I Told You So

Well, after that last post, I figure you don't want to hear about my life. I'd probably just depress you. Unless you have a worse life than me, in which case you're probably already depressed, and if you're not, you're a much stronger person than me. Anyway, since I can't imagine why anyone would want to hear about me, here's a short story I wrote about Harvey the other day;

I Told You So 

by Andrew Gerard Pankaja 

That day, on that hill, a lot of things went wrong. 

It was supposed to have been a simple enough process. Harvey had done it a thousand times before; sneak down into the city, kidnap a virgin female, bring her back to the hill and kill her, letting her blood flow into the smooth recesses that lined the ancient altar on the hill's crest. He had been doing it for years, for decades, and it had never gone wrong before, until tonight. Harvey laughed in spite of himself. 

Nothing ever goes wrong until it does, he thought, the bitter taste in his mouth intruding into his thoughts. Harvey sighed, the unfairness of the situation clear in his sight. He hadn't chosen any of this; he'd been forced into it by circumstances outside his control. It was hard, being homeless, and if some seemingly kindly people offered you a way out, how were you to blame for taking it? Some people complained about being born and raised into a religion instead of being allowed to choose themselves. As far as Harvey was concerned, they could shove it where the sun doesn't shine. If they were given a choice between being born into a Catholic family or being forced into a sinister cult of bloodthirsty maniacs worshipping a faceless, shapeless, nameless eldritch abomination from the endless void beyond time and space whose very gaze would cause the brains of all who saw it to seep from their ears from sheer incomprehension of the entity's existence just to get off the street, Harvey was sure they'd be whistling a different tune. 

His initiation into the cult had been...interesting, for lack of a better word. He'd been retaught everything he'd forgotten in school, along with some other more...specialised topics, learning English and mathematics alongside how to properly prepare sacrificial victims. His mentor had been the cult's high priest, so he got, as he put it, a "fairly good grounding" in their belief system, by which he meant that if he couldn't remember a tenet of their holy book, his mentor would grind his face against the wall. As his thoughts wandered into memories of his years as an acolyte, he ran his fingers over the rope-like scars that ran across the right side of his face. 

It was in his acolyte years that he started to disagree with his mentor on a few major issues of their religion, the main one being the belief that by bringing the virgin sacrifices to Jesmegoth, as the beast was known in their holy texts, the cult would be spared when he eventually woke up and set the whole universe aflame. Harvey had grown skeptical that a creature known varyingly as "The Heartless", "The Merciless" and "All-Consumer of the Nethervoid" would value the cult's loyalty enough to not send their minds spiraling into oblivion. As he remembered the conversation with his mentor, his fingers moved from his facial scars to the hole where his ear used to be. 

Perhaps the most important area where he and his mentor differed was on the issue of what exactly the sacrifices were for. His mentor believed that the sacrifices would act as sustenance for Jesmegoth until he was ready to awaken and reign over all from an obsidian throne draped with the flaming corpses of all who opposed him, whereas Harvey thought that the sacrifices were keeping Jesmegoth asleep, which was the reason that, despite differing rather fundamentally with his mentor on the issue of the value of human life, Harvey had continued to make the sacrifices when his mentor and the rest of the cult had been killed in a shootout with the police, having kidnapped a member of the royal family as a special sacrifice. 

Until tonight. 

Until he'd tried to sacrifice a rape victim, who, unfortunately for both the child and Harvey, did not meet the "virgin" requirement. 

A nearby rustling shunted Harvey from his idle wanderings. As he watched in horror, tentacles of liquid darkness seeped from the undergrowth, snaking across the ground before wrapping themselves around his ankles and lifting him into the air. Harvey found himself face-to-nearest-equivalent-thereof with something that looked like a mass of slimy, black worms in the rough shape of a giant squid. Harvey shrieked in horror and, as his brains started to ooze out his ears, he heard a voice inside his head, ancient, powerful and cruel; the last thing he would ever hear. 

"At least you can say "I told you so.""