Okay. It's been a week since I started working on authenticating Los Susurros, and things have gone a little more crazy than I'm comfortable with. For one thing, I severely underestimated how difficult my report would be to write, especially after I got asked to look at several items not on my original sample list. For another thing, there's been eleven bouts with supernatural nasties since that imp was beaten. What's really fun about those is that more than half of the nasties weren't from any stories in the books and instead showed up because a certain crossroads fiend has apparently put a price on keeping Los Susurros away from the public. At least, that's what the Agency got out of one of the vampire thugs. As for the ones from the stories, there was one of those corpse-possessing serpents mentioned in the last entry, a kind of bogey called a "scuttler", and a swamp hag.
A scuttler is a creature mentioned in several rhymes from Scotland that were recorded in Los Susurros which feeds on fear. In fact, it seems to be a living nexus of fear. It's a shapeshifter that has adapted to perfectly camouflage itself into any background, and it can only emerge from hiding when someone touches it and receives a portion of its fear. At that point, the victim (a woman who was analyzing the materials of the books) becomes haunted by an emblem of their ultimate fear which they then see hidden everywhere they go. The only way to defeat the scuttler (which will at that point be roaming freely and inspiring fear for it to consume) is for the touched person to pass through a door marked by the emblem and face whatever they find there. Once they do that, they have the power to hurt the scuttler. Fortunately, the woman in question was in on the supernatural scene, or at least open to it. The scuttler probably thought that would make her easier to intimidate, but if it did then it also meant that she knew to take the stories in Los Susurros seriously. I don't know exactly what happened, but I do know that by the time the agents got there she'd already hacked the scuttler in half.
What I happen to know a bit more about is how things went with the swamp hag. You see, the original story around her is that she inhabits bodies of fresh water and that any place she makes her home is cursed. But she doesn't have to stay there. If someone makes a deal with her she can go out of the waters and roam freely. In the story, she was approached by a man who was jealous of his older bother and wanted her to ruin his life. The thought festered in his dreams for weeks before he went to her home and made his wish, and when she was free she took his infant son as payment. Then his wife got involved. First she went to the ocean (this was somewhere int he vicinity of modern day Virginia) and filled a skin with water. When it was full, she drank from the waves until she was sure she couldn't drink anymore, and then she went to see the hag. When she got to the pond where the hag still rested each day, she poured out the saltwater from her skin. Then she knelt down and vomited out the rest, because she knew that the sea was toxic to the hag. Finally, the fiend leapt out of the water, and then the mother dragged her from the shore and used the hag's own hair to hang her from a tree limb, and swore that she would leave her then unless the hag told her where her son was. I was expecting the whole thing to get pretty gory at that point, but instead the hag just said some incantation and the child just floated out of some mud and woke up from some kind of stasis.
Anyway, my experience with the hag was a bit different, mostly because in my case she was the one who arranged the meeting. I think she came out of the sink or something, because when I woke up this morning (and by "morning" I mean "at two") Nox was hissing and spitting and she was backed up and hunched over just outside the bathroom. Then I said something groggy and nonsensical, and Nox decided that his job was over with. The little bugger ran away. Fortunately, I still had enough of my wits about me to go for my suitcase. I grabbed a conch shell that was supposed to have belonged to a naiad or something, and blew on it. That seemed to work, but only for a second. The hag covered her ears and shrieked in pain, but as soon as the sound ended she began to settle down. I was still processing that when she took her hands away from her ears and snarled right at me. She dove right at me, but I was still right next to a suitcase full of supernatural artifacts. I grabbed the knife, the one charged with a bit of the power of the Lord of the Wilds, and jabbed it out in front of me. Fortunately, that worked better than the conch shell did.
I need to figure this out. I can't just keep dodging assassins. Oh yeah, and all the other people in the way probably can't either.
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