Entry 014 (Original post removed) - i found the widow of an erased sailor from my grandfather's files. i think project GABRIEL has been using her grief as part of a 60-year-long experiment.

 it's been a few days. after the library, i had to go completely dark. i drove for two days straight. a relocation order from a GABRIEL front company, dated 1956, led me here. a small town in nebraska, the kind you'd miss if you blinked on the highway.

it led me to her. eleanor alden. she's the widow of russell alden, the sailor who is a perfect, empty space in my grandfather's division photo. she's in her nineties, living in the same small, blue house they moved her to after they told her her husband was "lost at sea."

i sat in my car for hours, unsure of what to do. eventually, i just walked up and knocked. i showed her the original, unaltered copy of the photo I have, the one where her husband is still there, smiling with the rest of the men. i told her i was joseph mercer's grandson.

she just held the photo to her chest and cried. she said no one had said his name to her in decades. she invited me inside. her house is a museum of a life that stopped in 1955.

we talked for hours. she told me about the men in the dark suits from the "bereavement committee." they told her russ was gone, but she never believed them. she said she could still feel him, out there somewhere. a faint presence she called "the static on the line."

that's when she took me to her bedroom. on the nightstand was an old reel-to-reel tape player. she said it was the last thing he ever sent her. in a letter, he told her it was a recording of a new song for them to dance to when he returned home to her. she told me she's playd it every single night for sixty years.

she played it for me. it was not a song. it was the uak-kilo signal. the silence. but underneath it, buried in the hiss was something else. a faint almost musical frequency.

she was smiling through tears. "isn't it beautiful?" she whispered. "it's his song."

i didn't have the heart to tell her she's been listening to the sound of the very phenomenon that erased her husband, believing it was a love song. i didn't have the heart to tell her she has been the unknowing subject of a sixty-year-long GABRIEL experiment.

but there's more. i asked her if she still had the letter russ sent with the tape. she did. it was a sweet, hopeful love letter. but at the very bottom, there was a postscript. written in a different, messier handwriting. it wasn't russell's.

it said: "listen for the Shepherd."

i asked her about it. she just shook her head. she said she always thought it was just part of a strange poem he'd copied down. but "the Shepherd"... that's the name of the GABRIEL quarantine program. this was a message. a warning hidden in a dead man's love letter. from someone inside Project ARCHER.

and then there's the impossible thing. eleanor is not sick.

she has no keloids. no lesions on her skin. she has been bathing in a low-level entropic field for sixty years, and she is completely and physically unaffected. the GABRIEL doctors must have known this.

she is not a host like the others. she is something else. i'm guessing an immunity. whatever it is, she is an anomaly.

i'm leaving in the morning. i'm taking a recording of the tape. this "static on the line" is the most important thing i have. and this note. this "shepherd"... i think it might be a person. if i found Eleanor i think i should be able to find them too. hopfully you'll hear from me soon.