The Tome of Shadows and other wierdness

[AdamaGeist]

Right now, I'm going to start this off with a quick statement. I'm not happy with the police at this moment. Not that what's been going on has been their fault exactly... But between them, an overzealous DA, and a bit of paranoia, I've been unable to post the details I referred to three weeks ago.

In addition, I've lost the original tapes I was going to transcribe from, partially to the police who confiscated them as evidence. I was able to make copies of all the tapes, and sent those tapes, along with my final tape, to a friend in Canada, but those are unreachable at the moment.

So, I'm going to have to do this one off of memory, and then go on to all the extras that came afterwards.

I'll start at the beginning...

About two months ago I finally got into the good graces with a dealer in paranormal items that has a shop near to where I live. It took a while, a few deals, and identifying a few items in his Pickled Punks collection as real or faked, but eventually I got him to trust me.

It turns out that Roy was an ex-Carney, who turned to selling a few odd things he and his friends had picked up over the years. The business had been good for him overall, from what he told me, and it seemed he kept a few old Carney habits, including that of cheating the marks.

I know right now you're wondering why I'm going into such detail on the shop-owner, but this comes into play rather soon.

One of the things I asked Roy about was anything really unusual he'd sold recently. A few things came to mind, but what really drew my attention was something he'd sold almost two years ago.

About two years back a stranger came into his shop, looking to get Roy to sell a book for him. From what Roy said, he wouldn't have agreed, but the stranger seemed to know a few of Roy's old, (and by then deceased) Friends, so Roy took the chance and accepted the book. Oddly enough, neither he nor any of his mage acquaintances could read the book, so he set it aside as worthless. A few months later someone came into his store that blatantly had no clue about anything paranormal, acting like an odd cross between 'one of those old spy movies and those crappy TV movies about cultists'. (Roy's own quote.) Taking the man as a blatant Mark, Roy sold the book to him, laughing as the man left his personal information and ran out in a hurry.

Why did Roy remember this? Because the man who gave Roy the book in the first place never showed back up to collect. In fact, past that first encounter, Roy never saw him again. This all reminded me too much of Ghost Spider's tales from earlier, so I asked for the information the man had left with Roy, and decided to check up on it for myself.

I'm going to pause here for a bit. It's late, and I think this post has gone on long enough. I'll try to explain more in the morning.

[Bert_the_Turtle]

Well, I don't like where this seems to be going.

[AdamaGeist]

Sorry to take so long in posting this second part... I haven’t had much time just to relax as of late, so I took Sunday off to do just that.

Anyway... I had two leads to follow, one of which I knew was going to die out rather quickly. The Seller's listed address was a nice Blues Brothers reference, (Wrigley Field) and the rest was about as useful. Not something that Roy had to worry about, he was selling something for a friend of a friend, and if the guy never came back Roy would happily pocket his share. But for me, not a good sign.

Next came tracking the purchaser. Not as hard as you'd think, Roy had actually conned the man into leaving his personal information down when he bought the book, so I was able to start there.

The address he had left behind was accurate, but he had moved since then. On the other hand, he'd left a forwarding address, which turned out to be completely accurate... But again, he had moved.

It took me nine days to track him down to his most recent address. The man had moved often enough, and to such wildly different locations that you'd think he was trying to hide, yet every time he'd left behind a easy trail to follow. The only delays I'd had were that of getting each of his landlords to get the next step along the way.

I used that time well, tracking down information on the man himself. Jacob R., 'Thespian'. Had a nervous breakdown on stage a few weeks before his appearance in Roy's store, and apparently never noticed it. Since then he was getting a steadily decreasing number of available roles, mainly as understudy. (You'd be surprised at how much information you can get from actors and off of old playbills...)

However, something else was notable. Every time he understudied, the people he was going under always ended up attacked mysteriously or disappeared, never to be seen again. Further investigation showed that quite a few odd events were happening around him, or in the area he lived. Two female leads were raped, both in dark alleys, and could never give a description of their attackers. (One referred to the man being in the shadow at all times.) There was a periodic string of disappearances wherever he lived. Barring a few gaps that could have been from people no one noticed had vanished; it was one every two weeks, always vanishing on a Tuesday night.

All this started within the week of him buying the book. By the time I located his present address, I was really looking forward to talking to him.

