Brendon McLeod

Ingress

MEMORANDUM

Detective, we are enlisting your help in investigating this case of multiple disappearances, connected, seemingly, only by similarity of circumstance. Please try to keep a level head. It is possible that there is something that we have overlooked. Find attached statements of witnesses and previous investigators which constitute a brief.

THE WRITTEN STATEMENT OF JOHN NEWCOMBE, FATHER OF THE MISSING PERSON

The night of my son’s disappearance was not a good night to run away, not a good night for criminal activity. Our house, built into the hill of a rainforest in the subtropical northern suburbs of Sydney was inundated with flooding from heavy rainfall that I remember, when taking the rubbish bins out, felt like walking submerged in water. Lightning struck once every three seconds, illuminating everything purple. There was no thunder. Because the night was so out of the ordinary I endeavored to check on Damien in his granny flat, which was accessible only by steep incline of rough stone stairs, which were flowing with water. Under the awning of the balcony, the ordinary litter of empty beer bottles were strewn around, and the one he used as an ashtray, stuffed with butts, was smoking from the neck, a cigarette recently discarded. Damien had been struggling with addiction. His mental health was ailing. He would not speak to me about what was wrong—he had recently lost his job at the café for showing up late too often, sleeping on the job. I remember in the weeks preceding, him telling me that there were people after him, that he had made some enemies in the course of his social life, that the people that wanted him had made vague threats. I asked him if he owed them money and he said that he didn’t. I asked him if drugs were involved and he gave me the cold shoulder. He had recently broken up with his girlfriend. Emma was a wonderful girl. I asked him why. Damien shrugged and said that she had broken up with him. His life was falling apart. Moreover, I had realised that when I roused him from sleep, most days in the mid-morning, I always slid the door open without needing to unlock it, that he was leaving his door open at night. I had been in to check when he was away, when his 1998 Mazda 2 (which had been our family car, gifted to him) was absent from our steep drive, and he was not locking his door while he was away either. I told him how important it was to lock doors and windows, thieves and villains still prowled the streets, and despite our natural scenery, we lived in the largest city in Australia. He was dismissive, he shrugged it off. I was persistent with my instruction. He became exacerbated, and told me that by not locking his door, he was protecting himself from something that I couldn’t understand. I did not understand. The night before Damien’s disappearance we had had a blues about this same issue. There had been thefts in the area, and emotions between us ran heavy. Perhaps part of our aggression was mutual frustration about the shambles his life was in. On this night of heavy rainfall and continual noiseless lightning flashes some a vague foreboding impressed on me it was important that I look to see my child. We had stopped attending church in the middle of the 2010s—we used to go on Christmas and Easter, but we decided as a family that it was no longer important to us, that we no longer believed. I am not sure what I believe, but it felt like it was an angel that told me that I should see my son that night. I would have ignored it, but the feeling was persistent. Perhaps it was a psychological urge. I do not pretend to understand the link. The sliding glass door was locked. I peered in. A skylight in the living area illuminated in dull and shimmering indigo the narrow passageway to the door where I saw Damien’s form swaddled in his duvet, eerily still. Once every three seconds, of varying brilliance, a flash of noiseless lightning, in the static roar of the rain, would show me the comfort of my beloved son’s bed’s topography. In the time it took for one flash of lightning, I thought I saw a shadow in Damien’s bedroom, standing about the height of a man but devoid of shape, looking at Damien, then turn, aware of my presence, and lock eyes with me—I saw two recessed circles, perhaps a sickly shade of green, yellow or purple, like a xenon which ate, and that vision of circles in what was a disembodied terror, imprinted as an omen, an impression of some incomprehensible evil that I carry as a suppurating wound in my psyche to this day, deepened by the disappearance of my son. In the moment, I was paralysed for the three seconds of clammy darkness and falling rain. Frightened as I was, the next lightning flash revealed no presence in the room—calming my agitated, manic immobility, I set out carefully down the path, and went to bed. It was a fitful sleep. I continued to see the figure in my son’s room turn and lock its ravenous, empty eyes with me. The next morning my son’s car was still in the drive, the door to the granny flat was locked, but my son was not in his bed. After unlocking the door I inspected his room. Nothing had been moved, there were no signs of struggle or preparation to leave. His keys were inside, on his desk, so he did not leave and re-lock the door. He had disappeared. I still love my son very much. I persist in using the present tense, though the vision I had been made privy to by whatever cruel entity permitted such dreadful, silent and aberrational horror fills my mind with excruciating confusion at what is the fate of my beloved son.

