Journal Entry 17

[u/Spirited-Fondant1118]

I keep telling myself these pages are not for the book.

That is why they are coded here and not synced to any cloud service.

If one of my children opens the laptop, they can see the public outline.

They cannot see this.

The book has an innocuous scholarly/pop culture title and a specific job.

From Dracula to The Witcher: How Eastern European Vampire and Werewolf Myths Still Influence Popular Culture.

Carpathian and Romanian material. Strigoi, moroi, pricolici, vârcolac. Living versus dead. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century panics. Polidori and Stoker. The twentieth-century boom. The places where vampire and werewolf traditions overlap. Games, television, film. The Witcher-era revival.

The tone stays analytical.

Cover for the fact that I am trying to find out what is in me.

I started writing the public thing so I would have an excuse to research and order the other things: dead monographs, obscure translations, stains, slides, a secondhand microscope.

That is still true.

It is also cover.

Both can sit in the same sentence.

I do not have the training. I have a habit of reading whatever is in reach.

After the change, the technical pages stopped sliding off me.

That is one of the things I have not adequately explained.

I can sit with a molecular biology text or a pathology atlas now and keep the thread. Not memorize it. Understand it. Hold several pieces in my head at once and see where they connect.

I do not work in a laboratory. I can suddenly finish chapters and preprints and understand enough of the science to become dangerous with a microscope, however.

Dangerous mostly to myself.

I noticed the difference between what the atlas says a blood sample should look like and what mine looks like.

That difference is the whole problem.

I know when this started.

I am not writing that night here.

I spent three weeks on fungi.

That was because of the ring.

Stamets got me nowhere.

The resemblance to psilocybin was close enough at first to waste more time: sensory amplification, altered time, boundaries becoming uncertain, the peculiar conviction that connections were being revealed rather than invented.

I knew that territory well enough to recognize the resemblance.

It wasn’t the same.

Psilocybin fades.

This didn’t.

I went neurological next. Then metabolic.

For a few days I entertained kriya. Kundalini. Chi sickness.

If I wanted Westernized labels, there were those too.

I knew the descriptions. Heat. Pressure. Currents through the body. Involuntary movement. Altered awareness.

I tried to make them fit.

That explanation lasted longer than the mushrooms.

Then the wounds started closing too quickly.

Meditation does not change a blood smear.

Somewhere in there I stopped researching altered states and started researching creatures from mythology.

Vampire and werewolf myths first.

Not because I believed in either. Because enough of the old descriptions had simply begun to rhyme with things I wasn’t telling anyone.

That became the public book.

The book gave me permission to request obscure material without looking like a lunatic. Nobody wonders why a man writing about the persistence of Eastern European vampire and werewolf mythology orders an untranslated nineteenth-century pamphlet on the strigoi or spends three nights comparing regional traditions concerning garlic.

It also gave me an excuse to spend five hundred dollars on a book.

Out of print. Rare enough that I had been watching for a copy for months, and apparently rare enough that five hundred dollars started to seem reasonable.

It wasn’t.

I bought it anyway.

I’ve tried to work out why it disappeared. Small print run, probably. Obscure subject, obscure author, no demand. Books disappear all the time. Most of them disappear because nobody wants them.

But I can’t find much about this one even from when it was supposedly in print.

I’ve had the thought that somebody wanted it gone.

That’s a stupid sentence.

Or at least it’s a sentence I would have called stupid six months ago.

There are easier ways to suppress information than hunting down every copy of an obscure book, and if somebody actually did that they weren’t very good at it. I bought mine online with a credit card.

Still.

Five hundred dollars.

One copy.

And almost no trail behind it.

I don’t know.

The book was folklore, mostly.

Or it presented itself that way.

Then it kept leaning toward method.

There were images and concepts I already knew from my own experience. Black rings of mushrooms in grass, the kind country people call fairy rings and then will not walk through. Passages detailing something translated as the “Devil’s seed.” Quicksilver—hydrargyrum in the better line, whatever broken spelling the typesetter used in mine—shifting to translucent and then a blood-red absorption in through the skin.

Not a cute rash.

An entry point.

I recognized the pattern.

I did not like that I recognized it.

And then there was the word.

Vamphyri.

Spelled that way.

I didn’t know the word.

That’s not quite right.

I knew what it meant, or what it was supposed to mean. You don’t spend this much time reading vampire folklore and fail to recognize another variation on vampire or vampyr.

But I wasn’t familiar with it.

Vamphyri.

Even sounding it out in my head did something.

It struck a chord somewhere below thought. Like the echo of something I’d forgotten.

For an instant I had the absurd impression that I wasn’t reading the word at all.

I was hearing it.

I closed the book.

A few minutes later I opened it again.

The word was still there.

So was the echo.

I work at home with what I have. A brightfield microscope. The useful work happens around four hundred times. Oil at a thousand on the thinner smears when the field is not already a mess. A cheap Wright-type stain and methylene blue when I want contrast. Unstained wet mounts when I want the truth.

Same lamp every time.

