October 23rd Born under a bruised moon, in the perpetually damp coastal village of Oakhaven. The midwife described him as "carrying the weight of a forgotten sorrow," a phrase that would echo through his life. McCaulley was an anomaly – unnaturally pale, with eyes the color of tarnished silver. He possessed a strange affinity for seabirds, spending hours sketching them in charcoal, capturing their desolate beauty.
It wasn’t merely observation; he seemed to *understand* them. Locals whispered tales of him speaking to gulls, receiving cryptic answers carried on the wind. This began the unsettling pattern - a perception beyond the mundane. He was always slightly out of sync with others, experiencing echoes of events before they transpired.
June 12th McCaulley apprenticed himself to Silas Blackwood, a renowned cartographer obsessed with charting the unexplored regions of the North. Blackwood noticed McCaulley’s unusual spatial awareness and uncanny ability to predict weather patterns – skills that bordered on precognition. Blackwood's later research focused on ‘temporal distortions,’ fuelled by his increasingly erratic behavior.
The obsession was contagious. McCaulley became consumed with mapping not just the physical landscape, but also what he perceived as the *shadow* of places – their histories, their anxieties, their potential futures. He began filling notebooks with bizarre symbols and diagrams, referencing forgotten languages and unsettling geometric patterns.
December 5th During a particularly violent storm, McCaulley vanished from Blackwood’s Peak while attempting to chart a newly discovered cave system. Blackwood was found days later, catatonic and covered in strange glyphs identical to those in McCaulley's notebooks. The only evidence of McCaulley's presence was a single, perfectly preserved silver gull feather.
The official report dismissed it as a tragic accident, but whispers persisted about McCaulley having stumbled upon something… *else*. Some believed he’d glimpsed the edges of time itself, fracturing his sanity in the process. The glyphs were later identified as belonging to a pre-Roman civilization known for their obsession with manipulating temporal energies.
April 18th McCaulley resurfaced in London, a gaunt and unsettling figure obsessed with collecting “temporal echoes” - seemingly random objects imbued with residual memories from different points in time. He purchased antique clocks, old letters, fragments of pottery – anything that felt… burdened.
He claimed to be able to ‘read’ these objects, experiencing flashes of past lives, moments of intense joy and devastating sorrow. His apartment became a labyrinthine repository of forgotten histories, each object radiating an unsettling aura. He communicated primarily through cryptic pronouncements and unsettling sketches.
November 7th McCaulley transmitted a single, distorted audio recording to the BBC. It consisted of fragmented voices, echoing laughter, and the unmistakable cry of a silver gull. The transmission abruptly cut off. Attempts to trace the signal proved fruitless.
Experts theorized it was a deliberate act – a final message from McCaulley, lost within the currents of time. Some believed he’d finally achieved his goal: to become untethered from the linear flow of existence, a perpetual observer adrift in the eddies of history.