-August- Through the Loop.

It's... the 27th now. It'll probably be the 28th by the time I'm finished this. 

Christ, I'm so tired. We're all so tired. Tired and hurting and scared but... relieved, so immensely relieved. After the complete and utter hell that was the last... nearly 20 days, we're all lucky to be alive. Some are in better condition than others but that's alright. I've never been happier to walk freely around the House, each room exactly where I last remember it. 

Well, almost.

But if there's ever been a time when the phrase 'close enough' felt appropriate, this is it. We're all just about half-here right now, and even if I'm stopping every couple of minutes to empty my stomach or move some bandages or check on whoever is currently groaning or hissing or whatever else we associate with pain, we're together and hey, we're all alive. Rivers is short a leg and Doc is high on what I think is heroin, which is good because when she isn't, she's...

I don't want to talk about it.

Spencer is in absolute shambles and everybody else... isn't really faring much better. But those are their stories to tell, so I'm just going to recount what I can while I can. 

Started getting bad when Steele brought Alex and Rivers back. It got worse when Elaine and Elliott came around. Spencer said he was having trouble holding the place together already, and when he and the two from the forest started complaining about headaches and voices I knew something bad couldn't be far off. I think we all knew it, but here we are again proving our startling intellect and genre-savviness. Instead of getting out we sat like, well, like sitting ducks and waited for our world to collapse around us. I want to say you couldn't blame us for it but, really, couldn't you? Shouldn't you? We should have gotten everybody out when the walls starting shifting around. When the ceilings climbed higher and our third floor disappeared. When the kitchen moved to the first floor and the extension that contained my room, a bathroom and half of the dining room disappeared, taking with it half of our oak table and leaving it seamlessly attached to a wall covered in fleur-de-lis that I know I painted over in March. 

But we didn't. We sat and we worked and we pretended not to notice when the cornflower-blue bathroom tiles turned bleached white and when the right stairwell became four steps shorter than the left and when you walked through a door that used to lead to a bathroom brought you to nothing but a brick wall, you closed it and pretended nothing happened, only to turn around and realize the hallway you were in seconds ago is now the library, and you calmly run your hands along the bookshelves and wonder if there were always seventeen of them, and whether or not that window was always there, and doesn't that wall face the foyer why is there a window on it in the first place, and where did the door that leads to the garage go? And you tried and failed to will your hand to stop shaking and when you blinked the ground turned from hardwood to carpet and you found yourself in the living room, only now it's about two hundred feet long and you couldn't even see the ceiling, the vines and the trees have so completely filled this place. Your most favourite chandelier was pulled from the stucco of the domed room, which sent glass flying all across the ground and it cut your feet when you walked. You realized the room is nearly pitch black and the only light that comes in is filtered through a heavy screen of leaves and branches, and the entire room felt stuffed; the air was humid and hot and yet thin, so very, very thin that you felt your vision go fuzzy and your breath turn ragged; shallow and panicked.

But maybe there's another reason for that.

Maybe you've just caught a glimpse of the Figure, that Man who commands so much fear and respect that you feel the need to capitalize every He and His and Being and Figure and name, because you could think of about three dozen things to call this Tall Man, this Thin Man, the Slender Man, the One Who Walks, Slender, Slendy, Slends, Dr. Stalkopus, Betentacled Abomination, Eldritch Abomination, Monster, Killer, Murderer; names born out of spite, out of anger, out of fear donning a wretched mask and hiding away, because the second you behold His shoulders - whether it's across a highway or in the mirror or just out of the corner of your eye in a dark hotel room - your entire being beings to shake and sputter in revolt of this Being, instinct kicks in and your mind goes blank and two voices cry out in your head.

One screams, run.

The other, come. 

Neither uses spoken word, and neither possess a tongue or speech to which you could grant a name; it's more the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach; twisting knots wrapping your insides tighter than some South American snake constricting its prey, waiting, waiting, waiting for its heart to cease its ba-dum, ba-dum (though at the time it was more a badumbadumbadumba----badumbadumbadum) so it can feast. 

It's about that time, realizing the Being in front of me isn't in fact a single, timeless, inescapable being but seems to be made up of the same breathing, shifting, moving masses that plague our employer that I begin to hear screaming. At first I think it's mine - I really, truly think it's mine, because the moment your eyes meet the perfect, porcelain white of the Man 

everything 

grows

still.

