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Hello again, my dearest readers,
I was sitting in a tent in the rainforest, a large HAM radio and some notes sitting on an adjacent desk, when one of my small, disposable pocket phones began to ring. I had been listening to the sounds of the rain pitter-pattering on the tent, and I was startled by the ringing, but in a moment I had reached for my backpack and pulled out a phone. Sure enough, it was my old college, the one who had given me the black suitcase. He had some very disturbing news, however, as well as some more information on the Aggregation.
When I last wrote to you all, I mentioned a colleague of mine. She was the one who had discovered a small, leather black suitcase with the camcorder and the set of logs deep within uncharted forests. I can recall describing her to others as, “an energetic girl as well as an excellent photographer and appreciator of nature.” Unfortunately, my old friend had a story. It was hers.
My hands are shaking a little as I write this. She was an excellent college and a good person, as well as a close acquaintance of mine. I never thought it would be my task to write her journal with Calvin’s and the other man’s. My old friend has also found a few other journals, some of which I won’t transcribe here but hold many of the same incidents and occurrences as the other two, now three, journals.
So, I will keep my introduction brief, but I personally fear for my colleges. The blonde American has not been in touch with my old friend, and I fear for him as well. My friend mailed me her satchel, the only item of hers that was found. Inside I discovered a journal, a small blue camcorder, a bottle of what appeared to be some sort of ginger drink, and a clay pig. The following writing is not my own, but the writing directly copied from the torn, somewhat burned journal. I will publish some pictures from the included camcorder, but broken or just repetitive photos will only be marked or left out.
The journal holds the accounts of a dear friend who I have yet to find any trace of, but rest assured, the logs are authentic.
I present the logs, edited a little for grammar but otherwise presented as they were on that rainy, dark day when I read them:
'''10:30, Wednesday'''
So… I bought a journal. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to write in here. The plane’s nice, I guess.
I’m going to Mehico!
I hope I spelled that right. Anyhow, it’s not Mehico, it’s New Mehico. I finally got the go-ahead from a close friend of mine, Mr. *****, to travel to America! Bye London!
Okay, apparently, it’s New MeXico. What a rude flight attendant. Typical American. Anyhow, I want to talk about Mr. *****. He reminds me of Santa Claus! My publisher for the magazine was not going to give the go ahead after the last paper I published about cults, but Mr. ***** gave me the go-ahead by convincing him, with a jolly laugh, the cult article sold successfully! He’s a very nice man.
Enough of my energetic ramblings! Since I am writing a journal, I best describe myself? First off, I don’t like describing myself. Makes me feel like a self-centered brat. My name is Antonia Martinez, and I was born somewhere in Chile. Somewhere being, well, somewhere. I was an orphan, then adopted by a couple in London. Nice couple mum and dad were, because I haven’t been to Chile since. I still live in London, only a few blocks from the old folks, near the heart of the city. I’m a journalist as well as an adventurist, and I used to work as an archaeologist in Phoenix, Arizona. Quite honestly, however, my favorite place is the woods. Where the pillars of dark bark become a black haze, where the snow falls in endless patterns across the ground, that’s where I’ll be. I hate the sun, and the bane of my existence was those long days in Arizona dusting off rocks. Now, I get to return, but this time, I’ll be staying in the shade. New Mexico has a cult problem, and I love the idea of getting dirty and up close to some crime scenes.
Hold on, the plane is landing. If that blonde bimbo walks by scoffing at me one more time I’m going to pour my drink on her skirt.
'''10:34, Wednesday'''
It is as hot as Hades in Mexico. I was talking about “Santa Claus” earlier. He’s a large fellow with a jolly smile, but unlike Santa Claus he prefers suits of black with red ties to red ones of cotton. He can also be a little too enthusiastic about his work. Only a few months ago he was extremely excited about some suitcase I had found in one of the forests I had been hiking in. By the way, I’m a hiker. Like big time. If there were an Olympic sport for hiking, I’d have every medal. Anyhow, he was rambling on about this horrid suitcase and how to open it. I popped a bobby pin in half and pick locked it for him. Honestly, he acts so modest around me it’s disgusting. He thinks that because I can get a little excited sometimes I’m a child. He hasn’t even organized the papers on his desk chronologically, not including the endless shelves of textbooks in his office! Seriously, that room is huge! There are around ten different raised areas above the ground floor of his office for collecting books, and I still need a massive ladder to get the right ones. He lets me borrow from his massive collection. Anyhow, there was a black camcorder inside with some blank paper scraps. He seemed disappointed (What did he expect, money?), but his little eyes suddenly bulged as he pulled out a Baofeng UV-5R Dual Band UHF/VHF Radio and called someone. What he doesn’t know is that I had been the one to lock the lock: In fact, the suitcase was never locked in the first place!