STATEMENT OF INVESTIGATING DETECTIVE ULLA JOHANNSSON REGARDING THE DISAPPEARANCE OF DAMIEN NEWCOMBE

I have been assigned to this case rather hastily. The detective covering disappearances has himself disappeared. We hope he turns up alive and well. After I read the statement of Mister John Newcombe and made a preliminary meeting and inspection of the crime-scene I took care to notice that on top of the fridge there was a half-empty bottle of scotch with an empty bottle on its side next to it. My initial suspicions on reading the statement of Mister Newcombe were reinforced by this observation, that John was a susceptible man, and what may have, in an atmosphere tinged with the confusion and gravitas of drug-induced psychosis, from which I suspect Damien his missing son may have been suffering, he could have confused a natural phenomenon for a supernatural one. My preliminary thoughts were perhaps that either that some assiduous Burke and Hare took Damien without leaving a trace, maybe through use of ether, or otherwise that the young man, whom it is known was under the influence of tobacco and alcohol and possibly other drugs, entered a fugue state, locked his quarters from the outside with some spare key to prevent detection and left of his own accord, on foot, or aided by an accomplice with a vehicle. My conversation with John and Cynthia Newcombe demonstrated their anxiety to push a supernatural interpretation of events. Cynthia was at pains to tell me that Damien had practiced kundalini meditation and lucid dreaming, that he wrote poems about the spirits with whom he communed. I asked to see these poems, expecting to find evidence of some enemy, and she told me I could read his notebooks. In the dank grotto of his granny flat I suppressed a foreboding. It smelled of semen and sweaty clothing. I asked Cynthia if I could inspect the scene privately. She obliged. After donning white rubber gloves, I began to look around. The room was in some state of moderate disarray. The sheets of the bed, however, looked neat, but not so neat as to have been made. It looked like Damien had got out from under them without disturbing their structure, not throwing them off. I opened the drawer of his bedside table. In vintage metal pencil-tin, emblazoned with a drover on horseback, I found a zip-loc bag of weed, a lighter, and a blue glass pipe. Under it, I found an A4 spiral-bound art journal. This was full of drawings and poems, which were strange and difficult to understand. One of the drawings I interpreted as a match to the figure John claimed to see standing over Damien the night he disappeared. Under it, there was the word PUHURUHURU. The figure looked as though it had been drawn with hundreds of short swift downward strokes of the pencil, so that it was the shadowed aspect of a man, but an indistinct figure. The eyes, in crayon, colours that evoked jaundice and nausea, shone a dull thrall. On the next page was a poem, which I excerpt here:

He seeks out those who seek out him
He captures those who capture him
He cannot move if you let him in
To obstruct him will let him in.

FINAL STATEMENT OF GOLIAS LOPEZ, DETECTIVE FORMERLY INVESTIGATING THE DISAPPEARANCES OF ANGELA GREEN AND JOSEPHINE WAUCHOPE, BEFORE HIS OWN DISAPPEARANCE

The disappearances of these two women have puzzled me. They both have written in their journals regarding a search which they pursued obsessively, each devolving into increasingly abstruse material before finally degenerating into undecipherable hieroglyphics, line drawings of vortices and shadowy figures and the word PUHURUHURU scrawled as though written hastily and in fear hundreds of times over the remaining pages of the journal. Josephine Wauchope’s also had the word PUCCA, written three times, and crossed out. Cursory google searches relate the information that puhuruhuru is the Māori word for ‘hairy,’ and is associated spiritually with militaristic masculinity, and that Pucca is a Celtic mischief sprite. Moreover I have experienced the recurrence of a childhood ailment. I have been disturbed at night by sleep paralysis. Recently, I have woken at the witching hour and stared into the black of night, unable to move. I have had the indescribable and unverifiable sensation that I am being watched, that something is present with me in the room. This sensation has been accompanied by a hallucination of breath, not my own, for I have noticed, when I hear this stertorious laboured aspiration, like a creature barely alive, my own breath chokes in my throat and my brain and extremities buzz with the tension of de-oxygenation—I feel like I am fading away. And soon I do fade back into sleep, but when I inevitably wake, I am restless and achy. I wonder if you are questioning the inclusion of my personal sleep disturbances in an official statement about a case I investigate. Both of the women who disappeared, cases connected by circumstance as much as personal investigations in their private journals, reported to friends or family that they suffered from sleep disturbances. It should be noted that these women disappeared at night, in their sleep. Or perhaps not in their sleep, perhaps they disappeared in that space between the conscious and unconscious mind, where the monsters which lurk in the archetypic ocean can surface to the hypnotised and susceptible mind and draw, by fear and terror, the dreamer out from their thinking mind to the depths of the unknown.

EXCERPT FROM THE DIARY OF ANGELA GREEN

PUHURUHURU is the PUCCA is the NIGHT is the DARK is the DEATH is the VOID is the END is the STEAL is the THEFT is the END is the FEAR is the TAKE is the NO is the SHIFT is the THINK is the APPEAR is the CHASM is the PIT is the LIGHTNING is the BLEAK is the STILL is the NOTHING is the END is the KILL is the OWN is the BITE is the TAKE is the MIND is the NOTHING is the END is the MIND is the TAKE is the FEAR is the APPEAR is the FEAR is the APPEAR is the END is the THINK is the HINDER is the HELP is the STOP is the ALLOW is the PREVENT is the GIVE is the SELF is the UP is the TO is the HIM is the EAT is the HUNGRY is the GHOST is the BODY is the SOUL is the PRIMORDIAL is the WAVE is the PRIMEVAL is the SCREAM is the SILENT is the SCREAM is the DEVOUR is the WAVE is the PARTICLE is the QUANTA is the COMPLETE is the DESTRUCTION is the END is the VOID is the STEAL is the DARK is the DEATH is the NIGHT is the HINDER is the HELP is the DEATH is the NIGHT is the PUCCA is the PUHURUHURU is the PUCCA is the PUHURUHURU is the PUHURUHURU

EXCERPT FROM THE DIARY OF JOSEPHINE WAUCHOPE

This creature is TERROR for me i DO NOT KNOW how to STOP him COMING for me he has VISITED me and i see his SALIVA which looks like NUMBERS dripping from his FANGS which look like SEQUENCES and think about SPACE and TIME and i know that to try to STOP him from coming only LETS HIM IN i LOCK THE DOOR i SAGE SMUDGE my ROOM i STILL hear his TERRIBLE BREATHING like he is taking the LIFE out of my LIFE and i remember that the names of JESUS MARY JOSEPH can stop any demon but i am TOO SCARED to TRY THEM because EVERYTHING THAT STOPS HIM LETS HIM IN

ADDENDUM

Detective, as this case represents an existential threat, no-one else has ordered or corrected the statements. All who read the contents of this case file disappear under mysterious circumstances.