ANTITHESIS - Entry 5 - Where Once They Stood

1998. The dead have risen and the stars are all wrong. Duncan Renfold finds himself in the midst of a emotional whirlwind when a long-prophesised celestial event brings startling changes to his hometown and threatens to reawaken old grief.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Nineteen eighty three um twenty sixty two right.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Um hi, uh Alex here. It's um it's been a while, I know.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Um don't worry, I'm I'm still here, I'm I'm still alive. I'm i i if you're still hearing this, uh I'm still working, still building a timeline, or rather trying to. Um things aren't making sense. Events in this book contradict each other. One story, like the one in my last recording, speaks of a detective marshal in the 1960s, but I remember him from the 90s. Same age, he was a young man. Several stories here speak of the UK in the 2030s, but there is not a single mention of the red wave at all. Like it never happened. There is no way that by 2032 that we have no memory of it. It's like it's like I'm looking at possibilities, options, choices, things that were, will be an art. Like none of it fits. None of it fits what I know, or I'm even close to it. I feel like I'm getting closer to something, but I don't know. It I turn a page, I I read the story, I picture it clearly in my mind and focus on it, and the book just guides me somewhere. Most of the time it's. It's strange. It's like I become part of that world for a moment. I leave the room and it's not as easy as just thinking about it. You have to feel it, I guess. Believe in it. Truly believe in it, completely, and when you do, it takes me somewhere. Where where I need to go. And apparently, today, that's here.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

1998. The village of Glind.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

I I know the place. Not far from my home, actually. The book seems to like when I narrate the story to you, whoever you are listening to this. It's like the book wants to hear it too. So maybe that's how I get out of this.

SPEAKER_02 4:07

I read, you listen, and together the stories take us where we need to go.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

