Chapter 23: Esther's Diary (Pages 11 to 13)

On October 2nd, me and Leo managed to complete rest of the files and send them to the court. On that day, we also learned that the first hearing will be held on October 6, that we are both likely to be questioned at this hearing, and on top of that we heard a rumour about who became the defender of Mad Dog and what line of defence he chose for his client.

Alair Taylor. I knew this name very well and his line of defence made me a little panicked especially after the dream I had before. I knew very well that this lawyer had a somewhat scandalous, at least for the general public, worldview on crimes committed by people who had traumatic experiences in their childhood. In general, the point is that, according to him, people who are driven to crime by suffering in childhood should not be punished as severely as unemotional psychopaths, who commit crimes deliberately, without a specific motive or simply for fun. While partially this guy is kind of right, I don't think that childhood trauma justifies subsequent crimes. After all, not every hurt child turns into a criminal, right? It is largely a matter of choice that each of them makes on the way. Some decide to overcome their trauma, seek the help of specialists (and there are more and more places or people who can help in such a situation), while others resort to crime to vent their emotions. That's why I figured that Leo and I couldn't let Alair Taylor make Laurens Vermeulen some kind of a victim. Perhaps for us, as the police, the investigation was completed after catching the Mad Dog and gathering evidence to confirm his guilt, and the rest should be left for the court, but I personally intended to follow the case and, during a court hearing, convince everyone that Laurens Vermeulen should be severely punished no matter what he went through in the past. I suspected Leo was thinking the same. In fact, I was sure of it. He seemed to care even more about Mad Dog receiving the highest sentence possible.

The more I cared about this matter, because he asked me to do so. I mean, of course, the 'Scarlet Angel' from my dream. He had clearly predicted that someone would come and will try to show Mad Dog as insane and clearly asked that we should do our best to prevent alleviating his punishment. This being also pointed out that the Scarlet Angels placed their trust in us by handing Laurens Vermeulen into our hands, instead of dealing with him personally, while asking us not to make them regret this decision. I definitely didn't want them to regret it. I wanted to prove to them that we, as human beings, can also justly punish criminals or hard sinners, as those people were called by them. I made up my mind to prepare myself well for the court hearing and spent the whole day compiling in my head answers to every possible question that I could hear not only from the Prosecutor, but also from Alair Taylor, or perhaps most of all from him. After all, the Prosecutor was on 'our side' in this whole trial, as he was equally concerned with severely punishing Mad Dog, Alair Taylor, on the other hand, was his public defender and would certainly do everything to ease the punishment of whoever he defends as much as possible.

However, as it turned out later, it was not the worst event of the day. It started very well, even great, because when I returned from work and turned on my laptop, among the non-important replies on the forums, I noticed a message in my e-mail box from a person with the nickname the_scarlet_truth. The name itself sounded promising, but it was the content of the e-mail that made me really happy. This was what it said:

Subject: (no subject)

From: the_scarlet_truth Message: Hello Esther. I saw your post on one of the forums about the paranormal and decided to write to the e-mail address you provided. Think I have the information you are looking for. If you want to know more, you have to find me on the Deep Web. In the attachment, I provide you with specific instructions and a link to download a special search engine. And remember, to be perfectly safe, use a VPN!

See you in the Deep Web.

I was surprised, but, without hesitating, started downloading the search engine. I had a basic understanding of the Deep Web and had used a VPN for quite a while. We had training on these subjects in the police force, I remember it being run by some handsome computer scientist from the Cyber Crime Department. It may sound frivolous, but I really remembered his face, after all, he really was a good-looking guy and, on top of that, very intelligent, so don't pick on me, I'm a grown woman after all, right?

