Hello NoSleep. Clayton again.
Let’s get straight into it this time.
The Haven is a two-story converted mansion built, according to the plaque by the front doors, in 1890 by town founder Charles M Hadwell III for his wife Olivia. It’s a classic Victorian, gray slats and white trim, high peaked roofs and brick chimneys. One round tower juts out from the back corner like an afterthought; for a while, in 2001, Elizabeth’s father tried to convert it into a belfry, but the idea turned out to be injudiciously expensive. Now it’s a used as a storeroom, full of dust and half-empty boxes, as I found out when I climbed the trellis to get inside. The double doors leading out of the building, predictably, were locked that morning.
The trellis was full of brown vines and the roof of the first story was slippery with ice, but it wasn’t a particularly hard climb. It wasn’t until I’d pushed through the unlocked window, into the musty silence and warmth, that my half-addled mind recognized the danger I was in. I came up with a weak story about being dared to break in, should I be discovered by the cult. They wouldn’t kill me, I thought, if they believed someone else knew I was here.
I listened hard at the threshold for any sounds from downstairs. There was nothing in the tower room but disused furniture and Christmas decorations, and I figured the quicker I got in and out, the better. A set of spiral stairs wound down from the tower room, and I took them as quickly as I dared. Every creak of the aging wood seemed like a clap of thunder. I could only pray the building was deserted.
The second floor hallway was empty. It was strangely cramped and narrow, as Victorian service hallways often are. Behind me, the tower stairs continued down to the first floor, but I wanted to check the rooms here first.
There were three doors and another hallway branching off to the right. The floor was faded blue carpet here, and it muffled my footsteps, blessedly. I quickly checked each of the service hallway rooms - a bathroom, a lost and found closet, and an unused bedroom with a single cot and an elaborately carved Victorian dresser. I figured that might be the room of the caretaker, on the hopefully rare occasion he had to spend the night here. It was clean and sparse, the sheets a little dusty. Long-since slept in.
The lost and found closet only had a couple of items inside - a baby blanket, a grade eleven History textbook, a pair of men’s flip-flops, a woman’s gold wristwatch. There was also a purse, in which I found the ID of my 4th period English teacher from senior year. I’d liked her back then - she was young, smart and funny. I’d trusted her, had been alone with her many times during office hours. That trust snapped as soon as I saw her grainy official picture on the laminated card. I think that was when I really started realizing how far the cult reached in this tiny town of mine. People I’d thought of as normal, even trustworthy, were involved. It threw my world into question, and I was already a paranoiac. I wondered about all of my friends. I wondered about my mom.
Next I moved into the main hallway, careful to leave everything exactly as I found it. There were two more doors here and the upper landing of the entrance hall, from which the main staircase descended. As I reached to touch the knob of the door closest to me, the house groaned around me and a low creak came from downstairs. I froze with mind-numbing fear for a solid minute, listening hard but hearing nothing. I decided it was the mansion settling, and opened the door.
Jackpot. It was an office, classically decorated in mahogany and bronze. Quintessentially Victorian. I closed the door behind me and went about searching it as thoroughly as I could. The desk yielded results, in the form of minutes from cult meetings for the past forty-odd years. They were contained in a thin notebook, which was contained in a locked drawer - a drawer I broke into with a pocketknife, a screw driver, and the longest fifteen minutes of my life.
The minutes were brief, and meetings were only conducted twice a year and on special occasions. There seemed to be four or five people in attendance at each, who were referred to by initials which changed occasionally, signifying the loss of an inner-circle member and the initiation of his replacement. There was nothing really of note the majority of the time - mostly administrative or charity stuff. But I started looking for entries during months that were not planned for meetings - any month besides January or July. The minutes themselves were lost when my file was stolen in 2014, but I transcribed them on my laptop long before that. A laptop, by the way, that was stolen and then returned to me. Thank you, Claire.
So. The minutes.
The first entry is dated January 1964. This was before the reign of the current Mayor Hadwell, so I assume the H that is mentioned is his father. Another initial that might interest you is that of Z.
The minutes were more long and detailed in the beginning, and you'll notice they really go in for Random Capitalization, so you'll excuse my omissions.
