The archives

In Search of Things Lost: Logs, Stories, and Notes

Arcus 02

I am going through some past scribblings and the notes of the previous unknown occupants, and I realise I should at least try to organise them. Reading these notes, I decipher several voices who I am aptly calling the unknown few who like myself had a fixation with the Entity and who like myself had an ability to experience the memories encoded in the fog. I will include my past scribblings and number them as best as I can, referring to them as notes obscura, or just obscura, to try and piece together how long I've actually been here. I think I may have found my first ramblings amongst the half-destroyed journals of the unknown occupants who struggled with infinite possibilities of whiling away the time except the one they probably missed the most. The one I miss the most—friendship, companionship, sitting with my father drinking whiskey and watching the Ancients swim across the night sky, or just losing time with a friend in a hearty conversation about the merits of art, music, laughter and stories. All I have now are the memories of others. Second-hand experiences that constantly remind me of things lost and half-remembered.

Obscura. Unknown Prisoners

I've found scattered about this tower countless journals from previous occupants. Occupants might not be the best way to describe them. Prisoners would be more fitting. Eight or nine of them from the distinct voices I deciphered in the manifold journals I read with surprising interest and alacrity. Some of these unknown prisoners shared my unusual penchant for beer, whiskey and stories of the macabre. Others seemed to be raving lunatics writing not journals but senseless notes—notes from the absurd I call them—strange musings and endless contradictions about places and characters observed and consciously or unconsciously improperly described. These notes from the absurd seem to start with unintelligible gibberish are quite different from anything I've seen or read, as though written by someone driven by madness or some other motive to undermine any attempt to make sense of this world. Along with the notes I found illustrations and survivor statements from police files and thousands of short stories in a dark chamber in the basement. They had been piled up and set ablaze but quickly extinguished with some sort of a putrid, rotting sludge. I cleaned the chamber and stacked all the stories in piles to go through and organise at a later date. For the time being I see no reason to remove them from what I am now calling the Chamber of Blood.

Survivor Statement. Sean Dint

I was listening to a podcast of creepy stories with my friends... Adrien... Mia... Tina... and Bill. I can't remember which one of us figured how to do it... but we realised that the stories were codes to pass on coordinates of locations of interest for some group or cult or whatever. We decoded a few other stories and came to the conclusion that these people were sending encrypted locations of places where they believe there would be ghosts. We didn't buy any of that paranormal crap and we were just having fun drinking and decoding the stories and looking up the places on satellite maps. But when the coordinates of one story turned out to be close to us, we thought we could check out the place for fun. Adrien rented a car and we headed up to what was left of the crumbling asylum. There was nothing but overgrown ruins. But I remember this unnatural black fog and it was like we were at the asylum but some other version of it. It was really strange. And that's when we saw this thing... this giant samurai with a demon mask lurking about as though it had stepped out of one world and into another. He killed Mia first. I don't remember what happened exactly... I just saw... I saw her head thump and tumble across the ground. I don't remember much... I remember crawling out of the fog and that demon or apparition or whatever that thing was couldn't follow me... like it was blocked by something invisible. Not long after a man who called himself Hans and who identified himself as a detective arrived and asked me questions about what I had seen. He took some notes and seemed a bit strange. Then when he heard the sirens approaching, he disappeared just like that. When the police arrived, the fog was gone leaving only the... the... hacked remains of my friends. And now I'm here... and you're telling that you don't know who that detective was and that you want me to show you how to crack the code of the podcast. But I can't because I don't know! That was my buddy Tina, and she's hacked to pieces you assholes!