Hello, NoSleep. Clayton here.
I’m not dead, as many of you guessed, despite the length between posts. Thanks for your… concern. I’m sure Elizabeth will let you know if she succeeds in killing me. Not for lack of trying, but it hasn’t happened yet. Though I must say, that woman keeps me on my toes. I can't tell you what I'm doing now, because I know she reads these. (Hey Liz, how’s it hangin? Oh also go fuck yourself.) Suffice it to say, progress is slow but steady... Slow because my leads are steadily running out. See what I did there? Comic fucking genius.
So once again I turn my scrutiny to the past. Partly because, for whatever reason, you’re still reading this. And I guess I like the sense of solidarity. But also because I’ve run out of options. I’m at a standstill, I’ve hit a brick wall and I don’t know how to proceed. I know the what and how, but not the who, when or where. And, when you’re trying to prevent something that may or may not be apocalyptic (no promises, obviously, this is just conjecture) the who, when and where are fucking important. There’s something I missed, there has to be. Some piece of this puzzle, and maybe I’ll find it in my past. Fucking introspection. I doubt it’ll help; I’m just grasping at straws here. So excuse the digression. I haven’t slept in a long time.
Also, sorry for always being so fucking cryptic. Chronological, remember? As per Claire. And it’s not like you people can help, anyway. Might as well take you for a ride. Let you see this shit through my eyes.
Last time I described to you my first encounter with the Eye - the self-proclaimed God of our universe. People have mentioned that they were not comforted by Him, that He sounds no better than the Entity. It's true, He’s less than comforting. But, at the least, He doesn’t create monsters out of the people we love. So, in my opinion, lesser of two evils.
You have to understand something about the Eye - He keeps things pretty close to His giant metaphorical chest. He might have some level of omniscience, or he might not. I don’t know. But if He does know everything, He’s not telling me shit. I woke up from my DMT trip with a head full of less-than-helpful knowledge that felt very real, but which the logical side of my brain insisted was an elaborately crafted fantasy. I also did not know exactly what I was supposed to do with all this information. I didn’t know who the Vessel was. I had the distinct impression that the cult and the Entity were very dangerous, and they wouldn’t appreciate me sticking my nose into their business. My fucking life could be in danger. If any of it was even fucking real. It was way too much for a sixteen year old kid.
Overwhelmed, frightened, and concerned I might be going insane, I did the only thing I could: I pretended it hadn’t happened.
I entered my junior year of high school a little quieter, a little more solemn and much less likely to start any trouble. I alienated myself from my druggy friends and took comfort in Alan and Lisa, my anchors of sanity. I never told them about my DMT trip. Life went on, not terribly different from the way it always had. The memory faded, and it got easier to tell myself none of it was real.
Then came the town scandal. In our senior year, Elizabeth was caught in the school around midnight, naked as the day she was born and covered in soot. A fire raged behind her, having climbed from a tunnel in one of the first floor classrooms. They passed the tunnel off as some maintenance corridor, and the fire the result of a faulty boiler. Elizabeth’s presence was a mere coincidence - a rebellious student caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. An adventurous girl who’d seen the hatch in her homeroom floor and been curious as to where it went ever since. Rather understandable, likeable even, and brave. She’d survived a raging fire - how horrible that must have been for an eighteen year old girl.
That was how the newspapers told it, anyway. With her father’s connections, I suppose it wasn’t difficult to paint her in a good light. Still, a lot of people talked. Why was she there? Why was she fucking naked? Did she have something to do with the fire? Eyes followed Elizabeth wherever she went, even more than usual, but she took it in stride. Her smile grew sharp, her posture better. She revelled in the attention. She fucking loved it.
The true events of the night will die with her, when she dies. But I, and Claire a couple years later, found out exactly where that trapdoor leads - to a secret room used by the cult, a few stories underground. I assume it’s a chamber for only the inner circle given its size, and an important place given its isolation. I don't know how or why the fire started. No one died in it, as far as I know. But I think something changed that night.
And I know Elizabeth was changed by it. Whereas before she was a relatively normal girl - albeit with clever eyes and a sly smile - now she seemed straight-up mysterious. Even I, who avoided speaking with her as often as I could, noticed. She was distracted and smug. No respect for authority, either. She estranged herself from her father, who was mayor and probably the cult leader, and her mom divorced him and moved away shortly thereafter. I didn’t know or care why. At eighteen Liz was wild and free from any kind of structure. I’m surprised the cult let her go, given how important she was, but maybe she was already too powerful to be contained. All conjecture, again.