The colour of the world fades from view and sudden there isn't anything but Him in the room, even your own being seems to be suspended. You're a floating consciousness and the voice that screams run, run as fast and as far as you can is quickly silenced, the boa constrictor that is your insides tightening more and more as each second passes, breath now in quick, hysteric huffs and your heart is skipping like a record, but you're 

calm.

So very, very calm. You don't notice the pain - you can't notice the pain, because there's something cooing in your head softer than the breeze of warm summer nights, ushering you forward and calling with gentle, honey-sweet notes of safety. You almost decide to listen to it, where somewhere in the back of your mind something finally clicks, the entire scene clicks, and the screaming comes back in a rush and no, no, it's not yours, it's far too distant and not nearly high enough to be yours, and like the last few flashes of a dream you grasp at, you can hear:

Remember, remember, the fifth of November...

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder, treason,

Should ever be forgot.

It wouldn't be until you write this post up later that you ask yourself why that poem came up, why you know it, where you heard it and why it seemed to ring loud and clear despite what you rationalize later as the closest thing to a near-death experience you've had in a long time. 

I... things get fuzzy from here. After that the entire world's a haze through a veil of a film grain, 60 frames per second and each one is smouldered at the corners and your head's still floating on air. You think you head in the direction of the screaming, what you think is the basement, (though could you really tell anymore? Did anything make sense here anymore?) but somehow you end up in the old rec hall in the East Wing, other couriers beside you. Doc is swaying on her feet and more gone than here, Steele looks right pissed off - but it's the same mask, the same pretend anger of fear hiding, trying to be anything other than itself - Amanda is on her crutches and looks like she's bleeding, Sam is a muttering mess, Todd's expression never stays the same long enough to register what emotion he's feeling and Spencer is still nowhere to be seen. 

Something happens and we start walking. We're a shambling, scared, absolutely terrified mass of survivors who can see the edge coming up, but we're not going down yet, no, no, we can't go down yet, not when we still have the boss to think about...

Hallways. So many hallways. At least fifty, maybe more. Or maybe it's just one, and as we turn the corner we're dropped off at the beginning, each door we open leads us back into the same place we started, but eventually we open a door and we don't see the same thirty feet and three doors, two windows and neglected crown molding.

Let me expand.

The problem with the times when the House implodes, or we enter a Loop, or You Know Who makes his rounds: memory gets cloudy. Not just mine, Spencer's and Steele's and Sam's - our collective memory gets covered in fog and ash, like we're watching it through some smoky filter; everything's in black and white and the faces are blurred and the static builds higher until there's no sound, just action, and what little sound you do hear is like you're listening with your head underwater, deep and twisted Charlie Brown 'wahhh wahhh's of what might be voices but you can't tell. The entire thing feels like a dream and when you enter that door for what has to be the hundredth time you're shocked that you're not met with the same  thirty feet and three doors, two windows and neglected crown molding, we see white. White so pure and so brilliant it burns away the fog and the haze and the Charlie Brown 'wahhh wahhh's and the world is painfully bright again. And I suppose that's why we're I'm writing this up now. Why we blog. Why we write about all these horrible things, why we share our experiences. Because the moment we stop thinking about this it slips away, a fleeting dream drifting grain by minuscule grain through you fingers. Even as you write you can't type fast enough to get it all down, and suddenly something slips through the cracks between 'o' and 'w' and you can't remember if his eyes were amber or slate, staring up at Him with eyes wide in horror, sacred, terrified and you don't think you've ever seen him like that in the few months - but it's a year now, isn't it? - that you've known him. Some part of you asks if the others have seen him like this, so utterly helpless and broken and scared, but the solitary thought run at the forefront of your mind blocks that out, tucks it away, and another grain falls between 'a' and 'y' and you forget who grabbed him; Steele or Todd, and what happens after that is the scramble of seven people all turning tail and running at once, and the second we clear the threshold of the door there's a sucking sound of air being displaced, the room around us compresses so its nothing more than a dot of light, infinitely small and impossibly bright, then expands with an explosion that leaves our ears ringing and sound returns with the hiss and whrrr of a fridge starting - wait, wait, no, that is our fridge starting. The heat clicks on and below us there's the distant rumble of the water heater starting, the buzz of the washer, the lights flicker and we're home, we're home, everything is back to normal and we're safe.