So we might as well get on with it. What else have we got to do? This is the story of Duncan Renfold and his experience with the sudden return of the dead. I saw my mother cooking breakfast yesterday. Now, to you that might seem like a fairly regular encounter. But for me it's quite the shock, given that as of last June, she would have been dead for twenty years. I remember it vividly. I'd been rushed out of my university lecture by my brother, who told me that my mother's health had rapidly deteriorated following the return of her cancer. I remember I had sat by her bedside, looking up at the woman who had raised me for eighteen years, holding her frail, skinny hand, as I had when I was a young boy, except now that which gave warmth and texture was cold and weak. She would not survive that night. I remember the doctors delivering that death knell news that my heart had been dreading. And when the fated surge came and her health seemed to improve, I looked her in the eyes one last time, smiled, and kissed her softly, and by the morning light she was gone. I had long since grieved her, the woman she was, and long since accepted her, the woman she became by the end, frail, sick, and in need of a miracle. So as I walked down the stairs of my childhood home, expecting to be the sole occupant, following the sound of clattering pans and the smell of Cumberland sausages frying on the stove. To say I was shocked to see her standing there humming a tune was an understatement. She looked just as I remembered her as a boy. Her auburn no brown, no black hair and emerald eyes. The necklace I'd bought her for Mother's Day when I was sixteen was sitting perfectly at her neck. I looked down at my body, almost ready to see that the past thirty years of my life had been a nightmare. That I was a child again, rushing down for breakfast before school. But no. I was still thirty eight, still equipped with my prosthetic leg. The woman at the stove glanced up at me with a smile. Her smile, the smile that had dried a million tears. It was a smile as if everything was alright. The smile of a mother who had most likely been up since the crack of dawn, making sure that the house was clean and in a fit state for the two boys she raised alone. And I couldn't even smile back. I could simply stare in horror because she was exactly as I remembered her as a boy. Which means she could not be my mother. Mum? Funny. Even now, looking back, I still can't quite remember what she said in response. At least not audibly or physically, it's it's like a half remembered day, despite it being only a day or so ago. But I remember the feeling. Hearing her voice, the the way her accent caught on her tongue, the the vocal ticks of my childhood. But I don't remember the words. I just remember the feeling that she was happy and that it was a special day. I I should probably rewind a little bit just to help with some context. My name is Duncan Renfold. I'm a thirty-eight-year-old astronomer and former army engineer. Hence the leg. Following my injury I moved back into my family home and turned my attention towards the stars. Glind is a quiet little village, not too far from some major cities, but secluded enough to be quiet. Perfect for a stargazer like me. My mother, Lydia, passed away from lung cancer when I was eighteen. And her death was quite a lot for me to deal with, as you can expect. I guess in a way, turning my eyes skyward was a way for me to figure out if there was a heaven. An afterlife, I guess. Or at least a way to see her again. My brother, Nathaniel, he doesn't talk to me anymore. Not since he moved overseas, took a job with a fancy pharmacy group. He took her death harder than me. No. Perhaps that's too competitive to say. More so he took it differently. While I tried running from it before turning to the sky. He drew steel, fought it head on. He went on to study medicine, excelled at it even. I wouldn't be surprised if the cure for cancer had his name on it. I loved him. Mum always knew that. Mum always knew everything. Mum's uh Mums always do. Especially ones like my mum, who we didn't have a dad to balance any of the responsibilities, so she did everything. Saw everything, listened to everything, took it all in and made it all better. I guess that's why I'm not so surprised that even in her surprise reincarnation, she knew that that day, January 9th, 1998, was due to be a special day. But the reason it was special wasn't because of anything she could have known. I I hadn't even begun to study the implications of that day until long after she had passed. There was no way she could have known, but it felt right that she did. I'm getting ahead of myself again without context. Excuse me. This is this is all still fresh to me. I I don't want to get your records wrong. As stated, I am an astronomer, but most of my studies are focused on charting and documenting historical celestial events and mythological ones. Turns out there is a huge market and hunger in the community for understanding of what the ancient world saw in the sky. Such knowledge can help in a manner of ways. Religious groups can use it to help date the events of their texts. Scientific groups can pass patterns to figure out future events. It's a wonderful niche that I'm very passionate about. There's one such date, or rather a few dates in history that have baffled scientists for years, and it doesn't come from science or religion. It comes from an artist. Ernest McIntyre. You must have heard of him, everyone's heard of him, I guess. Or maybe that's just my circles. He's a late 19th early twentieth century philosopher and artist. He's mostly associated with nonsensical but captivating poetry from his early years. Some say he even brushed shoulders with the occult. I mean I've I've heard stories that he supposedly s was spotted dining with Alistair Crowley and meeting with famous faces, including several members of the Briathorne family. For me, however, my eyes turned solely on his later works, his post-war paintings. Say what you will about Ernest's work, but he possessed a unique ability to paint the sky, the celestial, with just his naked eyes at his disposal. And the story behind the origin of his Magnum Opus is fascinating. I I'm sorry for the massive information dump, but I guess I'm just distracting myself, so just bear with me, I promise it all makes sense. The story goes that upon returning from a trip to South America, Ernest's entire worldview changed. And instead of working on his poetry and some of his shitty paintings, he started working on twelve unique ones of the sky, specifically painted from different key points around the globe. Even in his late age, he still travelled across every continent seeking to finish this collection, painting the sky and the constellations above no matter what. And it turns out that his last painting is the most important one. Because it was painted in my hometown, in Glyind. And it was said that McIntyre died mere hours after finishing it. But not before naming it. He called it the Death of Capricorn. What the f Hello? Hello What am I doing? There's nothing out there.

SPEAKER_02 15:56

I'm just I'm just going insane, aren't I? Sorry, sorry. Um We should we should get back to the story Before I lose this thread out. I can't get distracted, I'm sorry. Anyway, where were we?