Alan went fucking insane about her. I remember him calling her “too sexy to fucking function.” Not in front of Lisa, of course, who tried to take his crush in stride. As for myself, I thought Elizabeth was put on and ignored her as often as possible. We graduated like nothing had happened, Liz and Jess with honors the rest of us couldn’t afford.
Then, in early 2009, Alan met Liz and Jess at some house party, and suddenly the two girls were part of my life. He’d finally gotten what he wanted: access into the world of Elizabeth’s secret smiles. The inside jokes were out of control. She clearly loved Alan’s attention, with his awed eyes turned on her. More than once, if she was drunk enough, I witnessed her slip out of her clothes on a whim and go dancing naked in the rain. Or press the red hot edge of a knife against her skin. Or kiss everyone in the room like she meant it. Or howl at the moon.
Like the parody of some fucking Fleetwood Mack song. A teenager’s idea of what it is to be cool. I found it desperate and exhausting. But if anything, it just made Alan like her more. Jess laughed and shook her head, but I think she was caught up in the illusion that was Elizabeth, too. They loved feeling like badasses, revelling the freedom of our early twenties. Only Lisa and I saw through it, but Alan threw around the word “jealous” a lot. Jesus, poor Lisa. Her boyfriend, the love of her life, under the literal spell of the Entity.
I didn’t like it. Hated it. The girls weren’t content to play video games and drink beer every evening. Instead they pulled my best friend into wild gatherings with people he didn’t know. I suspect now that many of them were cult members, or the offspring of them. Despite not being on speaking terms with her dad, Elizabeth kept the same circles. Alan never said anything about Liz mentioning the cult. Jess never did, either.
As this was going on, I started having nightmares. It was June of 2009, I think, when the first one happened. I snapped to consciousness in a coffin, having assumedly been buried alive. I had no idea I was dreaming and it felt utterly real, because I could remember laying down in my bed to drift off to sleep. I thought I’d been kidnapped or something. I was seizing, choking in pitch darkness, unable to move. I spent hours there in the claustrophobic black, every second painfully vivid, slowly losing the oxygen necessary to breathe. I suffocated until I passed out. And I woke shaking and sweaty in my own bed, with such vivid memories of the coffin that for a while I wondered if it had actually been real.
Other dreams carried shades of shame, guilt, anger. I was called weak, stupid, pitiful. Dream people kept telling me that I wasn’t even trying. I remember gasping myself awake night after night, staring at my bedroom ceiling. “Try what? Try what?” No answer.
But the next night, the dreams would come back, more horrendous than before. My family, burning to death - watch your mom’s eyeball pop in the heat and trickle down her cheek, sometime. See how easy that is to forget. Or Alan, screaming at me to “fucking look, will you?” while being stretched apart, rusty chains around his wrists and ankles. I can still hear all of his joints pop in tandem, see the vertebrae of the spinal column start to separate under paper thin skin. Or Lisa, her back broken, her hands and her feet twisted the wrong way around on their limbs. “Why won’t you even look?”
If it really came down to it, I guess I always knew what the dreams were: reminders. So I wouldn’t and couldn’t forget. It came back to the cult. Back to my instructions from the Eye. They never faded like a trip is supposed to. I tried to shut them out, though, for more than a year.
In September of 2010 I started my second year at the local college, about an hour's drive from town. Liz had convinced Alan to hold off on school for yet another year, but Jess had gotten into PSU and moved to Portland. She visited often, though. That was around when this happened, maybe a month or two later.
I was driving home from class, taking the long way through the forest as I did sometimes when I wanted a bit of peace from the pressures of the day-to-day. I remember there was snow on the ground and my birthday was coming up - we were planning a triple party since my birthday was very close to Jess and Liz’s - so it had to be early December. It was five or six, winter dark, but I had my heater and a favorite CD. I was in a good mood, my mind far from the cult or the Eye.
I came to a bend in the road, one of those hairpins - the nasty mountain type. I slowed to take it. I knew the road like the back of my hand. Which, I guess, is why I was so creeped out to look ahead and see another road branching off to the left. An access road, it looked like. I’ve driven that way a thousand times, and I’ve never seen it before or since.
I guess my survival instinct completely turned off or some shit, because I turned and drove down it. What gave me that compulsion? My curiosity was only vague, and I wasn’t fulfilling some rash, youthful need for danger. The Eye works in mysterious ways, I guess. I didn’t think twice - just turned and followed the new road.
