Memories of Ink and Loss

(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/]

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.

She did not come in supplication.

She came to banish it.

To cast light into the dark and watch the shadows scatter.

She thought it would fear her, the thing from the deep.

The one that was whispered about in temple ruins and salted margins.

She thought she had earned its fear.

The one that asked for no worship, and received it anyway.

Faith had never believed.

Not in gods.

Not in oceans.

Not in herself.

⸻

She stepped into the chapel at low tide.

A ruin of stone teeth and rotted pews, half-consumed by the sea.

They said the creature nested there, in silt and silence.

She brought a torch, and a blade.

Both shook in her hands.

She lit the flame.

And the sea did not recede.

Instead, it rose.

Not violently.

Not even with purpose.

Inevitable. Obvious, really.

As if it had been waiting. As if it were tired of pretending it wasn’t listening.

Something shifted behind the altar.

Wet sound. Velvet mass.

A ripple of impossible movement.

Faith lifted the torch.

It died.

Darkness pressed against her, not like an enemy, but like a hand on the shoulder of a child too frightened to sleep.

“You came,” it said, without speaking. “Yet you doubt?”

She opened her mouth—to pray? To scream? To agree?

“I am. You are. What is there to doubt?”

She wasn’t sure.

The torch hit the floor, forgotten.

⸻

The tendril brushed her cheek.

Like a blessing.

Like a benediction from a faith she never wanted.

She realised she was crying, her body’s salt becoming one with the ocean.

Crying, but not from fear.

From recognition. From finally being seen. Known.

The thing she never believed in… it had always believed in her.

It believed, and it had waited.

Not for her obedience.

For her arrival.

⸻

She did not leave the chapel.

She remains. Still, and not alone.

Her torch lies rusted at the altar.

Salt crusts its edges, like it tried to burn underwater.

She no longer brings the flame to this place.

No more does she speak of gods.

She no longer speaks in ways most people understand.

She listens. To things that do not speak in sound.

Sometimes she hums—not songs, but tones.

Low, impossible frequencies that make the bones behind your ears ache. Non-tunes that make you close your eyes and dwell inside them.

The villagers come sometimes.

They sit in the shallows, wet to the waist in the drowned pews.

They do not ask questions.

They bring no offerings.

Sometimes they cry.

Sometimes they sleep.

Sometimes they leave with their hands stained faintly blue or green, with salt rime crusting the corners of their mouths.

No one knows why.

They call her Faith, still, but not as a name.

As a condition.

A state of being one can enter, briefly, if they sit very still, and let the water touch their lips but not their tongues.

She does not pray.

She does not command. She simply is.

And that is enough.