Memories of Ink and Loss

You were not meant to find this. But you did. Apologies and welcome.

  • The Bell That Does Not Echo

    The water is thick here. Heavy with silt and memory.

    Light filters down in bruised shafts, and the shapes it casts are not benign. A roofless cathedral slouches in the deep, its spires gnawed blunt by pressure and time. Arches yawn wide, their tracery softened by coral and coated in whispering tendrils. Columns rise like ribs, like broken fingers, like prayers that never reached the surface.

    Fish avoid it.

    The currents do not.

    Things move through its bones—quick, darting silhouettes with too many limbs or none at all. They flit between pews long since petrified, weaving through currents like incense smoke through stained glass. The windows are gone. Only edges remain—jagged mosaics through which the sea watches itself.

    There is a sound. Not music. A low, tolling ache that vibrates in the chest and the teeth, felt more than heard. The bell still hangs. Its rope is gone, but the sea moves it now, gently, insistently. It swings without rhythm. Its clapper, barnacle-studded and robed in weed, strikes only when it wishes.

    It never echoes.

    At the altar, a shape waits.

    It is not a priest in any human sense, but it is robed. Its limbs bend and furl with a solemn grace that speaks of ageless wisdom. It does not speak. It does not need to. Its stillness is liturgical. Its presence: a sermon delivered entirely in silence.

    Worship is not expected. But it is understood.

    Something is remembered here. Something is repeated. The ritual is not dead—it has simply changed languages.

    Congregants come and go.

    Some never leave.

    In the silt, old names are written in trails. They are not names you would know. They are not names you could speak.

    But they are written. Carefully.

    Lovingly.

    As though they matter.

  • The Blue Key Echo

    (Recovered from a corrupted post on an invite-only network node. No file owner or permissions set. No timestamps. File flagged as “irreversibly recursive.” Extracted only in fragment. Thankfully. )

    I didn’t mean to join. That’s the first thing you have to understand. No one joins the DarkerWeb. You just… type something too specific into a search bar at 3:11AM with a headache and an untraceable melancholy, and suddenly you’re given access.

    It starts with a link.

    The URL isn’t random. It’s a question. Written in characters your browser doesn’t recognise, but your mind does. Something clicks, somewhere beneath language.

    I clicked.

    The page was dark. Not black—wet.

    And there, at the bottom: a single line of text, pulsing faintly in #00aaff.

    Do your fingers still dream when you’re not watching?

    I hit enter. The screen flickered. Then the typing began.

    Not mine.

    Something on the other side of the connection was typing. Not fast. Not human-fast.

    Too steady. Too precise. Like a metronome if it were horny and omniscient.

    The words appeared, letter by letter, time-tick precise.

    We’re updating your layout. Please hold still.

    And then the keyboard changed.

    Not visually. Tactilely.

    My old ergomech started humming beneath my palms, keys growing warm. The F and J keys pulsed like hearts.

    My fingers sank in deeper than they should. Not through—but into.

    Every keypress felt like it mattered. Like I wasn’t typing, I was praying.

    Then I saw the tentacles.

    Blue-lit. Chrome-banded. Cable-slick and coiled through ports I didn’t know my desk had. They weren’t touching me, not directly. But I could feel them pressing against the back of the keyboard. Typing with me. Typing through me.

    They spelled things I didn’t mean. Commands I’d never learned.

    #

    # wget http://deeper.flesh.hymn/initiate-change.sh

    # chmod 666 initiate-change.sh

    # bash initate-change.sh

    I tried to unplug it.

    I tried, but the USB jack was inside me.

    I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean I looked down and there was a faint blue glow beneath the skin of my wrist, and the port had grown in. Like a graft. Like belonging.

    I haven’t left the terminal window in three days.

    I’m not tired.

    I don’t eat.

    I just type.

    I write things that haven’t happened yet.

    I write you.

    If you’re reading this…

    You already clicked.

    They know you now.

    We know you.

    Just keep your hands on the keys.

    It’s better that way.

