Wednesday 29 February 2012

FEBRUARY 29, 2012


Log from January 15th:

I am Scarlet-marked, though I deserve nothing but punishment. I am the first of her marked that she has found in months; as such I have been blessed by her and given the task of spreading her word. I am the First Priestess of the Mistress.
Now that she is here, she has brought with her a revolution. I am in the centre of the revolution.
Fear nothing, fellow marked. She shall dominate through deviation.
Bear the red.

January 11:
We haven’t encountered anyone of note for days. If it weren’t for the zombie-commuters, I’d wonder if we were in the Empty City.
Actually, I haven’t ruled it out. They might just be figments of my imagination.
I’ve been having more nightmares lately – again, possibly a present from the Grotesque. I’m flattered by the interest, but I’d really prefer to be left alone to get a good night’s sleep. Sleep is the only time I get to pretend to be a normal person. Closing your eyes and blacking out for a few hours – really simple in theory, right? So why the fuck can’t I have one thing that’s simple?
Jack’s a bit moody today, too. Well, as moody as a kid his age can be. Personally, I think he’s put out that it’s milder weather today, but the fact that we still aren’t mobile is probably a large contributing factor. Poor kid is stuck all alone in the car while I run off and look for signs of fuckery.
The only thing I can think to do is head to a library.
I know.
Stupid idea.

January 13:
Friday the 13th. Spooky day, right?
In actuality: dull.
Jack loves the book though. We spent most of last night reading it. Bunch of rhymes, mostly, and he doesn’t seem to care that half of it is basically ruined.

January 13:
The following was written in the form of a booklet. It looked as though children wrote it in crayon and illustrated with entirely unrelated pictures, but for the most part, it was readable.

THE BLIND MAN BEDTIME STORY
There was a man, and he was blind
But really, not a man
He has a book that has your mind
Or, how your mind began

The Analysts will take a look
At what Collectors bring
Scribes put data into books
They all keep it running

If you don’t fit within their ranks
It’s doubtful you’ll survive
To Grandfather, we give our thanks
For building the Archive

If you’re afraid of getting old
You’re ours already, dear
We won’t leave you in the cold
- That’s a different FEAR.

January 14:
The children from a couple days ago were outside. Just lurking, it seemed, not far from my car.
They didn’t do anything. They just stood there, for hours.
When they left, they left a plain notebook behind. Only the first page wasn’t blank.

The following was on a sheet of lined paper, torn out of a notebook.

THE COLD BOY BEDTIME STORY
There once was a boy made of frost
Who saw little kids sad and lost
The Children of Cold
Were his to remold
And we all joined the Court at great cost

January 15:
Someone left us a gas tank.
No idea who. I know they weren’t Scarlet-marked.
If they were marked, there would have been blood in the snow.
We’ll be back on the road and headed downtown within an hour – we’re giving Razzie some time to come back to us. He ran off some time last night. If he doesn’t wander back soon, we’ll just have to take off and leave the poor pup behind. He’ll catch up to us later. He always does.


Friday 17 February 2012

FEBRUARY 17, 2012


Log from January 22nd:

Red set me free.

January 17:
Without cash, it’s gotten extremely and annoyingly difficult to keep the car. ‘Free parking’ is a concept that doesn’t seem to exist around here. I can guess why, I suppose, what with the heavy traffic and limited space per parking garage and god damn, why make a lot that tiny if you’re going to make one at all? Also, parking meters? Whoever invented that concept ought to be shot through the head.
Twenty-five cents for five minutes? Who the fuck needs to park for five minutes? I could leave Jack in the car and keep it running at a stop light, for anything I needed to do that only took less than five minutes. Could probably get closer to whatever store I was looking for too, thus reducing the time to less than three minutes. I’m being generous with the ‘two minutes of walking’ period. With how crazy it is here, the closest anyone ever seems to get to their final destination is a five-to-ten minute walk. Longer, if the cold an wind is bad. Then add another five minutes to duck into the closest store, awkwardly pretend you’re in there to shop and not just to escape the Canadian weather, and bolt without buying anything.
I should’ve been a city planner. I would have words for those idiots. Words, and revolutionary vision.
…If there isn’t a Fear somehow connected to downtown traffic, I’ll be downright fucking shocked.
So, long story short – I say with a touch of irony – we’re camped out in the parking lot of an adult-fun-super-store. I am so corrupting Jack right now whether I like it or not. For the record, I don’t. Not in my nature to taint the minds of innocent children.
Neither of us have had a single thing to eat since we hit the road again, courtesy of our mystery gas-can fairy. He hasn’t complained, though. He seems happy enough just eating snow, but I’m starving.

January 19:

Most of this is interpretation. The writing is so uneven it’s barely legible.

Writing by light from the streetlamp. Maybe about midnight. I can’t remember the last 24 hours. Just recall being hungry. Now there’s blood and I’m tired. But not hungry anymore.
Razzie is following and won’t stop barking and growling. Took a break on a street corner to get my bearings. He’s gonna attract cops, if he doesn’t shut up.
Now he’s running off. Weird. Maybe his heightened canine senses could tell I was talking about him.

The rest of the page was torn off.

January 22:

The top part of this page was torn off.

Mistake. Maybe I was drugged, somehow. I mean, it seems unlikely…there’s a damned good reason why I don’t drink anything given to me by another person.
The weirdest part is…I feel like this wasn’t the first time. This feeling up blacking out and waking up a day later with blood trailing after me – didn’t it happen before? Like, recently? Like, all my fucking life?
I take the last part back. I wouldn’t know about ‘all my life’.
No bitterness here.
Jack has a new favourite story.

