It was just a week ago that I discovered this journal. It was given to me by a young lady, I suppose no older than eight years. She said she found it in the woods behind her family's property, sitting upon a crude assembly of rotten boards and matted heavily with browned autumn leaves which did their portion to protect the pages through decades of winter. What she described of the site was not unlike an altar of temporary and unkindly nature. Nearby, she said there was a pile of moldy, decrepit blankets, some softer than others; my guess, a tent.

Apparently the book's owner was camped at this particular spot in the woods of New England, and it didn't surprise me - especially with the dates given in the writing - that the girl's home was built no sooner than six years ago in 2002. This decaying site she described must have been fairly distant from their plot of land, for its discovery would surely have postponed the house's construction until a less ominous area was claimed.

Also it seems that I have been lucky, in all looseness of the term, to acquire this item, for the child had told me her mother found her in possession of it immediately and sought to discard it. After only a brief read, the girl was told, "This is nothing a little lady should be reading," and instantly left it sunken deep into a refuse bin. It was only by the child's defiance that she snuck out of her room in the late hours of the night to retrieve it and hide it in her room.

This was all a short number of months ago. I met this girl last Thursday in the town nearest her home. I was venturing to collect a series of material pertaining to the region's obscure religious lore. She was being escorted by her father in-law inside a corner-hole of a bookshop. A friendly girl, full of smiles, so much that I am proud to know she was not old enough to comprehend the horrific material upon the pages, for it would have easily broken her whimsical spirit.

During my searches through the deeper niches of shelving, she approached me. After a slight amount of simple small talk, she asked, "What kind of stories do you like?" I dared not be plain on the matter, for it would be no good to implant an impression of my near-occultist interests on her so she may mention them to her parents and create an arousal of fear. Now that I consider it, as defiant a child as she was, any strong authority instructing her to forget the matter would surely lead her to a deeper desire to study it.

I gave vague descriptions, choosing my words carefully, and though these words didn't specifically imply the material within the journal, she assumed I may wish to have it. Perhaps my opening line of, "Things that most people wouldn't like to read" was a surefire tip.

In any case she informed me that she would bring the item with her to school the next day and I was welcomed to collect it immediately after classes were let out. There was always at least a ten minute delay from the final bell to when her mother would arrive, and that would be my opening. I didn't necessarily count on this book of her's to be a worthwhile find, however my conventional search methods in the area yielded no good fortune and I was willing to accept any lead given.

Promptly meeting after the final bell, she dug the old volume out from deep in her book bag. Fortunately it had not suffered any more from the clutter within. Upon taking a quick flip through different sections of it, I picked out a great number of words and phrases to my liking and rewarded her with a five dollar bill, crumpling it first and then instructing her that this transaction is not to be mentioned to her parents and that any questions of the bill should be answered that it was found on the school grounds. I had no worries of being punished on the matter, for I'm certain the parents would be glad that the book was lifted from her possession, but it would be best they didn't know she had kept it until this time.

It was perhaps by miracle that the book survived this long, assuming that it was legitimately left for the two decades its dating implied in the outdoor environment it had been found. The cover obviously suffered the most, and bore scratches and mold and aging quite hideous. But the majority of pages within was intact and allowed an easy read. "Easy," I say only referencing its legibility, not the nature of its content. In retrospect, I suppose it is ironic that the very profound embodiment of my interests should cause my wishing to seek a new hobby.

As for this book's content, at first I thought it to be a diary, but after three dozen pages filled with trivialities of daily life came an abrupt change of pace. From the well-versed paragraphs and grammar came a series of studies and notes, most of which pertaining to an ancient lore. What this lore is, I hadn't the slightest, for as I imply ancient, I mean vastly predating mankind and the creatures we know to walk the Earth today, perhaps even beyond the time of their most distant ancestors.

These notes eventually bled back into paragraph format, continuing detailed accounts of the owner's experience involving his studies. This final, excruciating segment of the journal, however, is nothing to be taken lightly. There is a strong touch of fantasy associated with it, but having made my own haphazard research, I find the probability of this fantastic story bearing a majority's worth of truth may be staggering.

