After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

 

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment. It had been stripped bare—nothing remained except a single, loosely bound manuscript placed precisely in the center of the floor.

一The Publisher 

Preface

 
This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other related materials. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the span of a decade with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________. 

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.” 

There are things that ought to remain buried. Things better left to rot beneath the withering hand of time. Truths consigned to paper, once unearthed, bring not enlightenment, but ruin. So if there existed the slightest thread of mercy within this world, these pages should have been consigned to flame long before they reached the hands of another.

Yet I could not bring myself to do it.

I have tried before. More times than I care to admit. I've stood above open flames, the embers dancing in the wind as I grasped a whole section of the records with shaking hands. Only to recoil at the last moment before the pages turned to ash. One winter, I dragged every single last item pertaining to this investigation into the alley behind my apartment building. I stood there staring for what must have been at least an hour. In the end, I brought everything back inside. 

Even now, years later, I still cannot explain fully why. What compelled me to continue with my pursuit?  Curiosity is, I think, humanity’s oldest sin. Or perhaps there is something within these pages that refuses to be forgotten. 

I have spent the better part of a decade organizing and archiving what you hold in your hands now. What began as a simple editing job slowly metastasized into something else entirely. This is not an investigation in the conventional sense. It is the culmination of fragmented accounts, many of which were half-burned, waterlogged, or otherwise rendered nearly illegible before they ever reached me. 

I have tried to preserve the integrity of the material. Yet I believe such a task has become impossible long ago. 

It began with an email. At that time, I was employed as a freelance editor. I primarily worked with academic writing, articles, field reports, and investigative journalism. Most of my clients were forgettable, just a name tied to a document. They came and passed like the changing of the seasons. Nothing more than a list of deadlines and revisions. That vanished from my life at the moment of completion.

Julian Mercer was one such client. He was an investigative journalist by trade with a knack for going to places where the world had turned a blind eye to. Always in some sort of war-torn country or out in the middle of nowhere in some remote village. He seemed almost attracted to those places in hindsight.

His messages were always brief, almost clinical. Purely professional, not even the slightest hint of personality bleeding through.  I always found that admirable. It was kind of refreshing compared to some of the people I had to deal with.  At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work. We never met in person or even called.

The first email arrived on February 16th, 2011, or at least that's how I remember it now.  It was past midnight, and I was unable to sleep; the rain was beating at the window of my apartment for hours. While the pipes groaned and hummed. It made the idea of rest almost impossible. I was halfway through reading a dissertation on post-Soviet economic reconstruction when my phone notified me of a new message.

It was an email, and I still think about what might have happened if I had simply ignored it. Maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I opened it. It stated 

 To R.Hayes,

These documents need to be looked over and reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of my friend Elias' disappearance. Therefore, I need the assistance of another to organize the accumulated information I have acquired so far.

Attached:

• Police report (Callaway)
• Local interview 1 (audio transcription available)
• Retrieved photographs
• Constructed timeline
• Research notes (partial corruption detected)
• Statement excerpts
• Recovered dive recordings — catacombs
• Diary entry (fragmented/incomplete)

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

 一 From J.Mercer

At that time, there was nothing remarkable about it. Strange certainly, but remarkable no. In my eyes, it was nothing more than a regular work email. I had edited enough fringe investigations over the years to become desensitized to eccentricity. Hyperfocused cases like this happen all the time. Ranging from cults, killers, missing persons, local disappearances, and weird rituals deep in the woods. Yet the more you dig, the more you realize how mundane those things truly are. I believed that this would be no different.

I pressed play on that first video, and it was a black screen with static washing over the video, only accompanied by sound. You could hear the soft falling of the rain and the slight sound of the wind in the background. It was 17 hours long, and it stayed like that until exactly 15 hours, 12 minutes, and 11 seconds,  in which a low metallic screeching sound could be heard. Then 15 seconds of silence, even the rain had stopped. Then a noise. At first, I mistook it for static, but the more I listened, the more it resembled breathing. As if something had dragged itself into the room. I remember replaying that section well past three in the morning. 

The boxes arrived 3 days later. It was a total of 7 unmarked boxes that were delivered without a return address. My landlord left them outside my apartment sometime around noon while I was asleep. I remember waking to the sound of him banging against the hallway radiator with a wrench while shouting that my packages were blocking the stairs again. 

The amount of materials he had sent me were overwhelming. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of burned documents fused at the edges,  Cassette tapes labeled in hurried handwriting, Hand-drawn maps of tunnel systems, Fragments of interview transcripts, Newspaper clippings dating back decades, and journals. The journals were extensive…

Some belonged to Mercer personally, while others appeared far older. Some segments were completely illegible, either from water damage or purposeful mutilation. Entire paragraphs were scratched so vigorously that the pen had torn through the very paper itself. Only to be rewritten. While other pages lay barren with nothing but phrases repeated over and over again til the ink bled through the page.

I told myself I would spend no more than 2 weeks on this.

It ended up taking me almost 2 months to get through it all. 2 whole months of endlessly scouring through those boxes upon boxes filled with nonsensical writing that seemed to give way under their own weight.  However, I seemed to get lost for hours on end within those pages. The way in which everything was so disjointed yet deeply connected. 

I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. I was ready to forget about this, honestly, weird experience.

But it wasn't that simple. I tried to exist within the mundanity of my own life. Finding the ability to be content within my own routine. Yet those endless boxes of unfolding stories created labyrinths in my mind that I was unable to escape. The thought of what truths they might hold lingered with me like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. I tried to contain such urges, my curiosity pulling at the seams of my very being. 

Once again, I was tempted. Another delivery of those same unmarked boxes accompanied by another email. I knew even then it was probably in my best interest to leave whatever was buried in those boxes there. But I did no such thing. I explored the crevices of every word that was given to me. Hanging on to every detail as if it were scripture. Determined to uncover the truth that lies here.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu
Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus
Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." 

(repeated in Mercer’s recovered notes without attribution. His underlining) 

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) 

It was even more than last time—documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of videos that were half-broken or destroyed. It was as if I was staring into an abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. 

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Their contents are better lost in the winds of time. Some of those videos were days long, filled with twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as they ventured further. The only sounds to be heard were the slow and drawn-out breathing of the recorder on the other side and the groans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it. The never-ending shifting within the darkness. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls.
 
So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. As time bled into words. It took me almost a year and a half this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Months of non-stop work as I slaved away. Only interrupted by the arrival of more boxes. First, every couple of weeks. Then once a week. Then daily. I spent all that time interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those boxes. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. I became obsessed with finishing the analysis of these records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him with an attached message. That said, he was deeply disturbed and should probably seek psychological help before publishing this. After which, without even waiting for a response, I blocked him. I didn't even want but one moment that might allow my curiosity to pull me back in.  

As relief began to wash over me, I heard the slight ping of my phone. And when I went to check, it was a single message that read  “It's gotten you too.” I blocked the number without question. I spent the rest of the day sitting there.

For almost 3 years, I ignored the constant and quite pestering curiosity. That festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. The truth was that no amount of distraction could fully calm my weary spirit.  I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. There were probably better ways to cope with these feelings, yet I'd just ignore them. 

 I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions. I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they fervently flip through the pages. Some were in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text that, in their quickness, they accidentally tore entire sections from the binding. Each interpreted it differently, holding to their own version of truth. 

We must have talked for days about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Our discussion ran on, and on, with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Something rotten on every page. After a while, my friends refused to talk about it. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of that, that sense of compulsion remained. 

Somewhere along those lines is where the nightmares began. The whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams. They demanded action to know what lies behind the next page. They screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where the nightmare ended.

It got to a point where I began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company I had long since lost. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren in my own existence. 

And that's when the phone call came. From a lady who said I was listed as an emergency contact for a J Mercer. She was informing me that Mercer had vanished. I did not respond immediately. I stood there, the phone still resting softly in my hand. 

The official reports stated that Julian Mercer had disappeared sometime during the winter of 2017. They never gave an exact date.

A body was never found.

The official explanation suggested accidental death somewhere within the catacombs. A fall, disorientation, or anything simple enough for paperwork to digest cleanly. But after everything I had read by then, simplicity no longer felt believable. 

I received that call three days after his disappearance was formally reported. Not from the police. From the landlord. The landlord sounded exhausted. Irritated more than concerned. He spoke quickly, mumbling through what I initially assumed was a rehearsed explanation regarding abandoned property and overdue payments. I remember only fragments of the conversation clearly.

There was water leaking through the ceiling. The neighbors had complained repeatedly about noise during the late hours of the night. Several rooms smelled strongly of mildew and seawater despite being nowhere near the harbor. And then almost absentmindedly, the landlord mentioned the walls.

He said Mercer had covered nearly every surface of the apartment in paper.

At first, I assumed exaggeration.

Until he emailed me the photographs.

I wish he hadn’t.

Even now, I struggle to look at them for long periods of time.

The apartment no longer resembled a living space. It looked more akin to the aftermath of prolonged captivity. Every inch of wall space had been consumed by overlapping layers of paper and annotations. Maps pinned atop photographs. Journal excerpts taped beside medical records. Newspaper clippings connected through frantic spirals of red ink. Certain sections had been scratched over so violently that the drywall itself was exposed beneath. The landlord informed me that local authorities intended to dispose of most of the material due to water damage and “unsanitary conditions.” 

Without fully understanding why, I booked passage to the island that same night. I told myself it was a professional obligation. Someone needed to preserve Mercer’s work before it vanished entirely. But if I am to be truthful, and after everything that has happened, truth may be the only thing I have left. I think some part of me had already made the decision long before then.

