This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/meags_13 on 2024-04-08 05:33:24.
My grandfather was a simple man.
He worked for the newspaper company every week since he was twelve years old, only taking off for his father’s funeral, the birth of his eldest daughter, and to fight in Vietnam. He married my grandmother after the war in a white-clapboard chapel in a rented suit. He collected early American history memorabilia. He believed in God.
When Grandma died, he got a bit more social. Called sometimes. Asked me what I was learning in History. Mom said it was because he was lonely. As I got older though, I became something of a history buff myself and I think Grandad connected with that. He would show me all these letters he had collected over the years - letters that the earliest of settlers had written to each other and back home when they were trying to establish towns that would survive. Jamestown. Roanoke. They were fascinating.
When Grandad died, he left all those letters in two boxes. He had planned, organized everything so it would be easy for us. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and had never faced an enemy he couldn’t shoot, so that’s exactly what he did. He stared down his plaque-ridden brain in the mirror during a moment of lucidity and shot it with his '45.
The two boxes were labeled: ‘DONATE TO MUSEUM,’ and ‘FOR CARRIE.’
Almost everything was in the museum donation box, which I thought was only right since they were priceless artifacts. Mom already had the Smithsonian on the line. In my box though, the things he had passed along ‘for Carrie,’ there were two letters, and one was from him.
_
Dear Carrie,
If you are reading this, I am dead, and I hope it’s not too hard on you or your mom. The other letters I left you were given to me by a friend in the auction circuit, and he picked them up from a n antique shop- the owner gave them out for free, the bastard.
I realize I am burdening you with this knowledge, but it has to go on to somebody, and I know your brothers, God love em, couldn’t cut it. But you know. You know the horrors this country was founded on and you can be trusted to do what’s needed when They come back.
When I got back from Nam, I went looking for a reason to believe in America. I found this instead.
Love,
Grandad
_
Needless to say, I was spooked, and intrigued. Maybe a little numb from the week’s grief and chaos. I folded up the letters in my pocket and threw away the box they came in. The rest went to the Smithsonian.
I went back to my room and read everything, stayed up for hours. At first, I thought they were the ramblings of demented and lonely old man. Then I figured they were fakes, hoaxes that were just believed by a demented and lonely old man. Parts of it read like a PBS special on the settlers; the others like a horror movie. These things, surely, could not be real. I didn’t learn these things in school.
- 1
April 7, 1606
It is a grey day. All morn it has rained, and the men are weary and in foul spirits. The ground here is soft and wet, giving way underfoot like it does in Scotland, only the air swarms with a most pestilent insect that makes us itch and groan during the nights.
The native peoples do not go to the place we seek. They describe it using a word our interpreter says has no direct translation, but whenever they speak of it, they wave to blackened cobs of corn or rotten fish, dead things that fall to decay and stench. I bear no ill will towards these natives; I think them only a superstitious group, like the Scots. Perhaps it’s the wet ground.
Three of my men perished last night. They did not have the same fever as the others, who suffered from horrible aches and sweats until they collapsed, but simply did not weak up in the morning after appearing strong and healthy yesterday. We found their mouths wide open and fixed in crooked screams, which has bothered the others. They begin to speak of a curse, to whisper about what the natives said. They point out to me that the roots of the trees here are thicker and blacker, and that the animals are dying. There are no birds or fish or mice, only the accursed insects.
I have nothing to say to this, other than that if the land is not wanted by the natives, it is uncontested and therefore we would be fools not to accept what providence has shown us. I tell them the king will appreciate our efforts, and I hope it is true, but these are dark waters.
Jem McCallister
Of course, I spent hours Googling ‘Jem McCallister Settler’. I baffled over the date - 1606 -when the first American settlement, Jamestown, was supposedly not created until 1607. There were no results. It seemed like just another doomed early expedition.
- 2
April 9, 1606
At last we have reached The Place of Burning, as the natives call it. I do not know why. It is lush with forest plants and trees and as damp as everything else we have seen. We have called it ‘Richtown,’ because we hope for riches in the name of King James.
Still, there are no animals around. Our livestock continue to die. When they do, they are so skinny that there is no significant amount of meat to take from them, and when we cut them open, any meat we find is foul and stinking anyway.
Seven more men have died as well. Our numbers have reduced to twenty three, and the women. To my shame, the women have had to work in the labors of men, carrying lumber and helping to build houses. It is not right, but we must do what we can to survive in this strange land. We have begun to clear land and fell trees to build, and we need not make walls for there are no other people, and no animals.
But at night, we all hear the howling. It is like no wolf I have ever encountered, but like a mother who has lost her babe. I fear it is a banshee, and tell the men not to wander when the sun sets. Still, no beast comes for our remaining pigs or cows. Only the sickness that has taken the rest of them. Poor Beth Lyons is with child and due any day now, and I fear the babe will surely not live to see the summer. It is foolish on Patrick to have brought her along. I do not know what we will do once the last of the livestock perishes, for there is not one deer or squirrel or bird here to sustain us.
Jem McCallister
-
I went to a conservationist, one of those experts in old things, and showed him just the first two letters to see if they were real. He raised an eyebrow at the content, asked me a few times where I got it to which I replied a few times some vague story about collecting memorabilia, then said he’d send it to get carbon dated for me.
When the results came back, the conservator handed them to me with a pale face and suspicious eyes. The carbon dating of the paper on which the letter was written went back to about 1580 to 1620. That puts 1606 right smack in the middle and likely accurate, so I knew I was dealing with something real, not a hoax. Not dementia.
But the strange thing was that the chemical analysis of the letters revealed levels of sulfur 120 times normal background levels. I couldn’t find any reason for this in my research, nor could I find record of a ‘Place of Burning’ or a strange disease that killed off animals and people. I managed to dig up a record of an expedition to the New World from around that time headed by a James McCallister, but it was listed by the English writers at the time as ‘lost.’
- 3
April 14, 1606
This is a horrid place. No animal dares to set foot in our small town, and those we have brought ourselves are all dead now, their meat blackened and useless. All day, it smells of smoke and of rotten eggs.
We are hungry. I have written to the governor in England and pleaded for him to send supplies, but it will be months before such things can arrive, and we have thus far been unable to plant crops. The ground is too wet. All we have are the roots that grow naturally here, thick and tuberous things that taste of nothing but bitterness, and make us tired and sluggish the rest of the day.
Beth Lyons gave birth last night. The babe was born with black eyes, no whites. His skin was grey like that of a fish, and he screamed and screamed from the moment he came out- not in the desperate, wailing way that infants do, but almost in rage. Beth would not speak, and would not hold it.
Patrick says he doesn’t want the child in his house. He put it in the cradle and said the boy ‘stared at him.’ When I went to see it, the child had its mouth wide open like the corpses of our men who had died from the illness and its eyes were full of hatred. I swear before Christ that it spoke to me, in the voice of a man, or rather, of many men, and said this:
‘Foolish son of Adam, I will feast on your marrow. I will devour your soul as I devour all children of flesh. This infant shall be neither the first nor the last.’
Beth started to scream and has not stopped. Her laughed, then began to scream as well. We took it out and have placed it in the church we built, hoping the House of God could drive out whatever evil resided in it, or at least contain it.
This morning, we found Beth dead. Patrick had killed her, to stop the screaming, then shot himself. The baby continues to cry and nobody, not even Father Noah will enter the church.
I pray God deliver us from this terror, but I fear with each day that God does not reside here.
Jem McCallister
-
Virginia Dare, of course, was supposed to be the first white child born on American soil. This, I realized with a chill, thinking of th…
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