SPEAKER_01 16:26

The death of Capricorn had become my obsession in the past few years due to its proximity to my home. I had spent most of my later life researching the other paintings as best I could, looking over grainy photographs from decades old private auctions to catch even a glimpse of some of those constellations and nebulas that McIntyre had so expertly painted, despite most of them not even being visible to the naked eye. But Capricorn was different, for it did not depict a star map. All the others were constellations that matched the zodiac. But this one, this one didn't. It depicted a horizon. The horizon dominated by a single warped star, a black shape that seemed to hang impossibly low over my hometown. I recognized some of the landmarks, the glimmering spire of the church itself visible at the centre of the image. Beneath it the village itself seemed dark, quiet, asleep, slumbering beneath this midnight event that no one seemed the wiser or well maybe accepting it. The visible stars themselves, however, were there, and although they were warped ever so slightly, they did depict the constellation as titled Capricorn fading into the obscurity of the horizon. It was that detail that helped me figure out the secret behind this painting. The art itself was not a present moment. McIntyre was not painting what he saw. I mean, if there was some strange celestial event in the sky above Glind, someone would have mentioned it. But no one had. An old flame of mine, Caroline from uh the Hurstman Sioux, you must know it, and an old unimate of mine who'd managed to swing a job at Jodrell Bank were more than willing to help if it meant solving one of the most iconic astrological mysteries of our time. Through them we managed to figure out the exact date and time that the stars and sky would match the painting eleven fifty two PM on january ninth, nineteen ninety eight. Which brings us back to the present, and the realization that I had been staring in shock at the spectre claiming to be my mother still cooking breakfast that morning. If it hadn't been for the horrid knock at the door, I fear I may have collapsed down those stairs before my eyes unlocked from her. That sudden wrapping of knuckles on the wood, however, was more than enough to break my bewilderment, and I cautiously made my way down the stairs, eyes still locked on my mother until I made it to the front door. Cracking it open quickly just to come face to sweaty face with a man who, judging by his expression, was having a morning just as shocking as mine. It was the local cricket coach, Simon, eyes wide and balding head shimmering with sweat despite the cold winter air. The fact that he was here at all told me why he was sweating. Simon lived on the other side of town, a good twenty minute sprint at a brisk pace. He quickly attempted to catch his breath, leaving little time for me to ask him what he was doing there before he launched into a maddening tale that had I not had my own experience that morning I would have believed him beyond help. He began explaining that he feared the world had lost its mind, or rather maybe he had. Tears were streaming from his eyes as he reached to grip my arm, the force of which almost caused me to topple to the ground. I looked at him in horror. I quickly attempted to calm him, but doing so from the front door was going to be impossible, so I was left with a choice Go outside and leave this stranger in my home alone or bring him in to meet my mother. So I had no choice. I invited him in. I could not leave this woman out of my sight, this woman who shared my mother's face. The woman who now looked at the panicked Simon with motherly concern as I brought him into my house. She asked if everything was alright, and if the poor fellow needed a spot of tea. Given my earlier hesitation, it surprised even me when I turned to her and asked her politely if she could make us a pot and you know, bring it to us in the dining room. She nodded, and was more than willing to oblige. So I took Simon over to the dining room table and closed the door behind us. It took close to half an hour for Simon to even break out of his conniptions long enough to start to explain the situation to me. His eyes kept darting to my mother with cautious eyes whenever she entered and looked at me with a haunted expression. He dared touch the tea that was poured for him, almost as if he feared it would be poisoned or drugged. Not that I blamed him. It took me asking my mother to give us space for him to even begin to calm down and explain to me. Him what it was that he had seen. It turned out that, much like me, Simon and his wife Alyssa had awoken to sounds of another in their house. When the two went to investigate, they found their six-year-old daughter happily playing with dolls on the kitchen counter. For anyone reading this account, once again this would appear as a normal event. But Simon and Alyssa had lost their child to a freak car accident a decade prior. The pair had only just begun to truly move on from the event, and now, well, I cannot begin to consider what it must have felt like for Simon, let alone Alyssa. For me, the sting of losing my mother was a distant memory, one I had made peace with, but a child, your own child. Taken so soon and now freely returned, it's it's a horror I could not entertain. Simon, however, did not stop there. His blunt words that followed still haunt me. He asked me if the woman who had brought us tea was family. And then he asked me how long she had been dead. I tried at first to play it off, to lie, but Simon wasn't stupid. We shared the eyes of men who had seen death felled this day. Not through its cold removal of soul, but through this harsh reminder of where once those we loved stood. In a single moment the empty space in which our past loves stood was filled again, and we were learning