The Lack of Success

I haven't been able to find the Girl since whatever happened in the park. It's like she's disappeared from the face of the earth. Lady's not happy about how much time I'm spending looking for her either but something important obviously happened at the park and I can't remember it! I know I should be more grateful about her wanting to spend more time with me but I need my space too, I need my own time to do my own things!

Speaking of my own things, the insurance company had made its decision about my puppets and it's not coming through with the money. Even with the job I have, I don't have the money to replace them, so it looks like I'm going to have to retire from puppetry. At least I have that job with the newspaper to fall back on but it's going to be hard to turn my back on my art after so long...at least I still have Harvey and the other puppet (I still haven't unravelled the secrets of its control mechanism, by the way). I guess I can still get a booking now and then when I'm missing it, but it looks like I'm going to be focusing a bit more time on the newspaper for now.

Well, the newspaper and this whole situation with Girl. Whatever it takes, I'm getting to the bottom of this. I have questions that need answers.

The Halloween Night

I was at a party last night with Lady and some really strange stuff happened.

I was dancing with Lady when I spotted the Girl out of the corner of my eye. I shouted at her and she saw me and ran away but when I tried to run after her, the crowd kept closing in around me. When I asked people why they were doing it, they acted like they weren't doing anything, but it was too late anyway, the Girl was gone.

Then, when I went for a drink in the kitchen, Darren was there, even though he said he told me he was going to Veracruz for Halloween. When I asked him why he wasn't in Mexico, he said he was, even though he quite clearly wasn't, and asked me why I was in Mexico. Before I could continue the conversation, Lady came into the kitchen and dragged me upstairs to...well, yeah.

Afterwards, I came back downstairs and Harvey and the other puppet were sitting in the hall windows. I grabbed them quickly in case someone damaged them, then I went outside with Lady and the house we were in was in a forest, even though it was in the middle of a city when we got there. Then I went back inside and everybody was staring at me for like five minutes, then they stopped as if nothing had happened, but I got freaked out so I went back outside and we were back in the city, so I took Lady home and then went back to my apartment with the puppets. Someone had left a note on my door that just said "STRINGS".

What the hell is going on!?

The Break-In

Oh gosh, sorry, I forgot to update again. I have a good excuse this time though, so don't be too mad!

Someone broke into my apartment and wrecked the whole place. They destroyed all my puppets except for Harvey and the puppet I found in the park. The insurance company are being really difficult about paying out for replacing them too, even though I need them to work. If they don't come through with the money...I think I might have to give up my art altogether, though the newspaper have said that they'd be delighted to have me on as a full time employee. That would definitely be enough enough money to get by on, though I'd need to cut back on stuff.

Sorry, I'm probably boring you to tears with my financial situation. The more important thing is that I think it was the Girl. I've done a couple of short shows with just Harvey and she hasn't been at them. I gave the police her description but they haven't had any luck finding her just yet. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed though.

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.""