My name is Quinn Paxton. I was—no, I am—a member of the Emerson Valley Gazette staff. At this point, I’m the only one left. A lot has happened since I first joined the Gazette at the start of 2024. I’ve left a letter from our former editor-in-chief Charles Donovan stickied on the home page to help explain the sorry state of our website. I haven’t bothered to update it to reflect the changes in staff. I don’t really see the point.

After we were hacked in May of last year, Mr. Donovan became a lot more guarded about everything. Each of the staff writers were required to upload their articles to a private server he had in his basement, and he used the Gazette’s admin account to post new articles. He was also working on restoring all the older articles going back to 2019 that got purged in the hack.

When Mr. Donovan went missing in early July, I got an automated email from him that was apparently triggered by him not logging into the admin account for two weeks. It contained the passwords for the admin account, the Gazette’s email account, his personal email account, and his private server. It also instructed me on where to find a package he’d hidden containing an external hard drive, a set of keys to his house, and a green notebook.

In the email, Mr. Donovan implored me not to trust anyone else on the staff. Due to that, I felt it was best not to inform Martin Fitzgerald I had access to the admin account for the website. I let him run things through his restored contributor account, sending him my articles to post, continuing a similar process Mr. Donovan had implemented after the website had gotten hacked. Upon Mr. Fitzgerald’s disappearance, I decided to start using the admin account to keep the Gazette going on my own.

I’m doing my best to pick up where Mr. Donovan left off. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to go to his house and access the server in his basement. The Sheriff’s Department had the place under 24-hour surveillance, and I have no way of knowing if it’s even still there. I was forced to leave Emerson Valley in a hurry after Christmas, but at least I was able to take the external hard drive with me. It contains Mr. Donovan’s spreadsheet and a lot of the articles he was still working on to repost. From what I can tell, there’s still a lot missing that was presumably kept on his private server.

I’m in the process of restoring as many of the old articles that I can. That includes the weird articles that were eventually taken down for one reason or another. I’m also working on combing through the internal communications from the last seven years. As I finish going through each year’s data, I’ll post anything I think has some relevance to the misfortune that’s befallen the Gazette and our town.

Check the “Employees Only” section. It’s password protected, but the truly inquisitive among you will be able to figure it out. I don’t want to post it on an open page or give the password outright because I believe certain people with an interest in keeping everything hidden are getting updates on everything I post from bots. Since they seem to only summarize the content, I believe the information is safe for now.

I haven’t decided if I should post any entries from the notebook Mr. Donovan left me. It belonged to Sarah Donovan, and they’re…very disturbing. A lot of it concerns the private lives of the Gazette’s late staff members, especially her own. I wasn’t around for much of the interpersonal drama that went on here, so I don’t feel like the best authority to present such sensitive material. Then again, who else is there?

By the time I joined the staff, everything was different. The darkness plaguing the town had already taken root. I think Mr. Donovan hired me because I’m a loner and an outsider. He wanted someone who he could be sure wasn’t tainted by the same affliction as everyone else on the staff. My penchant for solitude antisocial nature meant I wasn’t likely to spend time with anyone else in town. That spared me from becoming infected like the rest of them.

I’m now far away from Emerson Valley. There might come a time when I have to go back, and I shudder at the prospect of returning. I have no idea what’s become of the town or its people, if they can even be called that anymore. For now, I’m still putting all the pieces together to figure out exactly what happened. If anyone out there cares, I want you to know too.

I also want to leave behind plenty of evidence in case something happens to me. The truth needs to come out. There are forces aligned against me who want to keep it hidden. They’ve done a good job so far, but I’m hoping to change that. I know it paints a big ol’ target on my back, and I’m okay with that. I’ve never been one to keep my mouth shut and fall in line, so I’m used to it.

If you’re reading this…thank you. The more people who know about the tragedy of the Emerson Valley Gazette, the safer I’ll be. If I can uncover the truth and share it with all of you, they won’t be able to bury it again. Too many people will know for them to cover it up. Maybe then I can get the authorities to take me seriously and actually do something about it. Then again, maybe nothing will make them care. Either way, there will be a record for others to find. Just keeping our story alive is enough to make it all worth it.

-Quinn Paxton, Acting Editor-in-Chief, Emerson Valley Gazette