But back to the topic. Once having the special browser, I found the chatroom that was mentioned in the instructions. No registration was required, but I needed to use a temporary nickname, so I chose scarlet_truth_seeker so that the_scarlet_truth could find me easily. I thought he was an intelligent person and would guess who I was by this nickname. And I was right. When his nickname appeared on the list of people present in the chatroom, I wrote a direct message to him that 'I found him and am the one looking for the answers'. Without a word, he sent me the link that I opened in a new tab. It was his website about the Scarlet Angels legend, specifically his collection of evidence for their existence. The very appearance of the page made it clear that this person was truly obsessed with Scarlet Angels, and my simple interest was nothing compared to this. I thought to myself that if Leo had seen this, he would have recalled his earlier words about me. I saw the description of the page, placed in the sidebar:

"I, the host of this website, known as the_scarlet_truth, have devoted my entire life and funds to collect evidence for the existence of legendary creatures called the Scarlet Angels, known mostly from legends or fairy tales passed down from generation to generation. I know they are real, saw too many strong evidence, heck, I even saw them myself. It's already 998 website on this topic that I created, the ones before always vanished mysteriously overnight after a while. It might be common on the Deep Web but not so often and sudden, especially since there were no problems with the servers beforehand. When I looked deeply into it, seems like someone just magically deleted the whole website. How? I don't know, it's probably a part of the mystery. Therefore I got to warn you, my curious guest, that the knowledge contained here is probably dangerous, it might bring you a LOT of trouble, so whoever visits this place, does so at their own risk. Think about it before entering further. Maybe it's worth turning back sometimes and closing the window? After all, as some say, curiosity is the first step to Hell."

This introduction, of course, didn't stop me, so I started scrolling slowly down the page, browsing the subsequent posts. First, I saw a lot of pictures of scarlet feathers that people found, that looked the same as the one I found back then. I know because I took mine out of the drawer and compared with the photos. It really looked the same.

The following posts contained photos and videos of various people who supposedly captured the Scarlet Angels. And here the word 'supposedly' was the key, because most of the photos or videos were blurry and maybe you could see something strange on them, but could this be these scarlet creatures? My inner detective could not agree with that statement. It was a VERY weak evidence, if you could even call it that.

Then there was a whole lot of detailed testimony of witnesses who either saw the Scarlet Angels in their dreams, like me and my grandma, or even heard their whispers and saw them in real life. This was much more interesting, as many people described the Scarlet Angels similar to Laurens Vermeulen's drawing. Of course there were many differences, but the_scarlet_truth wrote in his comment at the end of the post that it would be naive to think that such creatures cannot change their appearance. They were angels, incorporeal beings, so with that in mind, they could look different to each person. All in all, the only thing in common was their scarlet wings and those scary dark blue eyes without pupils.

However, the most surprising were the next posts. There were scans in them presenting old documents or engravings reaching back even to ancient times, also drawings resembling the Scarlet Angels, found in caves, coming from the stone age. Of course, some of them raised my doubts, because the figures depicted in them did not always resembled angels in general, and for sure not the legendary Scarlet Angels. But, since the figures in most of the drawings or wall paintings looked similar to those drawn by Laurens Vermeulen, the few unconvincing ones were forced out of my mind kind of naturally. I never would have thought that this legend could go back so far, and it was once known outside of Wales or the UK as well. Nowadays it was hard to find someone in Europe who had even heard of Scarlet Angels, let alone the rest of the world. And looking at those old documents, drawings, and wall paintings, you could find a scan from almost every corner of the ancient world. I began to wonder how this legend was so thoroughly erased from world history. And considering that, how did it manage to survive mainly in United Kingdom, especially in Wales? It was strange, because even if someone or something wanted to erase the evidence for the existence of the Scarlet Angels, how did the memory of this legend survive in one part of the world?

Then, of course, another important question struck me: Where did this user the_scarlet_truth get the scans of those old documents or drawings? I couldn't find anything about it in the library or on the internet. Those blurry photos, videos or testimonies of witnesses could be obtained quite easy. People probably did not want to share it anywhere, so as not to be considered crazy, but this person turned to those people, assuring that he believed them and that is why they probably agreed to give him the information and provided the collected materials. But scanning ancient documents or paintings was not that easy, the more so because nowhere was there even a mention of it, which could only be explained by the fact that it was classified information. Of course, there were many rumours about the US government hiding the fact that UFO landed on Earth many times already. However, even if the Scarlet Angels case was similar and someone hide their existence from the world, the question was how did user the_scarlet_truth gained access to this information? Was he an employee of some secret organization? Or has he sneaked in somewhere and obtained it illegally? At this point I had so many questions and wanted to find answers, because I didn't know if I could trust this mysterious person, and everything that was put on his website. Then I remembered that I still have this chatroom open, so decided to write to the_scarlet_truth and ask him directly.

