As some of you may know, I’m a collector.
I seek out all things bizarre, haunted, infused with the paranormal or cursed to add to my collection. Often I have to hunt these items down proactively, but sometimes they instead find their way to me. Like the thing that was waiting on my doorstep a week ago, carefully secured in a lead box. The thing that is now sealed away in the deepest chamber of my underground storage bunker behind three more layers of lead, the door secured with six deadbolt locks.
The indigo meteorite.
I only knew to take those precautions thanks to my friend who sent me the box. To preserve his family’s privacy, I’ll refer to him here as Emory Fox. Any other names mentioned have also been changed for the same reason.
Emory is (or, perhaps now, was) a fellow enthusiast of the supernatural. We met on a forum about three years back, debating the veracity of a UFO photo posted there, and became fast friends. We stayed in touch via email, exchanging our latest studies, findings, and experiences at least once a week. He is (was?) the sharpest of any of my other friends and associates, and I have him to thank for pointing me toward dozens of the items in my collection, as well as helping me design experiments to test their properties. While Emory rarely opened up about his personal life or history, we were able to bond over our shared obsession. He searched the way I searched. He peeled back the layers the way I did. Emory was one of the very few people in my life that I felt truly understood me and my mission. And that is why, fascinating as the papers he sent with the box were, I was devastated while reading them. While part of me wants to just curl up and sulk as I’ve been doing the past few days, part of my mission is to share and archive my findings. As such, I’m posting here the letter Emory sent me, as well as excerpts from the other assorted letters and journal entries he included on the subject of the meteorite.
***
EMORY FOX’S LETTER
Dear A.C,
Firstly, DO NOT OPEN THE BOX YET. I’d say do not open the box at all, but I know you too well to think you’ll be able to resist at least a glimpse at the object within, so I’m asking that you at least read through this entire letter and the other papers I’ve included with it before you do. That way at least you’ll be prepared.
I’m sure just having this thing on your porch has already sent poor Midge running upstairs with her tail between her legs. That should be your first hint that this thing is twisted down to the atom. That you should take it seriously and treat it with as much caution as possible. To be honest, I debated whether to send this your way at all. Whether I should burden you with it. The fact is that this monstrosity cannot be destroyed. It has to have a caretaker, and it has to be studied. To be willing to study this thing will require a solid mix of brilliance, experience, and sheer insanity. You’re the only person I know who fits that bill. Granted, I’m a hermit who lives in a cabin in the woods and socializes almost exclusively online, but still.
I don’t have much time to write. I don’t know where to start. It’s been only forty-two hours since I’ve made contact with the object, and I can already see the changes. As time passes, the changes are growing increasingly dramatic, and far more physically painful. Mentally painful. Maybe because I know what’s coming.
The object struck the Earth’s surface at approximately 2:33 AM EST on January 7th of 2023, burning very brightly. I observed it falling into the heart of Linville Gorge from my cabin, through the 16`` Dobsonian. It burned intensely indigo, the same as was seen in all earlier recorded sightings. The object’s indigo glow persisted even after earthfall, shining down below in the woods like a beacon. It took me a few minutes to compose myself before leaving the cabin to retrieve it. I was a storm of emotions. You know the “Big Project” I’ve always tip-toed around in our communication? Well, my friend, this was it. The Big Project. The one that’s taken up my whole life. The reason I’ve forbidden myself a wife or kids, and lived out here alone in the strange wilderness of Appalachia. I thought the sacrifice of staying here would be well worth it when the object finally arrived. I thought I’d get more answers.
It took me approximately two and a half hours to hike down to the object’s location. Its light guided me. I brought with me the same box I sent you to transport it, along with a steel grabber tool. For all my years of reading and re-reading descriptions of this thing, I was still unprepared for the actual sight. So beautiful. Smooth surface, indigo in coloration, shimmery and oval in shape. I stared transfixed for a moment, before grabbing it, sealing it in the box, and taking it home.
You may notice that it emits a low hum. I was unsuccessful in finding the source or method by which it does so. I only discovered that the hum is constant. And at times it grows so loud it seems to come from all around.