It goes on a bit before:
C and M approach with compelling evidence that Acolyte Stern is not one of our True Faithful. He has expressed doubts and queries to other Acolytes, particularly regarding those It has chosen for the Rites of Ascension. We cannot allow him to spread slander and fear among Its Followers. Our Entity’s continued strength and survival depends on Ascension being seen as the honor it is. H will preach on this during tomorrow’s sermon. Additionally, more evidence must be gathered against Acolyte Stern before action can be taken. Z will pose as a new member of our Following with doubts and concerns, and will go to Acolyte Stern for council to find the truth of what he is telling others.
Then, in February 1964:
Z reports that Acolyte Stern made clear his suspicion and doubts about our Entity. Z demanded evidence of him in an attempt to reveal his treachery. Watch closely for any movement.
Again, February 1964 but later in the month:
Last night, Acolyte Stern was found in the basement Archives taking photographs. He is now deceased. Watch for his allies. Security will have to be increased. On another note, Z asks our permission to take a two week vacation. In light of the continued and excellent service of his family over the generations, this council grants him three weeks and a ticket to London. Z is very pleased, and the council wishes him congratulations and thanks.
A couple things to unwrap here, quickly. Those “basement Archives” caught my attention. I read the first few entries while I was still in that office, so the basement was my next destination.
On the subject of Z. In April of 1979, there was a note in the minutes that Z celebrated the birth of his son. I have to assume this son is the Z who met Alan and pretended to cure him. I think he kept tabs on Jess during her time in the town, too.
He wasn't working against the Entity. Did you actually think lavender could cure fuck all? He, and his group of friends, were as full of tricks as their mistress, working with her towards whatever goal she had at the time. Z seems to come from a long line of the cult's spies, for lack of a better term. Liz’s loyal lapdog, full of misinformation and manipulation. I think that he and maybe one or two others pretended to be the Entity’s enemies while actually doing a lot of the grunt work for Elizabeth. Warnings not to return to the town were attempts to spread the infection. They also spread propaganda that grossly exaggerated the power of the Entity, making It out to be some kind of unstoppable force. Claire even got an email from this group, which doesn’t do much besides literally say “It wins.”
I wonder how many people this worked on - especially on those who were not cultists. I wonder how many ticking bombs Liz has set up across the country.
She doesn’t need Z anymore, that’s for sure. I know for a fact he’s dead, because he was my first kill. He was one of Elizabeth’s creatures by then - withered and pale, smiling. Finally Ascended, given what he wanted. I recognized him from my years after high school - a son of an old family, an asshole who thought he was a badass. I knew him as Mason Zabala. He never had dreadlocks when I knew him, but he did the goth thing. We got drunk together a few times with Elizabeth. I considered him just another in her long line of rejected suitors. I killed him in Liz’s old apartment.
The rest of the minutes I looked over when I got home that night.
An entry dated December 1988:
Celebrated birth of the Promised One. Baby is healthy and thriving. No action to be taken at this time.
And then, hand written underneath:
"Besides getting the proud papa drunk! Congrats, H!”
Though I didn’t know then that H was Mayor Hadwell, this told me that the Vessel had to have been born around December of 1988. A quick search in the town birth registry brought up three suspects: Liz, Jess, and me. Coincidentally, all of our fathers had a first or surname beginning with H, but my focus had narrowed considerably. For a long time, years, I was paranoid that I was actually the Vessel, that this was all an elaborate trick by the Entity. That wasn’t a comfortable idea.
This next one niggles away at the back of my head, because I still can’t figure it out. It’s dated July 2000.
Discussed H’s other child. No action to be taken at this time. Watchful waiting.
Mayor Hadwell, Liz’s dad, only fathered one child. There’s no record of anyone related to them being born in July of 2000. I don’t know on this one.
The last entry, dated March 2007:
Discussed fire and possible repercussions. Renovations to begin in July. H not concerned about other events. Assures us she will come to her senses.
Looking back, I see this was about Elizabeth, proof that she did break from the cult on the night of the fire. Perhaps they wanted to restrain her power, or perhaps they wanted to use her for their own devices. She refused them.
The minutes stopped after that. I knew the cult was still functioning - sermons were still held every Saturday - but it seemed the inner circle had disbanded.
Lying under the minutes folder was a plain silver keychain with labeled keys. I took that, too, and replaced the drawer as well as I could. There were scratches in the wood from my screw driver and chunks gouged out so I could get at the lock, but there was nothing to be done about that. I was focused on the “basement Archives.”
