Chapter Text
“Unsigned statement regarding an encounter with a group of entities calling themselves 'The Mighty Nein'. Original statement given January 15, 2018. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins.”
“ ‘I don't know how it happened. I don't understand it. Even now, after everything I've seen, after everything they showed me, it's still hard to wrap my head around.
“ ‘It shouldn’t have happened, not to me at least. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I worked as a garbage truck driver in the U.S.. The work is boring, and often gross, but no one else wants to do it, so the pay isn’t half bad, at least as a part time job. It’s not the kind of thing you could make a living off on it’s own, but I do other work too, so it’s not much of a problem for me.
“ ‘I go to work every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 4:00 a.m., and leave by 7:00. That morning, I had to arrive earlier than usual, 2:30, I was covering for a co-worker who had called in sick. In retrospect I wish I had done the same.
“ ‘We collect from neighborhoods and commercial buildings alike. The neighborhoods are the easy part, the can is waiting right there when you pull up, and if it’s not you just move on past. With commercial places though, it wasn’t uncommon for the dumpster to be in some obscure nook behind the building, and every once in a while, they were even inside.
“ ‘This was the case for the warehouse we went to that morning. Like I said, I was covering for someone else, so this wasn’t my usual route. I had never seen this building before, and I was glad of it. It was splattered with burn marks on the outside. They were serious, too, I was surprised that whatever had caused hadn’t burned the whole place down.
“ ‘That wasn’t the only thing, though. I’ve never had much of a problem with the dark, good thing too, cause most of my work gets done before the sunrise. I’d stared into plenty of dank, haunted-looking alleyways and walked in like it was any old Tuesday, because it was. But this place was different. There was suffocating darkness about it, like the shadow had mass, life, and was pressing down into me, weighing me down. Like the idiot I am, I shook it off as just the weight of too little sleep, convincing myself that it was nothing to worry about. But right then, in this strange, unknown place, it scared me more than I was willing to admit.
“ ‘But, a job’s a job, so I did it regardless. We couldn’t find the bin outside so we grabbed our flashlights, though I guess you would call them torches, and headed in.
“ ‘As suspected, the inside was dark, though not as bad as we had feared based on the outside. In fact, there seemed to be a light coming from somewhere in the middle of the building, reassuring me quite a bit. It was the only evidence I could plainly see that this building was even occupied.
“ ‘Most of the walls had lost whatever paint they had had, some entire halls even looking as though the color had been intentionally charred away, similarly to the outer. Once again, how this level of desolation was possible without burning the place to the ground was beyond me.
“ ‘While that light did reassure me in one way, it also terrified me in some others. Well, not exactly. It’s not so much that the light itself was inherently scary, but rather, the closer we got to it, the weirder things became.
“ ‘The air started to get unbelievably warm, like a real life game of hot and cold. Our surroundings got stranger and stranger too. It was more than once or twice that I got the impression we had already been around one hallway or another before, but I didn’t voice it aloud, and neither did Becca, my partner, so I let it drop.
“ ‘The hallways that had started to become familiar to me in their repetitiveness started to now become foreign. Where before, each hallway had two, maybe three doors, they now had upwards of five. Every once in a while, we would come to a hallway that simply stopped, and we would be forced to open a door to go down.
“ ‘I don’t know why, but every time we opened a door and stepped inside, it felt like a game of chance. Like something horrible would happen to us if we chose the wrong one, like there was something, someone, watching, watching over us, willing us to open the doors to death itself.
“ ‘We must’ve opened dozens of doors, gone down dozens of hallways. None of them seemed to lead anywhere. I started to panic, thinking no way was I going to get lost in an abandoned warehouse at three in the goddamned morning.
“ ‘I sped up, no longer concerned about doing my job and just wanting to get the hell out of this building. I don’t know why it made me so panicked, it wasn’t so weird yet. I should’ve been fine. But a madness invaded my mind in a way that I had never known before then, and have become all too familiar with since
“ ‘In my crazed state, I stumbled through door after door, winding hallway after winding hallway, barely taking in the still growing heat, nor the faint sound of creaking laughter that had suddenly appeared on the draft. I had opened half a dozen or so doors before I realized Becca was no longer by my side.
“ ‘Turning around, I looked at the doorways I had run past. Though in my heart, I knew it was pointless, I still harbored a small sense of hope that somehow, I would be able to make my way back to her, retrace my steps and find her again.