[KonThaak]

So where and when did the boys in blue show up to make your investigations so difficult? So far, I'm not sure if this sounds like something paranormal, or if the guy suffered some kind of a mental trauma that brought on schizophrenic MPD, and that book was just a mundane trigger...

What happened next?

[AdamaGeist]

Sorry for taking this in stages, but I'm easing back into life after the hassles of the last few weeks. I'm sorry I didn't inform you of all this Kon-Tiki, but your wife is unconfortable enough around me, I didn't need to inform her that I was being investigated for murder. And in the end I was glad I hadn't called you in before that point, in a way...

We start with where I left off... I'd finaly found the man I was looking for, and madman or otherwise, I was pretty certain I'd be having to put him down. Just me, but if this man realy was a rapist, I wasn't going to let him run free. But figuring out what to do with him would take more information than I had at hand. If all that had been going on was coincidences, or someone doing things for him without his knowledge, I couldn't just take him out. In the end I came up with what was a rather stupid plan, but surprisingly effective. I just called him up, told him I was a reporter who wanted to do a story on his recent career, and set up an interview. At his insistance, it was for 8 O'clock on the 22'nd of August. Tuesday. I checked my notes, the last missing person had been about two weeks before that.

I wasn't exactly thrilled by the timing, or the fact that if I was going to pull off the interview I would have to go unarmed. I don't use firearms myself, but at close range and with a risk of surprise, I would have been much happier carrying at least one combat knife with me.

Gah, my brain's being tired. Too long without writing. I'll post more tomorrow.

[AdamaGeist]

Forgot about the board for a few weeks, returning to somthing I like to call a 'Normal Life'. That, and making sure that the cops arn't going to pull me back in again... Alright, getting to the crux of things. Cops come after this little thing.

Oh, and for anyone wondering about Kon-Tiki's dissaperance, his wife just had a baby boy. I'll let him share the good news, but coming up to time has kept him too busy for words.

Anyway... On to Jacob.

The apartment building looked... Well, deserted. Old style apartments, three floor building with two on each floor, from the line of buzzers. Names were all worn out as well, or the little bits of tape were torn off, leaving no way of telling who was where, except by apartment number. First problem... Apartment he listed at his last adress was 3a, the one I was told to go to on the phone was B... The Super's apartment, from the little note that remained on the buzzers.

Anyway, I buzzed the apartment, and got let into the building. I can still remember the smell... Place was rotten, and too quiet. Should at least smell like food cooking, sounds of people moving around. No such thing. But the man I was there to 'Interview' was downstairs, not up, and that's where I went.

The door was unlocked, and the small apartment I went into was full of things that belonged more on a stage than someone's home. Set pieces, costumes, props, even portable stage lights littered the main area of the apartment.

Gah, havn't touched this for thirty minutes. Sorry about how long this is taking, but I was always a better storyteller than a writer...

[Willie Long]

When things cool down, you should finish the report of your investigation.

[AdamaGeist]

(Edited from a conversation with KT earlier...)

I sat down for the 'Interview' with the guy. I knew what he looked like from my friend, but he'd changed, since then. Paler, thinner, noticeably so for both. If I hadn't known this was the guy I had been looking for, I wouldn't have recognized him at all. I took out a mini-tape recorder I'd brought with, set it up, and asked him about his career.

Almost instantly the guy goes off on a monologue about his 'Art'. And it was one of those low, droning things, the kind of speeches you doze off to when you hear them. I'm trying not to, suspicious as I am, when I notice something. His shadow. Now, you wouldn't normally notice something like that in a room as dark as that was. The place was only lit by candles, not anything stronger than that, and it more gave shape to the gloom of the place than anything else.

It was noticeable. Darker than the surrounding shadows, but with an odd... Flicker. Like it was fading away at random intervals.

That was strange enough, but the thing was moving on its own, practically independent of the man. And then I realized I was feeling something... Odd. Something probing at my mind. Between its swirling patterns and the guy's quiet drone, it didn't take me long to figure out what it was aiming for.

So I pretended to fall into a doze... The guy was trying to put the whammy on me, make me go hypnotized. If I didn't pretend to, he was going to suspect something, and I didn't know what I was dealing with yet. That shadow itself was freaky enough, but I didn't know WHAT it was yet.

