Parcel received from Mokksy Jekks. Date omitted. Found in Jukksy Jekks's personal work desk. His whereabouts remain unknown.
[Dear Jukksy,
Last night, I was galavanting through the abandoned Summerwood apartments on Demetrius Ave. with Sissy and Marvin. We had been getting a strange pull from it all week, and decided that we'd stop by. Most of the apartments were barren, besides the detritus of fallen brick and sheetrock. We were getting ready to give up and leave, when Sissy started getting a screwy feeling about this one door.
It was Apt. #43. I know, chills right? She was shivering, and told us all to stop because there was something very important there. I had to kick down the door. The lock was rusted solid. Inside, the smell was bad, man. I mean, we had to hold our breath and everything, which really limited our time inside. All we could see at first was an aluminum bed frame and a ragged hole in the floor of the kitchen. Sissy made a beeline to it.
When we got close-up, we all started getting terrible migraines. There was some serious voodoo down there. She smeared liverdust over our foreheads and eyelids, and we got on all fours to peer down into it. For a while, nothing happened besides the steady incline of pain in our heads, but soon, we could hear screams.
It was something really terrible. As you know, people like us don't have weak constitutions when it comes to that sort of thing, but there was something so awful about it... We couldn't fight the compulsion to leave, so we stood up and started taking small, backward steps.
Just when we were getting to the hallway entrance at the far end of the room, the screaming hole lobbed this short little manuscript at us. Some guy named Jonathan wrote it (later, we discovered, through town records, that Apt. #43 was his). Apparently he used to frequent that old MacLellan's place. The things he described seem pretty familiar, now that I think about it. Unnerving stuff.
Anyway, I figured this would catch your interest. You're always trying to get more info on what's been going on recently. I think I need to take a little vacation and get out of Alexander, if you know what I mean. Things are starting to get a little hot around here, and the others feel followed, just like I do. I'll try to stop in before I head over to the Greyhound station on Tuesday. Enjoy, but try not to read this alone at night. I wouldn't recommend it.
Regards,
Mokksy]
Understand this. At first, it didn't seem to me that I was in any special sort of danger. I mean, of course there's that inherent risk of walking out of your front door and getting struck by lightning, but other than that, I felt pretty safe.
It was unseasonably warm. When I stepped out into the January abyss, I almost regretted wearing that thin hoodie. It was threadbare and full of holes, but still kept me uncomfortably warm. In a normal world, I would have been double-timing it, cursing the frigid bite of Winter with every begrudging step.
Walking through the town square, I took in the dismal air of the evening. I didn't realize that I wasn't alone at the time, so I walked on with little precaution, hardly noticing anything except for a happy couple that sat by Glover Fountain. They sipped at steaming cups of coffee and told snippy little jokes to each other. At least, it sounded like that's what they were doing... They were laughing their heads off.
Now that I look back, though, I'm starting to wonder at what they could possibly have found so funny. No one laughs that hard on a first date. That maniacally.
In case you're wondering how I knew it was their first date, don't worry. I have credibility when it comes to people-reading. The guy wasn't touching her in any way. That's either the sign of a touch-me-not, or a very unsure man, and the way that his eyes glittered with hopeless romance, the prior was rather doubtful.
Damn it all! That's what makes me so furious with myself for getting into this predicament. As a person who prides himself in his ability to size up the world, I should never have allowed Them to close in so wholly undetected. However, I'm getting ahead of myself.
I arrived at the bar not long after leaving the apartment. MacLellan's. A favorite haunt of mine. On any given weekday, you could walk in with intentions of being completely anti-social and getting trashed without disturbance. For an Irish pub full of hicks with heads that swim with insignificant things such as college football and recent renovations downtown, it wasn't a bad place.
Tonight was different.
I wasn't consciously alarmed by my surroundings, although I had been feeling a slight tinge of apprehension from the moment I entered. Some generic Gaelic drivel was spewing from hidden speakers, and the place reeked of whiskey, meat-sweat, and brimstone. I found a comfy spot at the end of the bar to brood.
Making a very conscious effort not to display my impatience while waiting for the bartender, I retrieved my phone and went through pictures I had taken that day. When the man arrived, I went through my usual, awkward ritual of asking for a drink.
To my right, a group of red-faced conservatives were drawling on about national defense and the travesty of Obama's presidency. The usual, lovely bullshit.
After a short time, my beer arrived, and I immediately began to gulp it down, taking breaks in between to zone out and stare at a glass-faced refrigerator full of Irish brews which never seemed to get ordered. I wondered to myself what it would be like to spend an entire existence chilled inside, looking out upon ignorance. Haphazardly spilled liquids, stupid guffaws and chortles, night after night. The hours rolled long.