I haven’t had time yet to look at the contents of the SD card, but it’s in the laptop in my bag. While I was importing the contents I noticed a ton of error messages! There’s probably nothing in there anyhow.
The airport is huge! A large group of Japanese tourists just went by, and a cute little girl holding her mother’s hand waved at me! She was very young, with long black hair and a little black dress to match her mother’s. The families in the group were all well dressed in fact. I wonder if there’s some convention.
'''13:01, Wednesday'''
After a long taxi ride with a very friendly local, I am standing in front of a very peculiar hotel. I shot some photos with my handheld camcorder, but as for my Nikon D700 I’ll save those for taking photos of the actual incident. It was nice of the police to wait an extra day before cleaning it up, so I’ll have to thank them. The hotel has a funky looking outside, and most of the rooms are a little ways off from the main building. There’s a pool where water streams up as decorations and tons of odd, peanut brittle brick walls. London always had large buildings and houses, yet here I feel like I could climb up the roof without a problem. My Nikon and tripod are starting to weigh on my arm, and my suitcase is doing no better.
The entrance was terribly short, to where I had to stoop over to avoid scratching the ceiling with my hair. I’m not incredibly tall or anything; it’s just a small, claustrophobic entrance. Anyhow, I talked with the lady at the desk and she handed me the keys. I’ll be heading to my room now. It’s a long walk for straining arms!
'''16:23, Wednesday'''
My room is so confortable; I could just slack the whole day away. I’m not scheduled to travel to the crime scene and snap photos until tomorrow. Maybe I’ll just sleep a while? I’ve been loosing sleep with the last couple of interviews on some satanic sex cult and writing said interviews up. Having lights on late at night and disrupting the sleep schedule is not a good thing for anyone’s head, especially mine.
'''20:54, Wednesday'''
I woke up just in time to catch the sunset! It’s gorgeous! Anyhow, back to sleep?
'''00:01, Thursday'''
I just had a horrible dream.
I was standing in the mountains, looking down at New Mexico, and the whole city was crawling with massive rats. Not rats, people, but people that, at first, looked deformed and were nothing more than black silhouettes. It took me a minute to realize they were wearing robes, and smoke was rising in columns unnaturally from each one of them. They were everywhere in the city, crawling through every alley and congregating in the streets. They all moved slowly, unnaturally gliding with each step. It took me a minute to realize I was standing next to other figures. They wore black robes and leaked black mist too, but they all had their heads turned to look down at the city. I couldn’t move, only look around. The sky was dark blue, with thousands of stars lighting up the silent night, but I could also hear distant screams piercing the silence in the distance. A part of the city was on fire, with a light orange glow and the first wisps of non-jet-black smoke rising.
As I watched the city, the individuals around me slowly turned their faces to me. They were wearing masks, which had the bone structure mapped out across the surface but no lips or any indication of a mouth under the nose. The eyes… The eyes were glass lenses on the skin-tight masks that gave each individual the appearance of some odd, freaky bug. Jesus, and they held up their hands… There were these eyes on them, carved into the ghostly pale white flesh and dried to give the appearance they were tattoos or something… They cut eyes into their hands… So my vision started to redden, and I know it was a dream, but I remember feeling terribly dehydrated. It was a very vivid dream. So these individuals in their cloaks stepped back from the edge of the cliff we were standing on, and the sky went red, like, crimson apocalypse red.
I woke up just as I was turning around to look where the individuals had gone.
Those cult papers are not helping me sleep well, but at least it’s a nightmare that makes sense. I have a phobia of bugs, I’ve been researching cult members, I’m pretty sure back at the airport I wandered outside and saw a similar view from a tourist balcony, and the eye… I’ve been seeing the eye all day! In the airport, it was graffiti on a rotating advertisement, and it was carved into the glass of the women’s bathroom mirror! I’m pretty sure there was a skipping stone outside the hotel that had a similar eye, without the eyelashes, etched into it!
