Waves of despair.

Mark Lumiere here.

My entry number 3.

Start of year 1922.

A lot has happened since my last entry. At the same time, only the most recent events were worth writing about.

Last year, to my surprise, I gained a companion. An arrogant explorer by the name of Liam Crow, I appreciated his bravery and skills, but I hated his personality. This was at the start, but the more time I spent with him, the more I realized that this was exactly the companion that I need. He pushed me in every way, he made me stay the course and keep searching.

For months we kept traveling from one port town to another, searching for any clues connected to the cursed Khul Duhl Suhl. Finally, at the end of the year we reached Rhode Island, and there we found fresh evidence of cults presence and to our dread several reports of men going mad, or committing strange suicides, which indicated Gaggonn’s presence as well. An old man at the fish market told us about a tiny island a bit far of the coast, he said that awkward men traveled there often in the last several month.

A thing I forgot to mention before, was that Mr Jogton back in Hathtom gave me a very large sum of money, and then when Liam met him, he did the same for him.

This made it possible for us to hire men and find a good captain to take us into the ocean.

Our crew consisted of nine men, counting us two and the captain. We had to be patient and wait for several days, staying at an old crummy inn, while the storms passed.

We set out on a calm and clear day, something we haven’t seen enough of in these last few months, or perhaps it was the nature of our investigation that clouded our minds and made everything seem dark and corroded our sense of positivity. Despite this, somehow we found a speck of optimism in this battle.

After just half a day Liam had managed to draw hate towards him from every single crew member, I took him to our cabin and tried to explain to him that moral of the team was important, he lit a cigarette and laughed through his teeth while letting it smoke up the cabin.

Transition into night began too early because grey clouds completely blanketed the sun.

We began to see a strangely abnormal amount of birds circling above our ship as it got darker and darker.

These birds were not making the usual noise you’d hear from seagulls and pelicans, they were screaming, almost hysterically. This was clearly making the crew uneasy. Liam stood leaning on the side of the cabin door, chuckling.

No, Liam was not insane, but he had to have been effected deeply from what he has seen. Instead of letting fear control him, his mind took him to another extreme, in which he had no sense of danger, it was absolutely absent.

I went back into the cabin and drank some coffee I brought with us in a bottle. It was cold, but satisfactory. The I heard a wild scream outside and a shot. When I ran outside I saw Liam with his revolver out and one of the crew members laying dead there, at first I feared that Liam had lost it, but then I saw a dead bird with red eyes and a bloody beek laying next to the sailor’s torn neck.

Suddenly Liam pushed me into the small cabin and shut the door. Dozens of birds attacked the crew members in that moment, ripping everyone to shreds. I sat in the back of the room terrified, I thought that after all I’ve been through and seen, I’d handle this moment better, but alas, if Liam wasn’t there I would have most likely been dead with the rest of them.

As we sat in the room and looked out of our small door window and the cabin one, we realized that these crazy possessed birds weren’t leaving. They all sat around the ship, no longer screaming, but staring into the waters with their red eyes and the waves which began to pick up.

It started to rain and it was the middle of the night when we saw him floating in his small wooden boat. Gaggonn stood tall with his eellike neck swinging side to side. He raised his thin long arm and pointed at us. Liam lit another cigarette and told me to lay down and sleep in the bed next to the window. How could I sleep!? Nevertheless he was insistent that we sleep. He sat in a chair and put his head on the small desk while I lay in the bed.

Hours went by and the nightmares began. I saw the tall monster step up on the ship and look through the window where I was sleeping, his tentacle crawled up the glass. Then as a thunder to my ears shots from a revolver rang and I felt glass fly in my face, I jumped to the side, quickly withdrawing my gun and realizing that Liam had fired into the window, I saw Gaggonn there fall back swinging his arms and the birds flying back up into the sky, his grip on them must have faded. We rushed outside and unloaded our revolvers on the monster. We shot him int the head, chest and stomach, but as he was falling overboard we failed to grab him to ensure his death.

In the morning the birds did not return, but we still could not assume for sure that he was dead.

Liam and I got back to the port that night, and needless to say no other crew wanted to have anything to do with us anymore.

Since then we traveled back down south. In one of the port towns we accidentally stumbled on the news of Hathtom’s detective Michael Smith being brutally killed by a group of cultists. Apparently Mr. Jogton got the army involved after that and big things went down in that place.

We decided to go back there and gather information, but haven’t done so yet. We had an accident on the road and Liam broke his leg, so now we had to stay in a small town and wait for his recovery.

How ironic that you could face horrors and leave undamaged, but then a simple moment in your routine life could do that trick.