October 20, 2011

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.