And the drapes are in tatters and the tiles are stained with blood and dirty and the wallpaper is ruined and the left stairwell is destroyed. The living room is a mess of splinters and broken vases and our at least two hundred DVDs, blu-rays and CDs are everywhere but we're home and the kitchen is next to the living room and light is filtering in from behind so that must mean we're back on the second floor. 

"Wow...home..."

I'm not sure if Doc collapses after or while she utters those two words. Two perfect syllables that speak volumes. They say exactly what we're all thinking, and in obscuring smog of something not quite human we're all shocked that everything can snap back to normal so quickly, and I'm sure if we looked out the window the tree line would be exactly where it was before: exactly 22' 3/4" from the back wall. Nobody grabs Doc and she hits the tile with a thud. 

Home.

We're back. It's been... christ, it's been so long. Even after everything that's happened and the scars we have to show for it, it still feels like a dream. In all honesty, if it weren't for the maze the basement's become and the completely obliterated living room, not to mention the fact that about five rooms have gone MIA, I would have told you this was all a horrible nightmare.

i’m floating

the first thing i notice is that im that that that im
you know
isn’t it weird how life just seems to buzz around you, sometimes like youre
like you’re not even

there. there, I fought it off
i fixed
ohgodithurts i fixed it are you happy now? I’m not, i’m not going to
so many
so many i see they're right there why cant
why cant anyone

its bright here
and everything hurts so much it feels like
my body is falling apart and i

sometimes i see lori, sometimes august
sometimes i hear todd and amanda and sam and
sometimes even leon but i
i cant see for more than a few seconds at a time and everything is screaming
my head hurts and He’d

already half in there
my eyes hurt and i cant see anything

how long has it been?

i can barely remember but everyones alive
alive
so many people arent and that

thats not fair
that’s not fair at all and i can only
im only going to watch and watch and watch and watch and He’s
He’s watching me He’s right here and nobody else can see him like a vulture waiting to claim a meal and He’s watching always watching he hasn’t stopped and i just want to be left alone and it hurts the pain is like a throb and it doesnt get better it never goes away and its making me insane and i cant breath and i can’t think i can’t i cant i cant i can’t i

iiiiiiiiiiiiiii

bynmmmm,99999jio ijb/;;;

~Steele~ Welcome to the Jungle

Apologies for my last post. I was in a bad spot…I’m particularly sensitive to changes in the Loops, they throw me totally out of whack. I decided to ride it out in my old room, until I felt able to talk again. Without any memories to hold me in place.

And boy, I missed a lot. When I emerged from the room, it was like stepping out of a plane wreckage into unfamiliar territory, ancient vines crisscrossing haphazardly, twirling into delicate leaves which obscured the fluorescent light from above, leaving only a passage through the brambles, fading into darkness. Only just visible behind the wall of vines was a fleck of worn blue paint, rusted and hanging demurely from branches far more powerful than it; that was the old Ford we kept for emergencies, looking as if it had rusted away over centuries of wind and rain, not a couple of nights.

This place feels wrong. Not evil, just numb. It feels as if the force it exerts upon those within it is just too much for us to comprehend. I’m not terrified; which is the state I generally do find myself in, all too often. It’s as if I’m beyond terror, as if Terror itself has imploded in on itself, a supernova of fear boiling down to a tiny speck of ash that contains everything it once was…It’s just dead, heavy matter, weighing down yet weightless; crushing oblivion turned into desolate loneliness, as if our lives, everything we were, everything we are, everything we could be has been reduced into one long, piercing silence.

I faced the abyssal forest of hanging leaves in that which I once called Home, and only darkness looked back. Darkness upon darkness beyond the squirming undergrowth…The only path I could take.

Even now as I type this post, when I close my eyes, that’s all I see, all I hear, all I know. Maybe it’s all I’ve ever known. A singular path through the madness, a pitch black hole through which all that I will ever be lies. There’s no sidepaths, there’s no maze. A maze gives you choice, freedom to backtrack. Life is no labyrinth of surprises, it’s a hole to fall through, until you reach the bottom. Any sense of hope, any sense that you might be taking the one path that leads to where you want to be, is just a trick of the mind, filling in the formless walls with nightmares. But there are no nightmares hiding in the twirling passageways of life, no pleasures on the way to distract you. All there is is a corridor, and at the end of the corridor, there He is, waiting with outstretched tendrils, welcoming you. Waiting patiently for you to trot obediently to the end.