"I woulda shot 'im in the face!" The exclamation jolted me out of a somber, timeless trance. The invalids a few seats down had been whacking each other off for hours, spewing nausea-inducing topics left and right. I was prepared to retire back into a stupor when something caught my eye about them. The one with the military buzz-job, who had brought me out, was speaking - yet, his lips moved side-to-side instead of the natural up-and-down.
The men that crowded around him were standing in casual, thumbs-in-pockets positions, but frozen in place. And their god-forsaken eyes! Upon further, inebriated inspection, I found them to be cloudy grey, and without expression. If I had been uneasy at any point in the night before then, it amounted to naught, as things had ascended to an entirely new level of mind-fuckery.
Trying to control restless, sanity-thirsty eyes, I focused on the glossy wood grain of the bar. I told myself, "Maybe it's not something completely terrible. Who knows? Maybe they're intellectuals who meet up every Monday night and take the sardonic ribbing of all that is wrong with society to an extreme level. I'm fine. Yeah..." But no. I was not fucking fine.
I couldn't keep myself from peering at the bartender, hoping for an equal reaction of petrified puzzlement. He seemed to be content with the scene. He also seemed to be removing his entrails with his bare hands. I couldn't look away. With a furious satisfaction, he unloaded his steaming life onto black, plastic serving trays, and served them to tables throughout the bar. He laughed through bubbles of blood all the time.
My head followed his journey, and suddenly, the simmering liquids inside longed for escape. I ran a catalogue of the drinks I had ordered: Two vodka-cranberries, a strong White Russian, and - dear stars! - even a blowjob. I found myself distracted at the thought, because it troubled me a great deal more. Who would drink a blowjob alone at a bar?! Anyway...
The recipients of our dear barkeep's guts chowed down as soon as they could. It appeared rubbery and tough, like the tentacles of an octopus, but they powered through it all the same. The music began to run backwards. The lights, to flicker. The eyes of all I saw, to glow.
I was glued to my stool. Avoiding the slightest bodily movement, in order to avoid the attention of the freaks that surrounded me, I let my eyes dance across it all. A waltz progressed through coagulated, blood-caked teeth. My corneas mambo'd betwixt ravenous, green eyes and dirty gore fingers. These retinas pranced, and salsa'd, and calypso'd through the physical incarnation of madness.
My doom was an apparent and sweet requiem. One that rivaled Beethoven's ninth.
You know those LED strips that most bars hang above the graveyard of liquor shelves behind the bar? The one that delivers the scores of popular sporting events or winning lottery numbers? The very one I found myself staring at announced a grave thing to me in a nearly mincing orange and green.
"Hello, Jonathan. Ready to sate us? You're the house special."
Suddenly, it became very quiet in MacLellan's. My dear bar was reciting the song of Death, and a... thing took a seat next to me. When I tell you that I couldn't differentiate its mouth from its eyes and lungs, try not to read into it much. Just visualize it in your mind. A thing, hardly even humanoid, with sooty, yellow skin, garbed in pristine black silk with a mouth/eye/lung for a face. It pulsated in a way that I won't even attempt to describe before dribbling some terrible, dark liquid from its orifice.
In my mind, I heard it say, "Go back to the trance. You don't want to be around for what comes next." I couldn't do anything but accept its existence, and think back at it.
"What in the hell are you?" It writhed at my question. An almost comical "harumph" of sorts.
"I'm every moment you've ever spent wishing you were somewhere else. I'm the demon beneath your pillow that ejaculates into your mind when you believe that you're alone and let the despair dig deep into your soul. I am the greedy, existential dog that awaits the table scraps of your hope, shortly before you succumb to your slummy, comfortable couch and remember that you are lost and waiting to die. Feed me. I haven't eaten since lunch."
I couldn't respond. It reached out and gently inserted its wormy digits into me. I could feel everything leaving, and I'll admit it: I went away. Everything wilted like smoke.
This morning, I woke up on my damnable couch. Here I am again. How can I grasp onto anything like dismissal? I won't even waste time pretending I was dreaming again. There is no difference between this world and the other. It's all the same, and besides, I've a hangover from the very bowels of Hades.
I can't make sense of it. I can't understand any one feeling that comes to me. It has all fallen apart, and please tell me; why are my eyes breathing? Through the window, the trees are skeleton hands that reach for the sky. A vain hope. I know what we'll both need by dusk. A trip to the bar.
---
May need further corroborating material on events that are accounted within. The being documented is reminiscent of codename: Sliverwood. It may still be in the general area of Clarion County. Agents to dispatch northbound, toward Allegheny National Forest. More to follow. Please destroy after reading.
