[Clayton again, with more of Claire's journal. The next few entries decrease severely in clarity. It seems Claire was suffering some kind of mental break. Lines indicate page breaks.]
April 14 or 15 or 20
April showers bring may flowers.
Have that song stuck in my head. Heather won’t stop singing it. I want to hit her. Want to fucking kill her. I wish she’d go ahead and do something fucked up so I could get revenge. But she just sits at the window. Just sits and hums and smiles. I try to remind myself she's just a victim in this, like Blake and I. But it does no good. Because thoughts like that lead to guilt at bringing her into this, and then I just get angry again.
I'm angry all the time now. Or I'm tired.
Blake, I love you. I wish you’d never met her.
I think there’s something burrowing under my scalp.
Next time
Head hurts so fucking bad but it was a good day. Blake told a good joke today. What did the horse
What did
Fuck. I can’t remember.
April March May whatever
Bad day. Head hurts. Don’t know how long I was out. Can hardly write. Even candles are too bright.
Walked into Blake’s room earlier to find him and Heather having sex. Heather on top. She looked at me with glazed eyes. Reached out to me like she was asking me to join them. But then she blinked and her face twisted into a snarl. She screamed at me to get out. Blake’s face was so blank. His eyes were distant and he just laid there limply. Didn’t even notice me.
I turned and left. I was really angry but I don’t remember anything else.
How can they fuck in a time like this? How can they even muster up the energy?
Maybe it was just a dream.
I don’t remember the last time I ate.
I’m not hungry.
FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU
[The entire page is filled up with these two words, the writing getting more incomprehensible near the bottom.]
Mid April - Early May
Feeling really lucid today. Blake is up and about, too, looking better than he has in a while. Heather has been sleeping all day. She drank a lot last night. But there’s still color in her cheeks. The idea that we might be getting better keeps running through my head. How could we be, though?
Blake and I went for a walk around sunset. I think his shoulder’s infected. Ha. Like the rest of him isn't, with something far worse. We thought about going to the hospital again, but when we checked the car we found the engine torn to fucking pieces. I don’t know cars, but Blake says a bunch of important wires were cut or ripped out, and we found a sparkplug in the parking lot.
Besides, we probably shouldn’t be around anyone else. The motel seems abandoned. We went inside the reception area today for the first time in a long time. No one there. Smell of earth and decay. Mold in the corners. Like I needed more fuel for my guilty conscious.
Spent the rest of the day rereading the Hadwell Bible. But I haven’t found any more answers.
[A piece of paper from the Bible was torn out and taped here, as though it contained what Claire thought might be pertinent information.]
Page 108, verse 3
“When It saw the Cruelty of Its Kin, our Entity felt shame for His disregard of Humanity. And so let it be known that our Race is Holy, and that we are Chosen. For without Man’s presence, our Entity would not have crossed into this Realm and blessed the World with Its Light. And without Man the Entity would not linger in this hostile Realm. As we are valued by our Almighty, so must we value Ourselves. And the Church of the Entity is the most Holy. We are the Bringers of a new Era. Let Its light Bless the World. Let all Men Ascend.”
Next day
I haven’t blacked out in twenty-four hours. I don’t know if this excites or scares me. Heather and Blake report the same thing.
Last night, for the first time in a long time, I went to bed myself, instead of simply blacking out and waking up there. I fell asleep easily around 2 am, after taking a much needed shower. I’m starting to hope…
Never mind. Can’t jinx it.
I woke from a dead sleep around 4 to the sound of the door to my room creaking open. Light from the streetlamp outside spilled through the crack. I felt real fear again, that cold rush all over my body. I haven’t felt so acutely since escaping that creature in the tunnel. It felt good, in a way. I felt more alive.
The door widened. I thought at first that it was Heather - vaguely feminine, short hair, wearing a dress. But as I blinked and the person lurched into the room, I realized it was far too thin to be her. Unnaturally thin, skin and bones.
The light from outside gave me a clear view as she pushed the door wide. A stiff old navy blue maid’s outfit hung off the tiny bony frame. White, withered skin. Mostly bald head, with a few clumps of tangled black hair. The eyes looked swollen shut but the flesh around them wasn’t bruised. Smile forced wide to the point of straining. Her head was twisted to an impossible angle, her ear close to her collarbone, like her face was almost upside down. She was missing her left arm at the shoulder but her uniform hid any wound that might have been there. Her left foot was bare and looked twisted. Reminded me of the gruesome results of foot binding.