to breathe in their presence once more. I shared the truth with Simon. The woman had claimed to be my mother, and that she had died twenty years ago. Simon seemed to relax slightly at that confirmation, as if it was the final nail he needed to know that what he was experiencing was real and not some elaborate hallucination. He explained that I had not been the first he had spoken to. He'd visited several other acquaintances across the village on his way here, all of whom had shared the same story. Loved ones, ones that we had almost moved on from had returned. Children, siblings, parents, lovers, the town outside had woken to a world where death was no longer the end. Some had called it a miracle, others a sign of the end times, others wanted to report it to the police, to the outer world, and others were stopping them. Because how do you even begin to explain it? Well for me, someone who had spent years waiting for this day, waiting to see what McIntyre's painting represented, suddenly found myself unraveling a layer of the puzzle I had never even considered. And maybe I had the answer. Silence fell over the room as we discussed the possibilities of what was occurring. I debated telling Simon about the celestial event I'd been studying, but how could I even approach such a topic, even in the circumstances we found ourselves in? How do you tell someone that the dead rising was only the prelude to something else, that it might not last? The truth is I couldn't. Not yet anyway, I didn't. And I didn't have the chance, anyway, because soon enough my mother returned with a fresh pot of tea, and remarked that Simon seemed to be in better sorts than when he arrived. He smiled and nodded, coming up with a quick story about how he'd received some terrible news about one of his uncles, and he'd rushed over for some support from a friend. My mother, as caring as she always had been, placed a gentle hand on Simon's shoulder and comforted him as best she could. I felt my whole body pull forwards ever so slightly in that moment, as if yearning for that touch, and yet equally repulsed by it because she could not be here. She couldn't be, she was dead, the boy I was is dead. But the pull of the space she occupied was almost impossible to ignore. It was then, however, that something she said caught my ear. She asked Simon if he'd be willing to come to the church that evening, an opportunity to pray for his health for acceptance of grief. I sat upright in my chair and stared at the woman blankly. It was as if watching polished porcelain crack, an imperfection in an otherwise perfect visage. You see, my mother had been many things in her life, a philosopher, a pragmatist, a stern and stubborn trendsetter. Me and my brother inherited so many of her traits I knew her better than I knew myself in some ways. And there was one thing that she had never been religious. I called her on it almost immediately, a bold move given that I was still unsure what it was I was dealing with, but she simply smiled and shrugged, explaining that she thought it would be a nice way to have everyone come together, would serve as a nice excuse for everyone to watch the sky tonight for the special day. Simon, to my surprise, was immediately taken by the idea, and seemed to be almost warming to the presence of my mother. I could see it the pull, the the draw like an event horizon, watching my my friend disappear beyond it, knowing that it was too late. I could see the acceptance in his eyes. My cup crashed to the floor, knocking everyone from their thoughts, even me. A boon in the grand scheme of things, as it gave me a chance to divert the subject, allowing me to make a hasty exit from the room and take Simon and ask him to leave all at the same time. My mother seemed almost caught off guard by the sudden shift and asked me if everything was alright. Without thinking I was a boy again, a teenager, snapping at her for babying me. I told her to leave me be, to stop interfering with my life like she always had, that she couldn't even let me have this, my one special day. I shouldn't have said that. Even if the woman herself wasn't real, the pain in her eyes was. The silence that followed her was. She surrendered, letting Simon go without a fuss. And even offered to clean up the mess while I took Simon home. I didn't think twice. Not at the time. Grabbing my coat and practically dragging Simon out of the door and starting down the path towards his home. It was all a mess. That whole encounter. You can take that out of this account if you want. But I prefer if it was left in. On the way back I began quizzing him on his thoughts. Simon, that is. How he could so easily switch tunes at the idea of going to church with a woman who had been dead just a day earlier. He smiled and shrugged just as she had. Then shook his head, arguing that the whole experience had been oddly calming in a way. That he'd begun to maybe understand the bright side of everything. He'd got his daughter back. I'd got my mother back, several others had got their lovers back. Grief didn't mean anything anymore. We had everything we wanted. It was a miracle. It was a miracle. We walked at a brisk pace, s fast enough to get home quickly, but slow enough to watch as the town came to life around us. Everywhere we looked, unfamiliar faces stood surrounded by familiar ones. Looks of wonder and horror on the faces of our neighbours as they greeted and conversed with the long dead. In the park, children we knew played with parents we didn't, humming tunes to humming tunes. I knew that tune, it was It was the tune my mother was humming. But but it was more than that, and I It felt familiar Like I'd known it since I was younger, since she died. I stopped for a moment watching the people around me, watching the world turn, feeling the pole around me. My eyes glanced upward at the morning