I needed to know how the story ended. That desire eclipsed every rational instinct I possessed. It eclipsed Fear. Even self-preservation. By then, curiosity no longer felt human. 

The voyage to the island lasted approximately eleven hours. I spent most of it contemplating what I'd find when I arrived. while the ferry groaned against violent winter waves outside. Sleep evaded me entirely during the crossing. Every time exhaustion threatened to drag me unconscious, I would hear something shifting within the hull beneath my cabin floorboards. Each time I investigated, nothing was there.

The island itself did not appear on the horizon so much as emerge gradually from the fog. Dark cliffs and blackened waters. A shoreline littered with crooked buildings pressed tightly together beneath looming hillsides. From a distance, the town resembled something preserved accidentally from another century. Narrow streets winding between towering stone structures whose architecture seemed oddly inconsistent even from afar. Certain buildings appeared connected where they should not have been. Windows were misaligned between floors. Rooflines bending at impossible angles against the mist.

I remember my first thought upon seeing it.

It looked wrong.

The townspeople unsettled me even more. Most avoided eye contact entirely. Those few who did speak answered questions with an almost rehearsed vagueness that bordered upon hostility. Several denied knowing Mercer altogether despite appearing repeatedly throughout his interview transcripts. Others claimed not to remember significant events documented extensively within the records.

One elderly fisherman insisted Mercer had never arrived on the island at all.

When I informed him I possessed photographs proving otherwise, the old man stared at me for several seconds before replying:

“Then why have I never seen him?”

At the time, I dismissed the comment entirely.

Mercer’s apartment was located above an abandoned tailor shop near the northern edge of town. The building itself leaned slightly sideways beneath decades of ocean weathering, its upper floors creaking constantly against the wind as though the structure resented remaining upright.

The landlord refused to enter alongside me. He handed me the key while standing nearly halfway down the street. I remember noticing then that several windows facing Mercer’s apartment had been boarded shut from the inside.

I asked why. The landlord only shrugged. “People kept complaining about the lights,” he said. The smell hit me almost immediately upon opening the door. Mildew. Saltwater. Rotting paper.

The entire apartment felt damp despite the radiators still functioning. Water stains crawled across the ceilings like spreading veins while towers of documents consumed nearly every available surface. The photographs he’d sent me had not exaggerated anything. If anything, they had failed to capture the sheer scale of it.

Mercer had transformed the apartment into an archive. Or perhaps a shrine. I spent nearly six hours that first night simply walking through the rooms, attempting to comprehend the volume of material surrounding me. Hundreds of tapes. Thousands of pages. Photographs stacked knee-high across entire sections of the floor. Several maps of the island are covered almost entirely in annotations. And at the center of the largest room, a massive hand-drawn diagram stretched across the wall. The catacombs. Or rather, Mercer’s interpretation of them.

The tunnels spiraled downward endlessly in overlapping layers of charcoal and ink until eventually the lines became so dense near the bottom that the structure resembled less a map and more a wound carved directly into the wall itself.

At the very center of it all, he had written one sentence.

Not in frantic handwriting.

Not chaotically.

Carefully.

Deliberately.

As though he wished those words above all else to survive.

THEY ARE NOT BELOW THE ISLAND.

The moment I read that sentence, something inside me shifted. Even now, I struggle to explain why. Perhaps because until then, despite everything, some part of me still believed this investigation possessed a rational endpoint. That eventually the contradictions would align. The disappearances would resolve. The tunnels would become understandable.

But standing there alone inside Mercer’s apartment, staring at those words surrounded by walls of unraveling thought, I felt for the very first time the overwhelming certainty that whatever I had involved myself in extended far beyond a missing journalist or abandoned orphanage.

And worse still, that Julian Mercer had understood this long before he vanished. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I worked inside the walls of that apartment. I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I opened my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was as if Mercer had known I would eventually return. As only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. I found a room that was filled with the same type of unmarked boxes he would send me mountains of. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me. 

So I threw myself into the records. It had become that which gave me meaning. This is the accumulation of everything I am and have to give. This, which you are reading, is the second draft and will be the last. As I pray, this will never see the light of day. So no soul will be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

I am no longer certain about where the narrative concludes, or if it ever truly does. Even after I have moved on from this page, it seems to follow me. This is a slow, creeping presence that stalks and consumes, taking everything before you’ve forgotten what it means to possess. These words may seem insignificant to you now, but they linger and persist, unwilling to leave you even until your final breath. As I descend further into the labyrinth, the deceptions hide within each inconsistency that plagues this text.

-R. Hayes
December 18th 2020

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment, and all that was left was what is contained within these pages.

一The Publisher

Preface

This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other forms of writing. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the past couple of years with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________.

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα

ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.”

There are things that ought remain buried. Things better left to rot lost, or forgotten. Every word contained within these pages should be left to the same fate. No good will ever come from a single thing contained within here. It has brought me nothing but sorrow and regret. Yet I can't seem to bring myself to get rid of these books that I have poured my very being into over the span of almost a decade. Still, after all that has happened to me, I am unable to remove thoughts of what lies inside here from my head.

It follows me wherever I go as fateful as my shadow. Even into my very dream. Sleep has been a friend whose company I have not known. I spend my nights dreading his arrival. As my mind has become nothing more than a vessel in which those words have found a home. Yet still I slave away endlessly working on this book to a completion that is never in sight. And there is not a day that goes by that I don't think about what could have been if I simply ignored that email. If I had never read that email, maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I open it. It stated

February 16th 2011

R.Hayes,

This document needs to be looked over and

reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of this text and therefore need the assistance of another. To organize the accumulated information I have acquired.

Attached:

Police_report_ callaway .pdf

Local _ interview_1.wav (these are the ones that were able to be digitized. Further video recording will primarily be on tape)

Retrieved_photos., pdf

Constructed _ timeline.pdf

reaserch_notes.pdf

Stament_excerpts.pdf

Recovered_ dive_ catcombs _1.wav

diary - entry.pdf

Important points, in no order:

Local interviews matter more than I thought.

At 7:32:42, [person] becomes increasingly agitated before falling silent after I mention [subject/location]. For 15 minutes. Background noise continues.

Then [brief description].

Listen to the change in tone after that point.

Something is hiding in the recesses of his mind that I will pry out.

The gap in footage from the Recovered dive catacombs 1from 12:17:52- 20:05:23

Further investigation needed

There’s also a missing section in the diary entry

The attached sections are mostly illegible material, except for repeated phrases such as blank, which appears multiple times across different dates.

Marked those sections.

Also, if [person] lied about [detail], the entire timeline after [event/time] shifts.

Review person interview first.

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

一J.Mercer

At that time, it was nothing more than a regular work email, seeing as though I had worked as an editor. It was one of my clients. A journalist by the name Julian Mercer, he wasn't really a talkative guy, and didn't really know much about him. (Now I know too much, or maybe nothing at all.) Well, he didn't know a lot about me, so I guess its fare. He was very professional, always straight to the point. Which I always thought was respectable.

At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work or speak to me. Usually, he would have me edit about some war zone he visited or an underdeveloped village he was at. He really seems to like going to places no one else wants to go. I was kind of jealous of him. Always thinking about how boring my life was compared to his. I always wondered what it was like in his shoes. (Maybe I got what I wished for.)

But this time was different; the way he was writing sounded a little more desperate, almost like he was begging me for help. He sounded more desperate, and the amount of stuff he sent me to look over was honestly crazy. It was a collection of writing, research, and videos from different people. Some were diary entries that seem to go into depth, a twisted rabbit hole of whoever this was's mind. Or essays written about the effects of sensory deprivation on the human mind in uncomfortable detail. Videos that involved endless tunnels and sounds I still think about to this day. That's not even mentioning the 100s of scattered notes and half-destroyed papers that had been delivered to my house. Those were barely legible. On top of all that were the notes and extra information that Julian had gathered himself.

It took me almost 2 weeks to get through it all. To whole weeks of endlessly scouring through those pages upon pages of nonsensical writing that seemed to collapse in on itself like that of a dying star. To be honest, I barely understood what I was reading, but for those 2 weeks it took me to finish sifting through all those papers and reading everything in the email. Not once was I able to take my eyes away. I was completely and utterly enthralled, yet also very disturbed. The way in which everything was brought together said so much, but really meant nothing, yet it deeply unsettled me. However, I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. Simply ready to forget about this honestly weird ass experience.

But it wasn't that simple; life went on like normal. The thought of those pages that formed a labyrinth in my mind still lingers like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. At this point, I was still normal. The seams of my being still hung together, stitched every so tightly. Yet there was this almost primal curiosity scratching at the back of my head. With such a simple yet deadly question, ‘why’. Those words linger in my head, weeds growing roots into my very being. Then another email came. And of its fruits I devoured. His writing is more frantic than the last time. Yet of its fruits I devoured.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu

Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus

Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." - Pardise Lost

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) It was even more than last time, pages running endlessly, documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of a video that was half broken and destroyed. It was as if I was staring into the endless abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. The email was also accompanied by the arrival. Of at least 10 boxes filled to the brim with piles of burned records, what are assumed to be stolen medical files, and more diary entries. And those god-forsaken tapes.

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Better lost the winds of time than to be looked upon by another set of human eyes. Some of those videos were days long. I'm talking about more than 24 hours of footage. Of twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as you ventured further into the maw of the abyss. The only sounds to be heard with slow and drawn out breather of the recorder on the other side and the goans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it .th never envding shifting within the darkness, the dread of what could be lurking behind the next turn. That feeling slowly rising your spine. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls, unable to remove my eyes from the screen.