And that's when it started. I heard something like a thousand whispers that sat in my head and pounded inside mercilessly like a flock of butterflies, or rather moths, not letting me write anything calmly. I grabbed my head and then heard more exactly what they were saying. "Stop", "Don't do it", "Turn back from this path", "Turn back while it's not too late"... and many similar sentences. My head hurt more and more, so I couldn't focus on listening or doing anything else. Then suddenly my laptop turned off, followed by all the lights in the whole apartment. My bedroom door was ajar so I could see the light in the living room, that I left on, turns off at the same time as the light in the bedroom. At the same time, the whispers in my head ceased, and I sat like that for several minutes in the dark, listening, but there was complete silence in the apartment. Even from the street there were no sounds, though there were some usually, even at this late hour, and when I looked at the clock on my laptop screen before it turned off, it was almost 11 pm. I started to tremble, was overwhelmed by fear, panic and had a bad feeling, so I ran from the bedroom straight into the hall, got dressed, took my car and apartment keys, and then went out into the hallway. I had a hard time closing the door because my hands were shaking, and then I almost fell over while running down the stairs. I also had a problem with finding the lock in the car door. I glanced up at my apartment windows and saw that they were still flooded with darkness. Don't know if I was having some kind of hallucinations, but thought I saw some movement in the bedroom window because the curtain moved slightly and there was no wind today, besides, my window was closed. It only increased my fear, and I felt relatively calm only when finally got in the car, fastened my seatbelt, started the engine, and drove out onto the street.

Of course, I went to Leo's apartment. In Cardiff, I didn't know anyone as well as him, and felt that only in his place I could spend the night. When parked in front of his block, I was afraid to get out of the car for a moment, but when I looked around and saw nothing strange, I left the car, closed the door quickly and ran into the building. Leo lived on the sixth floor of a ten-story building, so it was obvious there was an elevator. I waited impatiently for it to arrive on the ground floor, all the time nervously looking around. It's good that I didn't come across any inhabitant of this block, because they would probably look at me as if I was crazy since there was no one suspicious nearby.

I got in the elevator quickly as the door slid open and pressed on the button with the number six. Being in this confined space didn't help with my paranoia, so when the elevator finally reached the sixth floor, I flew out as if something was chasing me. I ran to the very end of the corridor where Leo's apartment was. I have been in his place a few times, but only sat with him in the living room, at most used the bathroom. I never spent a night there, but I was hoping Leo wouldn't throw me out and make me go back to my apartment, especially after finding out the reason why I couldn't sleep in my place that night. I rang the bell on the door and it seemed like ages before he opened it. Leo stared at me in surprise and was clearly worried—it must have been obvious from my face that something was wrong. But instead of saying what happened, I just hugged Leo and he didn't protest and hugged me as well. I immediately felt safe and asked if I could sleep in his place. He assured me I could, but insisted I tell him what had happened. But first Leo led me into the living room, sat me on the couch, and warmed up a bowl of soup for me, serving it with some bread. Leo asked if I had eaten, but it was obvious that he had drawn his own conclusions from his own observations. Of course, I ate the soup because I was actually really hungry. The chips I ate when got home were certainly not enough for a dinner.

Unfortunately, once I had eaten, there was no way to escape from questions about what happened. Since Leo was starting to assume the worst, I told him exactly what I did and what happened next. As promised me, he tried to stay calm, though I could see the irritation in his face and a little bit of it also in his voice when he was answering me. Leo explained the sudden shutdown of the computer and the lights in my apartment with an electric short circuit, adding that I lived in an old building and such a thing was quite normal. Probably everything was already back to normal. Of course, Leo didn't even comment on the whispers I heard. For him, I was simply exhausted and had auditory hallucinations, that's why I should get as much rest as possible. I couldn't go back to my apartment, so I took him for pity. It was going to be one night after all, so Leo finally agreed. He prepared clean sheets for me, took a blanket and a pillow for himself, and left the room for, as had decided, he was supposed to sleep on the couch and I would sleep in his bedroom. I wasn't going to argue with him about it, after all, as Leo said, he would not die because of sleeping for one night on the couch. As I felt much safer in his place than in my apartment, I quickly fell asleep.