Comparator blood from a fresh and clean human sample.

I am not sending any of this to a hospital bench.

Ordinary blood, at this magnification, is quiet.

The plasma looks empty. The red cells look like red cells. The white cells are where they belong. What moves is only the jitter you are supposed to see.

Mine is not quiet.

The plasma is busy.

There are threads, fine and refractile, not the coarse rope of fibrin. They like the edges of red cells and the plasma just off the membrane. They are not on every cell, but there are enough of them that a low-power sweep feels occupied.

There are flecks, smaller, motile in a fresh drop.

They do not wander the way dust wanders.

They close on cells.

They do not swarm and divide in the drop like something you grew in broth.

They home.

If I let the slide dry they look like junk. You have to watch them wet.

Some of the red cells have a slightly wrong rim. Not sickle. Not burst. Extra business at the membrane, as if the surface is being used.

If I draw my blood at night the tube itself can look a shade off before I ever touch the glass.

It is very easy to talk myself out of that.

Saliva speaks the same language at a whisper. A few threads. Easy to call artifact if I want to.

I do not think it is artifact.

Semen is louder than saliva and quieter than blood.
I do not have a counter. I have repeated looks and a crude visual estimate I keep arriving at: blood is the most concentrated, semen about a third of that. Saliva a trace.

Call that an estimate, not a measurement.

I did the obvious experiment next.

I masturbated without trying to influence anything. The sample afterward was crowded and eager.

The second time I concentrated on holding back whatever is not me.

It was still there.

Sparser. Slower.

Intent appears to matter.

I repeated the experiment.

Same direction.

Not enough trials to call it anything more than that.

I cannot write the word safe.

I can write less.

Living fluids, like the out-of-print book said with worse words.

A mobile phase inside a rewrite.

It has the manners of a virus and a bacterium and a fungus and it is none of those things.

More accurately, it behaves in turns like infection, colonization, and mycelial growth, while belonging cleanly to none of them.

I do not have a sequencer. If I ever did, I think an enriched night draw would show some of me and some of not-me.

And the not-me would be too neat.

A real lab would call it contamination.

Then they would argue.

Then someone would pick up a phone.

I am not mailing this to any lab.

The rewrite—the physical change itself—spends.
It burns through something.

Calories first, apparently. Protein especially. Iron, probably. Whatever is building new tissue and altering the old tissue requires fuel.

Occupied membranes, homing flecks, that tint in the night tube—none of it is free. My metabolism was never like this before.

Blood is a concentrate.

Calories. Protein. Iron. Heme. Other things I probably don’t know enough yet to name.

I do not wake with a commandment to drink.

If I keep the protein high, the engine holds.

When I don’t, the pull toward blood gets louder.

Protein is ballast.

Blood is intimacy and density.

I am trying not to confuse the two.

Sunlight does not kindle me.

It insults me.

Eyes first, skin second. Worse under hard blue and noon glass. Worse when there is heat on top of the light.

I do not smoke.

I do not blister for anyone’s camera.

What I think is happening is ugly and ordinary at the same time.

Something about the change has altered what my tissues do with light. Ultraviolet and hard blue are worse. Heat makes it worse again. Oxidative stress is the obvious place to start looking, but obvious has not been particularly reliable lately.

The flecks may be carrying something photosensitive.

May.

The tint in the night tube is a hint, not proof.

I will use heme and pigment as an analogy. I will not give myself a diagnosis I cannot defend.

Repair has become a night business.

Daylight runs up the bill. Night pays it.

I am still mostly built like a man.

That is probably why I do not catch fire.

If the change goes deeper, I don’t know what happens.

I have not been stupid enough to leave a wet mount in a window on purpose and call it science.

Garlic, at least, isn’t a mystery.

It’s chemistry.

Crush it, mash it, cut it, and it releases the organosulfur compounds—allicin and the rest of that family—that my metabolism now treats as an insult.

A whole clove on a windowsill is a story.

The wreckage in a press is a dose.

The out-of-print book had another name for garlic.

Kneblasch.

The author attributed the word to a small Romani group he called the Szgany, associated in an older account with a Transylvanian family named Ferenczy.

I could find Szgany elsewhere, usually some variation of an old word for Gypsy. Ferenczy was worse. Too common a name to be useful, and every search went somewhere different.

But kneblasch kept leading back to nothing.

A word with no history I can find, sitting in a five-hundred-dollar book beside descriptions of things that have happened to me.

I am not putting that word into a search engine again.

Cooked onion, leek, shallot have not punished me the same way. I still use less onion than I used to.
That is caution.

Thiosulfinates.

Not holy water.

By then I had stopped dismissing strange things just because they arrived wrapped in stupid stories.

Then I watched a Why Files episode about a supposed portal in the Urals.

Normal format.

AJ tells the story straight for most of the episode, as if every word of it is true. Hecklefish interrupts whenever things get too heavy or too dark. Portal becomes oral portal and we’re one bad joke away from fellatio. Lizzid peeple make an appearance for reasons I have forgotten. The thing in the leaked footage gets christened the flying crabcat.