-Agent T. Went
CIA district HQ (Dusk Division)
Quantico, District of Columbia
[Dear Jukksy,
Last night, I was galavanting through the abandoned Summerwood apartments on Demetrius Ave. with Sissy and Marvin. We had been getting a strange pull from it all week, and decided that we'd stop by. Most of the apartments were barren, besides the detritus of fallen brick and sheetrock. We were getting ready to give up and leave, when Sissy started getting a screwy feeling about this one door.
It was Apt. #43. I know, chills right? She was shivering, and told us all to stop because there was something very important there. I had to kick down the door. The lock was rusted solid. Inside, the smell was bad, man. I mean, we had to hold our breath and everything, which really limited our time inside. All we could see at first was an aluminum bed frame and a ragged hole in the floor of the kitchen. Sissy made a beeline to it.
When we got close-up, we all started getting terrible migraines. There was some serious voodoo down there. She smeared liverdust over our foreheads and eyelids, and we got on all fours to peer down into it. For a while, nothing happened besides the steady incline of pain in our heads, but soon, we could hear screams.
It was something really terrible. As you know, people like us don't have weak constitutions when it comes to that sort of thing, but there was something so awful about it... We couldn't fight the compulsion to leave, so we stood up and started taking small, backward steps.
Just when we were getting to the hallway entrance at the far end of the room, the screaming hole lobbed this short little manuscript at us. Some guy named Jonathan wrote it (later, we discovered, through town records, that Apt. #43 was his). Apparently he used to frequent that old MacLellan's place. The things he described seem pretty familiar, now that I think about it. Unnerving stuff.
Anyway, I figured this would catch your interest. You're always trying to get more info on what's been going on recently. I think I need to take a little vacation and get out of Alexander, if you know what I mean. Things are starting to get a little hot around here, and the others feel followed, just like I do. I'll try to stop in before I head over to the Greyhound station on Tuesday. Enjoy, but try not to read this alone at night. I wouldn't recommend it.
Regards,
Mokksy]
Understand this. At first, it didn't seem to me that I was in any special sort of danger. I mean, of course there's that inherent risk of walking out of your front door and getting struck by lightning, but other than that, I felt pretty safe.
It was unseasonably warm. When I stepped out into the January abyss, I almost regretted wearing that thin hoodie. It was threadbare and full of holes, but still kept me uncomfortably warm. In a normal world, I would have been double-timing it, cursing the frigid bite of Winter with every begrudging step.
Walking through the town square, I took in the dismal air of the evening. I didn't realize that I wasn't alone at the time, so I walked on with little precaution, hardly noticing anything except for a happy couple that sat by Glover Fountain. They sipped at steaming cups of coffee and told snippy little jokes to each other. At least, it sounded like that's what they were doing... They were laughing their heads off.
Now that I look back, though, I'm starting to wonder at what they could possibly have found so funny. No one laughs that hard on a first date. That maniacally.
In case you're wondering how I knew it was their first date, don't worry. I have credibility when it comes to people-reading. The guy wasn't touching her in any way. That's either the sign of a touch-me-not, or a very unsure man, and the way that his eyes glittered with hopeless romance, the prior was rather doubtful.
Damn it all! That's what makes me so furious with myself for getting into this predicament. As a person who prides himself in his ability to size up the world, I should never have allowed Them to close in so wholly undetected. However, I'm getting ahead of myself.
I arrived at the bar not long after leaving the apartment. MacLellan's. A favorite haunt of mine. On any given weekday, you could walk in with intentions of being completely anti-social and getting trashed without disturbance. For an Irish pub full of hicks with heads that swim with insignificant things such as college football and recent renovations downtown, it wasn't a bad place.
Tonight was different.
I wasn't consciously alarmed by my surroundings, although I had been feeling a slight tinge of apprehension from the moment I entered. Some generic Gaelic drivel was spewing from hidden speakers, and the place reeked of whiskey, meat-sweat, and brimstone. I found a comfy spot at the end of the bar to brood.
Making a very conscious effort not to display my impatience while waiting for the bartender, I retrieved my phone and went through pictures I had taken that day. When the man arrived, I went through my usual, awkward ritual of asking for a drink.
To my right, a group of red-faced conservatives were drawling on about national defense and the travesty of Obama's presidency. The usual, lovely bullshit.
After a short time, my beer arrived, and I immediately began to gulp it down, taking breaks in between to zone out and stare at a glass-faced refrigerator full of Irish brews which never seemed to get ordered. I wondered to myself what it would be like to spend an entire existence chilled inside, looking out upon ignorance. Haphazardly spilled liquids, stupid guffaws and chortles, night after night. The hours rolled long.