So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. Page after page, hour after hour. As time bled into words. It took me almost a month this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Weeks of non-stop work as I slaved away. Interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those papers. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. As I became obsessed with finished anylizing theses records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him. Again, I went on like normal, yet was more unsettled than last time. Yet the cycle repeated itself over and over for years. As I slipped deeper into the writing itself. Until one time it became too much to bear, I became t utterly creeped out. I felt that that very grasp of myself had been wrenched from me. As I was consumed initially. Wished that no such fate would befall me again. So attached to the revised records, I add that I no longer want to be involved with this investigation.

I didn't even wait for a response; I immediately blocked him. Not wasting a moment to possibly be reeled back in, it was my belief within this that would find peace, and for a moment, the world brought me sanctuary, and I drowned myself in work and the company of my friends. To deafen the whisper that filled my ears, begging for more questions, all the same, still, asking why.

For almost 2 years, I ignored their constant pestering, while the slight hint of curiosity festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. No amount of distraction would half calm my weary spirit. I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. You know I'd usually use work to cope with this better, yet I'd just ignore it. In my line of work, I read some wild shit or even talk to some weird people.

But none of that could compare to the things that I have experienced within those records. Unable to return to civil life. I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions

I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they couldn't resist the urge to continue to read. As they fervently flip through the pages. Some are in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text, that in their quickness accidentally ripping whole pages out of the book. Each one taking from there experience a different truth to be upheld/

Man, we must have talked for a day about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Much like never-ending labryths of hallways that played for felt like forever in those god-forsaken tapes. Are dissuson ran on and on with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones. A text that caves in in on itself over and over again.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, t that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Deeply rotted in the text after a while, my friends refused to talk about. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of this, that sense of curiosity was still left in me.

‘

Some wear along those lines is where the nightmares began. The once whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams that had taken over my very being. It demands action to know what lies behind the next page. As screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. Bleeding into my very dream. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where my reality began, and the nightmare ended

It got to a point wear i began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company long since lost to the likes of me. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren and desolate with my own existence. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I open my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was julian had know i would eventually return, as only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. A mountain of boxes was delivered to me. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me.

So threw myself into it it becoming my sole reason for my existence. This is the accommodation of everything I am and have to give. Yet it has brought me nothing, this which you are reading id drcond drsft and will be the last as I pray this we never see the light of day and no one we be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

Yet you just as I did. You'll continue to turn the page. You'll pull and tear at the very fiber of this book as you dive deeper into every word. With every new page, it simply leaves you more breathless than the last. And when you depart from the book, it will simply follow you, the way the moon chases the sun until you return to its page.

Or maybe you'll be unaffected by its content, imagine it pretend fictouse. Something utterly childish and simply gibberish. Maybe you'll imagine yourself too good to be affected by something so ridiculous. And to those people truly hope it's true. I hope that it is you who simply consume the book, leaving it dry, then it is the one to consume you.

Yet its horrors may befall you years from now, within your quietest moment, when its words shall finally pierce the veil of your soul. As the very confines of your existence become uncertain. As the very fragile walls of i8dentity coming crashing down around you. This is a slow killer that stalks and takes and takes before you've forgotten what it means to have. These words might mean nothing to you now, but these words linger and follow and will not depart from you till your dying day.

Well, either way,y no matter who you are or where you are going, tread lightly as you turn through these pages. As we fall deeper into the labyrinth, the lies hide through every inconstancy that befalls this text

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment, and all that was left was what is contained within these pages.

一The Publisher

Preface

This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other forms of writing. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the past couple of years with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________.

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα

ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.”

There are things that ought remain buried. Things better left to rot lost, or forgotten. Every word contained within these pages should be left to the same fate. No good will ever come from a single thing contained within here. It has brought me nothing but sorrow and regret. Yet I can't seem to bring myself to get rid of these books that I have poured my very being into over the span of almost a decade. Still, after all that has happened to me, I am unable to remove thoughts of what lies inside here from my head.

It follows me wherever I go as fateful as my shadow. Even into my very dream. Sleep has been a friend whose company I have not known. I spend my nights dreading his arrival. As my mind has become nothing more than a vessel in which those words have found a home. Yet still I slave away endlessly working on this book to a completion that is never in sight. And there is not a day that goes by that I don't think about what could have been if I simply ignored that email. If I had never read that email, maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I open it. It stated

February 16th 2011

R.Hayes,

This document needs to be looked over and

reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of this text and therefore need the assistance of another. To organize the accumulated information I have acquired.

Attached:

Police_report_ callaway .pdf

Local _ interview_1.wav (these are the ones that were able to be digitized. Further video recording will primarily be on tape)

Retrieved_photos., pdf

Constructed _ timeline.pdf

reaserch_notes.pdf

Stament_excerpts.pdf

Recovered_ dive_ catcombs _1.wav

diary - entry.pdf

Important points, in no order:

Local interviews matter more than I thought.

At 7:32:42, [person] becomes increasingly agitated before falling silent after I mention [subject/location]. For 15 minutes. Background noise continues.

Then [brief description].

Listen to the change in tone after that point.

Something is hiding in the recesses of his mind that I will pry out.

The gap in footage from the Recovered dive catacombs 1from 12:17:52- 20:05:23

Further investigation needed

There’s also a missing section in the diary entry

The attached sections are mostly illegible material, except for repeated phrases such as blank, which appears multiple times across different dates.

Marked those sections.

Also, if [person] lied about [detail], the entire timeline after [event/time] shifts.

Review person interview first.

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

一J.Mercer

At that time, it was nothing more than a regular work email, seeing as though I had worked as an editor. It was one of my clients. A journalist by the name Julian Mercer, he wasn't really a talkative guy, and didn't really know much about him. (Now I know too much, or maybe nothing at all.) Well, he didn't know a lot about me, so I guess its fare. He was very professional, always straight to the point. Which I always thought was respectable.

At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work or speak to me. Usually, he would have me edit about some war zone he visited or an underdeveloped village he was at. He really seems to like going to places no one else wants to go. I was kind of jealous of him. Always thinking about how boring my life was compared to his. I always wondered what it was like in his shoes. (Maybe I got what I wished for.)

But this time was different; the way he was writing sounded a little more desperate, almost like he was begging me for help. He sounded more desperate, and the amount of stuff he sent me to look over was honestly crazy. It was a collection of writing, research, and videos from different people. Some were diary entries that seem to go into depth, a twisted rabbit hole of whoever this was's mind. Or essays written about the effects of sensory deprivation on the human mind in uncomfortable detail. Videos that involved endless tunnels and sounds I still think about to this day. That's not even mentioning the 100s of scattered notes and half-destroyed papers that had been delivered to my house. Those were barely legible. On top of all that were the notes and extra information that Julian had gathered himself.

It took me almost 2 weeks to get through it all. To whole weeks of endlessly scouring through those pages upon pages of nonsensical writing that seemed to collapse in on itself like that of a dying star. To be honest, I barely understood what I was reading, but for those 2 weeks it took me to finish sifting through all those papers and reading everything in the email. Not once was I able to take my eyes away. I was completely and utterly enthralled, yet also very disturbed. The way in which everything was brought together said so much, but really meant nothing, yet it deeply unsettled me. However, I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. Simply ready to forget about this honestly weird ass experience.

But it wasn't that simple; life went on like normal. The thought of those pages that formed a labyrinth in my mind still lingers like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. At this point, I was still normal. The seams of my being still hung together, stitched every so tightly. Yet there was this almost primal curiosity scratching at the back of my head. With such a simple yet deadly question, ‘why’. Those words linger in my head, weeds growing roots into my very being. Then another email came. And of its fruits I devoured. His writing is more frantic than the last time. Yet of its fruits I devoured.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu

Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus

Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." - Pardise Lost

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) It was even more than last time, pages running endlessly, documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of a video that was half broken and destroyed. It was as if I was staring into the endless abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. The email was also accompanied by the arrival. Of at least 10 boxes filled to the brim with piles of burned records, what are assumed to be stolen medical files, and more diary entries. And those god-forsaken tapes.

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Better lost the winds of time than to be looked upon by another set of human eyes. Some of those videos were days long. I'm talking about more than 24 hours of footage. Of twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as you ventured further into the maw of the abyss. The only sounds to be heard with slow and drawn out breather of the recorder on the other side and the goans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it .th never envding shifting within the darkness, the dread of what could be lurking behind the next turn. That feeling slowly rising your spine. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls, unable to remove my eyes from the screen.

So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. Page after page, hour after hour. As time bled into words. It took me almost a month this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Weeks of non-stop work as I slaved away. Interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those papers. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. As I became obsessed with finished anylizing theses records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him. Again, I went on like normal, yet was more unsettled than last time. Yet the cycle repeated itself over and over for years. As I slipped deeper into the writing itself. Until one time it became too much to bear, I became t utterly creeped out. I felt that that very grasp of myself had been wrenched from me. As I was consumed initially. Wished that no such fate would befall me again. So attached to the revised records, I add that I no longer want to be involved with this investigation.

I didn't even wait for a response; I immediately blocked him. Not wasting a moment to possibly be reeled back in, it was my belief within this that would find peace, and for a moment, the world brought me sanctuary, and I drowned myself in work and the company of my friends. To deafen the whisper that filled my ears, begging for more questions, all the same, still, asking why.

For almost 2 years, I ignored their constant pestering, while the slight hint of curiosity festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. No amount of distraction would half calm my weary spirit. I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. You know I'd usually use work to cope with this better, yet I'd just ignore it. In my line of work, I read some wild shit or even talk to some weird people.

