Sunday, January 20, 2013

Shreds

Date ommited. Recovered from flash drive containing a manifest discovered at the Angivar estate in the western library office at the desk of Henry Angivar. Current status of Henry Angivar: Deceased. Location: West Claireville Hospital (Morgue), undergoing autopsy.

[To Whom This May Concern,

     I was up in Erie for the annual Lamppost City Auction where I came into the possession of this account of a young man who lived in Nimbin City, Pennsylvania (Clarion County). It's a most strange tale, to say the least, but what you will find exceptionally chilling is its fidelity to true events which occurred on the night of February 14th, 1992 in the area. News reports tell of an Eddie McKent who, upon returning with his family from a local high school basketball game, found the remains of his oldest son, Gary, strewn through every room in the house.
     
     Among the attendants of Nimbin City High School, a rumor still thrives of what is purported to have happened to the young man. A fellow student who lived across the street from the McKent house was playing video games in his room when, around 8:43 PM (cited from the Nimbin Herald; 02/15/1992) he reported feeling a vague sensation of unease and, pausing his play, looked out of his window and observed an abnormally tall man shambling through the McKent's hedges, heading away into the woods. Then, only a few minutes later, the parents arrived and, upon entering the house and turning on the lights, screamed loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. The fellow student reported seeing blood smeared on the inside every window.

     It seems strange that this account could even exist but, according to my correspondents, it is very much real, written by Gary McKent the night he was murdered. That taken into account, a dimension of nightmarish implications comes into the frame of this document. He wrote this all as it happened to him. I can only imagine how the situation must have weighed on him as he committed it to his computer.
      
     This account has significantly enriched my research of the happenings of Clarion County and the greater area of the Allegheny National Forest, and I am now working with a group of individuals (whom I will not name, for reasons of personal safety) whose knowledge of these happenings, I am only just beginning to scrape the surface of. They purport these occurrences to have ties to a much deeper history of the area which may even extend into times before the American Revolution. As I learn more, I will incrementally document my findings in this manifest, along with transcripts and images thusly procured.
      
     I believe that I have happened upon a great and terrible secret. With things unfolding the way they are, I must be cautious of my surroundings and associations. May god be with me, and you all.

-H.A.]


The transcript is as follows:   


     I was sitting at my desk, despairing as I typed another story fragment. Each word that came onto the screen from my busyfingers made me ferment inside. My stomach was a vat of turbulent acid, churning a recently-eaten stack of waffles into a foamy reservoir of vomit, and I knew that soon, just as soon as my dad hopped into his fancy SUV parked out in the driveway and headed off to my brother's basketball game, I would sprint into my bathroom and void my guts with a wet, splattering drum roll.
   
     I couldn't ever be completely relieved of the desperation I soaked in. When my family was home, I wanted solitude, but when they were gone, I found myself numbly cold in boxers, frightened by the knowledge of the empty bowels of rooms all up and down the halls of my home. For a few months, I had hardly left my room, and when I did it was to go to the nearest Chik-Fil-A for a shake and a classic chicken sandwich, chewing in solitude and whipping my eyes left and right, paranoid of being approached by old ghosts from my years in high school. Mine had been a doomed and wretched existence after the turning of the tassle on graduation day.
   
     And to make matters worse, the weather was becoming desolate as another winter approached. The skies were a shade of gray that reminded me of blasted dynamite on steel, and sometimes when I couldn't handle being alone in my house and went on short-lived walks through my neighborhood, I found myself in a wasteland.
   
     It was approaching eight o'clock, and my monitor was mostly blank except for the taunting cursor at the end of my last word, blinking to the rhythm of my disintegrating heart. I just wanted to make myself feel better by writing a spooky story; something capable of tingling the spine, and yet offering up a portrait of a life more fascinating and meaningful than my own. Conjuring up a dreadful monster seemed recreational compared to my own very real and daily terrors, and in what capacity it could, the completion of these tales set me slightly more at ease. My lungs always seemed to be stretched a little less thin after I'd rattled out the final line.
   
