The Siren's have been calling me for a thousand nights. I keep finding myself floating on my back in an ocean too calm to be real, not even the most docile of nights in the Atlantic are this tranquil. The sky is a bursting violet, with depth of a million layers of purple hues, and the moon. The moon is a vile thing a bright-red ball of fire, composed as a single entity, beckoning me to drown, drown, drown.

I keep on wondering why it didn't just burn me up right there.

Dreams haunting a man that doesn't dream.

And here I am, Monday morning, waking up on the curb of a desolate Canon City street, after interviewing five prostitutes about their biggest trials and tribulations on a Sunday, fascinating and insightful, but hell, it makes for a rough morning. Dean Lamper, a man known by little, strung together by booze, cheap cigars, and just enough morals to stay on the outside of Uncle Sam's cage, where slavery and torture are nothing but a common sense understanding, like getting wet a water-park.

Big breaks don't happen to me, just to all of my friends, acquaintances, and enemies. Always told I was going to make it one day. At thirty-five years old, I see a rickety tin-house in the Nevada desert, a bundle of sticks somewhere down a long stretch of beaten road that eventually turns into sand. Saying you're an investigative journalist is like saying you shit, piss, and breath air, being one is a different story, not too many people are the kind of risk-taking adrenaline junkie that is required by the profession when it's done right.

Who am I to talk? I'm sitting in a New Mexico Motel, couldn't tell you which city, region, county, just that I'm here, and I'm surrounded by a bunch of shivering, masked toto's brandishing AK-47's like NERF guns. When you're a nobody like me with zero dependents, with an ounce of intelligence, self-hatred and calculated stupidity becomes a way of life, not a one-night stand.

Hey. If I die, it won't make any difference if I was billionaire or just a man with a thousand in my back account, twenty in my pocket, three quarters up my ass and two pennies underneath my tongue, now would it?

“I fucking run New Mexico, man”

“Hold on a second” I was still in the process of unloading my equipment.

“Is this guy fucking serious?” A teenager squirming with his rifle looks at a male no-more grown than him, with a facial expression conveying that it's time to jump the cranky geezer.

“Yeah. He's Dean Lamper.” He wanted to say more, I could tell. Maybe I worked with his pops, had dinner a couple nights, or perhaps it was one of those drunken stupors I left bloody and it was time to enact papa's revenge. Lord knows there a-lot of bastards out there who want me gone.

“That's right. I am.” Notebook in my hands, recorder to my chest, video-camera on a stand. It's time to go. “Now do that over again.” I say.

“I fucking run New Mexico!” He sheered the muzzle a few inches from my face, I didn't flinch and luckily, he didn't take that as a challenge, I took it as a queue to establish the credence of my hairy ball-sack.

“Your boys besides you, do they run New Mexico, or is that just you?”

“We fucking run it.” The boy who knew my name proudly exclaimed.

“And what do you call yourselves?”

“The Chain Gang of Bullet Ives”

Yeah, it was cooler than I thought it would be. I look into his eyes, and turn my head like a curious dog, and left with a wide smile, followed by a chuckle. The Chain Gang of Bullet Ives.

“Cool name”

“I came up with that shit” A man, but scrawny and tweaked out, wearing a graphic t-shirt so he was still a boy, came from the back.

“Where did you hear it in, a cartoon? See, I don't watch that stuff anymore, only when I visit my niece in California, and she watches cable now. It's not my choice, my brother is just trying to grow her into a road-warrior or some shit.”

I ran the story on a website I'm chief editor and co-owner of, the very next day. I just didn't expect it to be with two black eyes, a dislocated shoulder, a bruised rib, and of-course, a bloody nose. And the website if you're wondering gets fifteen thousand unique visitors a month, that's about three hundred dollars in revenue, just before you think I'm all Hollywood.

