then, obviously.

I say obviously because, as you are aware, the Stranger seems unable to keep the same appearance for a long time. I don’t know how long, and it’s all just educated guesses really, but I’ve never seen it use the same form more than a month apart. When it kills someone to mimic them, it creates a new body. And when you destroy that fake version of them, you aren’t really destroying the Stranger. Whatever it is, it isn’t just a pod person or something. But it is smart enough and powerful enough to create living bodies. Use those bodies to hunt us. And keep coming back no matter how many times we try to kill it.

That’s something to keep in mind. The point of everything we do isn’t to beat it. It is to delay it. Keep sending it back to square one. And the most effective way of doing this, of buying us a few weeks or months of uneasy peace, is the ritual.