Just Bought my Childhood House 5 - End (Archive)

Like the title says, this will be my last update. There's nothing left to say besides what I'm writing here. I've done all I can.

I got an old camping backpack out of my dad's things. Took his crank flashlight, a measuring tape, energy bars, water, rope, Christmas lights, stuffed it all in there with the geiger counter and planned as if I wasn't coming back. I didn't know. I wrote my buddy a text but he never responded. Maybe he's mad at me for involving him. I know I would be if I were him. I'm glad he's the only one I have to be guilty about. Imagine if I'd taken up some of the offers to come and help me out.

The counter I used is the GQ GMC-300. Since it's so small I just had it looped around my wrist and was checking it periodically. It was totally normal until I hit that barrier. I thought it would shut off like everything else. The display died in a few places and then kept going. There were a few dead places in the screen but it surprisingly kept running. Sometimes it would fuck up, though, glitch out a little, so maybe my numbers won't be 100% accurate. They don't really need to be though. It was pretty obvious when the change happened.

As SOON as we passed that barrier, the reading jumped to almost .21 mr/m. Now I went down there totally ignorant of what the readings meant. Call me stupid, call me whatever. The fact of the matter is that I've already been down enough that nothing I do from here out matters. I didn't want to risk getting freaked out too much to continue. The reading stayed around that through the tunnel and into the first room. Fluctuated a bit but not enough to note. I figured, okay, that's definitely not normal but certainly not enough to worry about, surely. As I made my way down to the other room, the reading slowly crept up. .25. .34. By the time I was down in the largest room it was at 2. I took a break there and gathered myself. I pulled out the string of lights and compared it to the scrap I found last time. It's a 100% match. You can see where it was torn off the larger string, and pretty much match up the individual strands. I pocketed the strand, I don't really know why, and kept moving.

In addition to the counter I also brought a handheld mercury thermometer. At the start of the slope down out of the second room, the temp was holding steady at about 15F. Now anything beyond that was unexplored, so I prepped myself. I had a permanant marker and I made a little 'tick' on the wall in case it branched out from there on and I got lost or something. While I was doing that I noticed a little imperfection in the wall. A little gouge mark. Now of course that's not normally anything amazing but in this case, the walls were PERFECTLY smooth, no cracks or anything, so whatever did that did it intentionally. My guess? My dad had the same idea. Like father like son. Haha.

From this point, the hallway dipped down into a gradual slope downward in a spiral. Up until this point I wasn't sure if that was intentional or not. It is. I'm not gonna bother posting all the measurements I took but suffice it to say I measured every wall of both rooms, the tunnel entrance, and a bunch of other places. I worked it out, looked up the sequence to verify my suspicions. Without getting too much ahead, the measurements are consistent all the way down. The house, the tunnel, EVERYTHING, they are all on the same sequence. I'm sorry, I'm so scattered. I'll come back to this in a bit. Keep it in mind, though.

So the hall sloping down went on for a long, long time. Not like 'oh this is kind of a long walk' long. Like, 'I have been walking for hours and my feet are tired' long. I didn't bother timing it. Maybe I should have. I was too preoccupied with the counter and thermometer. For every, I want to say fifth of a mile I went, the temp dropped and the geiger counter rose. 10F, 2F, -5F. 21mr/m, 37, 58. Most of you are shitting yourselves, I'm sure. I had the benefit of ignorance. I assumed those numbers worked like temperatures. I'm sure you guys know better.

I walked. And walked. And walked. I had a watch but down there time was meaningless. I sort of kept pace of things by my thoughts. I thought about my dad. About how he changed so suddenly. How strange he acted before mom got sick. Do you know what it's like to have every memory of your parents called into question? Every motive, every sentence? I keep trying to remember anything I can. What did he say about us, how did he say it, was he always forgetful afterward? What happened to him down here? I'll be honest, I had no intention of ever leaving. I figured I'd go down and never come back. I left a letter taped to the front door in case I vanished. My buddy still hasn't answered, but I left him a detailed message about where I was. I told him under NO circumstances should he send anyone after me. Just seal the entrance and tell the cops I died in an accident. Whatever it took to keep them out. This place is bad. It doesn't feel evil, but it isn't cozy either.

I reached another room after a long, long time. Maybe double the size of the last. The hall was widening out, too. The place was getting bigger the farther I went. By now it was about -32F, and the walls were coated with frost. A mist hung in the air. Don't ask me how I was breathing down there, maybe oxygen seeped in after so many years of this place being around. I took a break to eat a quick snack. The counter was holding between 85 and 100. I was starting to feel sick again. Like the last one, the room was bare, stark. The floor was so cold it seeped through my three layers and chilled me to the bone. Even my parka wasn't helping much at that point. I'd looked up the symptoms of frostbite, and my nose and cheeks were starting to show the early stages of it. I'd brought one of those biking balaclavas and I put it on.