I'm still in New Mexico, just sipping on some Mescal, Pascal Williams besides me, co-owner of DespotsAndDaeoms.net, who is more than happy about our website crashing on a Wednesday, one-hundred thousand unique visitors in the last hour alone.

“It was a good idea, wasn't it?” Pascal said with a shit-eating grin on his face.

“What was?” I turned, and then gasped in agony, resigning to staring at a bunch of rolling tumbleweeds turning on black-asphalt while my partner giggles like a school-girl.

It's fine, the Mescal I'm drinking is damn good.

“The secret camera? The audio recorder I stitched to your chest? This is going viral, Dean. This is what we've been fucking searching for!” He goes for a high-five, I'm too fucked up to give it back.

“Whoa. I enjoy the enthusiasm, buddy. And I share it, too. But I didn't come out of this scotch-free, on-top of the teenage psychos probably riding to cut my head off as we speak.”

“Fuck em.” He leans over me from behind, wrapping arms around my neck, kissing my temple. “We're going to get the credit we deserve. After everything we've been through together.”

“Get off me.” I said, unable to push down a smirk any longer. “We did, didn't we?”

“Hey. I got something for you. Something really good. I was going to tell you earlier, but this all happened.” His voice breaks. “No. Really good is an understatement, this story is fucking crazy.. right up your alley. I'll be helping you with everything in the back-end, but I can't join you in the field with all of the attention we're getting.”

“Yeah I get. You know how I like to do my work, anyways.”

“Hey.” I cut off Pascal. “Despots or Daemons?”

“Fucking Daemons. Like you've never seen.”

“Huh. Consider my interest piqued. Is it just hearsay? How much do you know?”

Pascal paces in a circle behind me, I can tell how much is on his mind by the words he's unconsciously whispering. “Suspend your disbelief for a moment and take a ride with me.”

“I've been suspending disbelief for my entire life, go ahead.”

“Abandoned lighthouse, thirty miles off the coast of Washington. Though it's not just that, there's a small village there, mostly ruins now – one home has been well kept, my Aunt's white picket fence midst a maelstrom that's always trying to tear it down.”

“Marybel? How is she?”

“Dead. Passed away one week ago, I texted you the hour it happened, actually. You were doing a story on the Sewer Witch of Pleasant-Town, no hard feelings.” Pascal walks back into the house, and returns with a stack of folders.

“The Sheer Isle Massacre. Seven members of a sorority take a week off to get lost in “nature” a place far away from cops and crooks, a place where their parents won't follow. Boat comes three days later as planned, no girls in sight, vanished, gone. Never hits the national news circuit, doesn't leave the local authorities. The case was dead in the water, and everyone who wanted more, was blotted out by silence, fees, ten-thousand articles about sex-tapes and presidential fuck-ups that stretched the last bit of attention-span the public had left. Three of them ended up dead within the span of twenty-four months, two shots to the head, falling off the balcony, overdosing on fent, all things that can be chalked up to the happenings of life, so I won't weigh you with that theory.”

“Hold on.” I put my hand in the air. “You called it a massacre.”

“It is to people in the know,.”

“Okay. And how do you know?”

“Dean.”

“Don't give me that. It's a good question, and I got plenty left.”

“These things happen a-lot more than you'd think. People walk into national parks, some you haven't even heard of, public land that goes on for hundreds of miles, and never come out. And now you add in a little haunted island to the mix? I'd be surprised if people weren't getting snatched up and walking up ladders that lead to no-where, falling into fissures – things rangers don't tell you about.”

“You don't have to lecture me on disappearances. I'm in already. I already accepted the assignment. I just want the details. And why you think they weren't murdered by some waterboarding psycho, band of college girls stumble upon something they weren't supposed to, could have been drug related, corrupt cops, serial-killer roaming around. Got too close to the edge and tumbled over, scrapes and cuts head-to-toe, maybe hunched over and got eaten by a shark willing to jump for dinner.”

Pascal doesn't laugh, in-fact he grits his teeth.