So off I trotted, one foot in front of the other, as the vines writhed and salivated, dripping dead and dying leaves from the canopy as if the sky were bleeding. And then it was, drips of metallic red washing down my face, clotting in my hair, caking my face, cleansing my clothes of all the dirt and sweat until it was just red, red, red, red…A door. I opened it. One foot, two feet, three feet four, one in front of the other as the air choked my mind of every thought. Every thought but one, one single driving force as I found myself in the House’s main antechamber which heaved and slurped like a sleeping Cerberus, black fangs protruding from the paintings which tastefully lined the curled staircase up to the second level, the staircase which wept like a baby, waterfalling swirling oil which pooled at my feet. Vibrating in its reflection of the harsh mercurial sun which burned through the windows at the front door which I had entered through, the glass turning to charcoal and crumbling leisurely to the ground. One thought in my mind that was not swallowed by the Terror as I turned to the basement door, beyond the river of metallic blackness. There were two people in this House who did not belong. And as I sit here now, basement door open, the faint light from up here barely penetrating into Doc's little domain...it's eerie quiet down there...and her latest post...I'm trying to gather up the bravery to go find them.

I still have a delivery to make.

twenty-seven

happy birthday to me







happy birthday to me











happy birthday...to me.











happy birthday to me

-August- Messes

I guess there's no sense in dancing around the issue any longer.


The House is a mess, and not the kind I'm used to spending five or six hours at a time. This kind of mess is Spencer's job, when the walls start turning from maroon to eggshell and I can't find my bedroom and the kitchen's back on the first floor and there are these noises that have been coming from the East Wing and...

I don't want to talk about it.


Doc's locked herself in the basement, the House is overrun by plants, Spencer's got a wicked black eye and he looks like he's been dragged through hell. The worst part is probably that he won't tell me what's going on, but it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.

I'm scared.

This is bad. Bad bad bad bad bad. I don't think it's been like this since our first major blow out, and even then at least the boss' been able to pull everybody together. Now he spends so much time in the Wing and whatever he's doing, it's not helping (or I think it's not helping, because the rooms haven't stopped shifting and the staircases are uneven and we've all but lost access to the third floor) and the sickness is coming back. I'm pausing every few minutes writing this to puke up more of the black gunk and christ, did this stuff always taste this horrible? and Steele's on edge and Sam's muttering about her grandma and we're slipping, we're slipping and I don't know if we're going to...

This post's set to go up an hour from now in case we lose connection.

We need to get Alex and Dr. Rivers out of here. These are our problems to deal with and we've already gotten enough people tangled up in our business.

Please, stay away from the House and don't try and contact us. We'll come back online as soon as

-Spencer- Pages of Theory

Y’know, sometimes we cling to the most stupid things.

we’re all irrational and in a state of denial, because we don’t have the time to properly grieve to deal with what’s happened.

i’m really no better in that regard

but i think I’m tired of leaving my messes to be explained for me. I can do this myself. As long as I have one last fucking breath left in me, i can do this myself.

 

Page theory is something you’ve all seen thrown around occasionally; Elaine did a write-up but I felt that maybe i should be telling explaining this myself. i understand it best, after all.

Let’s get something straight first.

Page Theory isn’t mine. I wrote it, but it’s not mine.

The first time I heard anything like it was one night with Matt in the desert, looking up at the stars. It’s his. I stole it from him but that hardly matters because he’s dead, and took the credit. None of you knew him. I figured he wouldn’t have minded, wasn’t that kind of guy. Wanted to help. Always, always wanted to help. Helped me after I ran, after I saw Him for the first time in my life and didn’t feel worship, but fear. But Matt was there.

He was fucking brilliant. You all would’ve loved him. They say personality is a learned quality but Matt somehow knew how to be kind and loving and utterly insane all at once despite the cult trying to beat it out of him. He ran at twelve, straight into the fucking desert, and survived for eight years all by himself. Him and Father.

They didn’t realize how good he was; just assigned him to be a lower echelon because they were too stupid to see how smart he was.