There were no streetlamps but it was paved like it was supposed to be there. Not just some tractor trail that dead-ended in someone’s driveway, a legitimate two-laned road, complete with bright yellow lane markers. As far as I could tell, it was going east. It should have been going directly into the mountainside, come to think of it. But it wasn’t a tunnel - I could still see the bloated white moon hanging overhead. There was no snow on it, no ice. The trees in my headlights had white crystals adorning their branches, but the sides of the road were pitch dark. Like the Void. The thought kept creeping into my head. Black like the Void.
The road was straight as an arrow, disappearing before and behind me. I think I only drove for a couple minutes before my headlights picked up something in the distance. Something stark white, reflective, but too far off to see clearly. I slowed my roll, since the figure was in the center of the road and I didn’t want to hit it. But it kept getting larger at a steady rate and, as it got closer, I realized it was galloping towards me.
That’s the best way I can describe the uncanny way it loped at me. At first I thought it was some kind of deer or something, maybe an albino - as I said, it was pale white in the darkness. A mutant deer would make sense, because there was something wrong about the way it was running - it zig-zagged across the road, limping and swaying and falling over its feet. But it would always pick itself up, focus its direction toward my truck, and keep heading for me.
I started getting scared, thinking rabies or some shit, then reminded myself that I had a half-ton of steel under me. Worst case scenario, if I was attacked by a fucking rabid albino buck or some shit, I could run it down.
But as it got closer and closer, I saw that it was definitely not a deer. It was a man.
He was galloping at me, a full sprint on his hands and feet, doing the bear crawl as easily as a dog would run. His body seemed really stretched out though, torso at least as long as a deer's, arms and legs twice the length they should be. I could hear him panting and gibbering in a language I’d never heard, shrieking and crying out.
I slammed on the brakes as the man ran directly in the front of my car, and he skidded and turned before he hit my bumper at full speed with the side of his body. For a long moment, he squatted hunched in front of my truck. His body was mostly hidden by the hood apart from the curve of his emaciated spinal column. Then, slowly, he braced his hands on the hood and started to pull himself up and onto my truck.
I watched, petrified, as he clambered towards me. A gaunt, narrow face, a nearly toothless mouth - the teeth that were left were broken and brown. He had a tangled, dirty brown beard and long greasy hair, streaked with gray. I saw for sure, as his foot propped itself up on my bumper, that his torso was way too long. Probably it wasn’t twice the length of an average human’s, but it sure as fuck seemed so at the time. His arms and fingers were crazy thin and extended, too. His whole frame seemed twisted and narrow. Not in a “supernatural” way - in a “congenital disorder” way.
This fucking guy crawled right up to my windshield, moving more like a bobcat than anything - lithe and slinky and double-jointed. His eyes were completely white, the pupils tiny black pinpricks, slightly skewed, like both eyes were lazy. They bulged out of their sockets, sickly red at the corners. Whether or not he’d been born with some kind of extreme Marfan Syndrome, he was also acutely and horribly ill.
He pressed that insane, too-long face full against the window, less than a foot from where I sat, his breath fogging the glass as he spoke to me, staring at me. His mouth was making streaky, spittled contact with my windshield with every word, and at one point he opened his mouth to reveal a Gene Simmons-long tongue that was mottled black and gray. Jesus, the guy was severely sick, and he licked a long smear up my window. It left a trail of translucent slime in its wake.
Suddenly, in the midst of jabbering that I could not decipher, he went still and silent. His eyes locked with mine. He raised a bony white finger that had too many joints and not enough fingernails, and pointed at me.
His voice, when he next spoke, was crystal clear. “You! You’ve seen Him too! You are His! Like me!” He started this mad giggling, and he quickly licked my windshield a few more times. I got the distinct impression that he wished he was licking my face. Talk about nauseous. I could practically smell him from inside the truck. “Rejoice!” the man whispered. “Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you shall fear no evil, for He is with you. Yes. Yes. Amen.”
He was clambering up and over the windshield now, onto the top of my truck. I was graced with an intimate view of his withered junk for a second as he disappeared above me, and I closed my eyes, breathing deeply through my nose, battling nausea, fear and fury. He sat on top of my truck for a few minutes, singing Christian hymns in a loud, raspy voice. “When you eat my body and you drink my blood, I will live in you and you will live in my love.”
I had no idea what to fucking do. If I drove off and he fell, manslaughter was a serious concern. His fucking DNA was all over my car. My phone lacked any and all service on this impossible mountain road; the cops were not an option. And so, for a few horrible, lingering minutes, I waited.