I took it to the lab below the cabin for experimentation, the first of which I started later that evening (figured I needed at least a little sleep before I took on something so huge). I have attached with this letter the data for the experiments I was able to complete, and the designs for the ones I was not, so you can attempt them. But here’s the gist:
I started small. I put four fruit flies in the box with the object for two minutes. I found them all dead upon opening the box. Repeated attempts with shortened timeframes didn’t change those results, and ditto for attempts with other insects, though the cicadas did scream for a minute before dying. Dissections of the insects yielded odd results, as you’ll see in the data. Damage was almost entirely concentrated in the neural tissue of the subjects. The ganglia were fried. Brain tissue had bubbled and expanded into misshapen masses. The thing that kept popping up in my head as I examined the corpses beneath the microscope one after another with these same features was, “sensory overload”. I find myself thinking it again now.
It was difficult to draw conclusions from corpses. I wanted behavioral data. I wanted a living subject. Truthfully, I was impatient for answers, and that impatience clouded my thinking. Against my better judgment, I decided to move on to a larger subject. I got a rat, with the intent of giving it a more limited exposure to the meteorite (if it is a meteorite. I think of it like that, but it must be something much more) than the insect subjects. I hoped that I would at least prevent the death of the animal in that instance. I placed the rat (Allegheny woodrat) into the box with the meteorite for exactly thirty seconds. For a period of five seconds after the twenty-five-second mark, he squealed and thrashed in the box, his screams almost human in their sound, shrill and piercing before stopping abruptly. I quickly opened the box to extract him, or at least to see his condition.
He was and remains alive as of writing this. But I could see as soon as I opened the box that he was changed. I saw it first in his eyes: polycoria. He suddenly had multiple pupils visible, with highly strange patterning. Like a spiderweb, the iris was strung across the black void in the center. And he was standing on his back two legs, perfectly still, his posture unnaturally straight as he stared up at me. Most disconcerting, he was clutching the meteorite to his chest.
This will sound crazy, but I froze on the spot. I couldn’t move or tear my eyes from his. There was a sharp intelligence in his gaze, as though he could see right through me. As though he somehow knew everything about me.
Then he tipped the box over and lunged at me, the meteorite still gripped in his claws.
I reacted on instinct, batting at him before I realized what I’d done. When my hand made contact with his grimy, furred hide, I felt too the briefest touch of the meteorite on my bare skin. I felt its light strike through me like a whip. It and the rat fell to the ground. My hand shook furiously as the rat stared up at me with a cold, toothy grin, its eyes bulging as its pupils split again and again.
I realized, distantly, that I’d just doomed myself.
I can see hints of my future even as I write this, through the rat. He’s staring out the window right now, muttering to himself. His head has become misshapen, grotesque as the skull expands and bubbles. Pink foam is constantly spuming down his ears, likely a form of cerebrospinal fluid. His eyes are still growing. Of course, he must still just be in the beginning stages.
It’s hard to write. It will be hard to mail this. It’s getting harder to control my body. My right pupil has already split into two. I’m seeing things I shouldn’t see. My head is rocked by pain, full of screaming and spinning in a million different directions, and some unspeakable thing is trying to pull me out. Out to the others. Out to the end. I hope I die somehow before it succeeds.
You’ve been a good friend. I will miss you. I will miss all of this. Hug Midge for me.
Your friend,
Emory
END OF EMORY FOX’S LETTER
***
MALCOLM FOX’S JOURNAL ENTRY
January 7th, 1998
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck fuck. I’m fucked. It’s all fucked.
I don’t know who I’m writing this for exactly, now. Whoever comes after to pick up the pieces, someone smarter than me who can succeed where I failed and finally destroy this thing. Or Emory, maybe. Staying with his grandparents now, probably brushing his teeth for bed already, miles away with no idea that there won’t be anything left here for him by morning. Yes, Emory for sure. He’ll have questions when he gets older. He’ll want to know what happened to his poor dumbass father and he deserves the truth.
Emory, I’m sorry.
