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The Storage Papers is a fiction horror podcast.
Discretion is advised.
Transcript
WRITTEN BY JEREMY ENFINGER
Despite witnessing someone entering Joseph Foye’s hotel room moments after Brianne left, I still felt a sense of trust in his motives, and it didn’t even concern me enough to mention it. I considered it intuition, though I also admitted to myself that my contact with the Pyramidion may have helped me with a sense of discernment about these kinds of things.
For example, I couldn’t necessarily read her mind, but I just know that Brianne has pure intentions in her efforts to help me with the papers. Although, I suppose she never gave me a reason not to trust her. I was sure about it. This is just one of the many things I have been getting used to ever since then. I have to wonder if these effects are going to be permanent, or if they’ll dissipate over time. But then again, time seemed irrelevant while I was touching it. I’m leaning towards thinking it’s not going to be a factor.
My entire outlook on the papers has changed now. Ever since the Pyramidion, I’ve felt a reluctance to dive back into the papers. There’s danger there, yet they beckon me. It’s like I already know that continuing to pursue the podcast, looking into Hydra, all the families and lives they’ve managed to damage… It’s a more polarized direction for my life than where I’d like it to go. So while I’m sharing my own story as it happens now on the regular podcast episodes, I’m keeping the one-off stories about reports of local paranormal events to Patreon as kind of a side project.
My wife has been talking about having more children, which I’m not opposed to, and this whole experience has made me appreciate the family I have, even if I never find out what happened to my parents. At the same time though, I feel pulled toward the papers, unable to simply walk away and let Hydra continue to do… whatever it is they’re doing that once involved me. I need to make sure they can’t do anything to my family.
I heeded Joseph’s advice about looking into Dr. Patel’s case logs for Malcolm. There were actually several documents included, most of them containing the label of the pentagram. What’s interesting is most of the other Maker and Shepherd files aren’t nearly as thick as Malcolm’s. This leads me to believe that he was either extremely gifted or somewhat of a troublemaker… or perhaps both. Thankfully, she filed these in what seems to be chronological order, though there are no dates on these documents and they don’t specify his age at the time.
Dr. Patel had some notes scattered throughout these documents, with an incredibly long note on the very top. She expressed in this note that she only had access to a portion of Malcolm’s medical and psychological information. The rest was above her clearance level. She references conversations between Malcolm and one of the Hydra psychologists at the time.
He had a fascination with the occult in early childhood. They went so far as to provide him literature to read. Books about witchcraft, spells, and demonology. They even gave him a King James version of the Bible. Patel expressed frustration in her notes at the lack of diligence in their methods, that they never sought the source of his fascination with the supernatural. She maintained a theory that it all led back to his sister, Tabitha. Her own interactions with Malcolm concluded that until the accident with his dog around the same time he made Tabitha go away, he had actually been a very normal child. Of course, normal in the psychological sense, not taking into account his abilities as a Maker.
His behaviors changed dramatically after those events, and if the Hydra doctors gave two shits, they would have noticed and documented a change in his demeanor whenever Tabitha’s name had been mentioned. And they did mention it several times. Only they seemed to document Malcolm’s increasing abilities at the time, only having an interest in that, instead of how Malcolm was actually handling the situation. In some ways, her notes made her sound appalled at Malcolm’s treatment, like she had a heart that wasn’t made of cast iron.
Patel’s notes also indicated Malcolm produced a name during those early sessions. Malcolm had begun asking questions about a deity figure that he read about in some of his books named (BLEEP). I’m editing the name out in case it happens to be similar to demonic entities, and going on the theory that stating its name may give it power. Call me superstitious, I suppose.
Malcolm’s journaling took a turn after he began speaking of this being. According to him, it began appearing to him in the night while he was alone, or at least he thought so initially as he couldn’t be certain if he had been fully awake or if he’d been dreaming. The way he described it was very similar to the way I had begun experiencing shadow figures in my home, peering at me around my bedroom door all that time ago when the Grinner stepped into my life.
I paused my research of Patel’s notes for a moment and took some time to look up this thing’s name online. A lot of similarities existed between this so-called god that Malcolm refers to in his journals and in Patel’s documents, but there’s also some distinguishable differences.
I recall previously reading about this being commanding 30 legions of demons in hell and being considered a higher-ranking priest among those given authority to roam the earth. But as I looked further into it this time, I was focusing on differences between its description and what I personally knew of the Grinner. This thing is said to have certain powers or abilities that aren’t traditional in demonic lore. For instance, there are historical references to various cultures worshiping it. There have been statues found across the world in Greece, South America, and Asia that bear its resemblance. There are even hieroglyphs in Egypt that are similar. Most show the appearance of a bipedal, extremely tall humanoid shape but with the head of a bird. Some depictions have feathers all over and there are some differences between human hands and talon-like claws.