The guy fell silent. It was so fucked up, being directly below someone but unable to say with certainty where he was. His shuffling and moving around had quieted completely. I wondered after a while if he had somehow climbed down off the truck without my noticing. I decided, if I didn’t hear him in the next couple of minutes, that I’d start up the truck and slowly drive away. So I waited, I waited...
Then came a smell, like putrid meat and dog shit. A movement in my periphery caught my attention and I looked into my rearview mirror. There he was, with that long, manic face too close to mine. Right behind me. He was halfway inside the cab of my goddamn truck, having somehow managed to silently open the rear window and slide his upper body through it. In the ten fucking seconds since I’d last checked my mirror, his face was nearly at my shoulder. His tongue waggled, his breath fucking reeked. His legs seemed to still be on the roof of the cab, his torso twisted in a way that must have been more possible than it looked.
As soon as our eyes locked, the man froze like he’d been caught in a game of red-light-green-light, his mouth open in an exaggerated “O.” Slowly and carefully, he started sliding back out of my truck. His expression never changed from one of manic delight, and he was giggling wheezily. I spun around as soon as he was mostly out of my space, probably yelling at him to get the fuck away. I can’t honestly remember.
He sort of slithered down into the truck bed and crouched there, giggling, as if I couldn’t see him. It was so clear that he was having fun, playing a game. I yelled at him again to get the fuck away from my truck. Started telling him about the imaginary gun I kept in my glove box. Only then did he scramble away, out of the truck bed.
He stood to full height in the middle of the road. Fucker had to have been seven feet tall, or maybe my mind’s hyperbolizing. But he stood there like some weird twisted sapling, and raised a too-long arm to point ahead of me with a too-long finger, down the road beyond.
“Last house on the left,” he croaked, starting to back away. “And straight on till morning.” The grin had left his face. He looked scared now. I couldn’t imagine he was thinking of either seventies horror flicks or fucking Peter Pan.
He walked backwards away from me, straight legging it like a soldier, still pointing. Then he made a swift, regimented turn to the left and walked backwards off the road, disappearing into the dark woods.
His stench still hung in my car. Retching, I opened all the windows and sped away.
I drove for hours down the mysterious road that hadn’t been there before. It all looked the fucking same. Only my truck’s clock ticked to indicate time was passing. I tried turning around, backing up, you name it. Nothing but straight black concrete and dark woods. No twists or bends or hills.
At one point I purposely drove off the road, down the steep and bumpy slope to the right. The darkness surrounded me all at once, in one blinding black swoop. Like a bag had been forced over my eyes or I’d suddenly gone blind. I couldn’t see my fucking hands in front of me, or the road behind me. No moon, no stars. Just the fluorescent green of my dashboard clock, ticking away. Even the residual light from that fell flat somehow. It didn’t illuminate anything else in its vicinity. It was like the darkness was its own being, living and feeding off of stray photons. I kept driving in the pitch blackness, felt the road’s steep downwards slope level off gradually… And then the darkness started to lift, until I could see again. As if it was just a normal night. And I was back on that goddamn motherfucking road, headed straight onward, like nothing had happened.
For a while, around three in the morning, I was fucking convinced I was in some kind of infinite driving loop, some personal hell. I cried. I screamed. I laughed hysterically. And the night dragged on.
As the sun began to peek from behind the shadows of the trees, maybe seven or eight hours since I turned down the strange new highway, I suddenly found myself in familiar woods. Impossibly, I was on right outside my town, where the buildings end and the road continues up into the mountains. I know the area very well - I know the goddamn hills and woods very well - and there was no fucking way that I could be here. It wasn’t possible, it just wasn’t.
But it was. The trees parted. I could see the town beyond them, waking up slow, lights starting to burn in windows. I was in the thick, woody area just beyond the bridge, listening to the sluggish trickle of the half-dried creek.
And there, on the left hand side of the road, was none other than the cult’s church. As I knew it would be. Colloquially called the Haven, officially called the Church of God’s Light. Now, cresting six am, it was dark and empty. And just as I was passing by, eager for my own home and bed, right in front of the red double doors, my truck shuddered to a halt and died.
After the night I’d endured, I could recognize a sign when I saw it. I’d be stupid not to. The Eye was telling me, in no uncertain terms and under threat of torture, that I was to take this opportunity. I was to break into the Haven and find out what I could.
So I did.
I’ll save that exploration, the first of many, for next time. I know I’ve already taken much too long in posting this as it is. Thank you for your continued patience. The funny thing is, in writing this account out, I actually did think of a few leads I haven’t explored before. So maybe there is something to it. I’ll update you again when I can.
---
Credits