I hustled down the stairs, intent now on following my lead and then getting the fuck out of Dodge. If no one had come to investigate me scratching and chipping away at that fucking desk drawer, this building was definitely empty.
Downstairs, I paused briefly in the main hall - long rows of pews, a podium up front. It looked like a normal church. I grabbed a copy of the Hadwell Bible from between the seats. That turned out to be a fun read later.
It took me three tries before I found the right door. None of them were labeled. But finally I used the key marked “basement” and the door swung open to reveal a stairwell descending into darkness.
It’s hard to describe what I saw down there in anything close to a linear way. I only remember pieces. I know it was dark and smelled strongly of mold, but I crept down anyway, using the railing for support.
After that, I was stuck in a dark maze of pipes and machinery for a long time, led along by a weird blue glow through the gaps. My phone was dead, so I was essentially going blind, feeling my way along walls. The place was much larger than it had any right to be, as a basement in a converted Victorian.
I kept hearing skittering noises or felt things tug at my pant legs or catch at my hair. It wasn’t rats, I know that much. Rats don’t have fingers. I kept feeling like people were standing directly in front of me, inches away. They were hidden by the oppressive darkness, but even in a dark room you can kind of sense another person in your immediate vicinity. They seemed to be breathing in my face through their teeth. I felt their breath, heard every catch and inhale in their raspy lungs, but when I reached out, no one was there.
Things kept blocking out light coming in between gaps in the walls and pipes. Just for a second, long enough to peer in at me then move on. I don’t know how I managed to stay as quiet as I did. But I’m sure they knew I was there.
Finally, I got close enough to the blue glow to see what it was. Like you, I’ve seen my fair share of cult rituals in movies and shit - black robes, hoods, a group of people chanting latin, a big pentagram on the floor. This wasn’t like that. The fact that it was a ritual, or at least ritualistic, was pretty clear. But it was also surprisingly clinical.
There were three guys in a large open chamber. The room was absolutely covered in black mold. It created huge toxic piles in the corners, snaking out from them like a disease. The blue glow came from yards and yards of Christmas tree lights, strung back and forth across the ceiling like someone had intended to make the place festive. I was above on a walkway, crouched behind a piece of machinery, but my view was good.
One of the guys was dressed in a business suit. He held a leather bound book. I’d kill to get my hands on that thing, but I think the cult only has one of them and it’s guarded as shit. I’ve looked in the Haven since the town was infected, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. Given that the dark lower floors are crawling with Ascended, I was hesitant to go down for long. Maybe it’s still there, in that big chamber.
The guy in the suit was reading from the book, some language I didn’t recognize. There were lots of “sh” and “tl” and hard “k” sounds. I’ve searched a variety of sound samples pretty thoroughly, trying to find out what it was, and the closest I can come is Nahuatl, an ancient Aztec language. The guy’s accent was pretty awful though, unalterably American. I guess it doesn’t really matter, as long as you say the words.
Another guy seemed to be the muscle. He was dressed in a black jumpsuit, complete with gloves and some kind of makeshift hazmat helmet. He was holding the third guy face down on the ground, straddling his waist and forcing his arms behind his back.
The third guy was half naked, skinny and dirty. He was pleading with the other two, crying his guts out, but the guy with the book just kept reading and the guy in the jumpsuit kept restraining. As the ritual continued, the man’s crying slowly petered out, first into whimpers, then an ominous silence. The guy in the suit never changed his cadence - his tone remained oddly flat, even when the guy on the floor turned his face to the ground and shuddered. At this point his restrainer got off him and walked silently out of the chamber. The man with the book kept reading. It went on for full minutes.
Then the victim started twitching, and the man in the suit did raise his voice. He sounded slightly more excited now. The twitching got violent, practically seizing, while the man read the last few sentences. But as soon as the words stopped the victim collapsed, utterly still. At the time, I thought he was dead.
You’ve probably guessed what was happening here, so it shouldn’t come as much of a shock when I tell you that, after a few seconds, the victim’s head snapped up from the ground.
A digression here. Obviously we know that being exposed to the mold is enough to spread the infection. But I think it’s used as a sort of conduit for the Entity, as opposed to being its own supernatural occurrence. In other words, it’s real black mold - Stachybotrys chartarum. It’s just been infected, and apparently its chemical composition and ability to rapidly multiply in low-light or pitch dark conditions is perfect for the Entity's particular virus or whatever it is. For some reason, possessing a human can take weeks when the virus is spread by mold, and sometimes even takes multiple exposures - but not often.