“It's called the Greenstone Massacre because accounts of their faces glowing in the chlorastrolite, abundant on the coast. And by more than a few accounts, they weren't killed by people. But by something that came out of the water. Marybel says the island has an old history of the occult, witches, but the last three folk in occupancy, dead now, said something climbed up the rocks.”

“These witches like umm.. my aunt who buys candles from J.C Penny and strobes around with sage sticks, is that really daemon-like?”

“Levitating. Magical. Monster Faces.”

“Okay. So more cryptid, less daemon. Maybe I should bring an automatic shotgun with a couple thousand rounds in my bag, a machete strapped to my back, bear-mace on my hip, a few flares if I lose service, fifty-sixty meal kits. What the hell am I going to be doing out there? Hold on. Do you own this place now? Hey. You're moving awfully fast, I think I'm about to fall out your vehicle and land on my head, have a big ole' seizure and wind up comatose... and you wouldn't want that, would you?”

“We have an in. But right now, I want you to give me a yes or no in way of official signature on this piece of paper, no more verbal agreements from here on out.” He hands me an official contract.

“Yeah, I'm fucking in. You're getting all serious on me, Pascal. I like it.”

“You bet I'm serious. I have to be when I'm taking out a mortgage on you.” I hand back the contract, signed, he protects it beneath his arms, I see shimmering metal in his hands.“You thought this story with the child soldiers was big? This is going to the big-screens. Here are the keys to every building, closets, lock-boxes, whatever you can think of. In this folder are the schematics, just in-case you get lost in the catacombs, rumored to wind down all the way to the gates of hell.” He pauses, hearing my heart beat. “My home is your home. You can take a shit on Marybel's shell collection for all I care.”

“You own the fucking island?” I say as if I'm uttering a secret. “I'm sorry. Please go on.”

“Yeah. It's the only thing she left me.”

“Hold on a second. Why don't you start doing tours, hire a couple guide-tour actors, rent it out to a film studio, are you shitting me, Pascal? This is a goldmine and you're sending me out there to do a piece?” I try to get up, but I'm quickly reminded by the pains of bruised ribs. “You can't just freeze this place out on the hopes that I strike fire, again.”

“Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing.” Pascal squeezes Dean shoulders, resting every bit of his weight on the chair. “This is going to build us an empire of freaks. Just what we've always wanted. You and me” He kisses the top of my head. “Now get some rest.”

I still had questions, a whole lot of questions. Like what the hell were seven college girls doing on Marybel's - Pascal's newly inherited island. Hell, it all felt like a fever dream. Pascal was quiet for the rest of the day, and when he talked, it was whenever my piece broke past a goal-post we never thought would be reached in our life-times. I searched far and wide for the sorority case, a few videos, pleas from crying mothers, vlogs from family members, machine-tight press releases, and at the end of the day, there was nothing to indicate it was on Shere Island, just a bunch of cove-hunting turned high-tide turned lost in the riptide. Although, there was never a mention of retrieving the bodies, they were presumed dead, and whenever you're missing seven bodies, something interesting is awry. I begin to wonder if that's the story I should be working on, the island is a relic of a simpler time, fascinating, but of the dead, and I enjoy the living.

Either way, it wouldn't be the first time Pascal messed with my head for a better story. For the time being, people are actually saying my name, and for my work, not drinking too much at the pub and getting in a fist-fight with the bartender. I mean, it's not like I broke the seal of a state-secret kept in the vaults of an underground bunker traversed by senators and congressmen, I just got beat up by a bunch of degenerates, and to be honest, I would've done the same thing: kicked my ass from dusk to dawn. God knows I deserve it – and I hardly believe in God.

For now. For this great moment in the circus that has been my career, I'll be enjoying two double cheese-burgers, a chocolate malt, a bottle of mid-shelf whiskey, and hell, an apple pie.

And Pascal says I don't eat enough. I just don't got the motivation.