You know how if you sit in a really quiet room, you can hear your heart? It was like that, almost like the whole area was soundproofed, muffled. I could hear my blood in my ears. There's some room in a studio somewhere that is the quietest place on Earth, so quiet you go crazy if you stay too long. That's how it felt down there. I tried singing while I was resting but it was worse, somehow. I don't think that place was built to have noise in it. It just sounded wrong.

I knew if I stayed put too long I would eventually just not be able to get up, like the climbers who die on Everest because they stop and rest. So I forced myself up and kept going. I can't give an accurate depiction of the loneliness and non-life of this place. As the passage widened out, it started getting echoey. I lost track of the ceiling but kept one hand against a wall to keep my bearings. I found a few more of those tick marks, but they don't seem necessary really. It's just one long hall, no mazes or anything. I don't get the sense it was built to be a trap. Both numbers kept rising and falling, respectively. I didn't know what the numbers meant but even I was smart enough to know the ones on the counter were getting serious. They were rising MUCH faster now. Skipping entire decimal places. 200. 400. 800. It seemed like every few feet I went, it just got worse and worse.

The process of going, finding a new room, and passing through it repeated I don't know how many times. I'm so stupid, I should have been more careful about recording exact distance. But I had this horrible sense of... futility? Like nothing I did would matter anyway. Whatever this place was built for, it wasn't being used anymore. It felt abandoned. I was accutely aware that I was the only one down here.

Then, a little farther on, I found a glove. I recognized it as my Dad's, it was distinctive because of the fur lining. I remember when he stopped using them, we all asked about it. He loved those gloves, and he never even talked about losing one. Just said he must have lost it somewhere, and that was that. Above it on the wall, something scratched into the wall. It was hard to read, but I think it said '4m'. Maybe that's a reference to distance. Four fucking miles. This thing goes FOUR MILES under my god damn house. It makes me angry. Why my house? Why here? WHY ALL OF IT?? Couldn't they have put it somewhere where no one would find it? Why HERE????

I'll spare you the rest of the walk. It's just more of the same. More hallway, more rooms, more cold. God it was so cold. I've never experienced anything like that. I walked for, God. Days? Weeks? Years? It feels like I've been gone my entire life. Maybe it's so cold time freezes down there too. I don't know. Anything is possible. The geiger counter had long passed the hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Even I knew what that had to mean.

The last room came abruptly. The hall led into it and stopped. There was no other exit. No two walls were the same length. I measured. 8x13x34x21. I wasn't surprised. Maybe you're smart enough to have figured it out. The entire house, the tunnel, the halls, the rooms. It's all Fibonacci's numbers. I had to do some Googling but it all checks out. The entire fucking thing is built in a perfect Fibonacci spiral. I looked that up too. It's a sacred shape. It's life, it's found in nature of all kinds. I can only guess why it was so important to build it that way.

That last room, the ceiling was so high I couldn't see it even with the flashlight. It was snowing. Did you know it can snow underground? Maybe it can't. Maybe by then I was so utterly fucked that nothing was the way it seemed. Temperature: -89. Geiger counter: 377,000. I threw up as soon as I entered the room and couldn't stop. I felt weak, dizzy. My skin prickled. The snow felt electrically charged. It had no shape. The snowflakes themselves, the little crystals were all wrong. Not pretty like they should have been. Mutated. Points in all directions. Even the snow knew it didn't belong down there.

I don't even know if the floor was really the floor. It was all snow. For all I know, it just kept going down forever. Take it away, maybe I would have fallen forever. In the corner was a hump of snow, the only thing in the room that didn't belong.

I think I knew by then what it was. I guess somewhere along that long walk I put it all together and just didn't want to admit it. Who would want to?

I bent and brushed the layers of snow away. I'd uncovered the slope of one shoulder. The parka was faded and stiff, frozen solid. I set the flashlight down and dug the entire thing out. Didn't let myself see it as a whole until I was done. Just saw the pieces of it. A familiar boot. Hair. Hands curled at the chest. The bruised neck. Like someone had tied a rope around it and yanked it tight.

I sat down, recranked the flashlight, and threw up again. Was too weak to get up, so I just sat looking at him and trying to decide what to do.

He'd had been there for so long he was frozen solid as rock. Curled on one side. Perfectly preserved. I could see the familiar mustache, the scraggly hair, the scar on one thumb from when he almost chopped it off working on the trees one summer. It was horrible to find him there but so good to see him, even in that state. I didn't realize how much I'd missed him. He was long gone but just to be next to him, to see and touch him was wonderful, in a way. A relief to finally know what had happened. He made it so far.

That's the kind of guy Dad was.

He made it farther than I ever would have. Even if he was freezing and sick, he would have seen it to the end. Made sure that nothing could hurt us. I wanted to get him out of there, but I couldn't even budge him. I was too weak. The inside of my mouth was raw and I kept spitting up blood. So I just sat there with him and thought about the good times we'd had while I was growing up. The snow was falling lightly but steady. I let it cover his face back up. I stayed as long as I could, but I knew if I waited too long I'd never get back up, and I'd end up the same way. I left the flashlight cranked until the spring was too stiff to move anymore so he didn't have to be in the dark, and walked out in the pitch black.

