Wednesday 12 September 2012

2 - 12

Is it that she can't leave

Or is it that

someone

's not letting her?

Tuesday 4 September 2012

2 - 11

Surrounded by all these people in masks and I find myself forgetting what I look like.

Thursday 23 August 2012

2 - 10

Natalie, I know you'll read this. I know you know where I am.

I'm sorry. It's just that the proxy here - the man with the red hair.

I think it's Simon.

Well, I know the body is Simon's. But I think he's still in there.

I don't want you to get hurt. Just find somewhere else, forget about stopping Bleakley.

Just

leave me here

it's been so long, and I've spent so long searching. For answers, for someone else, I don't know. I've hurt people for it. But it's here. It came right to me.

Go. Run, before the big guy gets here. Don't look out for me. Don't try and be a big hero for Peter. Peter is His unfinished business. He did a bad thing, escaping, and now he's got to wait until his Daddy gets home.

I'm so sorry.


Monday 6 August 2012

2 - 8

We were too late. Bleakley's one of them. Maybe dead, probably a proxy. Who knows.

The answers I wanted, the answers I've wanted for over a year, are out of reach once again.

"Why did I survive, and why did he die?"

I feel sick to my stomach. Despite everything that happened, I'm still the more optimistic of me and Simon. I believe it happened for a reason. I believe I can find that reason. Hell, I believe I can get himback. He was the nihilist. He didn't need a reason for why he got torn apart.

I went looking for the article in the Eastbourne Herald site a few months ago. It's gone. It's like he never existed or something. Maybe someone read his blog and deleted all the infectious memetic material to stop Daddy fucking up Eastbourne any further or something.

I remember reading it so vividly. Stretched-out limbs. Disembowled. My head ached just reading it. I could probably recite the article word-for-word. But it's gone. It's gone, and Bleakley's gone, and even that gloomy little shit Peter is gone.

I haven't felt so utterly, terminally alone in years.

x

Thursday 26 July 2012

2 - 7

Today I recieved a note through the window. By the time I realised, there was no-one there.

I think it's from Bleakley.

It read "Found your new blog. I suspect you were thinking what I am thinking.

We must meet sometime. A chat between men."

If he's reaching out to me...what the fuck? Does he think I'm a man? I mean, I'm pretty femmy. But the only guy here is Peter and I can't imagine what business Bleakley would have with him. He hasn't come up with anything. He doesn't know jack shit. I know who Bleakley is. I tracked him across fucking continents. Hell, I figured out he was alive in the first place. I should be the one he wants! Not these fucking assholes who've locked me up after I came all this way Me!

...Maybe he saw me at a weird angle. More as it develops, kiddos.

x

Sunday 22 July 2012

2 - 6

It's been a while.

They found out what I was really after and they've lost their wigs. Bleakley is out there, a man who knows more about what's after us than anyone else I know of, and apparently they've decided that the best course of action is to sit around and glare at me.

Natalie is shivering in the bathroom last time I checked. Peter keeps going out on very long walks. I could run right now, but they have my medicine. So I sneak a go on the laptop to update you fine folks.

So the full story is that once those two had gone to sleep I'd been sneaking out through the window - which for some reason they didn't put up an alarm for - and went looking for Bleakley. Peter was right when he says you can spot a runner. The right scanning twitches can be enough. I spotted Nessa easy enough. So i'd been going out, looking into houses or checking out places that still had people around. No luck. And now I'm grounded because these two don't want to justify us being here but are too scared of going outside to leave. I have no idea what they think is going to happen if we just stay here. We're probably sitting ducks if we run, but we're definitely sitting ducks if we stay.

No-one's seen Him yet. Not yet. But someone is definitely looking in at us. Maybe - just maybe - it's not just me looking for Bleakley.

x

Thursday 5 July 2012

2 - 5

We're here, in Revelstoke, Canada!

Home to a HELL of a bear problem!

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go see a man about a book.

x

Thursday 28 June 2012

2 - 4

New Antihistamines. just in time too. It's only a matter of time before I come into contact with something I'm allergic to, and that rarely ends well for me. Got me thinking about a theory which belonged to an old friend, what seems like a lifetime ago. It comes up because I've tried, I've really tried. For a long time I managed. But I can't stop writing. I can't resist writing about what's happening here. I haven't been able to ever since He first appeared. In the year or so I was away from online blogs, I filled journals. I used up a year diary in two months, scribbling away. I'm only uploading a fraction of what I have saved on this computer. I can't hold it in. Two blogs. Almost fifty posts, only to be read by random strangers..

Oh don't look at me like that, you do it too.