'''00:05, Thursday'''
There’s some screaming downstairs.
The lady at the desk is lying on the floor, screaming. As other hotel members rushed to help her, I noticed a figure glide across the windows. Someone was trying to get her attention, possibly prank her. How rude. Maybe some of the local kids are playing pranks on her, maybe some old lover walked by. Who knows?
'''00:06, Thursday'''
I can’t fall asleep again.
'''9:09, Thursday'''
I just received the GPS coordinates for the site, and the police are waiting in the lobby. A few of the New Mexico police force will be accompanying me to the site. I think I’ll keep the details out of my journal; this crime scene sounds really disgusting. I can’t believe I’m getting to see an actual case and snap pictures of it! I just hope they give me something; the smell is likely going to be awful, like a pizza sitting in the Mexico sun. Except it’s not a pizza. It’s a corpse.
'''12:31, Thursday'''
I’m at a local museum now! This is awesome!
Mr. ***** asked me to research a topic at this specific museum. Near the back, where the area splits from a tourist section into a maintenance area, sits a circular, marble room with a desk labeled in golden letters “Information Desk.” I just asked the dude behind the desk about “The Prophet.” While he walks up the stairs to grab informational books from the informational library, I’m looking at the mural on the wall between the two stairs. It’s an odd one. Up, he’s back. Grumbling at me for taking a photo. Anyhow, I should probably put the camera away. The journal too. He’s looking at me like he’s seen a Martian.
I’m sitting on the steps of the museum now. Most of the information he gave me was stuff on actual prophets. I asked for “The Prophet” again, and he pointed at the mural! What a coincidence! So I asked for information about the mural, and guess what? He brought a big, dusty suitcase out and said I could keep it! Apparently, the suitcase isn’t part of the library and is jammed shut, but was delivered by the artist. He told me it’s the only information about the mural or the painter they have. I must look like a really odd character to him, writing in a journal and asking for information about an obscure mural.
Leave it to Mr. ***** to make me research an obscure mural. I’m walking through the shops now. Honestly, my camera battery is dead. It shut down seconds after I took the mural, even though it was at like fifty percent. Broken technology.
Someone is definitely following me. While I was at the airport I felt like someone was watching me while I carried my equipment, but of course people were watching me! I was carrying tons of equipment! Here, however, I can see someone in every crowd when I look behind me. He’s definitely there, some pervert or something… With his big trench coat and wide-rimmed hat, he’s a pretty obvious figure among the crowds. Not quite sure why the security guard only a couple feet away isn’t even looking at this suspicious figure, but who knows. Maybe he’s a policeman too.
I’m sitting in a little restaurant now, drinking a ginger beer. Man, New Mehico is weird.
'''19:45, Thursday'''
Someone else is following me now. I’ve seen inches of whoever it is. I think it’s a woman in a burka. Maybe he’s a man in religious robes? It’s also pretty hot out, and considering I’ve been researching cults all day I bet it’s just my mind playing tricks. Maybe it’s time to head back to the hotel and get some shade. I found a little clay pig in the sand near a cactus. A little boy vending trinkets had lost it, and I as able to buy it off of him on a discount. What a nice kid.
'''20:05, Thursday'''
I’m back at the hotel, and eureka! I opened the suitcase! Oh, the secretary has been replaced. Poor lady! Ah well. The suitcase is open! It’s really nasty smelling, like stomach acids and decay, so I’ll put it on the desk and not the bed.
There’s some weird stuff in the suitcase. A picture of World War 1 soldiers, I think, wearing gasmasks captioned “The Find,” sits among various wooden carvings and ratty papers. I think its World War 1 because the gasmasks look like bags more than anything else, and the soldiers are in full gear. Mr. *****, what the hell have you gotten me into? I just took a photo of the photo and cropped it. It’s weird looking, all right. There’s a carving of men wearing bags over their heads, with holes cut out of them, following what appears to be the silhouette of a man. There’s a carving of a massive eye, which is really creepy. I wonder if this is a cult case? The pages probably talk about “The Prophet,” but they’re in a different language. German, I think.
'''21:14, Thursday'''
I just remembered the SD card I copied. Personally, I’ve got nothing better to do in this hotel room, and maybe there are a few images that aren’t corrupted. I’ll write down my findings soon.
This is someone’s fucked up idea of a joke.