     I wasn't having much luck this night, though. I stared stupidly into the darkness of my closet, praying for some spark of courage to continue, and somewhere in the back of the house, I heard a shower spurt to life. It was my dad, catching a quick scrub-a-dub before the big match. My stomach was trembling under monsoon-level nausea as I closed my eyes and focused on the sound of the shower head spraying against the porcelain tiles, subconsciously rubbing my belly.
   
     The prospect of writing the story was a laughable, fading memory. My lips quivered as I gulped back a nearly overwhelming wave of sorrow. Rather than sit and fight such a losing battle, I stood up and grabbed my favorite parka from a lone hanger in the far left of the closet, leaving it swinging and deserted on the rail it clung to. I figured, why not fill a bottle of water and go for one of my unsatisfying walks? I was willing to face the cold if it meant I could at least get out of my horrible, horrible bedroom.
   
     As I shuffled through the living room, stepping over dog toys littered over the hardwood, into the kitchen, the shower's din grew louder. The sound soothed me.
   
     The bay windows by the breakfast nook admitted three solemn beams of moonlight into the room, where they washed over their geometric portions of floor. A gale was roused between the high bushes in our back yard, so forceful that it pressed against the panes and caused the frames to squeak. The wind howled like a creature from a lonesome pocket of Hell. I felt uneasy suddenly, thinking that, as invisible and elemental as wind was, it seemed like a conscious, calculating thing that was trying to get inside; to be there with me and maybe devour me.
   
     I shook my head, unsettling ideas losing hold and flying away by the strands of my hair, and walked over to the sink where my water bottle was already sitting. The faucet squealed in protest as I turned it on. I could hear the water glubbing through the guttery of piping in the basement over deposits of lime and rust in order to reach its freedom, falling promptly into a new polycarbonate tomb and, in the distance, the shower stopped. As a result, the pressure of the tap skyrocketed and I was sprayed all over. Clumsily, I fumbled with the knob, becoming deeply drenched in the process, but finally I prevailed over it and the water ceased to flow.
   
     With the shower off in my dad's room, the silence in the house loomed much larger. It was almost earsplitting. I felt an irrational mounting dread as if something unknowably large was burrowing through the layers of time and space to get at my unprotected, fragile body and would soon rip through the thin air right in front of me and tear me into sloppy mounds of gore. It was unbearable so I sprinted back into my room and desperately stabbed the play button on my stereo almost twenty times. A sweet, contemplative acoustic ballad spilled out of the speakers. I collapsed, sliding my back against my dresser and landing with a plop on the carpet.
   
     I would have gone into my dad's room and tried to have a conversation with him, but even in the face of such mortal terror, I couldn't convince myself to rush in and risk scarring myself with the image of him, naked. My head hanging so that my chin dug into my collarbones, I focused on the subtle music, but also sent a tendril of my listening down the hall to try and glean some action from him. For a long time there was nothing to be heard and I began to fear the worst; that maybe the thing I sensed, coming from the abyss to separate my body parts from one another, had gotten ahold of my dad instead.
   
     I was almost convinced by my delusion when I heard him cough and turn on the sink. I thought, good old pop's just brushing his teeth, and leisurebreathed for a couple of minutes. He clacked and tapped, tinked and clunked, and with relief I found the indeterminable void of my isolation shrinking down to a safe, comfortable size. In fact, I felt decent enough to climb to my feet and say, "Phew!", wiping sweat away from my forehead in pantomime with a hearty chuckle.
   
     I sat back down at my desk and started working on my story again, even though I still didn't quite have the right amount of inspiration. Good-humoredly, I tapped away, confident as I executed word after word, that I would eventually find myself staring at a finely-woven narrative. I even tapped my feet to the beat of the music as I went.
   