“ ‘It wasn’t so much that I cared for her wellbeing. Of course I didn’t want her to die, but I had spent maybe a collective five minutes talking to her in our 7 month co-workership, and in a regular circumstance, there would be no way I would risk my life for her. Who knows, maybe finding her would even be dangerous in the slightest, but… something told me it was.
“ ‘Something gave me the distinct sensation that to go backwards, to try and make my way back to Becca, to the entrance, would mean death for the both of us.
“ ‘So no, I would not be willing to risk my life for her. I had no urge to try and ‘save’ her whatsoever, no, that was not what this was about. My newfound desperation to be by her side, by anyone’s side, was about the fact that I suddenly felt so, so alone. Despite the growing warmth, a cold set into my skin, a wet, touch starved, indescribably lonely kind of cold. It wormed its way into my bones and dragged me down to my knees.
“ ‘I sat there for a while. I don’t know how long, I don’t wear a watch, but it felt like quite some time. Eventually, the cold, the lonely began to bleed out of my skin. Though it left me feeling dry and empty, I was at least able to pick myself up and start walking again.
“ ‘I should’ve just stayed there and let myself rot. I would have been preferable to the things I was to see.
“ ‘I decided to head towards the light. I didn’t know what I would find there, whether it would be dangerous or helpful, but it was better than aimless wandering.
“ ‘I headed towards the light for quite a while before I realized two things. First, I had no idea how it was reaching me. It wasn’t slipping under doorway cracks, there were far too many in between me and it, and it wasn’t shining through windows, for there were none to shine through. It took some wonderance before I came to the realization that it wasn’t a light at all. The warmth, no, burning of it was so powerful, you’d think for sure there’d be a light source accompanying it, but there was none. Just a striking, powerful burning, distinct enough to follow like a lighthouse.
“ ‘Secondly, though, and much more pressing at the time, I realized the floor was starting to get wet. Just spots at first, but after some time the whole floor became dark with moisture. Then, even worse, it began to rise.
“ ‘There were no indications of where the water could be coming from, it seemed to simply be climbing up out of the floor. There was nothing I could do to stop it as it came up towards me, centimeter by centimeter, inch by inch. It rose to my ankles, then to my knees, so on and so forth. At some point it became more beneficial to simply swim.
“ ‘Swimming through the halls, though uncomfortable, was far from the worst thing I had experienced that night. It wasn’t so bad for a while, until the water started to approach the top.
“ ‘The doorways were lower than the ceiling, They got closed off first. I would have to dive down for a second or two to get through, then swim back up to the remaining few inches of air. The water, of course, reached the top eventually.
“ ‘I took my last gasp of air and paddled on through the thick, suffocating ocean that had become of these halls.
“ ‘It was darker than it had been before. At some point during the panic, my flashlight had gone out, and I had left it behind. It wouldn’t have done much for me now, anyways, I doubt the light would have carried far enough to make much of a difference.
“ ‘My breath held longer than I thought it would, a minute at least. But then, my lungs began to ache. Almost no pain and then all of it at once. The air inside them was empty of oxygen and begged to be let free. I breathed out, watching the bubbles rise to the top, and felt relief for a moment. Then the pain just started back up again. Now, instead of my lungs being too full of the wrong substance, they were empty of everything. They contracted, screaming at me to let something in.
“ ‘And I did. I couldn’t hold out any longer. I let the water slip in through my throat and nostrils, burning and searing everything on the way down. It filled my lungs with cold, heavy liquid. I could feel it sloshing around in there. But the pain. The pain was unbearable. I couldn’t breathe, no matter how hard I tried, and with the lack of oxygen, my strength and consciousness was starting to leave me.
“ ‘With what little will I had left, I thrashed about screaming and gulping down water in my desperation to breathe. Nothing was working, I was suffocating, this was where I was going to die.
“ ‘Just as I stopped moving and my eyes floated shut, fuzzy darkness flooding my brain, I awoke. I was on a dry floor, clothes and hair perfectly dry. My lungs were still full of water though, and as I coughed it up, I could see in what dim light there was that it was dark brown and murky, the kind of disgusting fluid you could pull out of a swamp. To say I ran would be an understatement.
