Drilling
DRILLING (See also, RIFLES, SHOTGUNS) A combination gun such as this is delicate to manufacture and rare as a result. Triple-barreled rifles never justified their cost enough to enter mass production, but rather were crafted with the primary purpose of hunting and gamekeeping. They remained a specialty tool that indicates an increasing wealth amongst the Hunters of the bayou.
Journal of Mara Cranston
Handwritten, water damaged and hardly legible, 5" x 7"
December 18, 1894
In the weeks since her passing, I've mourned the loss of my sister Hannah. Even when we were both well into adulthood, I always thought of her as a baby, the very same way she looked on the day our mother howled and sweated while giving birth to her on the floor of our cabin. To know that Hannah died doing the very same thing, bringing a child into the world, has haunted my every dream. I can't help but blame myself for it, think that if I had only been there to hold her hand and keep her grounded through the pain, she might have somehow pulled through. I'm sure Jonathan did what he could, although I will admit to being wounded that instead of coming back to tell us of her passing himself, he ran off somewhere, leaving some stiff-lipped stranger from whatever organization he and Hannah were a part of to deliver the news: Hannah dead. Jonathan missing. The baby...the baby. I was told the baby also died during the birth, but something about the man's face gave way to something more. Was I just being paranoid? Why would he have any reason to lie about such a thing?
Regardless, it does nothing to change the circumstances. My sister is dead, and I miss her more than anything January 12,1895
I can hardly believe it. Today some woman came into the shop and told me that she was one of the delivery nurses from the day that Hannah died. She pressed a locket into my palm as she spoke in hushed whispers, looking over her shoulder as though she was worried someone might be following her. She called your name in the thick of it, - the nurse told me, and I wept into my sleeve. She loved you and would have wanted for you to have this. The locket was empty. The woman told me that Hannah had planned on using it for a photo of her new baby. Remembering the strange way the man from the organization had held himself when mentioning the baby, I pressed her until she spilled like a pierced yolk.
Don't go if you value your mind intact, - she told me from where I had pinned her against the wall. You don't want to see what it became.
Journal of Mara Cranston
Handwritten, water damaged and hardly legible, 5" x 7"
January 31, 1895
It was never a baby at all
The truth is something I would have never believed if not faced with the evidence. Something is wrong in Louisiana, something that goes deeper than a nightmare plague. Nosing around the outskirts of that crumbling organization unveiled the truth: Hell has broken loose in this bayou, taken root in its marshes and mines and compounds, the very soil corrupted. And it doesn't start or stop with what happened to Hannah.
There are so many of them now, but if what I've pieced together is to be believed, Hannah gave birth to the very first. A lumbering, monstrous, headless blasphemy, voiding its bowels of bloated leech creatures which slither around its ankles and alert it to prey. Pa s Drilling rifle found its heyday as it helped me bring one down yesterday. I shot at a distance at first, and then, not realizing that the thing wasn't dead yet as I came to inspect its corpse, delivered the killing blow with the shotgun barrel of the very same gun.
I will live out the rest of my days scouring this land and killing every last one.
?????,1895
Been weeks in this bayou now, or has it been months? The days blend together. The Meatheads, as the Hunters call them, are never-ending. One of these monsters will have to be the last of its kind, surely, surely.
My mind is going funny from being out here alone for so long. At night it's the worst. I've started hearing Hannah whispering to me from the dark, begging to know where her baby is, what's been done with her baby, where is Jonathan, where is her family? I had a dream that she stood before me, rotting and ruined from the waist down, torn open and gored and pointing at me, mouthing the word: family. The Meatheads are my family in some twisted, wretched way. All of this is just wrong.
I awoke from the dream sitting up against a tree, my shirt opened, my arms cradling a dead leech from the Meathead corpse still sprawled across the road behind me. I had been holding it as if to breastfeed. I do not know
how much longer I will last before I succumb.
Come back, Hannah. Next time I won't be too afraid to step forward and take your hand in mine.
