Hello, NoSleep. Clayton here.
I apologize for the long delay. Honestly, posting here fell far from my top priorities over the past months. In fact, there were (and are) many reasons I should not be doing this.
In the past, NoSleep was a useful tool to track Claire and Elizabeth’s movements. It allowed me to relay messages and sort through patterns. It also imparted knowledge of the Entity to a wider audience than I honestly believed possible. Then there was the matter of Claire’s last request to me, to transcribe and post her diary here. I fulfilled it, but thought it too dangerous to do much else.
NoSleep is a liability. Elizabeth isn’t particularly tech savvy, but I don’t know what information she (they, I suppose) would be able to glean from my posting here. Even if they simply found clues in a hapless detail I included, they could have come bearing down on me long before I was ready for them.
Now, after months of preparation, I am ready. I feel I have enough information and enough weapons; now, in fact, I feel I’m in a safe place. Things have quieted down. And so I will continue what I started more than half a year ago.
Christ, has it really been that long?
First off: a promise. I’m going to tell you everything I know, without omission. I feel obligated to respect Claire’s wishes to do so, but that isn’t the sole reason. I also believe that Elizabeth Hadwell does not want you to know any of this. She’d love for you to fancy her the victim, or even a heroine. She’d love for you to trust her and to question me.
You may question me (you have the right), but my second promise is that I will never lie to you. My one goal in this life is to ruin Elizabeth Hadwell and the Entity, and I believe I can use the truth to do this. I want to shatter their hold on this earth even further than it has been shattered by Claire’s testimony. I want to run their names into the muck, where they belong. I want to destroy them utterly, as they have destroyed so many others. As they have destroyed me.
Because they will keep destroying. That is the third promise I make. As long as Elizabeth Hadwell is alive and working with It, they will take and take. They will spread and devour and control. Donec totum impleat orbem. Until it fills the whole world.
And my fourth promise is that I will do everything in my power to stop them.
I suppose I should begin by finishing Claire’s saga. Then we can move on to the events in the past that led to this.
You will hate me when this account is over. I would not begrudge you that. I hate myself. That’s the problem with the goddamn “greater good”: it cares very little for the lives lost along the way.
I'd watched from the woods as Elizabeth Hadwell fled the motel with the dark haired man named Blake slung over her shoulder. He was a big guy, more muscular than average, but she carried him as one might carry an empty backpack. She looked strange, much taller than usual, but she moved so fast I couldn’t get a good look. She ran on her hands and feet, like a goddamn cheetah, back towards the town.
I followed. A stupid thing to do, given that she was so fast, but I thought perhaps I could catch up with her and stop whatever she was going to do with Blake. Maybe find her hideout while I was at it. I have an old ten speed bike that I found in an abandoned garage in town, so I jumped on that and pedaled hard.
I didn’t catch up. I spent a few hours in the town, looking around Elizabeth's usual stomping grounds - the apartment, the school, the church. But she had disappeared with Blake.
At sunset I left quickly. I did not want to recklessly wander around after dark, attracting the attention of the town's numerous infected meat-puppets or the thing that controlled them. They get more active when the sun goes down, coming out of their various dank basements and holes. They get more aggressive, too. The way mold thrives in the damp and dark.
I'd killed three of them to date at that point, but it was hard, visceral work (they are surprisingly resilient and knit themselves back together quickly) and I hated it. So I climbed onto my bike and pedaled back the way I'd come.
I only spotted one infected person on my way out of town. It stood on the roof of one of the houses near the bridge, its back to me, head tilted back like it was staring over the trees at the setting sun. I couldn't tell whether it was male or female - the head was bald and the body was stick-thin. It wore a tattered gray bathrobe. One of its feet was missing, which made its stance lopsided and clumsy. But I noticed with a jolt that one of its arms ended in a long, jagged white piece of bone. The skin had peeled away to make room for the protrusion. Made for stabbing, and it nearly reached the ground it was so long.
As I watched, the creature bent and scrambled down the roof on the opposite side, dropping out of sight. I didn't know if it had spotted me, but I sped across the bridge into the relative safety of the woods as quickly as I could.
I felt then that things were changing in the Infected Town. Things had accelerated over the months when the Entity and its Vessel were so close by. More and more infected people were coming into a new stage of their "Ascension." They were evolving, in a way, getting more mobile and more dangerous. I didn’t know why. It hadn't been that way before. As in the case of poor Lisa, when this first began the Entity usually drained Its victims after taking them. They wasted away into nothing and their bodies died and molded. Most of the citizens of the town met this fate.
But now some of the bodies I encountered there (only some, mind you) were gaining new power. They were still twisted beyond recognition, still grinning toothily. But since Claire had returned with Blake and Elizabeth, I'd started seeing weird bony hooks or spikes protrude from the ends of arms. Teeth grew sharp in those smiles. Whereas before simply taking a couple steps was slow and clumsy work for them, I’d seen infected people recently who could spring like cats, jump onto roofs or break down doors. It was rare, yes, but it was fucking scary.
Elizabeth and the Entity were more dangerous than ever, possibly because they were now fully merged.
I headed to a small cabin in the woods, where I'd been staying, one of the few safe places left. I planned to bide my time doing some research and stocking up on ammunition for my two guns, which would require a voyage into Portland. Cities are safer, larger, and I was more likely to find the items I needed for defense.