I fell out of bed as I jerked away from her. I might have screamed, I don't know. She just tilted her head to the side and smiled at me. She tracked my movements easily, like she could see out of her sightless eyes. I grabbed my crowbar, but I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it. I didn’t want to hurt her. She was almost certainly an innocent in this, someone I’d cursed to this fate by my motel choice. And my choice to explore the town in the first place. And my choice to fucking stick around. So many bad choices. I deserve this.
The thing in the doorway, what used to be a housekeeper and was now something else, opened her arms to me. We stared at each other for a long moment. Then she dropped to her hands and sprung.
She used her withered hands and feet to move, like an animal, much quicker than I expected from her. She was on me in a minute, her grinning face inches from mine. I noticed then how silent she was. Not a growl or a whine. Just short, shallow breathing through her teeth, extremely accelerated.
Her hand, the skin of it partially fused, forced itself between my lips, into my mouth. As deep as it could go, making me gag. It tasted like mold. I still can’t get the taste out of my mouth. She would have reached down my throat if I had let her. I couldn't breathe.
I hit her then, with the crowbar. It connected solidly with the side of her head and she went sprawling away. She still did not make a sound but the crunch of her skull. I heaved, then drew in a gulp of air and stood up.
I went nuts. I couldn’t see past the rage. No rational thought, just anger. I stood over her and brought blow upon blow against her skull. I smashed her teeth and dug the sharp of the crowbar between her eyes. There was no blood. The skin just parted like the flesh of a drained corpse. When I burst open her belly, thick black liquid oozed out.
I need to throw up.
Anyway, the short and long of it is I killed her.
I fucking killed her.
We buried the body in the woods.
[This page is stained with drops of water, as though she was crying when she wrote this. Claire had a lot of empathy for those things. This is not something I feel or understand.]
Don’t know when.
I was in town this morning. Don’t know how I got there but I was in a house, standing facing a corner.
It was a long walk back to the motel.
[This is when I followed Claire back to where they were staying. I saw her wandering through the streets of town, completely out of it. She was talking to herself, as they will sometimes when they can still talk. I knew then, as I’d long suspected, that she was beyond help. Yet when she gained consciousness and left town, I also realized she was sometimes still lucid enough to want answers. And smart enough to stay close, not to carry the infection any further.
You must understand, I did want to help her. I wished I could. I liked the girl immensely, brave and stubborn as she was. It was just that I had no way of doing so.]
[The next page is filled with the rough sketch of a floor plan, clearly drawn by Claire. It only took me a few seconds to recognize it. I used to hang out there almost every day. It is Alan's apartment, the one he shared with Lisa.
I took a picture for you. Here it is. I must say, those question marks intrigue me. Was Claire onto something? Is there something of importance behind that wall?]
I love something I’ve never seen, could never have.
I know what it is to love something I hate. I know what it is to love my warden.
Please, please don't stop. Keep going. No way back. End this. Take me. Ascend with me. You promised.
YOU PROMISED.
[Claire seems to revert back into a muddled or confused state. I believe she is talking about the Entity here.]
[A scrap of paper is once again pasted into the journal. I recognize it from my own notes, a conglomerate pieced together from a wide variety of sources. Everything I knew or had learned or even simply guessed about the Entity and Its infection. The file into which the notes were gathered was stolen from my camp shortly before I assume Claire wrote this.
Clearly, Elizabeth or one of her puppets took it and brought it back to the motel. It could have been Claire herself, in a fugue state. Claire seems to at least vaguely understand the significance of this passage, and part of her still-conscious mind must have wanted to remember. Or perhaps this was the only portion of the file she could salvage. I have no doubt the rest was destroyed. Now everything the world knows about this comes down to what's in my head, and what's on this website.
Anyway, here's the scrap she had. It was not written by me, but by a group of scientists that had been living in the town during the outbreak. They'd studied samples of the mold collected by the police and even had a live victim of the infection at one point. I wish I could have helped them further. They are all gone now.]
"Stage three:
Characterized by memory loss and ataxia. Apparent fugue periods lengthen. Moments of clarity still persist. Speech and motion is clumsy. Occasional numbness in extremities. Muscles seize in the face, resulting in a perpetual smile. Extreme sensitivity to light. Hair loss. Degeneration of the body. No appetite. Very little activity in the cerebral cortex. This has been the longest stage. To date, the patient has spent eighteen days like this."
[More to come. I will try to answer all of your questions, to the best of my ability.]
---
Credits
Comments