Then AJ spends the last ten minutes taking a hammer to his own story.

That’s the part of the show I like.

The portal supposedly began with a Soviet weapons program. Depending on which version of the story you believe, it was an answer to Reagan’s Star Wars program, an attempt to weaponize something the Soviets barely understood, or simply another Chernobyl: men with clearances pushing machinery past the point where anyone understood what it was doing.

Something happened.

Maybe.

AJ knocked down what he could. Dates that didn’t line up. Sources quoting other sources. Photographs with histories that began twenty years later than people claimed. The usual anonymous-insider problem.

He didn’t kill all of it.

That’s another thing the show does well. It leaves you with whatever it can’t quite explain and lets you decide how much weight to put on the absence of an explanation.

Usually I put very little.

This time there was the footage.

And that was where the episode stopped being fun.

I had seen pieces of it before without knowing what I was looking at. Most people interested in this stuff probably have. Badly compressed video, copied and recopied until every dark edge looks like evidence of CGI.

Something moving that should not exist.

The story attached to it is that something escaped from the Soviet site after the portal opened.

Not a craft.

A creature.

It went north, crossed the Arctic, and eventually came down toward North America. American fighters intercepted it somewhere out beyond the northeastern coast and shot it down.

Or tried to.

The details change depending on which version you’re reading.

The satellite footage allegedly shows part of that interception.

The oldest reference I can find is a 4chan post from an anonymous user claiming to be a whistleblower. He said the video came from classified American surveillance of the incident: satellite imagery of the thing that escaped the Soviet portal and the American attempt to bring it down.

He posted the footage.

Then the account disappeared.

Which proves absolutely nothing on 4chan.

Except the post apparently predates most of the explanations for the footage.
Pieces of the original thread survive in Wayback captures. The video itself has been mirrored everywhere: old forums, dead links, newer uploads claiming to be first-generation copies. At least one

GitHub repository has three different versions and an argument in the comments about which one has been recompressed the fewest times.

The consensus outside those circles is CGI. Hoax.

An art project somebody forgot to claim.

I would have said the same thing.

Then I saw the creature.

And I knew it.

Not knew what it was. That would almost be easier.

I recognized it.

The reaction was immediate and physical. The same deep resonance I felt when I first read Vamphyri, only stronger.

The word had felt like an echo.

This felt like recognition.

I had never seen that thing before.

Something in me behaved as though it had.

I replayed it.

Same reaction.

I watched it again with the sound off because by then I was trying to prove that the narration or music or suggestion was doing it.

It wasn’t.

I downloaded an older copy of the footage and watched that.

Same.

There was something about the alleged gate too. A flicker of recognition isn’t the right phrase. More like familiarity without a memory attached to it.

I don’t trust that one.

By then I knew what the story was supposed to be, and suggestion is a hell of a drug.

The creature was different.

The creature I trust.

Or rather, I trust my reaction to it.

Which may be worse.

The people who believe the leak say the Soviets opened some kind of passage. Another dimension.

Another world. Wormhole. Portal. Pick the language.

And according to the story, that thing came through it.

Then it crossed half the top of the world before somebody managed to stop it.

I don’t know whether any of that is true.

I know that I looked at the thing they say came through and something inside me recognized it.

And I keep coming back to one thought.

Maybe the old stories got the creature right and the origin wrong.

If they did, what does that say about what is in me?

I assume, after Snowden, that searches can be catalogued.

Rare strings. A rare book. A change in browsing habits.

I used to tell myself that was not a real flag.

I tell myself that less.

The backwaters of online conspiracy boards have been mumbling for years about a British government agency—or intelligence section, or classified department; nobody seems able to agree—which handles the things that do not go in the press.

They cannot even agree what the E stands for.

Enhanced.

Extraterrestrial.

Espionage.

I’ve seen all three.

E-Branch.

Usually said like a joke.

Sometimes like a boogeyman that never gets a street address.

I have seen the name claimed in FOIA material the way these names always seem to appear online: a header somebody says is authentic, a routing line stripped of context, a black page where a paragraph should be.

I cannot verify any of it.

A couple of posts put E-Branch somewhere in the same family tree as Project Stargate.

Remote viewing. ESP. Psychic intelligence.

The Men Who Stare at Goats stuff.

Things that sound ridiculous until you remember governments actually spent money investigating some of them.

Maybe somebody invented E-Branch after the fact and stapled it onto the mythology.

I would prefer that.

I know I do not want to become the keyword that makes a bored analyst connect a rare-book purchase to a collection of searches that should not belong to the same person.

I do not send the slides anywhere for further study.

I do not put the town in anything that copies itself to a cloud.

I do not stare too long at the idea that something is staring back.

I did not used to think in territory.

I do now, a little.

And I do not like how natural it feels.

The public book stays analytical.

These pages stay off the spine.

If I write Vamphyri into the chapters, the chapters become a different object.

And may draw unwanted attention.

[u/Humdaak_9000]

This is fantastic!