Due in part to my road trip, nearly a week passed before I returned to the town. But when I did, I noticed something that actually gave me hope.
It was quiet there. The feeling of being watched upon crossing the bridge, while still present, had lessened in a palpable way. I knew in my gut, as I somehow know many things about the Entity (more on why that is, later), that Elizabeth was many miles away. They had once again left Infected Town to its own devices, and their influence had decreased considerably.
I headed back for the motel, wondering if Claire could still be there. Wondering, even, if I could possibly still help her. My job, my fucking calling you could say, is not and has never been to help the victims of the Entity. Usually that desire was suppressed in me, by a Force far beyond my control. Other goals were far too important.
But in Claire's case, I couldn't stop myself. I had to see what I could do for her.
This is the part I dreaded telling you. But, in the interest of full disclosure, I suppose I should simply get it down, and post this, and have done with it.
Claire’s journal ends with the words “Someone is knocking at the door.”
That someone was me.
When I entered the motel room, I saw immediately how far gone Claire was. In her journal she rarely described her physical appearance. Indeed, all the mirrors in the room were cracked or stained with mold. I would not want to look at myself, either, if such an awful thing was happening to me.
I have seen many people touched by the Entity, what you call “mold creatures.” I have seen twisted backs and elongated arms, white skin and fused teeth. But this was worse by far than all of them.
Claire had, for some reason I do not fully understand, been made to suffer. The details were almost particular, as if bestowed especially to cause pain and horror. She lay on the ground by the door, having dragged herself towards it when I knocked but unable to stand.
Her hair was mostly gone, just a few thin white strands. She’d been a small girl to begin with, barely 5 foot, and now she was severely emaciated, her ribs and collarbone stretching the thin skin on her torso so obscenely it was a wonder they didn’t tear it.
Her legs, or what was left of them, sprawled useless under her. But they were no longer recognizable as legs. They’d been taken by the contagion as it finally broke through her skin from the inside, fusing her legs together and turning them into a black, shapeless, ragingly infectious lump. I’d only seen this amount of decay before in creatures that were already dead.
It stopped me there in the doorway, utterly still with shock and sadness. Claire… Jesus. It must have hurt like hell. I have never met a person braver than that woman.
The black rot stopped at her waist, and her torso rose from the ruins, draped in a shirt that was five sizes too big. Her hands, pale and thin, gripped a pen and a notebook. She looked up at me, and something like relief filled her eyes.
Her face was the worst part. Claire had been a pretty girl, with elfish features and large green eyes. Those eyes had arrested me when we first met. I think of them often.
Now her face was destroyed. Elizabeth had made sure of that. Her skin stretched waxy and tight across jutting cheekbones and eye sockets, veins popping from her temples and yellow bruises forming around the forced tissue near her mouth. Her lips stretched into the classic, permanent grimace, too wide for her face.
One eye was swollen shut, the lids beginning to fuse. But the other was wide open, so sunken into its socket I wasn’t sure at first that it could see. But it could. And that was something I’d never seen in an infected person. Every other time, the infected went blind completely. But Elizabeth, in her jealousy and spite, had made sure this girl still had a window to the outside world, to watch and wait as she was slowly consumed from the inside.
It spoke of a hatred I hadn’t thought even Liz was capable of.
I sat on the ground with Claire for a long time, and we talked. She could still move her jaw enough to speak, in slurred and jolting sentences. There was no rush and nothing else to do. Claire, incorrigible as ever, wanted to know everything. And I told her the whole goddamn story, everything I knew, even my wild conjectures. She listened silently and at the end we shared theories. I’m sure I’ll include most of them as this tale continues.
Then she asked me for a favor, and it broke me down to tears. But I agreed, and left for a few minutes to gather some supplies from my truck. When I came back, she handed me her journal with her handwritten note on the cover, including her username and password for NoSleep. She stressed how important it was that you all knew.
I took her journal and leaned down to kiss her, just once, on the forehead. She hadn’t deserved any of this. I usually let my mild sociopathy dull the sympathy for most of the infected people, but she broke right through. I will never forget her.
Her one good eye slowly closed, seemingly of its own accord, and she sighed in acceptance. As I watched, the skin swelled and the lids began to stitch themselves together, into one shiny smooth stretch of flesh.
She asked me to do it. She was ready, so ready. She did not want to let It use her anymore than It already had.
So I stood. I backed up a few paces and raised the item I’d grabbed from my car. I aimed directly at her head so that the metal slugs would destroy her quickly and painlessly.
I told her I was sorry, and that she deserved far better than this. She replied that I was doing her the greatest kindness she could imagine. It didn’t feel that way. It still doesn’t.
Then I pulled the shotgun's trigger. I knew at once that there was no way she could come back from it, even with increased regeneration. Chunks of skull flew in all directions. As black ichor spattered my shoes, her headless body slumped to the floor, still twitching.
I covered what I could in my leather jacket, a makeshift funeral shroud and the best I could do as a token of respect. Then I went back to my truck and grabbed the gas cans.
The mold doesn't catch fire easily. But with enough effort I managed to burn that motel to the ground.
I am tired now. I can't continue this tonight, but I will soon. I will finally put to words the events that started this, and hopefully we can all begin to understand why I'm doing what I am.
For all I have done and all I have failed to do, Claire... Please forgive me.
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Credits
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