I still haven’t run across anything saying this thing has anything resembling a large grin, but almost everything I could find about it on the internet says it’s rumored to have the ability to bring people back from the dead. To anyone who claims to have witnessed it in person, it could be summoned in the hopes that good fortune and protection would be offered, but it also only seems to appear to people who have experienced extreme loss or trauma. Some of the writings claim it has brought the dead back to life. Is this what Malcolm was trying to accomplish? Is he still trying to find a way to get Tabitha back?
I looked through more of the documents that Dr. Patel had sent me, and I was able to find quite a bit more related to this deity. One of the documents explained that Malcolm had fallen asleep while reading about this being when video footage captured it on the CCTV monitor after hours. There was a disk included in the file that I imagined might have some evidence. Unfortunately, when I tried to insert it into my DVD player, I wasn’t able to view it, so I ordered an external USB DVD player before I could get into the files to check it out.
It was exactly as I imagined at the beginning. It was old footage, and Malcolm looked to be about 13 or 14 years old. The quality was poor, and it was quite blurry, but I suppose they didn’t have high-resolution security cameras back then.
The camera looked like it was fixed to a corner in the room and you could see Malcolm sitting up reading. A few minutes go by and you can see his head start nodding before he eventually gives up and lies down, the book still open. A couple of minutes later, you could see Malcolm’s mouth moving. I don’t know what he’s saying because there’s no audio, but it appears to be repetitive. And then he stops, and appears to be in a pretty deep sleep.
A couple more minutes go by and you start to see what looks like smoke forming underneath the space under his doorway. Then the door opens. It’s moving slowly, but there’s nobody on the other side of the door pushing it. It’s moving on its own. The smoke begins to form a pillar just inside the doorway, stretching from floor to ceiling in a dark, thick cloud you can’t see through while Malcolm continues to sleep.
You can see the lights in the hallway outside the door begin to flicker as tentacles of smoke stretch out from the main column. One goes toward Malcolm’s desk on the opposite side of the room as his bed. Another goes toward a chest at the foot of his bed. Yet another goes toward the book lying next to Malcolm, and several more begin to sprout and examine the things in the room. Then they all rotate to the side of the smoke column nearest Malcolm and merge to form one large tentacle that makes its way toward him.
The end of it reaches Malcolm’s face and spreads out, covering it entirely from the view of the camera. And just as smoothly as it’s been moving the entire time, Malcolm’s head becomes elevated off his pillow, followed by his shoulders, and then his back. This smoke column is somehow lifting Malcolm up into the air while he’s sleeping.
He’s like this for a really long time. If I wasn’t so astounded at what I was watching, I would have thought to myself sooner, ‘If this is all on video surveillance, was anyone even watching? And why hasn’t anyone gone in there to help him?‘
After what seemed like 5 whole minutes of watching this, the smoke column disappears and Malcolm falls back on his bed, but doesn’t wake up. It’s the weirdest looking thing I’ve seen in a while… including that video of the Grinner from the hotel parking lot footage. I decided to slow the video down and look frame by frame. The smoke disappears first, and then Malcolm falls. But even more importantly, it only took three frames for it to entirely disappear, and it didn’t just dissipate either.
The first frame shows it moving away from the floor and ceiling just a bit, shrinking in height. You can also see more of Malcolm’s face in this frame, but it’s partially obscured by some of the smoke. Advancing to the second frame shows the smoke column reduced to an odd-shaped mass about the size of a basketball, but not symmetrical. The single tentacle leading from it to Malcolm’s face is split into two tapered down smaller ones going into Malcolm’s nostrils while he’s still suspended in the air. By the third frame, the mass is gone and just a billow of black smoke is seen, rather blurry, still going into his nose. The next frame shows Malcolm’s body starting to drop down toward his bed.
This thing went inside Malcolm. I don’t know if what I just witnessed is this supposed deity, the demon we’ve come to know as the Grinner, or something else entirely. That was the first of over 40 video clips contained on that CD! And yes, I took the time to meticulously watch them all. After I did, I continued to read through a lot of Patel’s additional documentation from over the following couple of years.
All of the Hydra names are redacted from this paperwork, but it seems like they actually made efforts to learn more about this entity, which continued to manifest itself in Malcolm’s room at night. Efforts were made to apprehend this being, or to at least get eyes on it in the first-person by some of the Hydra Occult Studies team. Of course, the figure was not able to be apprehended, but the longer this surveillance went on, the more it started showing itself, and the more it began to take on different appearances.