But none of that could compare to the things that I have experienced within those records. Unable to return to civil life. I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions

I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they couldn't resist the urge to continue to read. As they fervently flip through the pages. Some are in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text, that in their quickness accidentally ripping whole pages out of the book. Each one taking from there experience a different truth to be upheld/

Man, we must have talked for a day about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Much like never-ending labryths of hallways that played for felt like forever in those god-forsaken tapes. Are dissuson ran on and on with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones. A text that caves in in on itself over and over again.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, t that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Deeply rotted in the text after a while, my friends refused to talk about. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of this, that sense of curiosity was still left in me.

‘

Some wear along those lines is where the nightmares began. The once whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams that had taken over my very being. It demands action to know what lies behind the next page. As screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. Bleeding into my very dream. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where my reality began, and the nightmare ended

It got to a point wear i began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company long since lost to the likes of me. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren and desolate with my own existence. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I open my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was julian had know i would eventually return, as only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. A mountain of boxes was delivered to me. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me.

So threw myself into it it becoming my sole reason for my existence. This is the accommodation of everything I am and have to give. Yet it has brought me nothing, this which you are reading id drcond drsft and will be the last as I pray this we never see the light of day and no one we be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

Yet you just as I did. You'll continue to turn the page. You'll pull and tear at the very fiber of this book as you dive deeper into every word. With every new page, it simply leaves you more breathless than the last. And when you depart from the book, it will simply follow you, the way the moon chases the sun until you return to its page.

Or maybe you'll be unaffected by its content, imagine it pretend fictouse. Something utterly childish and simply gibberish. Maybe you'll imagine yourself too good to be affected by something so ridiculous. And to those people truly hope it's true. I hope that it is you who simply consume the book, leaving it dry, then it is the one to consume you.

Yet its horrors may befall you years from now, within your quietest moment, when its words shall finally pierce the veil of your soul. As the very confines of your existence become uncertain. As the very fragile walls of i8dentity coming crashing down around you. This is a slow killer that stalks and takes and takes before you've forgotten what it means to have. These words might mean nothing to you now, but these words linger and follow and will not depart from you till your dying day.

Well, either way,y no matter who you are or where you are going, tread lightly as you turn through these pages. As we fall deeper into the labyrinth, the lies hide through every inconstancy that befalls this text

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment, and all that was left was what is contained within these pages.

一The Publisher

Preface

This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other forms of writing. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the past couple of years with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________.

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα

ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.”

There are things that ought remain buried. Things better left to rot lost, or forgotten. Every word contained within these pages should be left to the same fate. No good will ever come from a single thing contained within here. It has brought me nothing but sorrow and regret. Yet I can't seem to bring myself to get rid of these books that I have poured my very being into over the span of almost a decade. Still, after all that has happened to me, I am unable to remove thoughts of what lies inside here from my head.

It follows me wherever I go as fateful as my shadow. Even into my very dream. Sleep has been a friend whose company I have not known. I spend my nights dreading his arrival. As my mind has become nothing more than a vessel in which those words have found a home. Yet still I slave away endlessly working on this book to a completion that is never in sight. And there is not a day that goes by that I don't think about what could have been if I simply ignored that email. If I had never read that email, maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I open it. It stated

February 16th 2011

R.Hayes,

This document needs to be looked over and

reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of this text and therefore need the assistance of another. To organize the accumulated information I have acquired.

Attached:

Police_report_ callaway .pdf

Local _ interview_1.wav (these are the ones that were able to be digitized. Further video recording will primarily be on tape)

Retrieved_photos., pdf

Constructed _ timeline.pdf

reaserch_notes.pdf

Stament_excerpts.pdf

Recovered_ dive_ catcombs _1.wav

diary - entry.pdf

Important points, in no order:

Local interviews matter more than I thought.

At 7:32:42, [person] becomes increasingly agitated before falling silent after I mention [subject/location]. For 15 minutes. Background noise continues.

Then [brief description].

Listen to the change in tone after that point.

Something is hiding in the recesses of his mind that I will pry out.

The gap in footage from the Recovered dive catacombs 1from 12:17:52- 20:05:23

Further investigation needed

There’s also a missing section in the diary entry

The attached sections are mostly illegible material, except for repeated phrases such as blank, which appears multiple times across different dates.

Marked those sections.

Also, if [person] lied about [detail], the entire timeline after [event/time] shifts.

Review person interview first.

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

一J.Mercer

At that time, it was nothing more than a regular work email, seeing as though I had worked as an editor. It was one of my clients. A journalist by the name Julian Mercer, he wasn't really a talkative guy, and didn't really know much about him. (Now I know too much, or maybe nothing at all.) Well, he didn't know a lot about me, so I guess its fare. He was very professional, always straight to the point. Which I always thought was respectable.

At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work or speak to me. Usually, he would have me edit about some war zone he visited or an underdeveloped village he was at. He really seems to like going to places no one else wants to go. I was kind of jealous of him. Always thinking about how boring my life was compared to his. I always wondered what it was like in his shoes. (Maybe I got what I wished for.)

But this time was different; the way he was writing sounded a little more desperate, almost like he was begging me for help. He sounded more desperate, and the amount of stuff he sent me to look over was honestly crazy. It was a collection of writing, research, and videos from different people. Some were diary entries that seem to go into depth, a twisted rabbit hole of whoever this was's mind. Or essays written about the effects of sensory deprivation on the human mind in uncomfortable detail. Videos that involved endless tunnels and sounds I still think about to this day. That's not even mentioning the 100s of scattered notes and half-destroyed papers that had been delivered to my house. Those were barely legible. On top of all that were the notes and extra information that Julian had gathered himself.

It took me almost 2 weeks to get through it all. To whole weeks of endlessly scouring through those pages upon pages of nonsensical writing that seemed to collapse in on itself like that of a dying star. To be honest, I barely understood what I was reading, but for those 2 weeks it took me to finish sifting through all those papers and reading everything in the email. Not once was I able to take my eyes away. I was completely and utterly enthralled, yet also very disturbed. The way in which everything was brought together said so much, but really meant nothing, yet it deeply unsettled me. However, I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. Simply ready to forget about this honestly weird ass experience.

But it wasn't that simple; life went on like normal. The thought of those pages that formed a labyrinth in my mind still lingers like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. At this point, I was still normal. The seams of my being still hung together, stitched every so tightly. Yet there was this almost primal curiosity scratching at the back of my head. With such a simple yet deadly question, ‘why’. Those words linger in my head, weeds growing roots into my very being. Then another email came. And of its fruits I devoured. His writing is more frantic than the last time. Yet of its fruits I devoured.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu

Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus

Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." - Pardise Lost

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) It was even more than last time, pages running endlessly, documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of a video that was half broken and destroyed. It was as if I was staring into the endless abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. The email was also accompanied by the arrival. Of at least 10 boxes filled to the brim with piles of burned records, what are assumed to be stolen medical files, and more diary entries. And those god-forsaken tapes.

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Better lost the winds of time than to be looked upon by another set of human eyes. Some of those videos were days long. I'm talking about more than 24 hours of footage. Of twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as you ventured further into the maw of the abyss. The only sounds to be heard with slow and drawn out breather of the recorder on the other side and the goans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it .th never envding shifting within the darkness, the dread of what could be lurking behind the next turn. That feeling slowly rising your spine. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls, unable to remove my eyes from the screen.

So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. Page after page, hour after hour. As time bled into words. It took me almost a month this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Weeks of non-stop work as I slaved away. Interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those papers. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. As I became obsessed with finished anylizing theses records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him. Again, I went on like normal, yet was more unsettled than last time. Yet the cycle repeated itself over and over for years. As I slipped deeper into the writing itself. Until one time it became too much to bear, I became t utterly creeped out. I felt that that very grasp of myself had been wrenched from me. As I was consumed initially. Wished that no such fate would befall me again. So attached to the revised records, I add that I no longer want to be involved with this investigation.

I didn't even wait for a response; I immediately blocked him. Not wasting a moment to possibly be reeled back in, it was my belief within this that would find peace, and for a moment, the world brought me sanctuary, and I drowned myself in work and the company of my friends. To deafen the whisper that filled my ears, begging for more questions, all the same, still, asking why.

For almost 2 years, I ignored their constant pestering, while the slight hint of curiosity festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. No amount of distraction would half calm my weary spirit. I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. You know I'd usually use work to cope with this better, yet I'd just ignore it. In my line of work, I read some wild shit or even talk to some weird people.

But none of that could compare to the things that I have experienced within those records. Unable to return to civil life. I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions

I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they couldn't resist the urge to continue to read. As they fervently flip through the pages. Some are in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text, that in their quickness accidentally ripping whole pages out of the book. Each one taking from there experience a different truth to be upheld/

Man, we must have talked for a day about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Much like never-ending labryths of hallways that played for felt like forever in those god-forsaken tapes. Are dissuson ran on and on with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones. A text that caves in in on itself over and over again.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, t that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Deeply rotted in the text after a while, my friends refused to talk about. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of this, that sense of curiosity was still left in me.

‘

Some wear along those lines is where the nightmares began. The once whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams that had taken over my very being. It demands action to know what lies behind the next page. As screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. Bleeding into my very dream. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where my reality began, and the nightmare ended

It got to a point wear i began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company long since lost to the likes of me. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren and desolate with my own existence. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I open my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was julian had know i would eventually return, as only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. A mountain of boxes was delivered to me. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me.