“The Prophet sliddes of its cross and is empty stomach cvity leaks the black fluid onto the ground. The blood splatter on the rocks, bits of flesh and bile. liquid entity known as the Prophet moves shell forward, taking firs trembling steps like baby. The Prophet is not used mobility. The eyes now poor the liquids, the mouth shut. However, something looks of. The Prophet is wek in current form.
It knows I’m here. It’s looking right at me with black dripping eyes.”
This is someone’s sick joke on Mr. *****. Most of the images are corrupted, but one of them is a man in the forest wearing a white mask and a hood. A “Parishioner,” as whoever wrote this called it. There’s another shot of a man hanging from a cross. He is a skeletal frame tightly bound in yellow, decaying skin, with tar-like liquids dribbling from his mouth and nose. The nails that hold his hands have bent and broken his metacarpals horridly, and while his ugly pea-green and blood-soaked shirt lies torn around his neck his pants, odd cargo-styled khakis, are smeared in blood and mess. I couldn’t look at it for more than a few minutes, and that’s considering I just saw the same thing…
This is sick. I’m catching a plane back to London tomorrow. First, sleep.
'''12:02, Friday'''
I’m in the desert. Everywhere is just sand. I woke up here, with my camcorder and journal lying across from where I was laying. No clue where I am. Can’t write. Gotta run. Don’t dehydrate Annie, don’t dehydrate.
'''21:05, Friday'''
It took me all day to get back to my hotel. Luckily, I found some tourists in a bus, and they had water. I almost died! I had to run miles! I don’t even care. I must have sleepwalked or something.
'''22:05, Friday'''
I’m burning the papers. It’s real. The Prophet, the Parishioners. I got back to the hotel, and I went to my room. Someone painted a massive white eye on my ceiling. My clothes and my Nixon camera are gone, only an empty bottle I kept from the market and the tiny clay pig are still sitting on the desk with the suitcase. The papers from the suitcase are scattered everywhere. That’s not the worst part of it. There was a man. Outside my window. Dark skin, a business suit covered in sweat. He was smiling, all teeth. His guts were trailed across the window. He fell forward when I looked directly at him, leaned against the window. I know who it is. The crime scene. He has the holes in his hands and everything. It’s the same cult. “The Prophet,” the crime scene, the papers, the SD card.
'''23:06, Friday'''
I missed my flight. I don’t care. I’m running. Into the desert. I can’t stay in the city. I can’t see them there.
'''00:00, Saturday'''
The desert is cool tonight, and there are millions of stars. My camcorder’s night vision doesn’t catch the stars or much else. I’m walking along the sand now. I’ve left the city.
'''00:42, Saturday'''
They’re here. The crickets have gone silent.
I’m hiding in the mesas now. Across a flat, desert plain, I can see the outlines of thirteen people. Two lines of six hooded figures form two diagonal lines, like an arrow, around the figure in the middle. The figures on the outside wear black robes and white masks, while the one on the inside wears a wide-rimmed had and a trench coat. The Prophet walks, wobbling a little but keeping in step with the Parishioners. The sand around him, no, not the sand… Five massive stretches of light have grown from his body, like petals unfolding from a flower. Not exactly light though: The ground around him is brighter, but the air above is still dark with the night. I can see clearly with my camera zoom that he’s wearing black goggles that jut out from underneath his hat. A being that cannot handle the light, yet who creates patterns of light across the sand?
It’s more than that. The “petals” are most certainly Kármán vortex streets, which fade out around a circle containing the four points the two lines of parishioners create. A pentagonal pyramid of light has formed, and at the top rests a set of Fibonacci spirals around a circle of light. The eye is in the circle, a pattern symmetric with the left and right edges of the circle.
I’m hiding behind the rocks on the top of a mesa, and despite the figures all looking forward and not at me, the arrow points a little to the right of me at the center of the mesa. They know I’m here.
I’ve been running for a little while, but I can run no further. The sky is a deep crimson red now, and I’m looking over the city from a cliff. The fire has spread to form a circle of sorts. It’s an eye. Of course. The landscape is now red. I know what happens next. The Parishioners stand patiently waiting for me to finish writing. The Prophet is there, behind me, waiting for me to turn around. I know what this is now.
It’s my dream.
Thus the journal and images end. I won't go searching into this case. A few days ago, I saw an eye in a local town. I don't know how much longer I can keep uploading these stories.
Until I find more, however,
- Monoco, 2/12/2015.