I let myself doze, and he seemed to relax. His style of talking changed, and he went away from his past career to talking about his humiliation on his 'Day of greatest triumph!'. Basically, his version of his nervous breakdown has him giving the performance of his career, but none of the 'untrained idiots' there could grasp it. He went on about things after that, how the 'Jealous fools' and so on blocked him from the jobs he 'Richly deserved', and his career spiraled on down to crap. In the end he was near to broke, working a minor understudy role, his girlfriend had left him and so on... But he held on to the delusion that he was perfectly fine, all of them were wrong.

This is where I had to keep from busting out laughing... Basically, the guy was wandering about, feeling lost and dejected, when he saw something 'Unbelievable... Something different from the mundane world.' Oiii... I'm glad I got the tapes back finally... Basically, he found my new friend's magic shop. This guy went Gaga over it. Talking about 'Odd scents, strange books, and unnatural creatures preserved in jars...'

Which, in case you're wondering, are (In reverse order) Roy's Pickled Punk collection, the magic tricks books he keeps stocked in strange places around the store, and Roy himself, who eats ALOT of weird foods, and the smell lingers.

But to hear this guy talk about it, he'd wandered into some magic shop cliché out of a fantasy novel. He said... Give me a sec... Yeah, he said that 'As I stood there, dumbfounded, the shop-keeper turned to me, and with a wicked leer, said... "I know what you want... Come here, I have something special, just for you..."'

Basically, Roy turned on the old carnie charm and sold this rube something he was dying to get off his hands. Just like Roy said, this schmuck repeated, only he was proud of the whole damn thing from his end, taking the whole damn scene at face value... And from when he continued, I understood it was Roy that was taken.

The guy took the book home, and spent a while trying to decipher the damn thing, not understanding a damn thing in it, until 'One glorious day' he cut his thumb. He kept trying to read the book, and as his blood touched the pages, the writing shifted, turning into something legible.

I almost started at that point, but I forced myself to hold still and listen, something not to easy to do... He went on about what he discovered in that book, spells that allowed him to 'Use the shadows' for his goals. Within a few days, he said, he'd started his path of 'Revenge and return to my rightful place on the stage!'.. Damn man bragged about using a spell to become invisible and rape his ex-girlfriend, and another to cripple a rival who he was understudying for.

Guy continued like that for a week, escalating things step by step, till he made a 'horrible discovery'… that his shadow was fading away. Reading deeper into the book (Something he apparently hadn't done at the beginning of all this) he found out that his shadow disappearing was a consequence of what he was doing, but there was a way to recover, and gain 'Greater power'... By summoning a 'New Shadow' to take his old one's place.

(Will be continued.)

[Willie Long]

Reading deeper into the book (Something he apparently hadn't done at the beginning of all this) he found out that his shadow disappearing was a consequence of what he was doing, but there was a way to recover, and gain 'Greater power'... By summoning a 'New Shadow' to take his old one's place.

That's an important lesson. When a mysterious book trades magic letters for blood, finish reading it before you do what it tells you.

[Eric Eland]

That's an important lesson. When a mysterious book trades magic letters for blood, finish reading it before you do what it tells you.

Sometimes you don’t get the option, the book reads you and before long your knee deep in chaos and disorder without your pants, why does chaos always go for the pants, I like my pants, tend to wear them, unless chaos is involved, probably could keep them if I put them on my head first, chaos may like that. Curiosity killed the cat too they say, what they never tell you is that it sometimes turns you into the cat before killing you, never been turned to a cat though, good thing too, cause the cat gets killed in the end. Stupid books with all their words of magical whisperings, why do they have to be so tempting, and with the secrets, you just have to read.

[AdamaGeist]

... You know, I've been wondering somthing for a while now. What the HELL is wrong with Eric? Seriously, it's like reading somthing written by a retarded child.

I know I'm moody today, but that's only the reason I finaly SAID it, not why I've been thinking it.

[Shadowstalker]

Your not the only one, thou I wasn't thinking retarded so much as some one who has seen one thing to many.

[Bert_the_Turtle]

I've been thinking someone that had a nervous breakdown. I've seen some "old" operators that sound like him; Spies that end up in the mirrored forest, hunters with the "Body Snatcher" syndrome, etc.

[Celeste Darken]

Let's not judge a book by the cover. Or in this case, the human by his typing skills. Moses had a speech impediment, but he is hardly someone I would make fun of. While I'm not putting Eric on the same level of a prophet, he could very easily be more than what he "appears" to be. The internet is good at such screens.