So threw myself into it it becoming my sole reason for my existence. This is the accommodation of everything I am and have to give. Yet it has brought me nothing, this which you are reading id drcond drsft and will be the last as I pray this we never see the light of day and no one we be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

Yet you just as I did. You'll continue to turn the page. You'll pull and tear at the very fiber of this book as you dive deeper into every word. With every new page, it simply leaves you more breathless than the last. And when you depart from the book, it will simply follow you, the way the moon chases the sun until you return to its page.

Or maybe you'll be unaffected by its content, imagine it pretend fictouse. Something utterly childish and simply gibberish. Maybe you'll imagine yourself too good to be affected by something so ridiculous. And to those people truly hope it's true. I hope that it is you who simply consume the book, leaving it dry, then it is the one to consume you.

Yet its horrors may befall you years from now, within your quietest moment, when its words shall finally pierce the veil of your soul. As the very confines of your existence become uncertain. As the very fragile walls of i8dentity coming crashing down around you. This is a slow killer that stalks and takes and takes before you've forgotten what it means to have. These words might mean nothing to you now, but these words linger and follow and will not depart from you till your dying day.

Well, either way,y no matter who you are or where you are going, tread lightly as you turn through these pages. As we fall deeper into the labyrinth, the lies hide through every inconstancy that befalls this text

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment, and all that was left was what is contained within these pages.

一The Publisher

Preface

This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other forms of writing. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the past couple of years with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________.

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα

ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.”

There are things that ought remain buried. Things better left to rot lost, or forgotten. Every word contained within these pages should be left to the same fate. No good will ever come from a single thing contained within here. It has brought me nothing but sorrow and regret. Yet I can't seem to bring myself to get rid of these books that I have poured my very being into over the span of almost a decade. Still, after all that has happened to me, I am unable to remove thoughts of what lies inside here from my head.

It follows me wherever I go as fateful as my shadow. Even into my very dream. Sleep has been a friend whose company I have not known. I spend my nights dreading his arrival. As my mind has become nothing more than a vessel in which those words have found a home. Yet still I slave away endlessly working on this book to a completion that is never in sight. And there is not a day that goes by that I don't think about what could have been if I simply ignored that email. If I had never read that email, maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I open it. It stated

February 16th 2011

R.Hayes,

This document needs to be looked over and

reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of this text and therefore need the assistance of another. To organize the accumulated information I have acquired.

Attached:

Police_report_ callaway .pdf

Local _ interview_1.wav (these are the ones that were able to be digitized. Further video recording will primarily be on tape)

Retrieved_photos., pdf

Constructed _ timeline.pdf

reaserch_notes.pdf

Stament_excerpts.pdf

Recovered_ dive_ catcombs _1.wav

diary - entry.pdf

Important points, in no order:

Local interviews matter more than I thought.

At 7:32:42, [person] becomes increasingly agitated before falling silent after I mention [subject/location]. For 15 minutes. Background noise continues.

Then [brief description].

Listen to the change in tone after that point.

Something is hiding in the recesses of his mind that I will pry out.

The gap in footage from the Recovered dive catacombs 1from 12:17:52- 20:05:23

Further investigation needed

There’s also a missing section in the diary entry

The attached sections are mostly illegible material, except for repeated phrases such as blank, which appears multiple times across different dates.

Marked those sections.

Also, if [person] lied about [detail], the entire timeline after [event/time] shifts.

Review person interview first.

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

一J.Mercer

At that time, it was nothing more than a regular work email, seeing as though I had worked as an editor. It was one of my clients. A journalist by the name Julian Mercer, he wasn't really a talkative guy, and didn't really know much about him. (Now I know too much, or maybe nothing at all.) Well, he didn't know a lot about me, so I guess its fare. He was very professional, always straight to the point. Which I always thought was respectable.

At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work or speak to me. Usually, he would have me edit about some war zone he visited or an underdeveloped village he was at. He really seems to like going to places no one else wants to go. I was kind of jealous of him. Always thinking about how boring my life was compared to his. I always wondered what it was like in his shoes. (Maybe I got what I wished for.)

But this time was different; the way he was writing sounded a little more desperate, almost like he was begging me for help. He sounded more desperate, and the amount of stuff he sent me to look over was honestly crazy. It was a collection of writing, research, and videos from different people. Some were diary entries that seem to go into depth, a twisted rabbit hole of whoever this was's mind. Or essays written about the effects of sensory deprivation on the human mind in uncomfortable detail. Videos that involved endless tunnels and sounds I still think about to this day. That's not even mentioning the 100s of scattered notes and half-destroyed papers that had been delivered to my house. Those were barely legible. On top of all that were the notes and extra information that Julian had gathered himself.

It took me almost 2 weeks to get through it all. To whole weeks of endlessly scouring through those pages upon pages of nonsensical writing that seemed to collapse in on itself like that of a dying star. To be honest, I barely understood what I was reading, but for those 2 weeks it took me to finish sifting through all those papers and reading everything in the email. Not once was I able to take my eyes away. I was completely and utterly enthralled, yet also very disturbed. The way in which everything was brought together said so much, but really meant nothing, yet it deeply unsettled me. However, I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. Simply ready to forget about this honestly weird ass experience.

But it wasn't that simple; life went on like normal. The thought of those pages that formed a labyrinth in my mind still lingers like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. At this point, I was still normal. The seams of my being still hung together, stitched every so tightly. Yet there was this almost primal curiosity scratching at the back of my head. With such a simple yet deadly question, ‘why’. Those words linger in my head, weeds growing roots into my very being. Then another email came. And of its fruits I devoured. His writing is more frantic than the last time. Yet of its fruits I devoured.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu

Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus

Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." - Pardise Lost

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) It was even more than last time, pages running endlessly, documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of a video that was half broken and destroyed. It was as if I was staring into the endless abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. The email was also accompanied by the arrival. Of at least 10 boxes filled to the brim with piles of burned records, what are assumed to be stolen medical files, and more diary entries. And those god-forsaken tapes.

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Better lost the winds of time than to be looked upon by another set of human eyes. Some of those videos were days long. I'm talking about more than 24 hours of footage. Of twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as you ventured further into the maw of the abyss. The only sounds to be heard with slow and drawn out breather of the recorder on the other side and the goans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it .th never envding shifting within the darkness, the dread of what could be lurking behind the next turn. That feeling slowly rising your spine. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls, unable to remove my eyes from the screen.

So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. Page after page, hour after hour. As time bled into words. It took me almost a month this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Weeks of non-stop work as I slaved away. Interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those papers. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. As I became obsessed with finished anylizing theses records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him. Again, I went on like normal, yet was more unsettled than last time. Yet the cycle repeated itself over and over for years. As I slipped deeper into the writing itself. Until one time it became too much to bear, I became t utterly creeped out. I felt that that very grasp of myself had been wrenched from me. As I was consumed initially. Wished that no such fate would befall me again. So attached to the revised records, I add that I no longer want to be involved with this investigation.

I didn't even wait for a response; I immediately blocked him. Not wasting a moment to possibly be reeled back in, it was my belief within this that would find peace, and for a moment, the world brought me sanctuary, and I drowned myself in work and the company of my friends. To deafen the whisper that filled my ears, begging for more questions, all the same, still, asking why.

For almost 2 years, I ignored their constant pestering, while the slight hint of curiosity festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. No amount of distraction would half calm my weary spirit. I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. You know I'd usually use work to cope with this better, yet I'd just ignore it. In my line of work, I read some wild shit or even talk to some weird people.

But none of that could compare to the things that I have experienced within those records. Unable to return to civil life. I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions

I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they couldn't resist the urge to continue to read. As they fervently flip through the pages. Some are in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text, that in their quickness accidentally ripping whole pages out of the book. Each one taking from there experience a different truth to be upheld/

Man, we must have talked for a day about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Much like never-ending labryths of hallways that played for felt like forever in those god-forsaken tapes. Are dissuson ran on and on with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones. A text that caves in in on itself over and over again.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, t that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Deeply rotted in the text after a while, my friends refused to talk about. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of this, that sense of curiosity was still left in me.

‘

Some wear along those lines is where the nightmares began. The once whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams that had taken over my very being. It demands action to know what lies behind the next page. As screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. Bleeding into my very dream. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where my reality began, and the nightmare ended

It got to a point wear i began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company long since lost to the likes of me. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren and desolate with my own existence. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I open my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was julian had know i would eventually return, as only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. A mountain of boxes was delivered to me. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me.

So threw myself into it it becoming my sole reason for my existence. This is the accommodation of everything I am and have to give. Yet it has brought me nothing, this which you are reading id drcond drsft and will be the last as I pray this we never see the light of day and no one we be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

Yet you just as I did. You'll continue to turn the page. You'll pull and tear at the very fiber of this book as you dive deeper into every word. With every new page, it simply leaves you more breathless than the last. And when you depart from the book, it will simply follow you, the way the moon chases the sun until you return to its page.

Or maybe you'll be unaffected by its content, imagine it pretend fictouse. Something utterly childish and simply gibberish. Maybe you'll imagine yourself too good to be affected by something so ridiculous. And to those people truly hope it's true. I hope that it is you who simply consume the book, leaving it dry, then it is the one to consume you.

Yet its horrors may befall you years from now, within your quietest moment, when its words shall finally pierce the veil of your soul. As the very confines of your existence become uncertain. As the very fragile walls of i8dentity coming crashing down around you. This is a slow killer that stalks and takes and takes before you've forgotten what it means to have. These words might mean nothing to you now, but these words linger and follow and will not depart from you till your dying day.