I had to go slow. I was so weak. My legs didn't want to work, and I'd lost all sense of balance. I must have been in shock because I remember almost none of the trip. It was all in absolute darkness, and it was impossible to know when I was lucid. I do remember climbing the ladder back to the attic and almost passing out. God only knows how I managed to do it, but I did. I took off all my gear and dropped everything back down inside. I didn't think it was a good idea to bring it back up to the surface. I have neighbors, after all.

I took a long bath. A lot of my skin is blistered, like a sunburn, but it felt wonderful. While I was in there I called and left my buddy one more message, letting him know that he needed to go to the hospital ASAP and tell them he was exposed to radiation. I don't know if they can help him or not but he shouldn't have been exposed to too much. I'd love to wait to talk to him in person but I don't think I have the luxury of time anymore. There's an open sore near my bottom gum line that I think is going into the bone, any air on it is excrutiating. So talking is kind of hard.

The other call I made after I got out was to the previous owner. She sounded surprised to hear from me. I told her I just needed to ask a quick question, and she was very nice about answering it. She said Dad came by when they listed the house, asked about the price, but never called her back. She figured that's why I bought the house, some kind of gift to him. I asked, was she sure? She said of course, she even got his full name from him. He gave her the entire thing, even though I remember his middle name being somewhat of a hot topic with him growing up due to its family history (he wasn't fond of his father, who also had that name). She said Dad and I looked a lot alike. That he looked great for his age. I thanked her and hung up.

It all makes sense to me now. Hindsight is 20/20, of course. I probably could have figured it out sooner but I guess I didn't want to believe it could have been true. Maybe I don't have it all exactly right but I can put the pieces together into a decent picture. I don't know if the family who owned the house brought whatever was down there with them. Maybe they were intending to build a cellar and stumbled on the system. Maybe they built it to hide their secret. I don't know. But they got tired of taking care of it, the thing that lived in the bottom of the spiral, of constantly playing keeper. They died out, and the house passed on to my parents. I guess we sort of inherited the responsibility. But of course, how would we have known?

Dad probably went down thinking he'd come up with a great story to tell. He took the lights with him, maybe just because he didn't want to turn around once he got in there. Maybe he wouldn't have died as quickly if he'd left them behind. I don't know. Maybe when whatever was living in there was around the radiation was higher, sent Dad into a delirium. Maybe he never even saw it coming. I'd like to think it killed him quickly. That he didn't suffer. Those bruises, whatever wrapped the lights around his neck did it so hard he couldn't have had any chance of getting away. So hard a piece broke off and the thing carried it until realizing it would be too incriminating to have around. Maybe whatever it was was just trying to escape.

For years, it lived with us and poisoned us all. It gave my mom cancer, and it waited for her to die so it could slip away. It was smart enough to know that we'd come looking for it if it just up and disappeared. It. Whatever it is. A shape-shifter, a monster. I don't really care. It's out there, wearing my Dad's appearance like a second skin. Maybe it's gone far away now that it knows the house is back in the family. It doesn't want to be sent back down. It has what it wants. It's free.

I'm leaving a letter for my brother, instructing him to sell the house as soon as it's passed to him. I'm leaving it and everything else to him. I'm not going to tell him anything. I'll say I got tired of living and went somewhere quiet to die. I'll say they'll never find my body. I'll sign the letter, make sure they know it's me. I don't want them searching too hard.

I'm bringing a blanket, my favorite pillow, and some water. I doubt it will take long, but I don't want to die thirsty. I'm also bringing a small thing of epoxy, to seal the entrance shut behind me. A padlock, too, so even if the epoxy is dissolved they still won't be able to get in. The door is almost invisible anyway. Sealed shut, it'll be like it was never there. I checked the house, the radiation levels are a little high, but maybe they'll go down once I leave. I won't be staying long. I don't want to contaminate anything any more than I have.

Somewhere out in the world right now, my Dad is walking around. But it's not my Dad. It's something else. Maybe it doesn't know what effect it has on people. Maybe it does. But there's nothing I can do about it either way.

I'll go back down, seal myself inside, and go sit with my Dad until my body gives out. Like I said, it won't be long. I can feel myself coming undone inside. My chest hurts. My lungs are all soupy. A couple of my teeth have fallen out, too. Whatever cancer I have is spreading like fire. Hopefully I'll die of the cold before it can kill me first.

Please don't try to look for me. Just tell my story and make sure people know that I tried my best not to bring anyone else into this.

Brian, I love you. Please forgive me for what I've done, if you ever see this. I really tried my best to be a good brother. Please get yourself checked out as soon as possible. It's not too late for you.

Mom, I love you. I don't know why any of this happened to us. I wish I could take it all back and never find that door. I wish I could go back and do everything again. I got the answers, that's all I could do. I did my best. When I see you, I hope you won't hate me for what I did to us.

Dad, I'll see you soon. I'm coming to meet you. I'll make sure you're not alone anymore.

I love you all. I'm so sorry.