Excerpts Taken From Marcus P. Kellum's Personal Journal.
There is something hiding beneath the streets of Chicago. We have yet to ascertain just what or who we are dealing with, but judging by what we have seen, something mighty sleeps nearby.
I have just returned to our room and I have managed to stop Avi’s bleeding and get her a cab back to the facility. I have a few minutes to wait and jot this down while it is fresh in my mind before our ride comes. I am certain we must come back here, but we shall need more help. Two was just not enough. After presenting our story to the superiors at the facility, I am sure they will allow us a full team and at least a mobile command center to base our operations from, but I must not get ahead of myself. Here is what has happened so far…
Once we had left the hotel, we traveled east towards lake Michigan. The roads were still deserted and they were still as bleak as they had been at dusk, but now, with nightfall and the streetlights on, they had taken on an almost unwholesome mood. Several times, as we would pass a boarded up doorway or a dusty window, I would get that nasty feeling of being watched. I tend to trust that feeling…I know I am being watched.
After traveling approximately two miles on the cracked and dirty sidewalk, we came to an old church. This place, at one time, had been an Eastern Orthodox Church. The old rounded ceilings were caving in slightly and I perceived that the building had been empty for at least twenty years. Small trees grew inside the building, their doomed branches poking through stained cracked stained glass windows. Avi stopped dead in her tracks, something about the building called to her.
“This is interesting, let’s take a look.” She placed her hands on the rotting boards that held the old doors shut. She didn’t even have a chance to tug on them when several things happened all at once.
While she was in front of the door, something small, black, and greasy grabbed at my leg. I gave an alarmed cry and several of the bricks from the roof of the church slid and fell on our position, followed by a cracking and scrabbling sound that came from the heights above us. Startled by all the commotion, I stepped backwards and slipped on the curb. I came down with a thud and reached out at whatever it was on the end of my pants leg. Something…a thing I cannot describe to you gave a small almost human yell and then scurried over my leg, into the gutter and then down an open sewer grate. I yelled after it, more in fear than in outrage.
Avi, maneuvering herself out of the falling bricks way, took the pistol out from behind her jacket. She held it up and scanned the roadway behind me, she then gave a quick, hawk-like glance at the roof above us.
“Quiet,” she hissed at me. “We’re in deep shit here, I think.”
I couldn’t agree more. I regained my feet with a soft grunt and moved closer to her. If something was going to happen, I wanted to be near the girl with the gun.
“I think whatever it was slid down the back side of the church’s roof,” I said. “If we work our way around the building through that alley, I think we can get back there.”
“I want to try going through the church, you go around” Avi said. I didn’t argue, but as I made my way towards the alley, she called after me.
“I think you had better take this,” she said as she reached down to her ankle and produced a revolver from a hidden holster. It was a .38 snub-nosed pistol, more commonly called a Saturday Night Special. I looked at it, hefted it in my hand and then nodded to her. We split up, but we never should have.
As I jogged around the church into the alley, I could hear Avi breaking the boards that held the doors shut. The back and side yards of the church were overgrown with weeds and there were several broken headstones in one small patch near the back of the lot. I crept slowly passed these tombs and found a box with which to climb over the old wrought iron fence that separated me from the yard proper.
Once inside the yard, I felt a cold chill take a hold of me, moving almost like water up my legs and gripping my torso in such a way, I had to gasp for breath. Whatever had run back here was either in the grip of this freezing anxiety or it was the cause of it. As I drew closer to the back doors of the church, I was sure I heard a faint snuffling coming from a patch of particularly out of control bushes. I moved towards them to find the source of the noise.
The gun felt alien in my hand as I prepared to glance under the bush, or perhaps to push some of its branches out of the way in order to see what was snuffling. My foot crunched down on some old gravel and the snuffling ceased abruptly. I gathered myself and with the gun in one shaking hand, I yanked a branch out of the way. Nothing.
Suddenly, a shriek rose up from inside the church. “Mark!” Came Avi’s voice. She sounded as if she were in pain. She then yelled something unintelligible and some more yells…other people’s voices yelled back. I scrambled back the way I had come, cutting myself on the fence and made it back to the front of the church. There I saw something I will never forget.
This thing, tall and dark, was walking out of the door of the church. It was rounded at the top, almost like a head, but the round part was split in the middle. A gargantuan mouth full of razor sharp teeth. There were no eyes present and the four arms that hung from the torso ended in hooked tentacles. The legs appeared to be human in nature, but not in function; the thing easily leapt over me and was nearly a hundred yards down the street before my eyes could catch up with it. I was shocked by this, but I was brought back to reality by another groan coming from the church.
Heedlessly, I barged through the broken doors and crumbling entry foyer. The light was far dimmer inside than out and I had to steer by beams that shone down from a stained glass window in the ceiling. All the pews and the pulpit had been tossed casually into a corner, piled and wrecked, to make the center of the room clear of all obstacles. There, in the exact center of the Nave was Avi’s body, lying prone.
I ran to her and slid to her downed position. I felt her throat, she was alive. Gently, I pulled her over so that her head was lying in my lap. Her face was ashen and she was struggling to breath. In the dim light, I saw that her right hand was missing. Missing? The extremity had been bitten off, leaving a ragged hump of torn flesh. She was bleeding badly. Quickly, I took a shoelace off and made a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. By the time I had tightened the lace, she had slipped out of her shock and was trying to speak to me.
“Pistol…it didn’t do anything..” she was struggling.
“Never mind that, can you get up or am I going to have to carry you?”
She gave a small nod and tried to put her right arm up. Realizing that this was futile, she switched over and put her left hand on my shoulder, I eased her up as slowly and carefully as I could. We then began the slow journey back to the hotel room. I vainly glanced around to perhaps find a phone booth or a lonely vehicle driving around on this miserable night. None were to be found.
