Eldritch Tales from the Jungle

A strange society interested in the occult sends a skilled team of men to the jungles of South America to seek out and terminate a devilish object.

Courtesy of Midjourney

Diary of Christian J. Baker

November 17, 2010

Where to start? I’ve never been a man of many words, including written ones. My job requires little conversation and my character is silent. In the interest of conveying this story, however, I must place verbal aversion aside. 

This is a compilation of my older diary entries and my own contemporary notes to serve as a warning to all who are unfortunate enough to need it. 

The sisters of this convent have provided me with pen and paper that I may relay to you this horrid tale. It is one of the few things I feel that I can do trapped here. The Sisters are kind and have taken good care of me—they are amused by my Spanish and will only speak English with me.

But I am getting distracted.

To the point.

When I am finished, I will seal it away. Forever I hope, but if something should arise, information related to this event can be located within these pages. 

You may wonder whether to trust a man imprisoned within the confines of a mental hospital. Yet, I tell you that all I say is true. 

I suffered from an acute shock, deep in some remote pocket of a hot and damp South American jungle. There, I looked upon unnamable things so monstrous that I at once knew they were not of God’s creation. Even now, though my constitution has been described as solid by past colleagues, I shudder to recall the eldritch scene. 

This is as good a place as any to begin: in the belly of an old iron vessel upon a black and grey sea somewhere in the South Pacific. It was not my first mission nor would it be my last. I trained from a tender age to retrieve daemonic objects from the farthest reaches of the earth at the behest of a secret organisation.

I mentioned before that my nerves were concrete; this was by design. My career involved many perilous meetings with unsavoury characters painted against alien backdrops. Often, I confronted sights that not even the maddest of men could attempt to conjure in drug-addled nightmares. The same can be said of my colleagues, an audacious group of men who cared not for the comforts of home. There were six members of our party including myself. First, there was the venerable doctor, Howard Phillips. Then, our guide and clairvoyant, a young boy by the name of Javier Delgado. So too we were joined by resident anthropologist and former schoolmate, Mark Kim. A new man also joined, Victor Ward. Alec Carter, an American, led our expedition. 

I had worked with Alec before. He was rough, but fair. It was difficult to distinguish which features belonged to Alec naturally and which he had obtained over his lifetime. Everything about the man was large down to his voice—nasal in part due to his accent and a crooked nose. 

I liked working with him. Neither of us were good conversationalists, which might have been the cause for our amicable relationship. 

After returning from our last mission in Egypt, Alec personally picked me for this assignment. I was happy to oblige. 

That was how I found myself in a cabin the size of a coffin, rolling back and forth with the ship… 

End of part I

Part II