Well, either way,y no matter who you are or where you are going, tread lightly as you turn through these pages. As we fall deeper into the labyrinth, the lies hide through every inconstancy that befalls this text

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment, and all that was left was what is contained within these pages.

一The Publisher

Preface

This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other forms of writing. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the past couple of years with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________.

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα

ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.”

There are things that ought remain buried. Things better left to rot lost, or forgotten. Every word contained within these pages should be left to the same fate. No good will ever come from a single thing contained within here. It has brought me nothing but sorrow and regret. Yet I can't seem to bring myself to get rid of these books that I have poured my very being into over the span of almost a decade. Still, after all that has happened to me, I am unable to remove thoughts of what lies inside here from my head.

It follows me wherever I go as fateful as my shadow. Even into my very dream. Sleep has been a friend whose company I have not known. I spend my nights dreading his arrival. As my mind has become nothing more than a vessel in which those words have found a home. Yet still I slave away endlessly working on this book to a completion that is never in sight. And there is not a day that goes by that I don't think about what could have been if I simply ignored that email. If I had never read that email, maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I open it. It stated

February 16th 2011

R.Hayes,

This document needs to be looked over and

reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of this text and therefore need the assistance of another. To organize the accumulated information I have acquired.

Attached:

Police_report_ callaway .pdf

Local _ interview_1.wav (these are the ones that were able to be digitized. Further video recording will primarily be on tape)

Retrieved_photos., pdf

Constructed _ timeline.pdf

reaserch_notes.pdf

Stament_excerpts.pdf

Recovered_ dive_ catcombs _1.wav

diary - entry.pdf

Important points, in no order:

Local interviews matter more than I thought.

At 7:32:42, [person] becomes increasingly agitated before falling silent after I mention [subject/location]. For 15 minutes. Background noise continues.

Then [brief description].

Listen to the change in tone after that point.

Something is hiding in the recesses of his mind that I will pry out.

The gap in footage from the Recovered dive catacombs 1from 12:17:52- 20:05:23

Further investigation needed

There’s also a missing section in the diary entry

The attached sections are mostly illegible material, except for repeated phrases such as blank, which appears multiple times across different dates.

Marked those sections.

Also, if [person] lied about [detail], the entire timeline after [event/time] shifts.

Review person interview first.

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

一J.Mercer

At that time, it was nothing more than a regular work email, seeing as though I had worked as an editor. It was one of my clients. A journalist by the name Julian Mercer, he wasn't really a talkative guy, and didn't really know much about him. (Now I know too much, or maybe nothing at all.) Well, he didn't know a lot about me, so I guess its fare. He was very professional, always straight to the point. Which I always thought was respectable.

At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work or speak to me. Usually, he would have me edit about some war zone he visited or an underdeveloped village he was at. He really seems to like going to places no one else wants to go. I was kind of jealous of him. Always thinking about how boring my life was compared to his. I always wondered what it was like in his shoes. (Maybe I got what I wished for.)

But this time was different; the way he was writing sounded a little more desperate, almost like he was begging me for help. He sounded more desperate, and the amount of stuff he sent me to look over was honestly crazy. It was a collection of writing, research, and videos from different people. Some were diary entries that seem to go into depth, a twisted rabbit hole of whoever this was's mind. Or essays written about the effects of sensory deprivation on the human mind in uncomfortable detail. Videos that involved endless tunnels and sounds I still think about to this day. That's not even mentioning the 100s of scattered notes and half-destroyed papers that had been delivered to my house. Those were barely legible. On top of all that were the notes and extra information that Julian had gathered himself.

It took me almost 2 weeks to get through it all. To whole weeks of endlessly scouring through those pages upon pages of nonsensical writing that seemed to collapse in on itself like that of a dying star. To be honest, I barely understood what I was reading, but for those 2 weeks it took me to finish sifting through all those papers and reading everything in the email. Not once was I able to take my eyes away. I was completely and utterly enthralled, yet also very disturbed. The way in which everything was brought together said so much, but really meant nothing, yet it deeply unsettled me. However, I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. Simply ready to forget about this honestly weird ass experience.

But it wasn't that simple; life went on like normal. The thought of those pages that formed a labyrinth in my mind still lingers like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. At this point, I was still normal. The seams of my being still hung together, stitched every so tightly. Yet there was this almost primal curiosity scratching at the back of my head. With such a simple yet deadly question, ‘why’. Those words linger in my head, weeds growing roots into my very being. Then another email came. And of its fruits I devoured. His writing is more frantic than the last time. Yet of its fruits I devoured.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu

Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus

Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." - Pardise Lost

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) It was even more than last time, pages running endlessly, documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of a video that was half broken and destroyed. It was as if I was staring into the endless abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. The email was also accompanied by the arrival. Of at least 10 boxes filled to the brim with piles of burned records, what are assumed to be stolen medical files, and more diary entries. And those god-forsaken tapes.

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Better lost the winds of time than to be looked upon by another set of human eyes. Some of those videos were days long. I'm talking about more than 24 hours of footage. Of twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as you ventured further into the maw of the abyss. The only sounds to be heard with slow and drawn out breather of the recorder on the other side and the goans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it .th never envding shifting within the darkness, the dread of what could be lurking behind the next turn. That feeling slowly rising your spine. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls, unable to remove my eyes from the screen.

So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. Page after page, hour after hour. As time bled into words. It took me almost a month this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Weeks of non-stop work as I slaved away. Interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those papers. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. As I became obsessed with finished anylizing theses records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him. Again, I went on like normal, yet was more unsettled than last time. Yet the cycle repeated itself over and over for years. As I slipped deeper into the writing itself. Until one time it became too much to bear, I became t utterly creeped out. I felt that that very grasp of myself had been wrenched from me. As I was consumed initially. Wished that no such fate would befall me again. So attached to the revised records, I add that I no longer want to be involved with this investigation.

I didn't even wait for a response; I immediately blocked him. Not wasting a moment to possibly be reeled back in, it was my belief within this that would find peace, and for a moment, the world brought me sanctuary, and I drowned myself in work and the company of my friends. To deafen the whisper that filled my ears, begging for more questions, all the same, still, asking why.

For almost 2 years, I ignored their constant pestering, while the slight hint of curiosity festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. No amount of distraction would half calm my weary spirit. I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. You know I'd usually use work to cope with this better, yet I'd just ignore it. In my line of work, I read some wild shit or even talk to some weird people.

But none of that could compare to the things that I have experienced within those records. Unable to return to civil life. I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions

I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they couldn't resist the urge to continue to read. As they fervently flip through the pages. Some are in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text, that in their quickness accidentally ripping whole pages out of the book. Each one taking from there experience a different truth to be upheld/

Man, we must have talked for a day about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Much like never-ending labryths of hallways that played for felt like forever in those god-forsaken tapes. Are dissuson ran on and on with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones. A text that caves in in on itself over and over again.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, t that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Deeply rotted in the text after a while, my friends refused to talk about. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of this, that sense of curiosity was still left in me.

‘

Some wear along those lines is where the nightmares began. The once whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams that had taken over my very being. It demands action to know what lies behind the next page. As screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. Bleeding into my very dream. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where my reality began, and the nightmare ended

It got to a point wear i began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company long since lost to the likes of me. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren and desolate with my own existence. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I open my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was julian had know i would eventually return, as only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. A mountain of boxes was delivered to me. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me.

So threw myself into it it becoming my sole reason for my existence. This is the accommodation of everything I am and have to give. Yet it has brought me nothing, this which you are reading id drcond drsft and will be the last as I pray this we never see the light of day and no one we be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

Yet you just as I did. You'll continue to turn the page. You'll pull and tear at the very fiber of this book as you dive deeper into every word. With every new page, it simply leaves you more breathless than the last. And when you depart from the book, it will simply follow you, the way the moon chases the sun until you return to its page.

Or maybe you'll be unaffected by its content, imagine it pretend fictouse. Something utterly childish and simply gibberish. Maybe you'll imagine yourself too good to be affected by something so ridiculous. And to those people truly hope it's true. I hope that it is you who simply consume the book, leaving it dry, then it is the one to consume you.

Yet its horrors may befall you years from now, within your quietest moment, when its words shall finally pierce the veil of your soul. As the very confines of your existence become uncertain. As the very fragile walls of i8dentity coming crashing down around you. This is a slow killer that stalks and takes and takes before you've forgotten what it means to have. These words might mean nothing to you now, but these words linger and follow and will not depart from you till your dying day.

Well, either way,y no matter who you are or where you are going, tread lightly as you turn through these pages. As we fall deeper into the labyrinth, the lies hide through every inconstancy that befalls this text

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment, and all that was left was what is contained within these pages.

一The Publisher

Preface

This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other forms of writing. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the past couple of years with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________.

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα

ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.”

There are things that ought remain buried. Things better left to rot lost, or forgotten. Every word contained within these pages should be left to the same fate. No good will ever come from a single thing contained within here. It has brought me nothing but sorrow and regret. Yet I can't seem to bring myself to get rid of these books that I have poured my very being into over the span of almost a decade. Still, after all that has happened to me, I am unable to remove thoughts of what lies inside here from my head.

It follows me wherever I go as fateful as my shadow. Even into my very dream. Sleep has been a friend whose company I have not known. I spend my nights dreading his arrival. As my mind has become nothing more than a vessel in which those words have found a home. Yet still I slave away endlessly working on this book to a completion that is never in sight. And there is not a day that goes by that I don't think about what could have been if I simply ignored that email. If I had never read that email, maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I open it. It stated

February 16th 2011

R.Hayes,

This document needs to be looked over and

reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of this text and therefore need the assistance of another. To organize the accumulated information I have acquired.