Matt had a stutter, and they thought he was useless because of it.

They were wrong.

They were wrong about me, too; thinking I was so fucking.. .a rising star, they said, it won’t leave me alone, they won’t…

it was Matt who gave me a real, proper name

it was Matt who told me to look up at the stars and think about how the universe worked

it was Matt who told me to never stop running

it was Matt who threw me into The Path, even though he claimed to not be able to use it

it was Matt who took the easy way out

 

… Matt told me that when he was out in the desert, it was hard to imagine anyone else existed. That he thought that maybe… the known universe was like an inbox, a framework.

In that framework, your view of it, your perception of the world, like an ever-changing snapshot of a whole universe.

Then I came into the picture, and my snapshot got layered on top of Matt’s. Our snapshots, our pages, interacted with each other freely. The rock on my page was the same as the rock on his page. But sometimes, we saw Him; I’d slowly see the stars swirl into nothing and Matt would just collapse to the ground and the black shit that ran out of his nose smelled awful and then He would be gone as quickly as he arrived. That was when our pages de-synchronized, and Matt was pretty sure that was the “Tall Bastard’s” fault.

We’d sit and talk then, because we didn’t want to talk about what we’d just seen and sleep wasn’t a possibility. Matt would talk about “cities” and “towns” and even “countries” and how all these people lived together in one place, how there must be SOME out there who knew about Father, how their pages must even be different from ours, how maybe even whole worlds were different. If our experiences with Father were shared but unique, did that mean that even the people we hunted, our targets, had pages as well?

It was a month afterwards before Matt tried to flesh out the idea of Loops. this was after we had stumbled upon a small one in the desert and tried experimenting with it. It was Matt who figured out that Loops were blank until someone filled them with something. It was Matt who tried to craft without any experience, trying to write over the empty space with something new. It was Matt who theorized that the Loops were the tiny spaces in between each page, that the miniscule areas could vary in size and flexibility to revisions and changes. It was Matt that figured out that you could tie the Loop so someone and let their own mind fill the gaps like some sort of infinite feedback reacharound.

Not bad for someone who didn’t even know how to read. They never taught him how, he said, because it wasn’t worth the time.

It was the night before everything went to hell that he told me in hushed tones about what he thought about Father, how he functioned like… a nail going through all the pages at once, how a nail isn’t supposed to be through the pages at all. How he wasn’t sure how the pages and the spaces got formed in the first place, but how maybe exposure to Father caused you to form your own page, how he thought The Path was the edges of the pages, so you could hop from layer to layer with ease. How maybe just because we were told that we were to be something from birth, that didn’t mean that we had to be that.

 

… i’ve tried to build on this, tried to find some answers, but Matt’s stuff is the best framework I’ve got. It explains so much; why we all can see Him at the same time in different places, how the Path shuttles us around, how some of the stranger, supernatural happenings can, well, happen, how M’s rules don’t work for everyone. A place like the House is a complete anomaly; how can there be a constant in a blank space…?

I don’t know.

I don’t know why the forest is suddenly invading or why the Loop is suddenly on the offensive. I don’t know why people that are dead should not be here walk through the halls when I wander.

i need more time.

Fuck. I… fixing this comes first. Then Doc can cut me open and we can all celebrate with tea and crumpets.

Not much longer.

I promise.

~Steele~ “Fine.”

I woke to the screaming in my mind, the horror, the masked menace merely masquerading as myself, malignant, morphing, making me not as I was, not as I should be, making me just…not. I saw red, I saw black, I saw him, I saw Him, I saw me and I saw myself and I saw I saw I saw I saw…

I woke with ghosts of the past squirming through my mind. The dead, the dying, the killed, the killing, the ended, the end.

Needless to say, I did not sleep well. I half fell out of the bed, half dragged myself, feeling queasy, I needed something to put my mind right, to take the edge off the madness, to make me me me again…

After I found that something, things were at least not-me in a good way. I stowed my medicine away and grabbed a cigarette, sitting against my bedpost, eyes rolling back into my head, the lightness of my mind floating like fireflies, far away from the frosty frigidity freezing myself into a body and actions that were not my own. Fine. I am fine.

I was well and truly Looped. We are well and truly Looped. I feel terrible at the best of times when space and time take a leave, but this was different. More powerful. I’ve only felt something like this once before, and I died that day.