"I woulda shot 'im in the face!" The exclamation jolted me out of a somber, timeless trance. The invalids a few seats down had been whacking each other off for hours, spewing nausea-inducing topics left and right. I was prepared to retire back into a stupor when something caught my eye about them. The one with the military buzz-job, who had brought me out, was speaking - yet, his lips moved side-to-side instead of the natural up-and-down.
The men that crowded around him were standing in casual, thumbs-in-pockets positions, but frozen in place. And their god-forsaken eyes! Upon further, inebriated inspection, I found them to be cloudy grey, and without expression. If I had been uneasy at any point in the night before then, it amounted to naught, as things had ascended to an entirely new level of mind-fuckery.
Trying to control restless, sanity-thirsty eyes, I focused on the glossy wood grain of the bar. I told myself, "Maybe it's not something completely terrible. Who knows? Maybe they're intellectuals who meet up every Monday night and take the sardonic ribbing of all that is wrong with society to an extreme level. I'm fine. Yeah..." But no. I was not fucking fine.
I couldn't keep myself from peering at the bartender, hoping for an equal reaction of petrified puzzlement. He seemed to be content with the scene. He also seemed to be removing his entrails with his bare hands. I couldn't look away. With a furious satisfaction, he unloaded his steaming life onto black, plastic serving trays, and served them to tables throughout the bar. He laughed through bubbles of blood all the time.
My head followed his journey, and suddenly, the simmering liquids inside longed for escape. I ran a catalogue of the drinks I had ordered: Two vodka-cranberries, a strong White Russian, and - dear stars! - even a blowjob. I found myself distracted at the thought, because it troubled me a great deal more. Who would drink a blowjob alone at a bar?! Anyway...
The recipients of our dear barkeep's guts chowed down as soon as they could. It appeared rubbery and tough, like the tentacles of an octopus, but they powered through it all the same. The music began to run backwards. The lights, to flicker. The eyes of all I saw, to glow.
I was glued to my stool. Avoiding the slightest bodily movement, in order to avoid the attention of the freaks that surrounded me, I let my eyes dance across it all. A waltz progressed through coagulated, blood-caked teeth. My corneas mambo'd betwixt ravenous, green eyes and dirty gore fingers. These retinas pranced, and salsa'd, and calypso'd through the physical incarnation of madness.
My doom was an apparent and sweet requiem. One that rivaled Beethoven's ninth.
You know those LED strips that most bars hang above the graveyard of liquor shelves behind the bar? The one that delivers the scores of popular sporting events or winning lottery numbers? The very one I found myself staring at announced a grave thing to me in a nearly mincing orange and green.
"Hello, Jonathan. Ready to sate us? You're the house special."
Suddenly, it became very quiet in MacLellan's. My dear bar was reciting the song of Death, and a... thing took a seat next to me. When I tell you that I couldn't differentiate its mouth from its eyes and lungs, try not to read into it much. Just visualize it in your mind. A thing, hardly even humanoid, with sooty, yellow skin, garbed in pristine black silk with a mouth/eye/lung for a face. It pulsated in a way that I won't even attempt to describe before dribbling some terrible, dark liquid from its orifice.
In my mind, I heard it say, "Go back to the trance. You don't want to be around for what comes next." I couldn't do anything but accept its existence, and think back at it.
"What in the hell are you?" It writhed at my question. An almost comical "harumph" of sorts.
"I'm every moment you've ever spent wishing you were somewhere else. I'm the demon beneath your pillow that ejaculates into your mind when you believe that you're alone and let the despair dig deep into your soul. I am the greedy, existential dog that awaits the table scraps of your hope, shortly before you succumb to your slummy, comfortable couch and remember that you are lost and waiting to die. Feed me. I haven't eaten since lunch."
I couldn't respond. It reached out and gently inserted its wormy digits into me. I could feel everything leaving, and I'll admit it: I went away. Everything wilted like smoke.
This morning, I woke up on my damnable couch. Here I am again. How can I grasp onto anything like dismissal? I won't even waste time pretending I was dreaming again. There is no difference between this world and the other. It's all the same, and besides, I've a hangover from the very bowels of Hades.
I can't make sense of it. I can't understand any one feeling that comes to me. It has all fallen apart, and please tell me; why are my eyes breathing? Through the window, the trees are skeleton hands that reach for the sky. A vain hope. I know what we'll both need by dusk. A trip to the bar.
---
May need further corroborating material on events that are accounted within. The being documented is reminiscent of codename: Sliverwood. It may still be in the general area of Clarion County. Agents to dispatch northbound, toward Allegheny National Forest. More to follow. Please destroy after reading.
-Agent T. Went
CIA district HQ (Dusk Division)
Quantico, District of Columbia
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