I have some documents transcribed onto my laptop, ones I stole from the police station in town during the outbreak. They’d been working with local scientists - sort of a “best guess” report on what the hell this thing could be, at least until the CDC was called. Which, by the way, never happened. PM me if you want to read them and I’ll gladly send them over. This story is already far too long to justify posting them here.
I think the cult used the ritual to speed along the process of Ascension, to feed the Entity here and now, to call It directly to the victim. Yeah, a magic fucking spell.
It seemed to work though. The guy on the ground braced his hands against the floor and started to turn his head, very slowly. The man in the suit watched impassively as the victim turned just his neck to look back over his shoulder. He rotated his head so far around I flinched, watching the tendons in his neck pop and strain. When he was finally facing me, I saw that he was smiling, mouth stretched tight in a rictus grin. Wide white eyes with pinprick pupils were trained directly on my hiding place the whole time.
Even as I watched, he deteriorated, like the life force was sucked out of him Hocus Pocus style. But he didn’t just get old. He got corpse-like. Skin went waxy white, fat and muscle dropped away, fingers curled in on themselves and adhesions formed between them. Black rot started to form rapidly on the feet, necrotizing them and half the legs in less time than it took for him to fully turn his head. This was my first experience with someone Ascended, and I remember thinking distinctly that I never wanted to see anything like it ever again.
In the midst of his literal ingestion and decomposition, the victim extended a frail arm and pointed to the ledge where I crouched.
“We have a guest…” he said, in a voice much deeper and raspier than the one he’d been using to plead moments earlier. At that moment the rot spread over his scalp and across the skin below his ears. On his next attempt at speech, his lower jaw broke away, taking his tongue with it and exposing a partially rotted trachea. Oozing black fluids, the flesh dropped with a wet thud to the floor.
I didn’t need more of an excuse. I shot up out off my haunches and took off, vaulting over some pipes and back into the basement’s darkness. I wasn’t going to stick around hoping the victim hadn’t meant me. I heard the man in the suit shouting, and soon his voice was joined by another, then the sounds of pursuit. My only thought was to put distance between us. I took random turns, and by the time my adrenaline was spent, I was lost.
The next bit felt a little like making my way through a Halloween haunted house - a series of rooms lit in eerie blue light, absolutely crawling with black mold. They’re in my head like so many snapshots - a tiny tiled cell with a drainage hole in the floor, clogged with long clumps of brown hair. Gurneys lining the walls of another room, white sheets stretched over their occupants. A row of dirty bathtubs. Mason jars filled with teeth.
One room was too dark to see in once the door slammed behind me. I froze for the first time since running away from that big chamber. I heard shuffling from all sides, raspy sighs, groans. Finding my sense again, I started trying to feel my way through it. I happened to touch the metal bars of a shaky structure to my left, only to feel something fleshy behind them touch back. Yelling, I stumbled backwards into another rickety metal structure and a hand stroked my hair from behind. I felt breath in my ear and reacted instantly, spinning around and pushing the structure away. I heard a crash as the metal structure toppled off its surface and on to the floor.
The noise had attracted attention. A door at the other end slammed open, giving me enough blue light by which to see what the metal structures were. Rows of tiny cages filled the little room, piled on each other, stacked side by side. None were larger than 3’x3’ and most were occupied. People were crammed inside. Pale, skinny, smiling people, twisted into impossible poses, covered in wounds that wept black fluids. Many were blindfolded. Some of them had lost limbs to the rot slowly consuming them, arms and feet that laid next to them inside their cages.
A collection of fodder. A basement Archive.
My pursuers yelled for me to stop. I screamed and ran.
Somehow I ended up retracing my steps back through the pipes and walls, back up the stairs. I slammed the door on that horrible basement and sprinted into a still-abandoned church. I found the first emergency exit I could and got the fuck out, ignoring the blaring alarms behind me.
I have more written, too much more, and it wraps up the rest of my past and hopefully answers many of your questions. Since I couldn't fit it all in this post, I've split them up. I'll post the rest tomorrow, once the 24 hour limit is up. It's the least I can do, given how long this story has taken to tell.
See you tomorrow, NoSleep.
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