Have I lost my way?

Things we’re looking bright a month ago. My journal is bare. For what cares does a man have when he has good fortune? 

I’d had a big success with a wealthy employer who put me on retainer. I got a new car and was in line for a partnership at my office. Sure, the investigation had taken a weird turn and put us up against some obvious ancient and dark forces. But they seemed to succumb to a well placed bullet just like any man or beast. 

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Perhaps it is some character flaw, an obsessive need to be liked, that compels me to try and whitewash any uncomfortable news that would put me in a bad light. Perhaps, it was that flaw, grown out of bias against my mixed ancestry, that caused my clash and departure from the London PD. I have been lying to myself that it was just my doggedness for justice and their natural bias to my birth. but it’s clear to me now that could have never been true.

I could have asked for help, from Lennox; come clean about my involvement in Puncheon’s disappearance. I could have made a useful ally for when we found ourselves narrow victors in a shootout with the Delgado boys. But pride and fear took over the better part of my nature and I led us to flee like  criminals - with blood-stained hands and shoulder that will never fully heal. What good is it to save a man’s life only to lose your own soul. 

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Another encounter with Lennox, and I know my time is running out. Time is on his side - the one real advantage of the police. When the truth finally comes out, he won’t look kindly on me. Again, charm failed where truth was needed. 

And now, after witnessing the broken mind of Gibbons claw out his own eye, after hearing the torturous screams of a man and woman sucked into a realm of hell before me, after giving int to my own cowardice to save myself from the same fate. What is my life still worth. 

I stand here in this pit, the basement of this wretched monument to man’s passed failings, the cursed fount of all my trials, sure in the feeling that I’m digging my own grave. Beside me - an ignorant porter, my good-natured but naive friend Longton, and his boss, Thompson- our partial benefactor - man who himself brought back unholy artifacts that God had buried - clearly on the edge of revealing his true nature. 

I want to run, but I have no stomach for it now. I can only dig, and count the bullets in my revolver. I must be sure to save one for when the time comes. I will see this thing to an end, and pray to God I find myself in a better hell than those that went before me.