I wish to describe the accounts including the studious notes and research left in this book. If only to create awareness - hell, if only to tell a grand story - of ancient and terrible, menacing things, I wish to paraphrase and describe this journal. I do ask that you, as the reader, please bear with me as I reach the end of my interpretation, for even without the knowledge I sought after reading these words, a chord of terror was struck at the very core of my soul.

This journal, scratched and seemingly rusted though no metal is present, belonged to a man of the name Adam Shore. As the many pages of proper diary will reveal, he was none too special of a character, both in his personal and professional life. His association with the accounts to come was not present or ever implied. Unless he meant to keep secret even to himself the fetish for terrible knowledge, Adam Shore, aged 23, stumbled upon his unfortunate trail of destruction (or so I can assume) entirely by accident.

I may only surmise that his life ended, in one way or another, given that there is a sudden collapse of material. A cliff-hanger of a most frightful nature, I judge. Yet with the utterly grotesque events that led to this lack of finality, I believe even you will wager that Adam did not bear to live with his knowledge.

The rising force began with the short scratches of notes taken on the third of April, 1979. They seemed to reference a succession of short volumes of forgotten text, yet they must have been easily accessible for a young, simple man to acquire them. Given that he displayed no apparent interest in secretive and arcane subjects, it is obvious that these texts were plainly written, in English, with a descriptive candor that caused reactions not unlike an unsightly, but oddly alluring, car wreck. In a single documented day, eight pages measuring seven inches high and slightly less than five inches across were congested with bulleted, circled and underlined verses of hand-written chaos. A great deal of fervor in this subject was instantly taken, and I can confidently say so because the previous entry was written the evening of April 2nd, jovially describing the current day and laughing of the events of April Fools.

From all these notes set down in one day, a library of terrible information is opened. Where there was a lack of detail, Adam accented his wording by every means known in modern literary technique, enticing himself and any other reader to delve within his darkest imaginings of evil nature and theory. Thus would explain my immediate turning to seek out the mentioned volumes and study them in detail myself, though the completion of this journal alone caused my sanity to ache of doubt already.

The broad outline of these pages described concepts wholly unlike that of conventional – or even Earthly – nature. Whatever entities the referenced articles implied were massive forces of mind. Perhaps the only detail that can be confidently gathered by any reader is that they, like humans, possessed what we know as emotions and motives. Just what these emotions and motives were no human understanding could define. The notes stated quite clearly that this state of mind transcended that of human basis. Good, evil, hate, love, jealousy, desire; none of these concepts were adopted, understood or even considered valid by the civilization soon to be described later in the notes.

We are merely three-dimensional critters on an infantile scale of evolution. The civilization – nay, the race –that was only vaguely hinted at in these first eight insightful pages were, without question, far beyond us. So far beyond, Adam himself suggested, that any attempt to explain themselves would be as successful as a human explaining itself to a sample of bacteria.

Among these first notes were names, none of which I can discern for myself. They appear most alien, even in the attempt of spelling in English. Many were devoid of vowels, and others apparently meant to be monosyllabic utterances, though it was plain that no human tongue and set of lips could sound them out in fewer than three syllables. Whatever these irregular and fearful spellings may represent, they were obviously not meant for human language, both written and spoken.

Before these first eight pages were completed, however, I could swear that Adam shared a growing kinship with the writings. Certainly he could not pretend to comprehend all that was laid before him, for even one as versed in dark and unspoken lore as I couldn't grasp a solid mental foothold in this chaos. Mind you, my knowledge up until acquiring this journal couldn't prepare me in the slightest for what poor Adam was jotting as an intermediary.

Two days were missed in his writings before another date was penned with material following. An explanatory paragraph was offered, and in reading it I could only sympathize more with the writer. He had not stopped with his studies in those two days, and in fact described a total isolation from his routine agenda while his eyes continued to devour the texts he obtained. The boy was obviously becoming disturbed as his mind absorbed the volumes like a dry sponge to water.