The House is was a space between the world, at its core, it was a Loop; albeit a tame one.

Not anymore. Something’s changed. The balance has been upset, and it’s upsetting our balance. It’s rejecting us, the House is turning into what it was, what it will be, what it is what it should not what…

What?

My head is…not clear. I felt myself leaving…but I refuse. I will remain here, even if it means dumbing myself with anything I can get my hands on. At least then I’ll be present, for it’s not insanity that we fear, it’s sanity, it’s when the illogical becomes the logical. I, however, am currently feeling incredibly illogical.

So at least I’ve got that going for me. As long as everything remains illogical, I’ll know I’m logical, for if the illogical seems logical then I am gone, and if I am gone then I’ll be right back in that motel room, seeing the bloodstains on the ground, my blood, his blood, smelling the palpable madness in the air, hearing His laughter in my mind, His laughter like that of a child, pure, innocent, completely oblivious to the horror He has created. He His Him he He hehehehe. And hearing your laughter. Mad, moving to mild. Ha…hahaha…huh.

If I lose myself, then I will know that I have killed. Even if at the time, I had needed to. The mask glinted ruby red, and he cried tears of blood. I couldn’t speak, my hand still around the knife which rested in his chest, but he giggled, a laugh of laughs…and then it left, leaving only him and me.

It was self-defence. It had to be. Right? You almost gutted me like a pig, but I don’t hold it against you. Every day I wonder, if I hadn't, if you had won, would you be living your life as a free man? Or would you be one of His? Still now then will be forever never ever? Would you be beneath the mask? Or would you be as I am? “Fine”?

I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I had to, though, you don’t understand. You were different, he was different, you would’ve killed me, he would’ve killed me. Maybe you should’ve, then I wouldn’t need to live with the guilt. I wouldn’t need to live at all. I could be resting, blissfully unaware, and you could live for me, like you said I should. You and your big green eyes, those eyes that haven’t left my mind for the last four years, they could be living my life, they could be living for a purpose, until they couldn’t live anymore, then we could be together again, happy, away from this bitch of a life…

But we couldn’t, could we? Live for me, you said. I can see it, and it’s dark, you said. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, it’s only blackness from the sides as your vision faded and I took off the mask so I could see your face one last time. Properly. I don’t know if you could see my face, as even without the mask you couldn’t see, as if you were peering through eyeholes in a porcelain masquerade, a harlequin, laughing and smiling until the end. Live for me, you said. And so I did, I lived. I still am. I still want to.

But streuth it’s lonely. For however long it still lasts.

Know I still think of you every fucking day. Those beautiful green eyes, behind that ghostly mask. I don’t think of you as I did that night anymore, I think of you as how you were, how we were, just two people surviving for each other.

I hope you were wrong, I hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel, with you standing there, it’s alright, come here, it’s over, come to me…

But until then, I remain in fear of the dark swarming from the edges of your vision, seeing those green summer eyes close and knowing that they weren’t going anywhere but into the ground.

I miss you. And as I sit here, the forest intruding into what was once a safe haven, the madness breaching the defences and consuming us in His hate, His red and black hate, my thoughts are always with you, they always have been, they always will be.

Until I can’t think anymore.

-Todd- Depleted

Something's been going on, and it's been affecting everybody. Yes, I hit my head. It didn't hurt right away, it goes on and off. Sometimes my eyes hurt. My vision becomes blurry and I can't tell where I am, and I have the sensation of being watched, but not by malevolent eyes, just cold, hungry, dying, eyes. There's recognition in them, though. They know me and I know them. It's hard to say if they're human, but it feels like there's humanity in them.

I sometimes lose sense of my self. I don't feel as if I really have a body, as if I'm... I don't even know. I feel like I blend right into the wall. I feel like I'm screaming and people are hearing me and they're responding but they're screaming back, and I can't understand anything that's anyone's saying. There's a constant static in my ears and sometimes it sounds like words, but no word in any language I've heard.

Then everything is silent. Everything is still. Breathing becomes a disturbance to the flow of things. I walk to try and find anyone, but if my footsteps are too loud, the whole sequence starts over. By the time I someone and start to talk to them, I can handle them for about fifteen minutes until their face starts melting away and they become lifeless corpses in my hands. By the time I come back to reality, I'm fucking crying. When it's August or Sam, it's okay. But when it happens with Spencer, I just feel insignificant. His eyes are judging. I don't know if he actually is judgmental of me, but it feels like it.

