Memories of Ink and Loss

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

  • 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.

  • The Last Illumination of Faith

    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.

  • You Will Not Like What is Inside Me

    He calls her beautiful.

    Not in that lazy way men say it to open thighs or doors, but like it’s an act of devotion. As if he’s naming something holy. She flinches every time. In love, she softly offers a soul-deep warning—

    “You will not like what is inside me.”

    He thinks she means baggage. Trauma. A few hard years. A series of childhood events, abandonment or the wrong affection. That kind of darkness.

    He’s read the books. He knows to stay. To hold space. To be gentle. Forgiving, accepting, not judging.

    He thinks she means she cries in the shower.

    She does not correct him.

    Not yet.

    They love quietly. Not passionless—measured. She allows him inside her but only so far, so deep—each time, she wonders how long she can keep him from seeing what else dwells within.

    He doesn’t notice the tremors. The way her breath catches—not in ecstasy, but in hesitation.

    He’s in the moment.

    Distracted from his usual attentiveness by sensation and possession.

    He doesn’t know that she sees herself from outside, even now. From the angles learned in shame. From the nights, long ago when she was told she was only worth what she could perform.

    He is kind.

    Too kind.

    He tells her she makes him feel safe.

    She wants to scream.

    She knows she will hurt him. She can feel the betrayal waiting in her viscera like a knotted tentacle—one with teeth, or maybe claws. She wants to hold him, keep him close; doesn’t want to betray. She wishes she were better than she is. That’s what makes it worse.

    The wanting to be other than she is.

    She wants to love him cleanly.

    Her love is always dirty. Smeared with her history. Soaked in the sodden guilt of every version of herself she was never allowed to be.

    He finds a page ripped from a journal once. Just a phrase.

    “There are things inside me that do not want to be forgiven.”

    He doesn’t ask. She doesn’t explain.

    But that night she says it again, not as warning, but as prophecy:

    “You will not like what is inside me.”

    He tells her:

    “I don’t care.”

    “I’m not afraid.”

    “You can tell me anything.”

    She believes him. That’s the problem.

    She always believes when they tell her that.

    She tells him.

    All of it.

    Not the details. Never the details. But the hunger she was given. The cruelty she feels like love. The things she’s done in the name of not being left. The manipulations. The lies. The soft betrayals of herself.

    He doesn’t leave.

    He just goes quiet.

    A different kind of quiet.

    Later, she finds his toothbrush gone. His drawers empty. A single note on the bed, unsigned.

    It says nothing cruel.

    Just: I don’t know who that was. I don’t know who I am now.

    She doesn’t cry.

    She opens her mouth to scream, but it isn’t a scream that comes out.

    It’s something older.

    Something clawed and soft and shaped like a voice from before she ever learned words.

    “You will not like what is inside me,” she says now, to an empty room.

    No one hears or cares.

    No one ever did.