Attached:

Police_report_ callaway .pdf

Local _ interview_1.wav (these are the ones that were able to be digitized. Further video recording will primarily be on tape)

Retrieved_photos., pdf

Constructed _ timeline.pdf

reaserch_notes.pdf

Stament_excerpts.pdf

Recovered_ dive_ catcombs _1.wav

diary - entry.pdf

Important points, in no order:

Local interviews matter more than I thought.

At 7:32:42, [person] becomes increasingly agitated before falling silent after I mention [subject/location]. For 15 minutes. Background noise continues.

Then [brief description].

Listen to the change in tone after that point.

Something is hiding in the recesses of his mind that I will pry out.

The gap in footage from the Recovered dive catacombs 1from 12:17:52- 20:05:23

Further investigation needed

There’s also a missing section in the diary entry

The attached sections are mostly illegible material, except for repeated phrases such as blank, which appears multiple times across different dates.

Marked those sections.

Also, if [person] lied about [detail], the entire timeline after [event/time] shifts.

Review person interview first.

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

一J.Mercer

At that time, it was nothing more than a regular work email, seeing as though I had worked as an editor. It was one of my clients. A journalist by the name Julian Mercer, he wasn't really a talkative guy, and didn't really know much about him. (Now I know too much, or maybe nothing at all.) Well, he didn't know a lot about me, so I guess its fare. He was very professional, always straight to the point. Which I always thought was respectable.

At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work or speak to me. Usually, he would have me edit about some war zone he visited or an underdeveloped village he was at. He really seems to like going to places no one else wants to go. I was kind of jealous of him. Always thinking about how boring my life was compared to his. I always wondered what it was like in his shoes. (Maybe I got what I wished for.)

But this time was different; the way he was writing sounded a little more desperate, almost like he was begging me for help. He sounded more desperate, and the amount of stuff he sent me to look over was honestly crazy. It was a collection of writing, research, and videos from different people. Some were diary entries that seem to go into depth, a twisted rabbit hole of whoever this was's mind. Or essays written about the effects of sensory deprivation on the human mind in uncomfortable detail. Videos that involved endless tunnels and sounds I still think about to this day. That's not even mentioning the 100s of scattered notes and half-destroyed papers that had been delivered to my house. Those were barely legible. On top of all that were the notes and extra information that Julian had gathered himself.

It took me almost 2 weeks to get through it all. To whole weeks of endlessly scouring through those pages upon pages of nonsensical writing that seemed to collapse in on itself like that of a dying star. To be honest, I barely understood what I was reading, but for those 2 weeks it took me to finish sifting through all those papers and reading everything in the email. Not once was I able to take my eyes away. I was completely and utterly enthralled, yet also very disturbed. The way in which everything was brought together said so much, but really meant nothing, yet it deeply unsettled me. However, I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. Simply ready to forget about this honestly weird ass experience.

But it wasn't that simple; life went on like normal. The thought of those pages that formed a labyrinth in my mind still lingers like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. At this point, I was still normal. The seams of my being still hung together, stitched every so tightly. Yet there was this almost primal curiosity scratching at the back of my head. With such a simple yet deadly question, ‘why’. Those words linger in my head, weeds growing roots into my very being. Then another email came. And of its fruits I devoured. His writing is more frantic than the last time. Yet of its fruits I devoured.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu

Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus

Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." - Pardise Lost

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) It was even more than last time, pages running endlessly, documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of a video that was half broken and destroyed. It was as if I was staring into the endless abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. The email was also accompanied by the arrival. Of at least 10 boxes filled to the brim with piles of burned records, what are assumed to be stolen medical files, and more diary entries. And those god-forsaken tapes.

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Better lost the winds of time than to be looked upon by another set of human eyes. Some of those videos were days long. I'm talking about more than 24 hours of footage. Of twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as you ventured further into the maw of the abyss. The only sounds to be heard with slow and drawn out breather of the recorder on the other side and the goans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it .th never envding shifting within the darkness, the dread of what could be lurking behind the next turn. That feeling slowly rising your spine. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls, unable to remove my eyes from the screen.

So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. Page after page, hour after hour. As time bled into words. It took me almost a month this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Weeks of non-stop work as I slaved away. Interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those papers. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. As I became obsessed with finished anylizing theses records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him. Again, I went on like normal, yet was more unsettled than last time. Yet the cycle repeated itself over and over for years. As I slipped deeper into the writing itself. Until one time it became too much to bear, I became t utterly creeped out. I felt that that very grasp of myself had been wrenched from me. As I was consumed initially. Wished that no such fate would befall me again. So attached to the revised records, I add that I no longer want to be involved with this investigation.

I didn't even wait for a response; I immediately blocked him. Not wasting a moment to possibly be reeled back in, it was my belief within this that would find peace, and for a moment, the world brought me sanctuary, and I drowned myself in work and the company of my friends. To deafen the whisper that filled my ears, begging for more questions, all the same, still, asking why.

For almost 2 years, I ignored their constant pestering, while the slight hint of curiosity festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. No amount of distraction would half calm my weary spirit. I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. You know I'd usually use work to cope with this better, yet I'd just ignore it. In my line of work, I read some wild shit or even talk to some weird people.

But none of that could compare to the things that I have experienced within those records. Unable to return to civil life. I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions

I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they couldn't resist the urge to continue to read. As they fervently flip through the pages. Some are in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text, that in their quickness accidentally ripping whole pages out of the book. Each one taking from there experience a different truth to be upheld/

Man, we must have talked for a day about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Much like never-ending labryths of hallways that played for felt like forever in those god-forsaken tapes. Are dissuson ran on and on with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones. A text that caves in in on itself over and over again.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, t that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Deeply rotted in the text after a while, my friends refused to talk about. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of this, that sense of curiosity was still left in me.

‘

Some wear along those lines is where the nightmares began. The once whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams that had taken over my very being. It demands action to know what lies behind the next page. As screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. Bleeding into my very dream. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where my reality began, and the nightmare ended

It got to a point wear i began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company long since lost to the likes of me. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren and desolate with my own existence. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I open my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was julian had know i would eventually return, as only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. A mountain of boxes was delivered to me. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me.

So threw myself into it it becoming my sole reason for my existence. This is the accommodation of everything I am and have to give. Yet it has brought me nothing, this which you are reading id drcond drsft and will be the last as I pray this we never see the light of day and no one we be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

Yet you just as I did. You'll continue to turn the page. You'll pull and tear at the very fiber of this book as you dive deeper into every word. With every new page, it simply leaves you more breathless than the last. And when you depart from the book, it will simply follow you, the way the moon chases the sun until you return to its page.

Or maybe you'll be unaffected by its content, imagine it pretend fictouse. Something utterly childish and simply gibberish. Maybe you'll imagine yourself too good to be affected by something so ridiculous. And to those people truly hope it's true. I hope that it is you who simply consume the book, leaving it dry, then it is the one to consume you.

Yet its horrors may befall you years from now, within your quietest moment, when its words shall finally pierce the veil of your soul. As the very confines of your existence become uncertain. As the very fragile walls of i8dentity coming crashing down around you. This is a slow killer that stalks and takes and takes before you've forgotten what it means to have. These words might mean nothing to you now, but these words linger and follow and will not depart from you till your dying day.

Well, either way,y no matter who you are or where you are going, tread lightly as you turn through these pages. As we fall deeper into the labyrinth, the lies hide through every inconstancy that befalls this text

After my friend disappeared, we searched his apartment, and all that was left was what is contained within these pages.

一The Publisher

Preface

This is not a book, but rather a collection of news clippings, tapes, articles, diary entries, and other forms of writing. These materials have been gathered and sifted through over the past couple of years with the intent of uncovering the truth about the ________.

一R.Hayes

Introduction

“ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμ᾽ ἀφελοῦσα

ἐσκέδασ᾽· ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.”

There are things that ought remain buried. Things better left to rot lost, or forgotten. Every word contained within these pages should be left to the same fate. No good will ever come from a single thing contained within here. It has brought me nothing but sorrow and regret. Yet I can't seem to bring myself to get rid of these books that I have poured my very being into over the span of almost a decade. Still, after all that has happened to me, I am unable to remove thoughts of what lies inside here from my head.

It follows me wherever I go as fateful as my shadow. Even into my very dream. Sleep has been a friend whose company I have not known. I spend my nights dreading his arrival. As my mind has become nothing more than a vessel in which those words have found a home. Yet still I slave away endlessly working on this book to a completion that is never in sight. And there is not a day that goes by that I don't think about what could have been if I simply ignored that email. If I had never read that email, maybe I could have continued to exist within the lie, living blissfully unaware. But instead, I open it. It stated

February 16th 2011

R.Hayes,

This document needs to be looked over and

reviewed. I haven't a single moment to waste. I must further inquire into the depths of this text and therefore need the assistance of another. To organize the accumulated information I have acquired.

Attached:

Police_report_ callaway .pdf

Local _ interview_1.wav (these are the ones that were able to be digitized. Further video recording will primarily be on tape)

Retrieved_photos., pdf

Constructed _ timeline.pdf

reaserch_notes.pdf

Stament_excerpts.pdf

Recovered_ dive_ catcombs _1.wav

diary - entry.pdf

Important points, in no order:

Local interviews matter more than I thought.

At 7:32:42, [person] becomes increasingly agitated before falling silent after I mention [subject/location]. For 15 minutes. Background noise continues.

Then [brief description].

Listen to the change in tone after that point.

Something is hiding in the recesses of his mind that I will pry out.

