Still can't sleep. Not even dreams
this time, just... can't sleep.
I keep looking to the puzzle, and
there's this itch in the back of my brain. This scratching on the
inside of my skull. I need to solve it. I have to solve it.
There's no release without the victory. I know I can do it. Just
staring at the words, I can feel them start to resolve in my mind,
falling into place. But I can't. I just
I've been spending a lot of time online
lately. Not much else to do in the middle of the night.
There's a lot of stories out there.
Some of them are similar to my own, but none fit quite right. And I
have no idea who is making things up and who is actually going
through this. This is real, but I don't know if I'm alone.
Survivor's guilt
That's the best guess I can come
across. The puzzle. Not this one, the one before.
There was a USB drive on my desk. I
plugged it in, and there was just a movie. About five minutes long.
Not much to it. Mostly blackness. With the occasional flash of an
image. I couldn't tell if it was a still. It last for a second or
two each time. Not estimating. Sometimes it lasted a second.
Sometimes two. The gap was fairly regular. Either three seconds or
six.
It was too exact, too regular. So, I
took it apart in windows movie maker. I couldn't look at the stills.
I wouldn't let myself. My eyes would just slide over it.
But I did the math. It worked out
pretty well. Morse code. Went online, translated the code into
normal text. It was an URL. I went to it. I wish I hadn't.
There was another movie. I feel sick
just thinking about it. The stills were taken from this one, and
showed the narrative. The whole piece flowing together seamlessly.
Kara's dead. I know it for sure.
It was a basement, poorly lit, just a
single bulb hanging from the ceiling, swaying slightly like the
metronome to a dirge. The walls were grey and brown and rusted
despite there being no touch of metal. There was a wooden table in
the middle of the room, and on that table was a cube. It looked to
be about a meter long on every edge, and the faces were carved with
some intricate pattern that I couldn't hope to replicate.
Kara was thrust forward, from behind
the camera. She was trembling, face covered in dirt, cuts along her
arms. She approached the cube and put her hands on it and
And
I don't know how it happened, but it
was like her skin started to unravel from her body. Blood began to
ooze out everywhere. She was frozen still and before her face became
unrecognizable, I could only see this open-eyed look of pure despair
locked onto her.
Then the cube rose. And it began to
revolve, turn slowly, the blood flowed into it, and it span and then
it has a thousand faces- a million faces and each was screaming, I
could hear them wailing, the agony reverberated in my bones. I tried
to look away, but there was only the cube, sections moving
independently, the cube of a thousand faces.
And then its eyes, or things like eyes,
portals into something, gazing into me, burrowing into my weakness.
It whispered, “Behold the consequences of failure.”
I jerked my head back from the
sight and the sound, as the whirling cube consumed what was left of
Kara.
