Work Text:
Gertrude,
Do not come looking for this town, if you even can. There is nothing here for The Eye, and nothing here for you. It took me weeks to get to this place, and I believe that when you come, if you chose to do so, the ground will have finished swallowing all evidence of its terrible crime. And what a terrible crime it was.
At first, I believed The Spiral to be the main culprit, and you will understand why I believed so later on. Though there was no evidence of any avatar acting on Its behalf, said avatar could very well have chosen to saunter away before their actions reached a peak, or been swallowed up with the rest of the town. In my searching, however, as I found no evidence of a malicious toying, I found more signs of the slow inevitable squeeze into death. But that means nothing. You and I both know of my theories of The Extinction, and The Spiral could have simply been a co-agent of that emerging power.
Have you been to Japan, Gertrude? Have you heard of the folklore, of the monsters I have no trouble believing creep about in the night? I cannot remember who first told me, but he said that it was a development stemming from the islands’ unique geography. Tsunamis could rise up and sweep away lives without a moment’s notice, hence the reflection of such inevitability in many stories. Perhaps it is like the contrast between Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The former had the predictable and fertile Nile, while the other had the all-consuming and stormy Tigris and Euphrates, and their outlook on the spiritual world was a reflection of their day-to-day lives. But I digress.
Kurozu-cho was, as I have been told, a rather quiet place. Most of the working population commuted to the nearby city through the mountain tunnel, the collapse of which local authorities are still organizing to dig out. For whatever reason, it took them a while to even start.
I suppose I understand why none of the town’s population attempted to flee over the mountains; I had a difficult time of it myself without nature conspiring against me. I cannot imagine that anyone would have dared attempt such a thing while the town was transforming. There were simply too many harmless possibilities even in the beginning—the idea that a new and harmless wonder of nature was at their feet being, likely, a strong one. And then, of course, there was the cultish sentiment surrounding it all.
As I have said, it was a slow transformation, easy to dissect in hindsight but difficult to see in the moment. Several diaries I found scattered about document flashes in terrible ignorance of the final result, but at some point there began an obsession with the thing. Men and women plaiting their hair, scarring themselves, inducing others to join them in their nigh-on worship of that horrible, twisting line.
And as I sit in a small, bustling cafe, I can still see it in the back of my mind. It refuses to leave, and I may safely say that it will not for some time yet—if it ever does.
Gertrude, everything in the town had turned into a spiral. The grass for miles around, the people within down to their skeletons and rotted flesh, the— things that I cannot place in any natural category, have all twisted into ghastly and unnatural shapes. I have had to focus on the inanimate objects and nature more, for even looking at those caricatures of abandoned humanity makes my stomach turn.
There was a scientist on the outskirts of the town, whose findings have been invaluable for me. He was the first, I believe, to see a pattern in the happenings, though it only led to his ruin. I must admit I stole what research I could find in the ruins of his house. He had no children, nor heirs of whom I could find evidence, and if the local authorities manage to find anything before this town finishes sinking, I do not know what they could do with it. It was mostly observations, at least, the parts that weren’t covered by wobbling, ink-splattered spirals. Nothing terribly useful, at this point.
The pictures of the town certainly do not match up to what I saw. The buildings had changed from the natural sprawl of a town. A series of row houses (in a spiral out from the center, of course) stood in their place. I was informed that they had been the only surviving buildings after a number of hurricanes (or tsunamis, or both) ruined everything else, and the townspeople had lived in them for a good amount of time before their deaths. I did not go in any of them; they were so narrow as to be impossible to access, and it was likely a trap as well.
Many more people lived in the town than the number of bodies I saw before m. For all I know, their bodies are trapped inside those buildings, vanished from the face of this Earth.
And so you may easily see why I believed The Spiral to be at blame upon looking at the immediate signs, but also why I do not believe it was working alone. The Spiral tricks and distorts, yes, but never has done so on such a large scale. Perhaps it was an attempt at a ritual, or a taste of one, though you would know that better than I. With little else than scraps of clues, however, I cannot make any real conjecture. Only that the town was ruined over years, the people within were aware of it, and their existence has been ended by events far outside their control.
In any case, my friends in the MLIT have given me ample reason to believe that our “Worker in Clay” was unaffiliated with the town’s transformation, so you may rest easy there.
I am not certain where to proceed with this case. There are no survivors, and if there is anything helpful to us within the town, I have not found it or translated it yet. I will be leaving for Iwate Prefecture in the morning, to investigate a number of odd disappearances after a recent earthquake, and will keep you updated on what I find, if I happen to find anything. Be well.
—Adelard Dekker