6-17-17 Vodyannoyed

Byline: Gary Llewellyn

Dateline: June 17th, 2017

Hello again, gluttons for punishment. This week the Page Five Ghoul’s nonsensical itinerary has taken us to Ukraine, but not the parts the Russians are currently trashing. Specifically, a podunk hole in the ground called Nova Borov, about three hours into the wooded countryside outside of Kiev.

While the town’s name might be fun to say, they have themselves a bit of an unfun problem. A local, water-dwelling creature known as a Vodyanoy, or in Ukrainian, Vodianyk. The thing looks a lot like my uncle Wallace, a fat, dumpy old man with a frog face. That’s right Wally, I’m talking shit about you in print. You still owe me $300 for breaking my glass dragon bong.

Like Uncle Wally, the Vodyanoy is often covered in algae and river bottom muck. The Vodyanoy would travel around by doggy paddling or clinging to a rotting log. If you’re going to live on the water, wouldn’t you learn how to swim? Not Uncle Wally. He can’t slide me three hundred bucks for busting up my shit, but he’s got the scratch to buy a houseboat and the dude doesn’t even use it. It’s just tied to a dock, rotting.

Also like Wally, the Vodyanoy demands favors or he’ll start wrecking your stuff. That’s how most of these monsters work. They start protection rackets, but unlike Wally, they’re good at it. They’ll demand tribute and then throw a tantrum when they don’t get it. Drownings, sour milk, turning chickens into stone, stealing your kids, and then when the local yokels get fed up with their shit and call out the pitchfork crew, they go into poor me victim mode. Sound familiar, Wally?

So that’s what we have here. A Vodyanoy running a protection racket on a local hole in the ground. The way a Vodyanoy runs his game is, if you don’t pay up he’ll take you down under the lake and keep you as a slave. This particular Vodyanoy is running a sweatshop server farm that’s responsible for an estimated 83% of the world’s spam. Ever wondered why that one brunette, who’s constantly emailing you, is always named Olga or Svetlana?

When something like this happens. What are you going to do? You’re going to call a professional. That’s me. Gary Llewellyn. I’ve got business cards. They’re just beer coasters with my name and my secretary Stephanie’s number on written on it, some in pencil. Just until I can get the real deal printed up.

Gary Llewellyn

Monster Hunter

610-555-4674

24 hours 7 days

Rates negotiable

So, I banish the sucker. A carton of smokes goes a long way with Vodyanoy. I present the mayor with a bill for my services, which is when folks got real chilly. If you don’t want to pay, that’s fine. I can just bring the thing back.

6-17-17 Stop Calling Me!

Byline: Stephanie Morgan

Dateline: June 17th, 2017

If you call me looking for Gary, I’m just going to hang up. If it was one after another it would be one thing, but it’s the same five guys. I don’t care that you want to talk to Gary about blah, blah, blah harpy, blah, blah, blah shoggoth.

This week we were in Delta Junction, AK. Gary wanted to see his Uncle Wally because he owes him three hundred dollars and since the SEG checks didn’t clear, again, and Gary blew out the charge card in the Riviera, we could use the money. Wally claimed Gary broke the bong and it kind of sounds like he did, but he wouldn't back off the money.

Normally, I wouldn’t back Gary, especially when he’s being transparently full of shit, but I’m too hungry to be concerned with subjective things like justice and morality. I’m rationing Tic-Tacs.

They got into a fight and Wally started breaking shit, yelling, ‘<crash>Now you owe me three hundred bucks,<crash> six hundred, <crash>nine hundred.’ So then, Gary picked up a cricket bat and threatened to destroy Wally’s server farm. Wally said he’d give Gary the three hundred if he got him a carton of cigarettes. So all we really got was around two seventy after the cigarettes. Gary handed him a stained beer coaster when we were done with my phone number on it. And he’s been handing them out for the past two weeks. So that’s what happened this week. Stop calling me.

6-24-17 The Grassman Goeth

Byline: Gary Llewellyn

Dateline: June 24, 2017

I have to admit, when I heard about this week’s monster, I got pretty jazzed, but then it turned out to be some bigfoot-type shit living in Ohio. The government supposedly rounded up all the bigfoot and sent them to Mars to activate the pyramid and terraform the planet. They say it’s breathable up there now. All those pictures NASA feeds us from the Curiosity. That’s Arizona, man.

