6 September, 2024
To those who find us,
This is a record for posterity, should our remains ever be recovered.
– we are dying by degrees –
The nights here are colder than anything we had prepared for. So cold as to form ice in the air sometimes, ice that hurtles toward the ground and the unsuspecting with such ferocity. The tops of the tents have been made thick, layers and layers of whatever protective material we could find. It has, several times, proved to be not nearly enough. The first one we lost to the shards was a lad of eighteen. We woke in the morning to find him neatly stabbed through the throat. He had not cried out during the night.
This place, it is not natural. A bleached, bone-white desert in the daylight, and yet at night the ice falls. It is not precisely ice, but that is what we have taken to calling it. It is better, we have learned, slowly, bitterly, to give known names to the things we encounter on our travels, to catalogue them within our existing field of reference, no matter how far out of our understanding they seem to be. New concepts in this land take on twisted, warped forms. The first leader of our expedition went out one night after some rodent-like creature in order to get a closer look and returned screaming. We don’t know exactly what it is he saw or experienced. We do not want to know.
Is it not ironic? An expedition team, handpicked, the best and bravest in our fields, to venture out into the unknown and make it known, iron it flat and label it in little glass jars. For the good and advancement of humanity. For science. And now we sit and huddle in our tents, moving a few metres each day if we can manage it –
– the sands will not stop their aching songs of loneliness, they grab us by the throats and fill us to our ears, there is no escape from their constant shifting, the noise the noise THE NOISE –
-now half of our number are dead, or worse. Some of the missing return to haunt us in our dreams, and such is the nature of the atmosphere that we cannot be entirely sure that they are only dreams or-
– they have too many eyes now, too many mouths, and their howls convey nothing but fear and lust and greed and the background of it all is the terrible sound of drums, of howls even further away, screams of the damned and the people who we once loved washed away in the great tide of time, their bodies shrinking and stinking and being consigned to the flame or rotting in the open to be picked at by the –
– but now my friends are stirring beside me, and I must tend to their wounds.
– great mountains, stretching up farther than the mind wishes to comprehend, and the wind rushing through them, we know now, is the death rattle of the universe –
We have few supplies left, but that is all right. I do not think any one of us could stand to live here much longer. I write this with the last of my will and sanity. Leave this place and never return. Take our bodies home, and spirits too, if you can manage it –
– there was one who escaped once, and now he takes and takes and takes, and some of you worship him, and most of you fear him, and all of you fall to him and are embraced by oblivion –
– try to keep our spirits warm, yes, that is what we must do if we are to pull through, the gasoline on our clothes is no longer enough to keep the fires of life going, we will have to burn and burn and burn and burn and burn –
My dear professor,
So ends the last message we recovered from the scorched remains of the camp. The authorities are still trying to puzzle out how the entire Mars Base Camp Team (A) managed to go off their rocker simultaneously, and so spectacularly too. All that bit about the desert, in this and the past letters, it makes me wonder. You can’t help but wonder, can you? I mean, we know it’s only Nevada, but the team sure didn’t sound like they believed it was. I wonder what exactly Control told them when they were assigned to the expedition. Did the poor sods even know that it was just an experiment in psychology before the real thing? I hear they have machines up north that can mimic the effects of space flight. Alright, alright, I can see you shaking your head. I’ll lay off the “seditious talk”, worrywart.
Anyway. So much for ‘the best of humanity’ and ‘our first crew in outer space’. One of the guys left alive is in the hospital, trying to gnaw off his own leg.
Interestingly, the handwriting of those snatches of crazy talk above don’t match any of the crew’s. Thought you’d find that tidbit of use in your report. I suppose all this means you’ll be flying back home soon, wherever that is. Classified, yada yada yada.
I was wondering if you’d do me the honour of dining with me tonight? There’s a place that makes the best tacos in the universe just outside of city limits. Pick you up at eight?
Yours,
– the void, the screams, the winds from below, the edge of your mind that believes in the monsters under your bed and the bloody maw of the Beast –
Only kidding!
Charlie