sky. It was a clear day. Beautiful. Perfect. The sun catching the downs. Just like the day that she She did die. Right? Simon's voice rang out suddenly, followed by a thud of his hand on my shoulder. I don't know how much time had passed, but we had moved, definitely. We stood just outside his house. Simon was now looking at me with concern. He asked if I was alright, that I'd been quietly humming to myself. I lied. I told him that I was fine, that I had simply not slept right with all my studies for everything I was working on. That and the ever-present phantom pain in my leg, I guess. He smiled at me and patted me on my shoulder once more, thanking me for the tea and the comforting words. And to give his love to my mother. Love to my mother. The Phantom Pain itched. The day passed and I said not a word to anyone. I dared not go home, there was too much there. Spaces that shouldn't have been filled, words that couldn't have been spoken, words that had been spoken that shouldn't. I had created a paradox of my own grief of my pain. I couldn't go back there. So I went and sat atop the hill overlooking the village, where McIntyre had painted his last work. My eyes watched the village below as people went about their days. Cars drove up the hill towards Ringmo without even a thought, not knowing that this small parish was witnessing a miracle. The dead had come home. I lost track of time on that hill, just like I had when walking. The January chill biting at my fingertips became oddly comforting, as it was the only thing that in that moment felt real. Each gust of wind reminded me that warmth would follow, not because the wind stayed, but because each gust ended, leaving room for the next. The sun reached its zenith, and by early afternoon it had begun to set. And as the air turned colder and colder, my mind turned back to that earlier encounter. Shouting at my own mother. The hurt I had seen in her eyes. I began to wonder if I was wrong. You too, right? Yeah? If you were in my situation. I began to wonder if I was wrong to spurn the gift of having her back. Healthy and willing to be there for me. How could I have done such a thing to her? My own mother. Her own son. I felt bad in a way. Wishing death on her when she had stood so smiley in that kitchen. I I felt bad for remembering who she was not who she was when I was a boy. Maybe I should have just accepted it. The sun dipped into twilight, and soon I found myself wandering home. I wondered if she still held that pain in her eyes that had shown to me earlier. A hurt that my younger self would never have even registered, but I did. Me, thirty eight year old me looking for the love that I couldn't have in my twenties. It just I hurt my mother even in death. Was moving on from her any different? Was me forgetting her to go out and to fight for my country and then come back and stare into space? Was that any different? I crossed the threshold back into my house that evening, and I found it dark. Silent empty. I called out to her, expecting to hear her voice but found nothing in response. My legs carried me from room to room, looking for even the smallest trace of her, and yet I found nothing. With each moment, each call out to her, the silence weighed heavier. She was gone. Just like I had been used to, but I'd had her back. She she was she was right there. Right there, and I had spurned her, and now she's gone again. I'd seen that emptiness filled it and now it was empty again, and I had been too blind to accept it. Grief washed over me, and I fell to my knees at the foot of my stairs, tears welling in my eyes, twenty years of grief erupting from my heart so violently that my screams seemed to ring out across the house. I raged against the pain. I raged against my own guilt. I scorned myself. I hope that my screams may return her once more just as I had all those years ago, but all they did was echo around an empty space in an empty house. But deep within that echo, I heard that song again. The song that she had hummed, the song the children had hummed, the song that I had hummed, and now the song that rang out from the church organ high up on the hill. I listened for a moment, finding comfort in its sweeping tunes, but then I remembered what my mother had said earlier to Simon. A gathering at the church, a chance to pray, to remember, to accept grief. The sound of shattering porcelain filled my mind once more, and the grief slipped away and logic embraced me once more. I had been grieving a distortion, a facsimile, a fake a promise, an illusion, and it was playing with my mind. My eyes glanced at my watch. Eleven forty five PM seven minutes until my allocated time. All at once the strings in my mind that had been too clouded to fight back began to form, and to my horror I realized what McIntyre had foreseen. A dark, quiet village, not sleeping. Dead empty. The church beneath the warp star, the dead were not rising to comfort the living, they had come to collect, and they had almost incapacitated me with my own grief to stop me from alerting people to it. I had to stop that service. I had to stop the song. I raced out of my home with mere minutes to spare, rushing over the bridge, past the park and up the hill towards the church. With each step the organ's discordant tune seemed to grow harsher and darker, the bells louder and louder. There was no life on those streets anymore. It was dark and hollow and absent. Like the silence of a graveyard over an entire town. My footsteps echoed against hollow ground. A row of gravestones from the nearby graveyard bearing ancient names watched me charge towards a fate uncertain. A celestial event charted by a madman now coming to pass, one I could not allow to occur. I checked my watch again. Two minutes two minutes to go. With no time to spare, I charged through the church gate and towards the main