Goddamit, I’m out of smokes. How many did I smoke? I gotta get Stephanie hooked on smoking so she has cigs I can bum. So there’s some stragglers and this one made it to Ohio and stopped for some reason. Another poor bastard ended up in Pennsylvania. Why didn’t they go north? What the hell’s in Pennsylvania? But then, if he kept going and crossed the river he’d run into a devil. Nobody needs that. I speak from experience.

So, you see how it doesn’t make any fucking sense to come this way? Which makes me think he doesn’t have great judgment. So I need to make this doofus interesting in how many words, Uncle Mort? My check still hasn’t cleared, by the way. I’m running out of restaurant and hotel chains to burn. I’ll be the next Ohio Grassman, at this rate. Because I’ll have to go back to selling stuff that looks like weed to get out of this weird ass state.

Stephanie has been talking to the thing for four hours. At least when that Flat Earther started hassling me in the Greyhound station I made sure to keep it short. That feels like five minutes ago. What the hell could they possibly have to talk about this long? Shampoo?

The stars are nice, though. Hypnotic, like they’re shooting toward me at furious speeds stopping just short of piercing my eye and lingering, wobbling into new focus when I shift my vision. Centuries of time, infinite points of time in between, all passing the mass-less photon simultaneously, as it blazes along at the fastest velocity allowable by the man. At that speed, time and space are irrelevant because you would inhabit all possible points at once.

So, in a certain reckoning, the photon is leaving the core of the star and getting absorbed by my retina, at the same time, with its whole crazy trip also pressed into that single moment. A cosmic entity whose whole life is lived in the smallest segment of time possible. Exempt from relativity, it’s the only true objective thing in the cosmos. Only light tells the truth. Only through the light can you know truth.

6-24-17 Gary, Watch the Stars

Byline: Stephanie Morgan

Dateline: send money

Heya- SEG-ers! Welcome back to another Page Five Ghoul. This week, I’m home in Columbus! I’m borrowing some money from my parents until the checks clear. Gary didn’t want to go to Ohio and had some kind of anxiety attack, so I told him we have a local monster called the Ohio Grassman and we were on a Greyhound soon after that. Gary spent the last hour puking in the bathroom because he ate a whole bag of shriveled mushrooms. We got into the station around 3:15 and Gary started getting into it with this guy in an Infowars shirt about the Earth being flat. At about 6:30 we left the station and went off in search of the Grassman. He was easy enough to find, he was sitting crisscross applesauce in the middle of a grassy plain smoking a cigarette. He was nice enough. I interviewed him for a bit, but then Gary just stood there for like three hours staring at the sky, moaning ‘truth’ over and over, so the Grassman and I just kinda chatted.

His name is Steve and he moved here from just outside of Portland when the government sent all of his kind to Mars. He still gets postcards from his wife and kids on Mars. A man from the government delivers them to him. I asked him why the government sent his people away. It was because they’d "had it with your shit.”

“People were always creeping around in the woods peeking in bigfoot windows,” he said, looking wistfully through the plumes of his cigarette smoke. “The final straw was the Patterson video. I mean, Flint had just gotten done using the creek, for chrissake, allow the man some privacy. So the President of Bigfoots sent a letter to Area 51 asking for transfer off-world. They asked us if we’d be interested in the Mars terraforming project. A few of us said, ‘I’m good,’ the rest said ‘fuck it, sure.’ Looks like it’s going well. They had all the ancient, abandoned alien technology justa waitin’ for ‘em up there.”

He had a tendency to go on like that. If Gary was catatonic, these two would be besties. The only time he became a man of verbal economy was when I asked him if he regretted his decision not to accompany his wife, Wendy and their two children, Bryce (10) and Cadence (4).

“It was a hard day, sure,” he said as his eyes lowered. His face became drawn. “You can’t regret. It’s a silly game.”

He quickly returned to his cigarette. On why he didn’t go:

“Some us didn’t trust the man. Not after what they did to the grays.”

He went on for some time about the mistreatment of the gray aliens but added that the government hadn’t shown similar aggression to the bigfoot. He just knew they were capable. So now he wanders the Sandusky plains of Ohio, leading a life of quiet contemplation occasionally punctuated by correspondences from his beloved family.

That has got to be worth a few bucks, Uncle Mort.