     Fifteen minutes later, I was well on my way to developing my plot, and all the while, took solace in the sounds coming from my dad's room down the hall. Mainly, I heard drawers being opened and closed, along with the faint rumble of his closet door as he slid it on its tracks. I was so entranced with the labors of my uplifted spirit that, when my phone rang, it caused a start so violent in me that I toppled backwards out of my chair and bashed my head on the corner of my bed frame. Pain explored my scalp in razor-sharp lines from the back of my skull, radiating to my forehead, and when I felt around for the wound, my fingers found wet warmth. I sat up, reeling, and stared at the blood on my hand, the phone still rattling with vibrations as it rang on my desk. Warily, I made my way to it, worrying that I would drop like a fly if I moved too quickly. My hand shook bringing the phone to my ear.
   
     "Hello?" I said.
   
     The voice on the other end tore through my head and down through my gullet, into my whimpering lungs.
  
     "Hey, son. How is everything at home?" said my dad.
  
     I couldn't say anything but, "I- I- I-".
   
     " You sound like you're worried about something. Is everything okay?" he said.
   
     Silence from my dad's room.
   
     "But... I- I thought you...", I stammered. My face was going numb and my ears were ringing. Everything my dad said sounded warbled and distant as he continued to speak.
   
     "Son, do you need me home? I'm not sure what you're saying, but you seem upset." On his end, I could hear a ref whistle in the background amongst a crowd of screaming fans.
   
     "But you were just in the shower!" I crowed. "I've been hearing you all this time, and you were in the shower, and you were brushing your teeth, and you were making noises! Sounds!"
   
     The feedback from the crowd was distorting the speaker in my phone, causing it to crackle. A thunk sounded down the hall and made me jerk. I silently dashed to my door and locked it. Standing there, I heard my dad's doorknob jiggle as my un-dad turned it.
   
     "Son! I can't hear you! What's got you so excited?" said my dad.
   
     "Dad, I, um... I'm not alone." I said in a pathetic whisper, sure he hadn't heard me.
   
     "Well, look. I'm gonna hop on out of this game and call you back when I'm outside. I promise." he said.
   
     "Oh god, no!" I said. "Don't leave me with the quiet and the thing in your bedroom-" I heard the crisp swish of a basketball net, then a click and dead air. My dad had hung up not even listening to my plea.
   
     Outside in the hall, my dad's bedroom door swung open with a faint hingewhine and I detected the soft footfalls of the un-dad, moving slowly and steadily up the hall. Knowing it before it happened, the steps terminated at my door. It tried my handle once, causing the loosely screwed brass workings of it to chink-chink before falling still again. My eyelids widened so much that the skin at the corners felt close to splitting. By this point, tears were streaking down my face, but I had accepted my doom.
   
     The un-dad made no further attempt at disabling the lock. Instead, the doorknob altogether disappeared into the hallway, leaving a hole behind, jagged with splinters. The door sullenly creaked open, exposing me to the dark horror that lay beyond it, but from where I was in the room, a corner of wall at the left of the doorframe obscured everything of the hall except for a small sliver of darkness on the right of the opening.
   
     From just beyond the threshold came a series of wet, wheezing breaths.
   
     For five minutes, I simply sat there, panting shallowly and staring in the direction of it, but nothing happened. Then, the phone rang, but I didn't dare to answer it, and in the dull moonlight that hung in a shaft through the one window in my room, I noticed the painfully slow approach of the thing.
   
     Just as I had thought, it was very far from human. The phone droned on with its piercing, shitty techno ringtone, and the un-dad advanced on me. Its eyes were the size of tea saucers, and caught the moonlight in a pearlescent glowing ring around the iris. Its mouth hung open in a vertical rectangle about a foot long and there was nothing inside; no teeth, no tongue. All there was inside that mouth was a mortal gurgling that sprung from somewhere deep back in its throat and squishhacked into strands of drool which drooped down over its bottom lip.
   
     Its skin seemed thin, like an intestine casing, and beneath it were things that caused me to chant "no, no, no" to myself; pumping sacs and writhing tentacles. Aperture holes of an alarming number and arrangement that opened and closed with a "fmmmuck".
   
     The phone kept ringing.
   
