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It’s coming…The Crate Pt3 (part 1 of two)

((a continuation of.. http://cityofnewbabbage.online/reader/node/891 blog had to be splot into two parts cause it couldnt take the full sroty in one go… ))

It is now October the 7th, two weeks since that cursed crate arrived in New Babbage.

The scratching freom below Brunel Hall’s floor has been getting decidedly louder, it only seems to be centered around the bar though as the digging out of the foundations for the new bathing pool garnered nothing.  It seems that the bar’s foundation mightpossibly be right ontop of one of the final appearance points for the undead hoarde during the final few hours of the plague that engulfed the city.

The hotel’s foundations becoming weaker as the week goes on coincides with more and more strange events going on with…The Crate, which started two weeks ago when it found its resting place in the library of the museum.

It started almost a week after it arrived…strange noises coming from inside the crate.  Miss Bergamasco is always hovering around the thing and for a time she beleived my rather flimsy story of “the building settling down”.  However the noises from The Crate has not abated and infact has become decidedly louder.  I took a risk a few days ago and drilled a hole into the side of the crate to take a sample of the atmosphere inside.  Theoretically there shouldnt be any…

…but there was.

The hermetically sealed casket inside…was broken.

It must have happened during the shipping of the crate to New Babbage, or maybe even the rough handling of the crate when it was dragged upstairs by the removals men.

The…item…that was inside the sealed coffin, was sealed next to it’s resting place directly behind the immorta stone.  With the seal broken, and the stone gone…it seems the item inside has somehow been woken from it’s long slumber.

I thought to myself simply leaving it inside the hardwood crate and injecting a toxic localised atmosphere around it would kill the thing off, but it didnt.  Neither did injecting into what remained of the coffin inside a mixture of arsenic and formaldehyde.  For the past few days the rumblings and noises inside the coffin have gotten louder and louder, the same scratching noises below the hotel’s bar have also gotten louder.

Today though…the first warning signs appeared around the crate…

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The localised air around the crate has been trying to change, trying being the operative word…because I had seen something like this before…a long time ago.

The Pathenogesis of the Hidden Forest…something which I had seen first hand, the single event which gave me my rather annoying tendancy to grow long furry hair and look somewhat like a befuzzled werewolf…it was something which i was told would NEVER happen again.

Yet as I stare at the cloud emitting crate, it all falls into place now.  The old forest of Nas Shore was an archeological dig, another dig which was sponsored by a renegade timelord like myself, Mr Burns I think his name was…yes, that was it…Mr Victor Burns.

Coincidence in first names aside, Burns was a much more “gung-ho” type of time traveller, ready to get in there with both feet first, not looking at the consequences of what he was doing, always narrowly escaping the wrath of the New Gallifrey High Council of Timelords by the skin of his teeth because he always found a way to undo his mistakes at the very last minute.  He was that type of timelord who was very rare, the type who could think on his feet, rather than think of escaping at the earliest possible opportunity.  Nas Shore however would prove to be his undoing…

Someone once told me that history and time is always repeating, always going in ever decreasing circles.  You might miss the first repeat because you simply was not at the right place at the right time, but those circles always decrease in radius, eventually catching up with you, no matter where you are…even if you are a time traveller, history will eventually come back and bite you in the rear end.  The fact that i came to babbage to escape some of the more…dubious things I am involved in, i never thought for one second the fall-out of Nas Shore would be sent to babbage…by my hand.

Nas Shore…the very name gives me nightmarish visions of what happened on that single final day.  The dig itself was unremarkable, until they found a stone.  The stone itself was from Norse times, but the depictions was greek, apart from that the stone was quite unremarkable.  Below the stone was a buried english nobleman of the old feudal days, or at least it was his skeleton.  Myself and Burns thought nothing of it…until the fog started to appear…that was Day 1

Burns was the first one to change.  We didnt notice it at first, itwas very subtle.  He started to wear gloves, saying that he “was feeling the cold”.  We all laughed at him thinking that he was just using it as an excuse to get us to order in more whiskey for him.  The next day  after the fog started to appear most of the site digging staff also started to complain of coldness around their hands and feet.

The evening of the third day was more of the same, complaints of cold hands and feet but with a marked difference, the greying of the skin, deep wrinkles on the hands and feet as if the person had been in the bath for two hours.  Burns had by this time ran tests on random folks and found out that the cause was a viral pathogen, a pathogen of unknown origin.

The morning of the fourth day…all hell broke loose.  The rest of the camp workers, and myself, woke up to find ourselves…changed.  We looked like the living dead.  The deep wrinkles of the skin turned into deep cracks, sometimes to the bone.  Bodilly organs sometimes spilled out of
the skin.  For some folks…it drove them insane, literally turning into the slow walking, lumbering “zombies” of stories told to young children to scare them.  For other folks, myself included, the pathogen found some kind of stumbling block…some sort of natural vaccination which halted the progressive decaying of the brain itself…but that wasnt enough to stop the decaying of the body.

So there we all we’re, the fourth day.  All of us looking like the living dead.  Myself and the others who still had control of our faculties barricaded ourselves in the old mound temple, the others outside who had went insane banging on our door trying to break it down.  The temple had been used by Burns to try and illicit a cure, he had a mini lab there all set up…the shocking thing was according to Burns notes…he had already found the cure the previous day…

((continued at http://cityofnewbabbage.online/reader/node/933 ))

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