THE WOODEN GIRL BEDTIME STORY
Harlequin, come out and play
Wrap me up in string
Take all my free will away
Cut me ‘til I sing

I will be a willing doll
And you, my puppeteer
I like it better under thrall
We have no power, here

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

Log from January 9th:

I am Scarlet-marked.
We bear her mark to let her know we are hers.
She embraces our depravity; in turn we embrace the war.
I received her word yesterday. It was written on several sheets of paper. It was stained with blood, but I did my best to interpret.

January 4:
We spent the entire day yesterday driving. I almost crashed us repeatedly. Not because of bad weather or incompetence or anything, just to break the freakin’ monotony.
The cooler started to leak all over the car, which made the night that much colder – Jack’s currently packing it back up with snow. I’m trusting his judgement, but goddamn, if there’s any dirt in there I’m not going to be happy. I haven’t hit that level of desperation, yet.
So not the point I was heading towards – anyway.
My point is that I woke up at roughly five o’clock this morning a good ten kilometers away from my car.
It’s not like this is unusual. Shit like this is why I used to wake up in unfamiliar beds with scars I couldn’t remember getting. …Well, one of the reasons why-… Man, a lot of people don’t like me.
Maybe because I call them people. Is that an insult? I’ve lost track of what is and what isn’t. Digressing again.
Restless Dreaming is a consistent part of my life, but ever since my past was taken from me, I haven’t been able to tell whether I have regular nightmares, or ones induced by the Grotesque. If my dream last night was a part of my past, I’m not sure when it would have fit in.
I was in an unfamiliar car, with unfamiliar people. The only certain thing was that we were all trying to get away from something. Running – or driving, as the case may have been – had this sense of…a last resort. We were fleeing the violence, and the violence was in hot pursuit. It was pressing us towards the sea.
I don’t know whether or not I’ve ever seen a beach in my life, but god, it was dismal. You know those pictures of white sand and blue waves and fluffy clouds? Those are lies. Within the dream, at least, they were lies. The sand was grey. The waves, grey. Everything was this fucking shade of grey, like the world had fallen ill, and there was a single dock leading far out onto the water.
Whoever was driving decided they’d had enough – we stopped the car, and they were stretching their legs…heading towards the water. I think they wanted to pretend it was the kind of beach that Hollywood liked to portray.
At the very end of the dock was…someone I didn’t know. And it was wrong, and I knew it was wrong, but they were half-draped on the dock, hair fanned out…pretending to be a mermaid.
The others were fooled. I probably should have run away, myself. Hijacked the car, or something…but I didn’t. I just stood there and watched, as this so-called mermaid started…pleasuring. Taking them one at a time, and then…
They were devoured. One by one. If I saw what did it, by the time I woke up, I’d blocked it from my memory.
The Camper had fangs.
When I woke up, the sun hadn’t started to rise yet. I followed my own footprints and the blood in the snow, and found the car. Jack was still asleep. Razzie had run off, probably when I got out of the car.

Don’t ask why there was blood in the snow.

January 5:

This was more disjointed, with spelling errors. Written in blue. I have corrected the errors for readability purposes.

We find Razzie
Red reads me stories because she finds books in town
THE GROTESQUE BEDTIME STORY

Sleeper, nestled tight in bed
Can I see what’s in your head?

I will walk in on a thread
And push you into shades of red

“Is this a trick?” the dreamer said
It was not, and so they fled

But the dreamer was misled
Stuck forever now, instead

Ding-dong; the dreamer’s dead.

January 6:
We made it into the outer reaches of the city – welcome to Suburbia, home of the brain dead. At this early in the morning, the morning commuters might as well be zombies.
We trekked into [REDACTED] – lucky for us, it was open 24 hours – and took a look around for any of the Scarlet-marked, but found none. It kind of figured, to be honest. The section of town we were in struck me as…prudish. I wouldn’t expect any here.
Sadly, that meant we had to spend money.
We were forced to ditch the vehicle for the time being, until we stumble on someone willing to give us gas. That also meant we left the cooler behind, the blankets…even if it weren’t suspicious for a young woman and her (what did people guess Jack was to me? The illicit son I’d had in middle-school? My brother? …Nephew?) to be wandering around the city with their homes apparently strapped to their backs, it was just too unwieldy. I needed full mobility.
Especially since Jack seems to still think he’s being stalked. I’m kind of feeling the same way. Every so often, I feel like there’s someone standing just out of my peripheral vision. Whenever I look, there’s no one to be found.
Or, when there is, I’m sure it’s not who I was seeing. It’ll be like…some beet-faced businessman or a stay-at-home mom taking her kids for a walk, despite the fact that it’s well below freezing. Why do these moms think that being outdoors is good for their kids? Don’t they know what kind of shit is out here?
Ugh, and if Jack were a little younger or if I looked a little older, I’d probably appear to be doing the exact same thing.
Walking towards the city, there was only one thing that looked to be…off, to me.
Another one of those stay-at-home moms. At least, I think. Pulling her two kids around in a sled. Leaving footprints and sled-trails in the snow.
Perfectly linear trails, forming an exact square.
I can’t see her kids from here and I’m not getting any closer just yet, but I plan on stalking her later.
Bitch better have been born with OCD.

January 8:
Those children had been dead for days.
Her house had been easy to find, even if I hadn’t been tailing her. I left Jack at the car yesterday, with Razzie guarding, and took off around 21:00.
Every single light in the house was on.
I found her in the childrens’ room, humming like a maniac. Cradling their heads. Or, trying to.
They’d been folded. Every bone snapped, until they could fit in a little perfect square.

When I left the house, Razzie was there. He’d left Jack all alone. I was pissed, but not surprised. Damn dog always seems to just show up, when

The rest of what she has written was ruined.
The paper was soaked by my blood.
In penance, I have given myself fully to the scarlet mark and await my punishment, at [REDACTED].
Please come for me.