More than ever I feel like giving control to Sybil, maybe even Grosvenor. But I can't. I can't hear them anymore. I can feel them, but I can't hear them. But while I'm still here, not much to do but write.

-Doc- Whisperings

Something's not right. Something hasn't BEEN right. I haven't felt right and I know that things are not right.

I keep hearing things in the walls. The House is speaking, shifting, groaning like a great beast that's waking up from a long nap. Dr. Rivers says he can't hear the sounds (Or, well, more like he gave me a funny look when I asked about it), but he's on such a cocktail of painkillers, I envy him for being unable to hear. But I have to stay sober. I have to take care of everyone. Amanda is feeling better. Dr. Rivers will feel better soon. Alex will feel better. August looks pale, but he'll be okay. Boss will be okay. Steele is his usual self. Todd is Todd. Sam is Sam. Everyone will be okay.

There's just this constant tingling on the back of my neck, and occasionally, I see an unearthly shadow from just around a corner and my hair stands on end. I want to scream, even right now. August tells me I'm not getting enough sleep, but my god, the things I SEE when I shut my eyes...the coyotes, the raccoons, once stuffed away neatly into their bags, carefully preserved in formaldehyde, ripping open their plastic prisons to shamble across the floor on their mutilated limbs. Dozens of rats burst from mason jars, splattering sick fluid across the walls and floor, all crawling towards me, staring right at me with those dead, whitish-blue eyes. I almost fear blinking. I fear blinking and I fear sound and I fear silence and I fear the lights in the ceiling and the shadows on the floor. I want to shut myself away deep in the basement until this all blows over, but the architecture keeps shifting, and I gaze down those dark and unfamiliar corridors and it's as if they will swallow my mind, leaving my body with its mouth gaping open, empty and unsure. All I can do is stare until I realize I have been staring, then continue on with my business.

I am still clean. No drugs. None at all, this is all just me, me, me. I don't know why this is happening. Why is this happening? I don't feel well, I'm going to get a glass of water and try to forget that the world is spinning around me and how much my head throbs.

The mice have gone silent. They never go silent, I can always hear them, but they're quiet. I wonder if they all died. What a fucking pity, I wanted to cut all their tiny hearts out and see what they had hidden in their soft little bellies.

-Sam- Little things

I woke up this morning and my floor was carpeted. Not that I’m complaining or anything, it’s freaking cold in here.

The kitchen window shifted six inches to the left yesterday. There’s two extra stairs to the second floor. And the doorway into the dining room is now juuuuuust low enough for Todd to hit his head on. (Not gonna lie, that was pretty funny.)

It’s nothing big. I’m not worried about it. Everything is fine.

-Sam

~Steele~ My my, this place has really gone to shit.

Rivers is still unwell. The affected tissue has been excised, but when he's been conscious, he's still been in a lot of pain. Muscle death does so tend to do that. Lori's been discussing the options available to him...either leave it and keep as much of himself as possible, despite the pain (much like my right hand, which, well, I try not to look at too closely; the gloves that I wear are as much for my benefit as they are for the sorry bastards who have to look at me), and he'll probably be walking with a limp for the rest of his life.

The other option is amputation. Matt's still debating it, but you can see in his eyes that the pain is getting to him. God knows it gets to me. Lori's a particularly skilled bonesaw, but even she realises her limitations sometimes; it'd be much better to, if this is what we're going for, get him properly fitted for a prosthetic at a real hospital. So once he's recovered enough to travel, that's where we are heading, never to return.

Though looking at my garage, I can see the courier fleet falling into disrepair already. A rogue ivy vine has crawled in through the cracks in the walls and is propagating itself quite nicely across the southern side of the garage; I had to tear it away from the entrance to park the ute. Seriously, have you guys not paid any attention to the place in a month?

Realistically, it couldn't have grown to the size it is in that short amount of time, but time is very much relative when it comes to the House. Some sort of voodoo Loop bullshit, I suppose; makes things kind of funky. Still, come on, take care of your transport, it's the only way you guys are going to escape when things inevitably go south.

I'll do one final maintenance on the fleet then bid thee adieu. Call it a parting gift.