Hello friends.
I’ve been receiving emails from an unknown source lately.
I cannot identify the senders address. Any replies return with an “address not found” message.
The contents are...disturbing.
I’ve reached out to any and all of my journalism resources to determine the source of the messages.
And everything has come up empty.
I’ve researched what I can, and while I can identify some of the text as rudimentary computer code, I am not sure how to proceed.
I went to school as an English Major at OSU, and while I have a keen sense of narrative and motif, there are sections of the discourse which confuse and frustrate me on a comprehensive level.
So I will release the emails as I have received them.
Week by week.
And I hope against hope, that one of you out there, will help me understand what the hell is going on here.
Many thanks in advance,
Cassie
PERFORMANCE LOG 143001
OPTION ONE
You don’t know where you are.
Maybe it has always been like that, maybe you have always felt your thoughts skittering spiderlike from one room of your brain to the next:
I don’t understand.
What is happening?
Why can’t I see anything?
It’s dark.
Not shadowy or rustling, not some kind of haunted house darkness, where you might think you see a shape just beyond the edge of your vision, where a pile of clothes resting in a chair suddenly cocks its head to one side and smiles sickeningly before a passing car reveals it’s yesterday’s laundry. For now.
No. This is true dark.
It’s pitch.
Vacuum.
Void.
Abject nothingness.
It’s cold.
What are you supposed to do when the void has swallowed you whole?
You feel sore, rusty, like a runner who hasn’t properly stretched.
You stand up, that is if you can quantify that you can stand or that you have legs -- you could hold your hand in front of your face and not see it an inch from your nose.
If you have eyes, you use them to look around the void. Strain them to find anything, shapes, light, anything.
Ahead. A few hundred feet: A flicker. Like something just walked in front of a light and cast a shadow.
You shiver. Not from the cold.
But it’s light and you need it, so you move toward it, stupid little moth that you are.
Nearing it, the sharp bite of the dark inches backward, revealing snarls of the surroundings: You are in some kind of facility? your mind guesses wildly.
Maybe a hospital?
A lab?
When you close your eyes you swear you see alien combinations of letters and numbers stream across the inside of your lids.
48 ef b8 8e 65 ef b8 8e 6c ef b8 8e 70 ef b8 8e 20 6d ef b8 8e 65 ef b8 8e 2e ef b8 8e
The walls are straight, sensible blank, leading down to long perpendicular hallways and turnoffs, rectangular. The sameness is dizzying. All sharp right angles, nothing soft.
You reach the light, a flashlight, resting on the patterned floor. A faint mist snakes in front of the light and you pick it up, it’s warm.
Like someone just set it down.
You illuminate the surroundings.
Grey hallways.
Grey ceiling.
Checker patterned floor.
Empty. Some kinds of doorways, but no doors.
You turn to the direction you came from, padding toward it, trying to understand. Nothing.
Hallways.
Ceiling.
Floor.
There is nothing here. Just you, the flashlight, the cold and the hallways, ceiling -- wait.
Letters, on the far wall further down from where you found the flashlight. You move quickly toward them.
The letters are black, long, and sharp, as if scraped and scratched onto the wall with a crude tool, a scalpel? A rock?
The end of the statement falls away in a long scratch, you can imagine the writer startled by something and fleeing into the hallways, writing tool still in hand, dragging it along the wall as they run.
But most disturbing is the information the words convey:
It’s hunting you.
You shiver again, fighting the urge to crouch and hide. Somewhere.
Pan the flashlight, more words, further down, down, down, into the black.
You move toward them, mindful of where you step, not sure what the words meant by “it.”
You imagine the writer, running to the next sentence, breathing hard, heart beating from exertion, hand shaking as it holds the writing tool to scritch scritch scritch out the next piece of information:
Find switches. Make it stop.
A few paces away is the writer’s final advice:
RUN.
Comments
Post a Comment