[Willie Long]

Curiosity killed the cat...

Has anyone told you the rest of that sentence?

"Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought him back."

Adama, maybe Eric is a child. I don't recall the site doing an age check. (Though it probably should.)

[KonThaak]

Eric doesn't seem like a child. Far too intelligent. I think something about the magic has done this to him. To him, everything he just said makes logical sense, each and every step of the way.

Adama, remember the old rpg? I mean, the really, really old one? (Not that we've had time to have any rpg's that aren't really, really old by now...) Think "Mage Most Magnificent" syndrome.

Eric, don't take anything that's being said personally. People just aren't used to anything too different from themselves, sometimes; an odd prejudice to have, considering all things...

[Bert_the_Turtle]

Well KT, when something that's unusual by the standards around here happens I tend to go into information gathering and speculation mode. Kinda forget there's a person behind it somewhere.

[AdamaGeist]

I throw up my virtual hands in admission of defeat, KT. But you also must understand my position as well in this... If Eric realy has suffered some form of major trauma, I find it rather strange that he's actively a part of the very thing that caused him that trauma. The paranoid role he's playing gollows the pattern of avoidance of the cause of shattering stress.

Just my two cents in this.

[Eric Eland]

Im not broken, not so much stress either, just aware. Too many bad things around to not be worried, always have to watch everything, it works though, nothing has gotten me yet. People never understand, always being mean, saying mean things, I am not a child, I still help people though, they don’t know how to take care of themselves, they are not aware enough of the bad things, or each other.

[Razor]

Personally, I have little trouble understanding Eland. I sometimes have to take a break from things mentally, and often think in the kinds of terms he does. I'm very good at abstract reasoning/thinking, so his statements made on these boards don't really bother me much. Being somewhat eccentric isn't a bad thing. I mean, after all... aren't we all eccentric in our own ways in this little Society?

[Ron Caliburn]

Sometimes I think Eric makes the most sense. He knows what bad things are and he knows what will lead to pain and suffering.

I wish more people had that level of sense in them.

[KonThaak]

I wonder... My youngest brother was diagnosed with autism at an early age. He had a great deal of difficulty communicating. Autistic people are also often treated as being terribly annoying and stupid people, when in fact, as Ron pointed out (which is what got me thinking), they have a much keener sense of what's going on than many of the rest of us do. If one were a mage, or if someone studying magic had their mind damaged by it...

Maybe this is our answer...?

[AdamaGeist]

About time to finish what I started here... From the notes here, I left off as the man started in about his 'ritual'. Best to start from that.

Geez, even now it's hard for me to think about this... Jacob said that the book told him that the ritual would take alot of energy, and recomended a mass sacrifice as part of it. And thinking I was in a daze, he started bragging about what he'd done.

He claimed that on a trip out of town, he'd found a day-care that was off on it's own in a residential area. He watched and waited till the kids were set down to take a nap, then snuck in and knocked out the caretakers, then went around locking up the place and setting up tanks of gasoline. He set the place on fire, then started the ritual on the back yard, using the power he got as the children burned to death to finish his ritual.

I don't know how I kept from going for him right there and then, but he went on, talking about how his shadow had been replaced with somthing much stronger, much darker. He was realy getting into his dramatic telling of his 'growing glory', his phrase, not mine. From there he went back to his normal life, no longer having to cast spells to get his shadow to do things for him. Instead, it did them on it's own. But it wasn't long before it too started to fade. Again, he started checking the book again, and found out somthing he'd missed... That his shadow needed to be fed.

He looked at me then, grinning stupidly. I don't need my tapes to remember what he said then. 'Well, I don't need to go on with what happened after that, now do I? You'll find out first hand. My shadow's so VERY hungry now, I don't dare put it off any longer. So, it's time to say farewell...' He reached for me, expecting to go like his other victims... And I grabbed him by the wrist, twisted and threw him right into the wall.

The odd thing was how he stuck there, upside-down and facing me. He'd struck right against his own shadow there, darker than the rest of the gloom, and for a moment we just looked at eachother, dumbfounded. The the tape-recorder clicked off, having run out of tape... And Jacob started screaming.

