Work Text:
STATEMENT 16280520
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ANNABETH CHASE
Test… test… 1, 2, 3…
[Sigh] Right.
My name is Annabeth Chase, and as of October 3rd, 2023, I am the head archivist at the Chrysos Institute, New Alexandria, Long Island, New York. The head of this institute, Luke Castellan, hired me after a recommendation from Thalia Grace, one of my archival assistants, to replace the former archivist, Ethan Nakamura, after his resignation.
While I have not worked at the Chrysos Institute for long, I have been assisting in [static] University libraries as a volunteer archivist for over ten years at this point. While dealing in the paranormal is relatively new for me, I trust many of these statements can likely be chalked up to some rational explanation; many would see if they approached these records with healthy skepticism.
This institute claims to have been founded back in 1792; however, I have found statements in here that date back much further, almost to the point where selling them to a museum might be more beneficial than rereading them here. There are also many statements from parts of Europe, which I find odd, though it will make for an interesting time, trying to find translators and such. Of course, such decisions are far above my pay grade, and I don’t feel it necessary to bother Luke with such things until they present themselves as necessary.
Regardless, it will likely take years to truly order this place, as my predecessor seems to have no means of organization for the statements that he left for me. This, of course, means that hopefully I can leave a somewhat half-decent beginning to that reordering before I resign and return to school in a year or two.
In the meantime, I suppose it is useful to have Thalia and Grover as assistants. Percy seems to only want to make paper airplanes out of the documents we’re meant to be archiving, and causing a general disturbance everywhere he goes. The other two seem to already be researching what they can on unfinished statements and have offered to help with whatever research I may need going forward.
I should probably get into the recording now. Though I might add the reason for this unconventional means of audio transfer is due to some incredibly irritating static in any other form of recording I’ve tried thus far. Should I figure out a better means of doing these recordings, trust I will switch over to that immediately.
Enough stalling.
[PAPERS SHUFFLING]
Statement of Frank Zhang, regarding a missing persons case in the woods. Original statement given May 28th, 2016. Audio recording done by Annabeth Chase, Head Archivist of the Chrysos Institute, New Alexandria, Long Island.
ANNABETH CHASE (STATEMENT)
My grandmother told me stories as a kid. Lots of them. Always warnings about what we eat, about how one day karma would catch up to humans, and we’d end up at the bottom of the food chain. I thought it was ridiculous, just an excuse for her to get me to eat my vegetables. My mom never confirmed any of that stuff, though. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.
I work as a police officer in my town– or I did until recently. I was an Inspector, the youngest one in my department. I got the position after a serious shootout when I was 20. The, uh, the old Inspector was incapacitated, and some of the younger officers panicked, so I took charge. The Commissioner heard about it and decided I was a natural leader. It was the proudest I’d ever been.
The thing that caused me to quit, though, well, I guess it was a bunch of little things. See, my grandfather owned a butcher’s shop, a small business, weird in the part of Canada where we lived, but it stayed open until he died. I never met him, or saw the shop, I hadn’t even heard of it until a missing persons report in late 2014.
The guy was the owner of a jerky shop, sold all kinds of meat and other animal parts. It was a huge deal in town, had some of the best jerky around. Then he went missing.
[OMNIOUS MUSIC BEGINS]
No one reported him for a long while. Not his wife or kids. We only found out about it 5 days later. Of course, since it was a bit of an urgent case, I took on assisting in the search itself. The last place he was seen was drunk at his house, according to his wife, and just left. Not unheard of, of course, but he hadn’t opened his shop since that day either.
I wasn’t even on duty when I found the body.
A walk, I was on a walk. I went on a path I took every day, which is why none of what happened made sense. Nothing was out of the ordinary, not until the horrible smell hit.
I’d been around dead bodies before, of course I had in my line of work, but I never smelt anything as rancid as I did that day.
I immediately started looking for the source– I didn’t know if it was the guy, but I could tell it was human– and didn’t find anything initially. That’s when I saw the hogs. Canada has had a wild hog problem for years now, and everyone knows they’ll eat anything: including their own kind. I followed the hogs, careful not to disturb them, and was led right to the body. That wasn’t the weird part, though.
It was the sheep and feral cattle.
[BONES CRUNCHING]
I know that not everything adults tell children is true, but that was the moment I remembered my grandmother’s stories. Humans losing their footing as the top of the food chain. Sheep and cows don’t eat meat, but they were eating this human.
I took a step to leave, after pinning my location on my phone, but I stepped on a branch. The animals that had been so engrossed in their meal whipped around to face me. Have you ever seen farm animals look murderous?
I sprinted away, not willing to become their next meal, but I got bitten by one of the sheep. I got all the way back to the station before stopping, not even realizing my injury. I informed the sargents to take a crew, as well as take a group of Animal Control for the ferals. Some kid patched up the bite so I could get to writing out the papers necessary.
Of course, animal control only found the hogs, told me there weren’t even tracks for other cloven animals. Made me feel insane, so of course I turned to other case files. I found the one about my grandfather was the 14th one I found.
Butchered people– and animals– and eaten by wild hogs too. The original report had parts whited out, though, stuff that seemed to list things besides the boars as factors that sped up decomposition. There was a photograph of the body attached to the file.
I’ll admit, I threw up as soon as I saw it.
The same chewed-through appearance the man I found had– as though it was the same group of animals. There were dozens of reports, all with pictures of identical damage to the other eaten corpses. All owned some sort of meat-based food business.
Every. Single. One.
[MUSIC ENDS]
I quit not long after that, maybe a week later. I’d seen a lot of stuff, but that… I still see those murderous black eyes whenever I blink, still smell the human decay mixed with barnyard stench.
ANNABETH CHASE
Statement ends.
[PAPERS SHUFFLING]
Based on what Ethan Nakamura kept filed with this statement, it seems Mr. Zhang did actually have a blunt bite scar along his left arm; however, that is the only thing Nakamura left to verify the validity of any of this. Of course, I shouldn’t have had my hopes any higher given the things I’ve heard and seen of my predecessor’s… [Pause] …work ethics.
I did have Thalia do some digging, and there is a news report online of a man in a rural town in British Columbia, Canada, who was devoured by wild pigs, listing Inspector Zhang as the officer who discovered the body. I don’t doubt the likelihood of missing persons being devoured by pigs; however, there is no evidence of the other animals Mr. Zhang listed being present at this particular case.
It is more than possible that the stress caused a hallucination, or the stories told to him influenced his views on the other reports he had dug up. Regardless, while I do find this scenario mostly unlikely, there is a photo that Thalia found on Twitter of an escaped cow with blood on its snout that is tagged as being taken in the same town. There is no evidence that this is unedited, though.
End recording.
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