I read over my own notes and looked at the evidence taken from Giuseppe’s house. I had a broken tablet of volcanic glass, a cylinder of smoke, a journal and a wicked sharp knife of unknown origin. Honestly, nothing here is of known origin, I thought.

I had spent a lot of my time investigating the disappearance of a man that held an interesting life, but I would not learn of his story until I dove into his journal. After all, it was all I had that was written in his own hand. I will admit it was difficult to read, as the man did not seem to write in the regular sense of English. Words were spelled phonetically and not accurately.

he depth I must have plunged could not be accurately described. I stood upon a precipice overlooking the endless void of space itself. Below me there was nothingness, and it spread in all directions except for the outcropping of unknown white rock I stood on. A whistling breeze tremored through the chasm and moaned in twisting, tortured tones.

I absentmindedly thumbed through the journal, noticing what looked to be a couple pages of simply random words. Not all of them were in English, many in a couple different languages. I recognized German, Latin, and Greek, but the scribbles did not make any sense to me. The strange wedge-shaped symbols clustered together down a page looked little more than geometric rubbish. However, even though I could not make it out as a written language, it must have been code or shorthand, for it had a clear pattern—maybe even the flow that many languages have.

It would be a few days before I would be able to start on Miss Curwen’s case. In the meantime, I needed to file the paperwork with the Portland Police Department in regards to a missing body I had been asked to look into. Turns out that the husband had come home from a deployment and found his wife with another man. This made things interesting when he killed her and then dropped the body into the Willamette River.

The frosted glass inset in the door read: Alexander Booth, Private Investigator. In this area, there were about three other detectives who worked in the private sector. I worked with the local police department off and on for jobs that they simply did not have the manpower for. Small jobs. Odd jobs. Little did I know that the oddest job was about to knock on my door. She was a dame with the straightest posture, positively the tallest woman I had ever seen.