I watched him for a moment, confused, when I started seeing his shadow start to lash over his skin, like it was trying to cover him. But it kept falling back, and as it did, it left deep red welts behind. Didn't take me long to realise the thing was eating him, bit by bit.

As it did so, the shadows all around the room seemed to start to flow away from thier locations, despite the quite limited light in the area. They pushed back twards where Jacob hung against the wall, impaled on his shadow. He was still screaming, obviously still very much concious and in pain at what it was doing to him. I stepped back away from him for a moment, grabbing my tape recorder and seting a new tape into it, setting it up on the table to continue recording. From the rate his shadow was going, Jacob wasn't going to die any time soon, and I had things to do.

I started with a search of the apartment, looking for the book. I couldn't find it anywhere away from where Jacob hung, and the area around him was a seething mass of darkness around his rapidly diminishing body. It was strange... It was still only dimly lit, but the only real areas of darkness was where his shadow was holding him. In the end, I went near to where he was to continue my search, and a bit of that darkness lashed out at me, as if to grab me.

I felt Void react from inside of me, and that bit of darkness suddenly dropped to the floor, flowing back to where it had been originaly. (Part of the shadow of a chair, if I remember correctly.)

The Shadow retreated suddenly then, flowing back up behind Jacob. It seemed to want to keep the man between it and myself, so I finaly got a good look at how he was. Most of his clothes were gone by this point, shredded and torn apart. He wasn't much better. One of his legs was completely gone, and I watched as it tore the last bits of muscle off of a bloody bone that was all that remained from the other. I could say the same of his stoumach, bits of shadow eating away at his insides. But strangely enough he was still alive, despite it all.

I kneeled down by him, and asked the only important question. "What happened to the book?"

"The writer... took it. I didn't... need it anymore..."

I nodded, and left him there, slowly being eaten. I suspected what might be the best thing to do next. There was plenty of stage lights around the apartment, as well as power cords. I set them all up to face him. He whispered. "Help me..."

I just looked at him, and flicked on the lights. Place lit up brighter than day, and I swear, I could see the shadows steaming away as the lights hit him. He wobbled a moment, then his body dropped, or at least what was left of him at that point. A bloody skull and ragged remains of a torso, with one intact arm. He was dead before he even fell.

I took a moment to collect my tape recorder and do one final check and search. No book at all, and what remained of his body cast no shadow, no matter how I aranged the lights.

[Bert_the_Turtle]

Wow! Holy crap! What happened next?

[Natasha]

do tell.

[AdamaGeist]

Sadly, there wasn't much left after that. I got the hell out of there as soon as I cleared up after myself. I didn't know if anyone else was alive in the building to hear Jacob's screams, and I didn't want to have to explain what happened. The whole bloody event had only taken about fifteen minutes, all told, so I got out of there and got home as soon as possible.

My bad luck was that my car had been spotted, and I had been spotted leaving and entering the building. The cops investigated the day after I'd left, I never did find out why, exactly. They found the obvious, a witness to my having been there, and before two days had passed, a couple of cops had shown up at my door.

I'd sent away the copies of my tapes the day before, as well as the original of the final tape, with Jacob screaming all over it. But I brought my original first tape along with me, and explained my side of the story, omiting the part where Jacob tried to feed me to his shadow. I just stated that I'd reacted to him trying to grab me, threw him against the wall, and got the hell out of there.

Good news was, with the condition of the body, there was no way I could have done somthing like that to Jacob, in the few minutes I'd actualy been there. Bad news is, the ADA in charge of my case was revving to prosecute me anyway, regardless of the evidence, the probability of self-defence, and the long list of crimes the man had confessed to on tape.

Took the better part of two months before the cops stopped following me to and from work, and as far as I know, that DA's still trying to get me investigated. Thus, my being pissed at the cops. I never found out what happened to the book, but I did find out what the shadow was trying to do...

[GhostSpider]

Do you think that we can convince one of these shadows to eat the Voice before we destroy it?

[Ron Caliburn]

Shadows that eat their casters . . . interesting thought

One more reason I always have a flashlight within reach.

[The Dark Voice]

Fascinating. I must get a look at this tome.

[AdamaGeist]

Geez, the monkey speaks again. But you know what, Dark? if I find the tome, I'll be sure to get you to read and cast from it...

Those damn things eat people, completely, and only want to use humans as hosts to get into this plane of existance. I'm perfectly certain one'd be happy to get you off of our hands.