The gap in footage from the Recovered dive catacombs 1from 12:17:52- 20:05:23

Further investigation needed

There’s also a missing section in the diary entry

The attached sections are mostly illegible material, except for repeated phrases such as blank, which appears multiple times across different dates.

Marked those sections.

Also, if [person] lied about [detail], the entire timeline after [event/time] shifts.

Review person interview first.

One more thing;

The accompanying files should be delivered shortly

一J.Mercer

At that time, it was nothing more than a regular work email, seeing as though I had worked as an editor. It was one of my clients. A journalist by the name Julian Mercer, he wasn't really a talkative guy, and didn't really know much about him. (Now I know too much, or maybe nothing at all.) Well, he didn't know a lot about me, so I guess its fare. He was very professional, always straight to the point. Which I always thought was respectable.

At least it made my job easier. We always spoke through email, he said he preferred it. Only ever used it to send me his work or speak to me. Usually, he would have me edit about some war zone he visited or an underdeveloped village he was at. He really seems to like going to places no one else wants to go. I was kind of jealous of him. Always thinking about how boring my life was compared to his. I always wondered what it was like in his shoes. (Maybe I got what I wished for.)

But this time was different; the way he was writing sounded a little more desperate, almost like he was begging me for help. He sounded more desperate, and the amount of stuff he sent me to look over was honestly crazy. It was a collection of writing, research, and videos from different people. Some were diary entries that seem to go into depth, a twisted rabbit hole of whoever this was's mind. Or essays written about the effects of sensory deprivation on the human mind in uncomfortable detail. Videos that involved endless tunnels and sounds I still think about to this day. That's not even mentioning the 100s of scattered notes and half-destroyed papers that had been delivered to my house. Those were barely legible. On top of all that were the notes and extra information that Julian had gathered himself.

It took me almost 2 weeks to get through it all. To whole weeks of endlessly scouring through those pages upon pages of nonsensical writing that seemed to collapse in on itself like that of a dying star. To be honest, I barely understood what I was reading, but for those 2 weeks it took me to finish sifting through all those papers and reading everything in the email. Not once was I able to take my eyes away. I was completely and utterly enthralled, yet also very disturbed. The way in which everything was brought together said so much, but really meant nothing, yet it deeply unsettled me. However, I still had a job to do, so I finished organizing it, giving feedback, and making edits. Trying my best to organize these writings to the best of my ability. And I sent it back over to him via email. Simply ready to forget about this honestly weird ass experience.

But it wasn't that simple; life went on like normal. The thought of those pages that formed a labyrinth in my mind still lingers like the smell of smoke that sticks to your skin long after the last ember burns out. At this point, I was still normal. The seams of my being still hung together, stitched every so tightly. Yet there was this almost primal curiosity scratching at the back of my head. With such a simple yet deadly question, ‘why’. Those words linger in my head, weeds growing roots into my very being. Then another email came. And of its fruits I devoured. His writing is more frantic than the last time. Yet of its fruits I devoured.

"De hominis prima inobedientia, fructu

Illius vetitae arboris, cujus mortalis gustus

Attulit mortem in mundum, omnesque nostras miserias." - Pardise Lost

(Check Appendix 1 for the email) It was even more than last time, pages running endlessly, documents that referred to other text buried even deeper in a pile of information that itself was an interpretation of a video that was half broken and destroyed. It was as if I was staring into the endless abyss, and it was looking upon me. Ready to swallow me whole. The email was also accompanied by the arrival. Of at least 10 boxes filled to the brim with piles of burned records, what are assumed to be stolen medical files, and more diary entries. And those god-forsaken tapes.

Those old, worn tapes that contained so much within their tiny frames. Better lost the winds of time than to be looked upon by another set of human eyes. Some of those videos were days long. I'm talking about more than 24 hours of footage. Of twisted, never-ending caverns. Tunnel after tunnel as you ventured further into the maw of the abyss. The only sounds to be heard with slow and drawn out breather of the recorder on the other side and the goans that echoed from the slowly shifting wall.

Sometimes it would be hours of just walking in pure darkness, only then, as you stare even more intently at the screen, you begin to see it .th never envding shifting within the darkness, the dread of what could be lurking behind the next turn. That feeling slowly rising your spine. That's not even mentioning the times where the silence was instead filled with a never-ending monologue that lasted for hours. The tapes were suffocating, claustrophobic in their presentation, only met by temporary relief when those binding halls would open up into larger rooms. Yet I was still enraptured by what lay within those halls, unable to remove my eyes from the screen.

So, same as before, I studied, organized, and took notes. Page after page, hour after hour. As time bled into words. It took me almost a month this time. To conquer that mountain of paper. Weeks of non-stop work as I slaved away. Interpreting half-lost records just to get a fraction of the simplicity of understanding. Buried in the depths of those papers. Yet all that time and effort passed by like the changing of leaves on the cusp of autumn. In that time, what semblance of life I had had seemed to slip through my fingertips. As I became obsessed with finished anylizing theses records. Only after finishing did I return to my senses, untethered by whatever lay within those pages and endless halls.

I sent over the organized version back to him. Again, I went on like normal, yet was more unsettled than last time. Yet the cycle repeated itself over and over for years. As I slipped deeper into the writing itself. Until one time it became too much to bear, I became t utterly creeped out. I felt that that very grasp of myself had been wrenched from me. As I was consumed initially. Wished that no such fate would befall me again. So attached to the revised records, I add that I no longer want to be involved with this investigation.

I didn't even wait for a response; I immediately blocked him. Not wasting a moment to possibly be reeled back in, it was my belief within this that would find peace, and for a moment, the world brought me sanctuary, and I drowned myself in work and the company of my friends. To deafen the whisper that filled my ears, begging for more questions, all the same, still, asking why.

For almost 2 years, I ignored their constant pestering, while the slight hint of curiosity festered in me like a sickness bold in its symptoms. No amount of distraction would half calm my weary spirit. I began to drift through the years. It was deafening for me. I was a lot of things, but content surely wasn't one of the words I'd use. You know I'd usually use work to cope with this better, yet I'd just ignore it. In my line of work, I read some wild shit or even talk to some weird people.

But none of that could compare to the things that I have experienced within those records. Unable to return to civil life. I thought maybe if I discussed what I had seen. And what had transpired over those years. It would bring me solace or some form of peace. Yet it only brought more questions

I compiled his work into something semi-understandable, a first draft of sorts, and shared it with a couple of friends. All of them just said they felt uneasy reading it. Yet they couldn't resist the urge to continue to read. As they fervently flip through the pages. Some are in such a rush to let their eyes gaze on the next line of text, that in their quickness accidentally ripping whole pages out of the book. Each one taking from there experience a different truth to be upheld/

Man, we must have talked for a day about our interpretations and what we thought it all meant, never agreeing or coming to any real conclusion. Much like never-ending labryths of hallways that played for felt like forever in those god-forsaken tapes. Are dissuson ran on and on with no truth to be found, simply questions answered only to form new ones. A text that caves in in on itself over and over again.

There was only one agreed-upon fact, t that whatever this was. There was something wrong with it. Deeply rotted in the text after a while, my friends refused to talk about. Saying that it did things to them, and they would rather stay far away from those records. Even after all of this, that sense of curiosity was still left in me.

‘

Some wear along those lines is where the nightmares began. The once whispers in the back of my mind had become a raging storm of screams that had taken over my very being. It demands action to know what lies behind the next page. As screamed from dawn to dusk. From waking hours to sleeping one. Bleeding into my very dream. There was not a moment of rest for me. I had lost my very grip on my own reality. I no longer understood where my reality began, and the nightmare ended

It got to a point wear i began to dread sleep. Sleep became an old friend whose company long since lost to the likes of me. the idea of normal life, but a distant memory to be appreciated for its simplicity. Whatever connection I had in my life had long since passed me by. I have been left barren and desolate with my own existence. So once again, I threw myself back into the records this time hell-bent on deciphering, organizing, and publishing for the world to see. A complete telling of what transpired on that island.

For years, I dedicated myself solely to the understanding of those records, and when I open my email again. There are 100s of new emails spanning the last couple of years until radio silence. It was julian had know i would eventually return, as only a couple of weeks after I began working on the records again. A mountain of boxes was delivered to me. They were filled to the brim with new information, something to quell this dreadful curiosity that had consumed me.

So threw myself into it it becoming my sole reason for my existence. This is the accommodation of everything I am and have to give. Yet it has brought me nothing, this which you are reading id drcond drsft and will be the last as I pray this we never see the light of day and no one we be cursed to bear witness to what is to unfold.

Yet you just as I did. You'll continue to turn the page. You'll pull and tear at the very fiber of this book as you dive deeper into every word. With every new page, it simply leaves you more breathless than the last. And when you depart from the book, it will simply follow you, the way the moon chases the sun until you return to its page.

Or maybe you'll be unaffected by its content, imagine it pretend fictouse. Something utterly childish and simply gibberish. Maybe you'll imagine yourself too good to be affected by something so ridiculous. And to those people truly hope it's true. I hope that it is you who simply consume the book, leaving it dry, then it is the one to consume you.

Yet its horrors may befall you years from now, within your quietest moment, when its words shall finally pierce the veil of your soul. As the very confines of your existence become uncertain. As the very fragile walls of i8dentity coming crashing down around you. This is a slow killer that stalks and takes and takes before you've forgotten what it means to have. These words might mean nothing to you now, but these words linger and follow and will not depart from you till your dying day.

Well, either way,y no matter who you are or where you are going, tread lightly as you turn through these pages. As we fall deeper into the labyrinth, the lies hide through every inconstancy that befalls this text