building, the pathway seeming to extend, rejecting my approach and any semblance of reality, as if denying me a chance to accept, denying me a chance to be free of that grief. The pull of it was greater here. Time began to warp, seconds became minutes, became hours. The audio of the bells warped, the organs screamed, it was deafening, it was painful. I felt my body begin to unravel, to strings beginning to pull away from my skin. And as I reached the door of the church, the distortion became so fierce that even my watch stopped, and in my horror I realized that the time had come. McIntyre's prophecy. I watched. As the sky bent within itself, folding into impossible shapes. Stars warped and constellations decayed and burnt and fell out of light into the darkness. And then that darkness that was left formed into a perfect well of nothing. An empty space consuming the grief of a town that could not accept death, could not accept the coming of an end, the ever present, infinite void where once they stood. Where once they lived. I had spent my life seeking the afterlife, to know where my mother had gone, and here at this moment I realized that I had invited this thing into my heart to feed on my need to know, and through McIntyre's work, I had found the truth. I had found meaning, and that meaning meant that it had no power over me anymore. Because I knew where my mother had gone. The empty space gazed at me with impossible eyes, hungering for me and the soul of the town it had already begun to consume. It sung with an incomparable voice, but I would not allow it to finish its verse. I would write my own. And so with renewed figure I barged my way into that church to find calm. A room full of familiar faces listening to a gentle tune from the organ. The faces of those in prayer turned to me. I recognized them. Simon, Alyssa, everyone we'd seen in town, and even my brother. They smiled at me as if they had waited for me to join them in that moment. To join them in acceptance. To try to fill the empty space. And at the end of the room, standing between me and the organ that was my mother. She smiled and welcomed me in. She asked me what took me so long. I grit my teeth, holding back the torrent of emotions in my mind. I approached her. I asked her if this was real, if if any of this was real, if I was if I was dying, that I don't know, maybe I'd made a terrible decision and this was an afterlife. That I had found heaven, that I was that everything was gonna be okay. I just wanted my mother to tell me I was going to be okay. I just wanted my mum. She told me that everything was as real as I wanted it to be. She sung the same tune that I could hear from the organ. The song blessed my ears, and I shut my eyes in comfort. For a moment I was right where I wanted to be. I felt her hand on my cheek. I held her other hand tight, I squeezed it so tight, but my hands were so small I was I was a boy again. I I grazed my knee at the playground and she'd rushed across, having heard my cries and she was looking at me. But her hand felt wrong. It was not her hand. It was not my mother. My mother had died. My mother was dead. I had watched her go and I would not let anyone take her face, and so with a heavy heart, I kissed her goodbye once more, pushed her aside and charged for that horrific organ. The smiles in the crowd turned to horror and panic as I threatened to take their reality from them. But such a reality is not worth the price. They tried to stop me, but they couldn't. They grabbed my arm, they grabbed my leg, but I would not let them. I ripped my prosthetic from its socket and I jammed it into that organ, expecting gears and sparks, but all I got was blood. And I realized that it wasn't just an organ. It was a heart. The beating heart The beating slowed, and the world seemed to shift into utter silence and darkness. The next thing I remember I was here. Brighton Hospital. I couldn't tell you how I got here, but apparently a driver who had been passing by found me unconscious at the side of the road moss, picking some of the wild garlic that grows up there and Yeah, apparently I had been up there with my leg removed, unconscious and severely dehydrated. Doctors said that it seemed like I had been walking around for days, but when I told them that I knew exactly what day it was, what time it was, they were surprised. Because my symptoms did not line up with the time that I said it was. But Simon came to visit earlier today, just before um you came to visit me, actually, to document this whole thing. He corroborated the dates and times that I told the doctors, and I guess that was it. They accepted it that I had been seen on the ninth of January at ten thirty in the morning, and by one PM on January the tenth, I had appeared dehydrated at the side of the road with only one leg. To make matters worse, Simon didn't have any memory of anything. When I tried to ask him about the church and all of the the villages or his daughter, he just looked at me strangely. Told me that his daughter had been dead for ten years, and you know that it wasn't fair to me to bring that up to him and I apologized, but The thing that scared me the most, I guess, was that he said that there had never been a church on the hill. But I I I know that there was. I know it. I didn't dream that. McIntyre's painting showed the church. It was right there. There are forces and things out there that we cannot possibly understand. But we can fight them. I know we can. I did it. Whether McIntyre wanted to warn us or bring about the end is yet to be seen, but I'm done with it all. After this, after after this recording is done, after you have taken my words and transcribed it onto paper, once all is said and done, I just want to go home. That's what we all want, right? We all just want to go home.

SPEAKER_03 54:01

What the fuck What the fuck was that?