“ ‘I only ran for a few seconds, that was all my damaged lungs could take. I leaned against a wall and gasped down as much air as possible. I needed a break. It had been overwhelming experience after overwhelming experience, and I needed everything to just stop for a minute.
“ ‘As I let my breath catch up with me, I glanced around this hall for the first time. It was different from the others. Where every other hallway I had been down, the dozens upon dozens I had seen, all of them had been lined with generic paintings and boarded up windows, this one was lined with small, handheld mirrors.
“ ‘Every three or so feet, there was a small, metal framed mirror, hanging on the wall. The metal surrounding each and every one of them was different, but all the same dark brown-ish red. Some were curving and rounded, intricate and complex. Others were simple, plain, just there to hold the glass.
“ ‘But every single one had the exact same engraving of an eye. It was uncomplicated, the shape of an american football, containing two circles, one inside the other. There were three lines protruding from the top and bottom of the shape, which I assumed to be lashes, and that was it. It was something so simple, yet it made me so uneasy.
“ ‘Though they were far from realistic, there was something inside of them that seemed alive, somehow. Like it recognized that I had seen it, and it was now settling down for a nice long session of seeing me back.
“ ‘After all of my experiences that night, the idea that someone was watching me through mirrors maybe didn’t seem as far-fetched as it should have. Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to care all that much. Let them watch, let them see all the shit I was dealing with in here.
“ ‘And so, like so many times in the previous few hours, I carried on. Even after I left the hall of mirrors, I still felt as though I was being watched. It wasn’t so bad for a while, it almost felt nice to know there was someone else here. But, of course, it got worse.
“ ‘Slowly, memories began to pop up in my mind. At first they weren’t bad, they were just strange. That time when I slipped and fell into a pool and on top of someone. That time when I threw up in the middle of class. But then they began to get weirder. Weirder and sadder. Things that I must’ve repressed the hell out of. The fresh sting of my dad’s belt on my arm, the deep-seated betrayal of my girlfriend telling me never to speak to her again, dozens of other memories I wish would’ve stayed in my subconscious.
“ ‘But the worst part about all of this, is that through every memory, I felt, no, knew that they could see them too. Whoever, whatever was watching me, they knew. It may not sound like such a terrifying thought, but to be there, alone, and have the deepest reaches of your soul dragged out and left for that thing to see, is one of the worst horrors I’ve ever experienced.
“ ‘Whatever I did, wherever I ended up, I needed to get away from that thing. I needed to stop being seen, to put those feelings and traumas back where they came and never show them to another soul. I ran, I ran as hard and as fast as my exhausted legs could carry me. The watching faltered, every once in a while. With every door I opened, and every turn I made, I stagnated, but it kept seeing me.
“ ‘My legs cried out, my muscles aching, but I didn’t stop. I ran and ran until my walls went back up and I felt safe again. What I had failed to notice in panic, though, was the still increasing heat. Where I stood now, it was unbearable.
“ ‘It didn’t take long for me to sweat straight through my shirt, and my jacket was probably wetter than one might say it should have been, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about the heat, or about the exhaustion in my bones, I finally felt safe.
“ ‘I took a moment to catch my breath, a difficult task made more so by the dry, broiling heat surrounding me. After gods know how long, I stood up and looked around. I noticed immediately that this hall was different from the hundreds I had been in that night. Every other door in this building was made of yellow painted wood, but there was one in this room, just one, that wasn’t.
“ ‘It was unpainted, just a solid silvery metal. It might’ve been steel, or iron, I don’t know, but it was intriguing enough that I decided it was worth opening. I couldn’t have known at the time, but in hindsight, that was the worst decision I could have made.
“ ‘I opened the door and stepped inside. The heat was even stronger here, enough to make me hazy and nauseous, and now I could see why.
“ ‘In the center of the room stood seven individuals. Six of them walked in a circle, surrounding the last. The person in the center appeared to be a man, somewhere in his thirties, maybe, but you might’ve thought older by how tired he seemed. He was dressed in a torn brown coat, with a faded blue scarf around his neck. He was slumped over, his chin on his chest, with his arms stretched outwards.
“ ‘His hands were the strangest part. They appeared to be dripping, like candle wax, and they were glowing a bright, aggressive orange. His eyes were closed and relaxed, but the moment I stepped into the room, his head snapped up and his eyes flew open.
“ ‘I have never been more sure of my own demise.”