The Lead

I've got a lead on the Girl. Her name is Sophie Stevens. I found an article about her in the paper's archives. A few years ago, she was rescued almost unscathed from a fire at a church in the suburbs. I recognised her from a photo in the article. There doesn't seem to be anything else on her in anything I can find but a name is a start. Hopefully I can start getting to the bottom of this.

The Garden

Sorry about the lack of an update, I've been trying desperately to try and keep my grant and with all the phone calls and letters and forms, not to mention continuing my regular shows, I've been really stressed out, so stressed out, in fact, that I don't even think I have the energy to talk about how horrible a waste of space I am. Here's another story I wrote. I'm sorry if it sucks, I wrote it very early one morning while slightly drunk and listening to a CD my Granny Margaret sent to me.

The Garden

by Andrew Gerard Panjaka

As we looked out on the bay, the fishermen came back across the water. Their boats were empty of fish but their mouths were filled with words that roared across the cool divide, from where their lips parted to release them to where ours met to speak them without sound. Over the whistling of the wind as it blew through the bulletholes in their sails, they screamed of navy blockades and an approaching army.

The screams that erupted from everyone in that park except us were as piercing as your tongue as it entered my mouth. In that moment, passion overtook me and I pulled you close, holding you tight in my arms. In that moment, the entire city seemed to stop around us before exploding into an ever more cacophonous bombardment of the senses; the wailing of the sirens, the scent of burning oil and, somehow, through it all, music. Looking back, I can remember the tune and the words, but never the name or the singer.

I don't believe in an interventionist god, but I know, darling, that you do. But if I did, I would kneel down and ask him not to intervene when it came to you.

Somewhere, in the distance, just above the sound of that song, a man on a hill was calling out, telling his brethren to fight back and crush the enemy. There was a rumble of thunder from above, followed swiftly by every cloud in the sky opening like a flower and letting its tears spill forth. As the rain fell, I asked you whether the calling man was with the army or the rebels and you replied that you didn't know. But when we looked back at the smoke that was filling the sky above the burning city, turning the rain to acid, we understood, for just one moment, that it didn't matter whether he was a soldier of order or of chaos. Either way, anarchy prevailed.

Oh not to touch a hair on your head, to leave you as you are and, if He felt He had to direct you, then direct you into my arms.

The next day, peace was announced. To this day, I'm still not sure whether it was the army or the rebels that won. All I know is that, mere days after the city had burned, a million people were walking back to work while another great crowd left the city forever, walking towards the horizon. Maybe it was the rebels being banished, maybe it was the army retreating, I could find out if I asked but I didn't care then and I don't care now. To me, that day was just another day, lying with you in the garden, holding you close, caressing your thighs, running my hands through your hair, just experiencing you until, at last, our lips met again and, somewhere, that song played again, the singers deep, sonorous tones hanging in the air alongside our sighs of content.

Into my arms, oh Lord, into my arms, oh Lord, into my arms, oh Lord, into my arms.

And that's where you ended up. Whether it was fate or circumstance that guided you there, it was in my arms alone that you rested for the rest of your life, brief though it was. Even as I sit here in this house alone, I think back to those few days. The world exploding around us while we just lived. We lived as hard as we could, because we both knew we wouldn't live long enough to join in the victory celebrations. But at least, if nothing else, we went on our terms. Dr. Andersen wanted us to have chemotherapy but why drag out our lives in misery and pain when we could simply enjoy what time we had left together?

So, you and me, we just laid down in the garden and died in each other's arms. Our bodies held each other close as we grew cold under the night sky. Yeah, you and me, we just laid down in the garden. 

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.""