The Halloween Harvest

January 15th, 2024

Before you listen to this, you must understand that I had no choice other than to play along. You must understand the people that I was forced to interact with, the actions I had to endure. I do not know who will be hearing these entries. My plan is to ship this to the police once I'm done recording the message, but I can't insure it'll work, especially because I'll be dead. So, without further ado, here's my story.

January 16th, 2024

My grandmother died a couple of months ago. I inherited her small house- a cottage, if you will- in Highgate Village, North London. Since I was young, my grandmother and I have shared a love for cooking. You could imagine my excitement when I found her personal cookbooks filled with little sketches and... and her handwriting... sorry, it's a bit emotional for me... okay. Okay, it's okay. What was I saying? The cookbooks, right. Well, most of them included meat of some sort, but she didn't specify a type that I recognized- she would... name them. Name the meat. There was Milo, Jenny, et cetera. I brushed this little detail off and just used chicken or beef or whatever I had on hand. I should've investigated, asked around... it still disgusts me... I'll get to what it actually was soon enough. For now, I need some tea.

January 17th, 2024

Alright. So. Around the beginning of October, I learned that on the 30th, the townfolk gather to have a feast of sorts, and my grandmother usually supplied the food. They didn't expect me to do the same, but I wanted to make a good impression, you know? I was chatting with a woman at the cafe and she told me that my grandmother kept her best ingredients in the back room: hundreds of spices, all sorts of cheeses, and- of course- her favorite meats, in a locked freezer. To prepare, I went and... I... well, first I chose the recipes she had bookmarked for the feast, which she called The Halloween Harvest. I prepared all the ingredients- actually, let me grab it and read it out... where did it go... come on... ah, there... okay... okay. I'm back. Here are the recipes:

Meat Cube Appetizer

Ingredients-

1/2 cup breadcrumbs

1 kg ground Benedict

1/4 cup Mozzarella cheese, chopped fine

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 onion, grated

1/4 cup parsley, chopped

1/4 cup butter

1 egg

Salt and pepper

Olive oil (for frying)

Instructions-

1) In a bowl, combine all ingredients and mix well.

2) Form into small cubes- roll into balls before shaping.

3) Heat olive oil in a skillet and fry each cube until golden brown and cooked through. Set aside to cool before plating.

Crusted Torso Roast

Ingredients-

1 torso (either Annie, Mark, or Jake as of October 2017)

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 tbsp fresh rosemary, chopped

2 tbsp fresh thyme, chopped

1 lemon, halved

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Instructions-

1) Preheat oven to 220°C.

2) Rub torso with olive oil, garlic, rosemary, thyme, salt, and pepper.

3) Stuff cavity with lemon halves.

4) Roast in oven for about 1.5 hours, or until internal temp reachers 75°C.

5) Let rest before carving.

So... Yeah. Those are the recipes. I think you can guess what the meat was, but I'm not smart. I didn't figure it out until after I cooked everything, after I peeked in the freezer and found tons of labeled meat with names and body parts and organs and… well... you'll see. I have to take a break for now, this is exhausting.

January 18th, 2024

On the day of the feast, there were about thirty or so people that came over. I set up some tables outside and plated the appetizers. I tried one, and... it makes me feel sick talking about it... it smelled exactly like pork, but I found myself assuming it was veal from the taste. Stringy and firm, a little bitter. I hate to admit this, but... it was... good. God, I'm a monster... I'm sorry... I'm so sorry... I-

January 21st, 2024

Sorry about that last log, I had a bit of a mental breakdown of sorts. I'm back on track, though. This is important.

So, as I had said, there were around thirty guests. They happily ate the appetizers, but they kept eyeing each other strangely, and a few times asked if I had used the meat in her freezer. When I said yes, they would... smile. They were glad.

I'll try to list as many names as I can remember, as I've made a habit of writing them down once I see people I recognize throughout the town. So there's Emma Johnson, Liam Eckenthal, Ava Wilson, Noah Chung, Sophia Brown, Oliver Martinez, Mia Anderson, Elijah Thomas, Grace Taylor, Lucas Schwimmer, Amelia Clark, Mason Riggio, Harper Lewis, Ethan Seferidis, Scarlett Hall, Isabella Robinson, and Cleo Walker. Yeah, that's all I have.

I started to get a bit doubtful of the meat. I was suspicious of how they had names, and the body parts were large... as large as me. I decided to look through the records of the town and I checked through the list of missing persons and- god- they were all there. All of the missing people, they were the names of the meat. They were humans. I had eaten... I ate humans. I served people humans. And they knew, and they wanted it, and it explains so much, it explains how Ethan- Ethan Seferidis- kept delivering chopped up meat right after the newspapers published the missing people, and residents kept coming over for dinners and requesting names... why the hell- they're all sick, they're all disgusting monsters...

And I'm one of them. God, I just kept serving them because I had no idea what to do. Until now. You're going to find me soon, in my house, dead. Ethan's coming for me, and I just have to get this out before I'm killed. You have to get them all. The evidence, everything's there in the freezer. My address is 2 Kiston Rd, Barnes. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. There's nothing you can do to save me, but you can save others in the future. I can't live with this anyways, and I can't afford therapy.

I'm a cannibal. The horrible thing is, no matter how much I wanted to stop, I couldn't. It just tasted... it tasted so good. I'm hooked. I even... Jesus, I... I killed someone. Ch- Charlie Goldsmith, a 41 year old librarian. He went missing a few weeks ago. Because I killed him. I came up from behind and dragged the knife across his throat. Washed the floors with bleach, cleaned his body, skinned him, chopped him up, boiled him, seasoned him, served him to my guests, and ate him... I ate him. God... I can still hear, to this very moment, the sound... his ribcage... cracking... I had to remove the bones... I had to dig my hands throughout the spongy tissue... bloody muscle... remove them. Blood.... so, so much blood. I soaked him and scrubbed him, but I could never get it all... the knife that I used to kill him, I used to slice off his skin. Little strips of flesh that I put in the oven, turned into a fruit leather of sorts... His organs had to be carved out perfectly... preserving as much meat as possible... His heart was the size of my fist... rubbery, squishy like a stress ball... His eyes had to be scooped out, the strings so goddamn difficult to cut… next his nose chopped off, his teeth yanked out, his lips pulled apart... His face didn’t have much meat on it. The worst part, though, was his brain. I had to cut open his skull with a huge saw... when I saw it, I think that’s when I realized I had killed a human. This squiggly pink blob was all him... his private thoughts, emotions, biases, opinions, all in the palm of my hand... I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just… I soaked it in water for 24 hours to purge it of blood... then I put it in milk with nutmeg and cinnamon to… flavor it... I par cooked it, adding in layers of spices, then poached it... after refrigerating it, I cooked it, chopped it, and fried it. Then. Well. I plated and served it. We were all aware it was Charlie, and ate him anyway... Charlie didn’t do anything to deserve it... he just... he just looked appetizing.

I don’t know why or how this tradition started, but I know why it's called the Halloween Harvest. The morning of the event, everyone goes out, kills two people, gives the bodies to me or my grandma, and eats them. Jesus... In the end, I'm glad I'm about to die... I deserve it... Hell, we all do.

I guess that's goodbye. I'm sorry... I'm so sorry.