If you read the rest of this journal, you’ll know why I sent you off two days ago, and what I went out to find after you left. I had a feeling, call it a sixth sense, that it was coming back to Earth. And I was right, I saw it falling in the dead of night, blinding indigo blue tearing the sky into two before landing in the gorge. I tracked it down by its light, locked it up in an old ice box, and took it home to the cabin basement. That’s where the setup was. All the tools that I’d gathered and kept waiting these last many years.
The plan was to destroy it completely. No studying it, no nothing, I didn’t want to give this thing the chance to change anything again. I wanted it gone forever. I thought I could do that if I just broke it down as much as anything can be. My first attempt was with acid. A big sealed vat of, here’s a billion-dollar word for you, fluoroantimonic acid. Got it off Mac and he says it’s the strongest stuff there is. As the gas mask clung against my skin and the sweat dripped off my brow, I threw on leather work gloves and grabbed the meteorite out the cooler with tongs, then dropped it right into the vat with a sizzle. Left it in there for hours to dissolve, pleased as hell with myself. Feeling like I’d just beaten the monster under the bed. Even got a beer to celebrate.
Went to check it finally, only to find the vat empty of everything except the meteorite. That bastard, piece of shit space rock looked just the same as it had when I’d stuck it in, not so much a chip in its edge or a dull to its shine. Like it had drank up all the acid.
Next I tried to melt it using [REDACTED], and once again the meteorite suffered no ill effects, though the kitchen almost caught on fire and the house choked with smoke for awhile. Attempts at vaporization with [REDACTED] failed just the same.
Finally I’d had enough. I was exhausted from attempt after attempt to obliterate the thing and at the brink of pure rage. I decided there was nothing else for it, and grabbed my sledgehammer from the shed. I was gonna break this thing down manually, bit by bit, down to dust, down to the atoms.
I set the meteorite down on the basement floor, heaved the hammer above my head, and swung down hard.
As soon as the head of the hammer struck the meteorite, I felt something like lightning shoot through the hammer up to my hands. For a moment the world fractured around me. It’s hard to explain. It was like I was in the room, and not in the room. Or maybe, in every possible iteration of the room, all at once, from every angle, at every point in time. Seeing everything everything.
Then things snapped back into focus, and somehow, the meteorite was glowing in my hand.
I don’t even know when I picked it up, or if I did at all. But my skin tried to pulse and unfurl where the meteorite touched it. There was a screaming in my head. A familiar one, one that I had heard before, that I hadn’t realized was still going all this time.
I dropped the rock as soon as I’d regained my senses, but I knew it was too late. I’ve touched it. I’m contaminated now. The change is coming to get me. I’m already seeing this paper and these words through five pupils. It’s pulling me out. Like with Dad all over again. What a man he’d been. I wish Emory could have met him. Then again who knows? Maybe Emory still could meet him. Poor kid sure as hell wouldn’t like it, though.
Love you, Emory. Be good. Be smarter than me.
-M
END OF MALCOLM FOX’S JOURNAL ENTRY
***
ABEL FOX’S LETTER TO MALCOLM FOX
February 1st, 1973
Dear Malcolm,
By the time you receive this letter, I will be gone. Not dead, but gone. You’re still young and all this will be hard to understand, but I ask that you not mourn for me, and don’t be sorrowful for me, either. What has happened is a good and wonderful thing, Mal. It has all come to be as I have dreamed for these last twenty-five years, before you were even a glimmer in your mother’s belly, rest her soul. Don’t mourn. Ezekiel 36:26.
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.
It’s time to tell you the truth about Grampa.
He did not, as I once told you, die of hypothermia out hunting. Rather, he went out hunting and found for himself a strange and beautiful treasure, fallen right from the sky like an angel out of heaven, into the wood of the gorge. At first glance it seemed like a rock, but its perfect smoothness, its blinding indigo glow, marks it as something more. Divine, I’d argue, now that I gaze upon it myself. At the time Pa, your grampa, didn’t know what he’d found, but praise be he took it home with him anyway to put on the mantle.