After going through years of documentation included in that box, and after a several year gap in documentation, only a few were included of Malcolm’s from his mid-twenties. Those few had Dr. Patel’s name on them, and I suspect they’re from her early interactions with him. They recalled Malcolm’s continued interaction with the being, which Malcolm hadn’t initially been sure he had successfully summoned versus something he manifested entirely on his own. Patel suspected the latter since there was no specific proof, at least of a scientific basis or even historical resemblance of the deity Malcolm had been reading about in his childhood and had attempted to bring forth. Patel ultimately concluded that this being was a result of Malcolm’s Maker abilities, completely brought into existence by Malcolm’s imagination.
Over the years, Malcolm had developed a kind of relationship with it. He taught it things, had an inner-dialogue with it, and nurtured it, until it began thinking its own thoughts and making its own decisions. Malcolm had been somewhat of an authority figure over it for years until finally, one day, it decided it didn’t want to do what Malcolm wanted it to do. It was a powerful being, and one that had superhuman abilities itself. It could read minds to an extent, it knew things that most people didn’t, and it wasn’t a demon or a deity of any kind. It was the product of Malcolm’s imagination that had developed its own motives and intentions.
It soon flourished outside Malcolm’s authority and began venturing further into the world, using Malcolm for its own purposes, influencing his thoughts and actions to further influence other people like the Order of the Divine Acolytes. A cult. It told Malcolm what to do, almost like a possession, and its influence was strong.
Patel theorized it would leave Malcolm entirely to cause chaos, and she had been developing a plan with Hydra to contain it. She included a report in her documents from the Department of Occult Studies within Hydra. She read it, but wasn’t sure whether its conclusions were correct. And then right around the time she began seeing evidence that it was growing more and more powerful… that its physical independence from Malcolm was likely going to happen soon, she received a phone call from Malcolm saying it had already occurred, and that he needed help.
According to Patel’s notes, she met him in a park in the middle of the night, and found him lying down on a park bench, barely able to move, and bleeding from the chest. He told her about this group of people who had lured him into a church to confront him. Malcolm claimed to have blacked out shortly after arriving, and awoke when a man named Jeremy had been using an ornate dagger to carve the Star of Cepheus into his chest.
He reported to Patel that this being, who we’d referred to as The Grinner, was no longer with him. Patel noted this event as further proof of her theory that Malcolm had brought The Grinner into existence with his Maker abilities, which meant he had initially failed in summoning the being he thought would be the answer to his problems.
There was one last page in the folder containing Malcolm’s documents, and it just had a few scribbles on it. It was hardly legible, but it had my name on it. Below my name, it had the word, “Podcast,” and then next to that, it had in capital letters and underlined, “THE STORAGE PAPERS.”
The very last marking on that page was a gigantic question mark. I had a feeling that Dr. Patel may have had the same question that’s been shuffling inside my mind this whole time reading this. The question that had me wondering for so long: If the Grinner we met in that church was something that Malcolm just brought into existence based off of what he read about the real entity and a lot of his own imagination, then the real one is still out there, and Malcolm is likely still trying to summon it. He’s still trying to find Tabitha, and the only way he knows how is to pin his hopes to this deity.
I wonder if that’s why he’s kidnapping Makers and Shepherds. Either way, I know Patel was likely in on something with Malcolm, and I only wish she would have left me some kind of clue as to what was going on in her notes. I still have more of them to sift through, but at a glance, these are the main documents containing Malcolm’s name.
(pause and music)
Before I end this episode, I need to follow through on a promise I made you all. I told you that I’d be following up with you regarding my neurology consultation, and after receiving the results of my MRI. It’s kind of complicated, but I’ll do the best I can.
My neurologist basically said I have a tumor that’s growing rapidly inside my brain. The MRI confirmed there’s vasculature within the tumor, meaning it’s growing with its own blood supply, which makes it very risky, if not impossible to remove. Basically, if they go in to surgically remove it, there could be an unrecoverable brain bleed. But there’s the irregular shape of it as well, which makes it seem like it has fingers extending into other regions of the brain.
Right now, there’s no reason to believe it has metastasized to other areas of my body, however, that risk is also high since it can easily travel via the bloodstream. I’m supposed to have a repeat brain scan in about a month or so.
I don’t know exactly why I’m sharing all of this on the podcast except that I started this season with the intention of being more transparent with you all about some personal things. But I also don’t feel too worried about this thing. You see, I’ve seen my death. Witnessed it first-hand. The Pyramidion showed it to me. And I know for a fact that I don’t die because of a brain tumor. The only thing that really concerns me now is why Malcolm claimed to know I was going to die soon.
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