     The thing got within a foot of me after another five minutes had passed. I sat in my swivel chair, bereft of any desire to live, and gazed into the gaping hole of its mouth.
   
     It.

---

   Henry Angivar was discovered murdered in his foyer on 04/23/2013. He was bound to a chair with twine and ritually murdered in a fashion that unmistakably implicates the "group of individuals" he described in his manifest (Codename: The Historians). The account provided details and corroborates data recently gathered on codename: "Lamassu". Sweep teams stationed in the Allegheny National Forest have reported sightings of, and casualties as a result of this creature for the past two weeks. We have now gained authorization to begin phase 2 of Operation: Trap Door. When we have apprehended a "historian", we will begin interrogation and proceed from there. More to follow. Please destroy after reading.

-Agent T. Went
CIA district HQ (Dusk Division)
Quantico, District of Columbia




    

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Body 32

   There are royal tombs underground in the city of Ur, a place just north of the Persian gulf. Within their gullets lie barren corpses, crushed flat with the imposing weight of earth above, and a man named Leonard Woolley liberated these tombs a little over a hundred years ago. There is plenty of documentation from the excavation, as it was well-known. In fact, Woolley even went as far as to number the bodies as he found them, wreathed in beaded jewelry.
    
   What never made it past the boundaries of ancient Ur was the truth surrounding the discovery of Body 32.
  
   It was in a north-eastern chamber that was named “The Great Death Pit”; a female corpse of slight stature, notwithstanding her crushed status, lying face up with slitted, hollow eyes. Usually, it was Woolley’s ritual to whisper blessings unto the dead and move on, simply taking account of them as he tip-toed down their rows. However, Body 32 caught his eye. There was an anomalous bulge between her withered breasts that seemed to have broken through her sternum, as there were petrified jags of rib which had punctured the skin there.
  
   Woolley, lamenting the disturbance of the dead, grudgingly called down a fellow archaeologist who happened to have spent many years as a medical student at Oxford. The man’s name was Emeritus Waldenston, and he stood wide-eyed at the sight that his former then alerted him to. Woolley asked him to incise the chest and biopsy the contents.
  
   A team of excavators assisted the two in dragging the corpse into Woolley’s personal tent, where Waldenston did just that. The procedure took two hours. Even though the skin had all but disintegrated at his first touch, what lay beneath was as hard as iron; an oblong, spherical thing, obsidian black and ice-cold to the touch. He labored at it with a pickaxe once subtler methods had failed, and many times, Woolley popped his head in to check on his progress as he had still to govern the dig, but after the first hour had passed, Woolley confided to himself that the impregnation of the object would take days.
  
   He found himself stunned when, an hour and a half after his latest check-in, he found Waldenston lying dead on the floor. Immediately rushing to his aid, Woolley saw no external signs of damage, and so assumed that something had gone on with the man’s heart. He almost called out to the workers for help, but his eyes wandered over to the corpse’s chest where he saw something that soon caused his own unconsciousness out of sheer shock:
  
   The thing betwixt the maiden’s ribs was not so unfamiliar as he first thought it might be. It was simply an egg, however strong, and within was an abomination, nestled around itself with many rigid, angled limbs. It was somewhat arachnoid, but its surface was a glossy shell. What disturbed Woolley the most, though, was what was unmistakably wreathed around it — White, feathered wings.
   
   The archaeologist weakened and fell to the floor, croaking out desperate pleas for help though he knew they were fruitless. You see, Woolley was well-versed in the stories of the Bible and one of his main motivations for exploring the then-sensational “Near-East” was the confirmation of his faith, which was vigorous and undying. He had gleaned details from a number of tomes which he had devoured in the decade prior to his arrival to Ur which made the creature within the woman’s bosom quite familiar.
  
   It was a winged harbinger, cast from the heavens and placed in a realm of torment; a sufferer of the fate of Lucifer, worshiped in Sumer as a god. Then it dawned on the poor man…
  
   He had found many places of long-gone grandeur, but never did he expect that he would find Hell.