I was living at home by then. This was back in ‘48, a year after the lord called Ma home with a tumor, and I still carried scars from the war. I couldn’t sleep from the nightmares. I struggled to keep work, and I was steadily losing my battle with drink. When I closed my eyes, I saw fields of limbs and lakes of blood, and I saw my friend’s eyes at the moment of the bullet-strike, and the soft ‘O’ of his mouth before the bullet came out red through the other end. I felt like a dead man walking. A ghost of myself.
Then Pa came home with that meteorite. He told me not to touch it, that he didn’t want my hands rubbing away the color by mistake. He thought he might sell it at the fair, or donate it to the mineral society in Asheville. I respected his wishes and never physically touched it. But oh, how I looked at it. Every spare moment I sat myself in front of the mantle to stare. When I was near it, it told me things. Not with words, but with pictures in my head, loud and bright and filled with ecstasy, that pushed the nightmares right out my head. I came to understand that this must be the language of God, and these visions of his kingdom. I also came to understand, through the growing urging of the meteorite, that the only way I could be given full access to the secret and celestial knowledge the meteorite offered, was to be made new. My feeble body as it was was not enough. I needed to change. Thankfully, the meteorite assured me it could help with that.
Three days after the meteorite’s arrival, I decided I would take it for myself. I had taken a quick job for the day in Waynesville and so had to leave in the morning, but planned to steal away with the meteorite into the forest as soon as I returned home that night. Little did I know at the time that I was not the only one feeling the effects of the meteorite.
When I came home, the meteorite was off the mantle, and Pa was at the window. I greeted him, and he said nothing. I grabbed him by the shoulder, no response. When I physically turned him around, I saw that the meteorite was cradled in his hands, and he had begun to change. Pinkish fluid dripped from his ears, and his eyes had grown to triple the size, drooping and stretching and burrowing through more and more of his face as his pupils split into dozens against his vast, green iris. Eyes for seeing everything. Even the shape of his head was different, huge and lumpy. Mind for holding everything.
He turned for the door then in a trance, walking away as though I wasn’t there, down to the woods and the gorge. I followed him the whole way there. Everything was dark outside the meteorite’s glow. I followed my father hours until we’d reached a clearing in the deepest bowels of the gorge. Still senseless to all but the meteorite, Pa fell to his knees. He looked up to the heavens, and in one swift movement, shoved the meteorite into his mouth and swallowed.
What I saw then, Mal, was the most beautiful transformation I’ve ever been privileged to bear witness to.
Pa’s eyes grew rapidly gaping, and mesmerizing indigo light poured from them up to the sky. His body melded with the earth around him, shedding his mortal flesh for something else I can scarcely describe, a making of mud and blood and starlight, his bones taking root into the soil and his mouth going wide in a cry of ecstasy, his body now the shining blue link between Heaven and Earth.
I can only guess what world he was given entry to through that ritual, what knowledge he gained that I will soon share. For the meteorite came back, and I hold it now in my hand.
He’s still there, of course. I’ve visited him now and again over the years. Tonight I will go to join him permanently. If you like, I have left a map where we can be found. I’m sure your Grampa would love to finally meet you.
Or, wait for the meteorite’s return and claim a place for yourself. It is a grand future, to reach and touch God himself on high. Someday I hope you’ll join us.
Much love,
Dad
END OF ABEL’S LETTER
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SAMUEL FOX’S JOURNAL ENTRY
January 7th, 1948
Went hunting this morning. Caught two rabbits for dinner. Found a falcon feather on the way back, and a nice blue rock. Might be from last night’s meteor shower.
Expecting freezing rain tomorrow.
S.F
END OF SAMUEL’S ENTRY
***
Well, I don’t intend on joining any “grand future” like that.
I’ll study the thing, don’t get me wrong. It’s too unique a specimen to ignore, and in any case I feel I owe it to Emory. But the meteorite’s not coming out of the bunker until I’ve figured out more, and can protect myself as much as possible from its effects.
Because whatever it is the meteorite has “linked” four generations of Fox men to, I don’t think it’s Heaven.