Some of you write. Some of you can't stop filming yourselves. That dear sweet Nessa had her drawings too. I heard of one runner who just made music about it. But we just have to express ourselves about it. It's like that Lovecraft joke, "The Lovecraftian compulsion to keep writing even as one is being devoured." Some of us have done illegal things, amoral things. Hell, some of us have done downright despicable things. Yet we document and, more importantly, we disseminate. I had to throw away those journals to keep from uploading them, and I'm almost certain that someone found them. I'm almost certain that I left them where I was sure someone would find them.

It kinda reminds me of the compusion, when you're sick, to cough or sneeze.

We runners get sick a lot. We cough uncontrollably. We get blackouts. Some of us hallucinate. Hell, we have a name for it - slendersickness. And I've always been sick. Never healthy.

We cough up these this information and then it spreads, and the information spreads like...

Bonus round: Who here knows where the term "meme" came from?

Time's up! The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his landmark biology essay "The Selfish Gene". Here, he developed the basis for evolutionary biology and psychology being refocused on genes themselves, and on all living creatures being ultimately there to further their own genetic line. They fight for prominence, and some succeed, some fail. Organisms spread and struggle for the sake of their genetic makeup.

By way of analogy, he suggested that cultural information does the same thing. He suggested that information has a makeup of its own individual units - instead of genes, he used the term "memes" for these. He created the idea of the story as an organism, spreading, evolving and adapting, or failing. Stories are like organisms, and the ideas and concepts that make it up are like genes. And the organism that the story of the tall man in the business suit ressembles most is a virus. A sickness.

It takes over its host. They disseminate virons at a massive rate. Then, often, they die.

It's all symptoms, my friend argued. The coughing. The mental decline. Hell, maybe even the visions of the man Himself. The slendersickness is at the heart of it all. And we're all infecting one another, different strains arising with different characteristics, mutating at the rate of chinese whispers, changing and adapting, growing and spreading. The memetic structure becoming more complex as it infects and claims more victims. I feel sick just thinking about it.

Of course, this supposed revelation never saved my friend. Perhaps a new theory is in order.

And so I resolve to go see an expert. Someone I just recently unearthed. We've got a long trip ahead of us!

x

Saturday 16 June 2012

2 - 3

They're not listening to me.

Rather, Peter, the boy. He isn't.

I told him, no more internet. It's a trap they're all fucking falling into. The  blogging is a compulsion. It's a symptom of the sickness. Tear the willow out by the roots. He needs to stop but he's not listening to me. Nothing.

Daddy's much more dangerous here. I'd read about his little friends but I'd never actually faced any. Sometimes Peter or Natalie think they spot one when we're somewhere more than a few days. But few deaths. Not like the bad old days. Daddy's on our heels, but he was

no. I came here for a reason. Answers.

In other news, I'm running low on pills. I've been taking antihistamines for the allergies every day. Strong ones. Prescription ones. We need to stop somewhere with a drugstore.

Look at me, blogging away. I know, such a hypocrite.

x

Saturday 19 May 2012

2 - 2

We're in Squamish, a First Nation town just north of Vancouver, We didn't want to go too far, but Natalie was getting really antsy about staying in one place. It's nice here. Vancouver's an odd place to be - either the plastic veneer of inorganic wealth or the inner-city wear of drugs and record homelessness with nothing inbetween. Ironically, the drugs on the bottom half are what fund the high-living on the top half for a lot of people. Squamish is...more grounded. It's largely a First-Nation settlement - First Nation being the accepted term for the indigenous tribes. They're friendly and they run a tight ship with regards to their land - they're not so much an underclass as the aboriginal tribes in the US or Australia.

Natalie and Peter are an interesting duo. They barely talk, and avoid eye contanct, yet they've been travelling together for about a year. And of course, there's the missing arm, which he hasn't adjusted to completely yet. I keep catching her staring at it, zoned out. There's interesting stuff going on there, between those two. Stuff I figure I could use to my advantage.

I have big plans for this little group!

Kari      x

Tuesday 15 May 2012

2 - 1

So!

It's been a very long time since my last blog post - excuse me if I'm a little rusty about this - but I'm just so excited I feel like I have to tell someone.

After being on the run for almost a year, having been spirited away to god-only-knows-where by Daddy, I'm finally meeting up with an old face - Natalie Walker, a spicy, saucy little number caught up in the same fiasco that forced me on the run - here in Vancouver. Her and a guy she's been travelling with, who I don't know. From what I've read, he's not exactly perky these days, but I guess I'll get to find that out for myself. I'm so looking forward to seeing them both!

That's all for now, though there'll be more to come!

Kari    x