Well, we're finally on to my portion of The Book of the Beast. Here's my story.
APG
June 20th 2010
I've been searching for my mother most of my life.
My father wouldn’t even file for a missing person’s case. He kept telling me “The lord will take care of it.” Everyone seemed to say that. Like God was just going to magically bring her home one day like nothing had happened. I hated that more than anything. I ran away from home in search for her. God wasn’t going to “take care of it.” I was. Like Orrin Patten before me, I wanted answers and no god was going to give them to me.
To my dad’s credit, he never reported me for stealing his car. In fact, I’m pretty sure he transferred the title into my name. I've been traveling, blogging, acting like a Gen X minimalist, all the while trying to find my mother. My journey took me all over the state. I went to ghost towns, old archaeology sites, universities. My mother thought the beast was like a giant wolf. A Dire Wolf perhaps. Archeology seems to support that theory. Witnesses have reported seeing long extinct dire wolves in southern Utah. Much of her work was spent investigating strange happenings in rural Utah.
I did not find her. I found strangeness. I found tragedy. Most importantly, though, I found my legacy. I used public records to find an abandoned property owned by Amanda Patten. Amanda was my mother's name, and I knew that our mormon roots could be traced back to the Pattens. On the abandoned property was an old RV. One of the keys from the keychain for my Dad’s car fit into the lock. Inside the RV was 5 generations of work. Everything my ancestors had collected concerning The Beast. Too much for one journal. Most of it was a mess of dead ends and folk tales. Here are some of the important parts.
The Beast has intelligence matching or even exceeding that of a human.
The Beast does not kill for food or sport, it appears to kill ritualistically.
The Beast takes trophies, often part of the skin or a single bone from its victims.
The beast is either ageless, or it is somehow able to breed and create offspring.
The amount the beast kills follows a pattern
1 kill in the first year of a decade, 2 in the second year, 3 in the third year, until 10 in the 10th year and the cycle starts over. 2020 should mean 10 victims of the beast.
The Beast travels to more populated areas later in the decade.
The only thread connecting the victims, other than location, is that some of them are members of one family. Mine.
The Beast will occasionally mutilate animals or kill livestock.
Those who have actually seen The Beast and lived were said to have gone mad. None of the descriptions of the creature seem to match up. This makes witness testimony of the beast shaky at best.
I know, all of this sounds crazy. Maybe it wouldn’t have if the Church had supported my family in their hunt for The Beast. I guess they doomed us to forever be “Mormon Madmen” or I guess just “madmen” after the excommunication.
APG
September 15th 2013
My father has moved to California and changed his name. He avidly denies that I am his son. I’m guessing he’s been paid off. It feels like the whole world is trying to gaslight me into believing that there never was a Beast. That my mother is just some madwoman or that she never existed at all. But if that were true, why would they work so hard to cover it up?
APG
January 4th 2019
Next year is the year I strike. I've been preparing for nearly a decade. I'm certain that if we can break the beast's cycle, we can kill it. There has to be a reason it kills in this manner and it is a hypothesis worth testing. I still haven't found my mother. Who knows if she's even still alive. I'm going to devote this year to solving her cypher. At the very least, I can try and track down the text she used to encode the cypher. It appears to include some kind of abbreviation or acronym, followed by a range of years. Whatever the text is, it has to be older than 2009.
APG
September 1st 2020
I have a contact with the park service. Well, sort of. He used to be with the park service but he was charged with poaching. He found this website and reached out to me. He says that some kind of massive beast was mutilating animals in the wasatch mountains and the blame for these deaths was placed on him. He's on probation, doing community service at a city park. He says he knows where the Beast's feeding ground is. If I can find that, I can set a trap that will prevent The beast from feeding on the allotted amount before year's end. I have a meeting with him tomorrow where he'll exchange information with me.
APG
IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH
I will be publicly releasing all of the cyphers and information I've gathered so far on the beast. I don't have any children. I've elected to have a vasectomy. If there is a curse on my family, it dies with me.
If I do not update the website on OCTOBER 1ST 2020 It will all be released at the URBAN ARTS GALLERY at the Gateway Mall. Just because I'm ending my family line doesn't mean I'm ending the hunt for the beast. Far from it. I'm recruiting everyone I can to finally put a stop to this monster.