Hey y’all,
I found this old model iPhone wrapped in a blanket stuck in a tree. Normally I’d be excited! This could be anything, a geocache, evidence in a cold case, or just someone’s trash. Either way, I am naturally inclined to be interested in this type of stuff. I work in IT and have a bunch of old cables for these phones lying around. So I plugged it in. It became immediately obvious upon reading the first note that something was wrong.
Each separate file is password protected, except for the first note. Whoever left this behind, needs help and in good conscience, I can’t let it go. I tried to take it to the police and they just brushed me off. As I mentioned above I am experienced with IT, as that is my job. I figure if anyone can do it, I can.
I feel like it’s the slow declination of a person’s mental health. None of what they write below makes any logical sense, but maybe if I continue to find the passwords to the notes and if you think you can help in any way, I’ll keep posting them and we as a whole can find and help this person.
I’m sorry if my thoughts seem rushed, but I’m trying to get this out there and continue to solve my part of this.
I’ll keep my writing in italics so it’s a little easier to differentiate!
I’ll post this in parts as I crack the password for the notes. Here is the first part:
###If you’re reading this, then I’m probably dead or lost the device I’m using to write this.
###I don’t know what happened, we were in an argument and now I’m here. I must’ve been high I don’t remember a damn thing. I remember blacking out…and I know what happens when I black out.
###I’m sorry, Lily. I promised to get clean and god knows I tried. I did. I went to every NA meeting, I went to therapy. Nothing stuck. If I get out I promise I’ll change, I’ll get better, I’ll leave I’ll go away. You have my word. I know it doesn’t mean much anymore.
###It’s funny how that works, right? You never really think about the boy who cried wolf, until you’re the boy who cries wolf. You surely think about how stupid the boy is the first time you hear the fable. “Why would he do that?” You delight in his demise, a stupid liar. Until the day you realize you’re in the wolf’s den and no one is coming to save you.
###Cry little boy, cry.
###I should probably back up a little bit and explain just what I’m seeing here on the off chance someone finds this, maybe they can find what’s left of me.
###Lily, we were arguing I was using again, and you found out. You confronted me. I had used about two bars right before so I knew I didn’t have much time in the waking world. I fell into the usual euphoric stupor where worries and fear wash away as easily as all the regret of taking it. I heard you upset, and then I don’t remember what happened. I woke up here, in this place.
###A lilac-tinted swamp, a sky so melancholy almost like a painted sadness. Twilight in the perfect form of the word. Trees draped down, their branches hesitantly perched above their leaves dancing on the water’s surface. Stretching endlessly across the horizon. The only sound it made was the normal bubbling of a bog, steam rising from each tiny explosion. It smelled of sulfur and acid, a smell I had only smelled once before when I was a kid. Aside from that, it would’ve otherwise been breathtakingly beautiful. A small patch of grass on an empty island is where I sat up.
###Well, almost empty.
###There was a tiny computer, must’ve been 30 years old minimum. I had nearly forgotten how to turn it on. But then the antique lit up with a loud whir, explosive in the silence of the swamp laid before it. Eventually displaying to the bog it inhabited the retro IBM logo. It’s almost as if the computer had been unboxed and left there, but it had no weather damage nor looked any worse for wear. Certainly, a swamp like this gets rain or floods. There was no damage to this computer, as if it were opened, and stored perfectly here, waiting for someone to find it. After a few minutes of standing in disbelief, it showed a screen.
###“Forgive yourself, within the House of Vapor.”
###Well, certainly this was a joke. But even now the sentence is burned into my mind. Wholeheartedly still unfunny.
###I sat there confused, staring at the little time capsule in a place that made even less sense than the message flashing on screen.
###I tried to type, and as soon as I moved, slowly the earth beneath started to tangle around the monitor. Roots rapped on the plastic sides as it coiled around them slithering ever so slowly, but faster than any normal plant could move. The ground beneath started to shake as the roots pulled it back down into the earth, I moved aside and watched as a final glimpse of the screen gave way to my vision like a person taking their last breath before succumbing to the tide.
###“Forgive yourself, within the House of Vapor.”
###Lily, I think I have to be dead or stuck in an unending nightmare. Maybe I’m even writing this to no one. Maybe you already know my fate before I do. A quick overdose slips you into unconsciousness and from there, you drift away. Maybe this place is where I landed. If I’m alive I promise I’m gonna try to come back I’m not gonna disappear. Not again.
###I stood on the now-empty plot of grass and soil. Sat down in defeat at the events transpiring, when once again I felt the ground shake.
###The ground once again, spewed open, rumbling and angry. It became quickly obvious that a door was being birthed from the same spot that the computer had been reclaimed. A large, water-damaged wooden door. Like one you’d seen in an old castle, or an old home that time forgot. Quickly, it rose and stood before me, an iron door now beckoning every fiber of my being. It oddly looked like it fit within the twilight-soaked swamp. Only, physically it didn’t make any sense. If I were to open the door, it would assumedly take me to the other side. Which was just a threshold, it would take me to the other side of the door. Like if someone left a door in the woods and you walked through it, you’d just be on the other side, still in the woods.
###If you assumed that, you’d be wrong. As was I. I gently reached my arm outward, and with an odd, but deserved sense of fear and anxiety, rested my palm on the rusting iron doorknob. I finished the motion now resting my entire hand on the doorknob in position to turn it. As I did, it made a loud creaking noise, as if no one had opened this door for years, it slowly slid backward revealing the strange visage behind it.
###It led me to what seemed like a mall…