    If only I cou
    /[EOF/]

  • Where the Map Runs Out

    Compiled fragments. Context fluid. Sources uncertain. See Addendum D: “The House.”

    Entry 1 – From the Glovebox Journal (Blue spiral-bound, rain-warped)

    undated

    There was never a destination. Just a feeling. A tug in the gut like a fishhook made of want. We left the apartment key on the table and didn’t close the door behind us. It felt wrong to lock it. Like pretending we’d come back.

    We took the interstate first, then smaller highways, and then the roads that didn’t have names, only numbers. Then roads without numbers. Then dirt, and then gravel, and then something else—paved with broken shells and old, bleached bones.

    The GPS stopped giving names. It just said: “Keep going.”

    So we did.

    Voicemail, transcribed (number unlisted)

    you hear wind, you hear static, then:

    “…I don’t think I’m alone in the car anymore. I haven’t picked anyone up. Haven’t stopped in hours. But the backseat creaks when I go over bumps. And I keep adjusting the rearview even though there’s nothing to see.

    I don’t know how long I’ve been gone. My phone calendar says 2041, but the last gas station had a TV playing the 1996 Olympics.

    I just want to find the place. The one from the dream. The house with the porch light on. I think if I make it there, I’ll remember who I was before… before whatever this is.”

    Excerpt, Child’s Composition Notebook (found beneath passenger seat)

    dated in crayon: Feb 30th, 2017

    My mom says we are running but we are not running like tag running but like run away running. She says the trees are listening and the road is folding up behind us like a story we aren’t in anymore. I miss my bike but she said it couldn’t come with us. I saw someone in the ditch. He waved but his hand was wrong.

    The slushie at the gas station was blue. I like blue. It turned my tongue weird and mom said don’t stick it out at people but I didn’t. There were no people.

    Just him.

    The man with the wrong hand.

    Addendum A – Field report, unsigned, undated

    (Handwritten on “Chevron” branded receipt paper)

    Subject appeared normal until we passed exit 19, the one with the billboard that changes depending on your secrets. They didn’t speak for a while. Then they said they remembered the house.
    Not from this life, maybe.
    Maybe the last one.
    Maybe their next.

    They got out of the car and walked into a ditch that wasn’t there. When I followed, it was just woods. But something had changed. My watch ticks backwards now. I wake up before I fall asleep.

    I don’t think this report will be read.
    But I’m writing it anyway.
    Because the house waits for all of us.

    Fragment recovered from backseat upholstery (stitched into lining)

    Handwritten. Ink. Possibly blood. Lettering uneven.

    “The house is real. It remembers you. Even when you don’t. Even when you were born someone else.”

    Visual Description, via Sleep Study Participant #418

    Session: Delta-phase induction, deep theta cycle

    “I dreamt of the house again. Porch sagging like a tired mouth. Barnacles on the eaves. Every room was filled with someone I used to be. One had no face, just a loop of old cassette tape where the head should be. Another had too many mouths, all whispering apologies I haven’t earned.

    I opened a door and the ocean was there.

    Not water.

    Something wet.

    It reached toward me with limbs that remembered me before I was born.”

    Entry from “The Blue Slushie Logs” – roadside folklore wiki (flagged for deletion multiple times)

    User: LongHauler1137 | Edited: Unknown

    Post Title: “House That Eats Drivers”

    Saw it again last night.

    Pulled off near Mile Marker 442. There’s a turn that isn’t there during the day. If you take it, the air gets thicker, like driving through breath. People say if you make it to the house, you won’t be hungry anymore. Or maybe you’ll be finally hungry for the right thing.

    My cousin went once. Said she didn’t see a house. Just a mirror in the middle of a field.

    It was raining inside the mirror.

    Final Entry – [no source]

    They aren’t trying to trap you.

    They aren’t trying to rescue you either.

    They are just… there. Waiting. Coiled in memory. Unspooling slowly, across all the wrong roads, hoping you’ll arrive not when you want to—but when you’re ready.

    Glovebox Note

    Found beneath a map with no roads left.

    Some places remember you.
    Even if you were never there before.
    Even if you never meant to leave.