...they are coming...

The transition was rougher than I anticipated. But I made it. As long as the Resonator keeps working I'll have internet access as well. Good thing that I brought along my camera. And the Slim Jims. Now it's time to try some of this stuff out from this side of things.

They Aaarre cccComing

One more adjustment.

Just a little more to the Right.

No.

Left.

There.

Tttthey Aaarrrre Coming

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It Burns

It hurts

hurts

hurts

Its so cold

I'm full of stars

Iiiiiimmmmmmm Ooookkkkkkkaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy

Jon? Are you there Jon?

Look In The Mirror, Boy...

I no longer recognize myself in the cracked mirror up here in my attic retreat. I've got The Who on repeat on my iPod, now that I was able to steal it back. I've got my lap-top. And the Resonator. I've become something of a thief I guess. Not how I expected it to end, but there it is, whether I like it or not.

Stress is the accumulation of force impeded by a blockage. Something has to give, eventually. Something, or someone, breaks. A board, a brick a human mind; they all have weak-points and vulnerabilities that can be exploited to break them. You just have to know where to look, how to apply the requisite force, and voila the damn thing snaps as if on cue.

Except when you get it wrong.

Not every board, not every brick, and not every mind is exactly the same. What might have broken one may only deform another. That leads to tension. Pressure. Energy pent-up and confined looking for some sort of release. By definition that's a volatile situation. Explosive.

It's cold, dreary, raining and soon we'll have snow. My breath billows out like little clouds of desperation in the dimness here just below the eaves. I fell asleep earlier dreaming about running through crisp brown-gold fields of tall grasses. I never made it to the tree-line. Maybe I should care about that. But I don't. Not any more.

I don't care anymore. I don't believe anymore. The flickering purple haze of the Resonator washes over me and fills this place like ectoplasmic Jell-O and I watch it all unfold before me.

You can only put your hand in the fire for so long. You only get to fall so far, for so long, then you either turn it around or crash into a bloody mess. I've been falling for a long, long time now. It's time to break on through to the otherside. Crash and burn, slash and burn, smash smash smash -- I'd play the Cure's Burn, but I lost that CD.

I've lost a lot.

I've lost myself.

They say you have to hit rock-bottom before you can really turn it all around. The rocks are close now. Closer than they've ever been and I'm moving fast.

I'm cold. So cold. My fingers are slipping on the keyboard as though they have a life of their own. Cold, pale spider-things at the ends of my arms.

They shouldn't have hurt me, not like they did. But they did.

Maybe I shouldn't have broken the mirror with my fists. But I did.

They shouldn't have lied to me, manipulated me, deceived me and misled me. But they did.

Maybe I shouldn't have gone digging in the dirt for things better left buried. But I did.

They shouldn't have started all this thinking that I'd just cave-in and collapse, that I'd give up and get out. But they did.

They don't know anything. But I do.

Terrible things become terribly banal with prolonged exposure. Terror corrodes ones nerves too quickly, too deeply to be sustained. Successive shocks break down barriers, clear the channels, allow for the re-programming of what once was into something otherwise unattainable, unreachable, unimaginable.

I'm not afraid anymore.

Here, in the chill dark loneliness of this last hiding place I watch the slow trickle of purple-tinted red, the curling vapor of my breath, and I pay the price for what it is that I must now do.

I'm going to war.

If Only I Could Sleep

Hello. It's me. Everything is falling apart. Disintegrating. Before my very eyes. I may be having hallucinations, despite what that quack Dr. Williams tells me. I don't trust him. He's up to no good. I can tell. I've been watching him slip downstairs to the room behind the old pantry, the one with the wire-reinforced windows that have been painted over from the inside with some crumbly-looking cheap brown paint. It's where they've set up the Resonator. I watched them move it into that room last night. I was coming back upstairs from the cellars where I'd been doing some digging around and I nearly blundered right into the broad backside of a sweaty ape of a guy who was huffing, puffing and lugging along great jumbly chunks of machine-parts and bizarre apparatus on a dolly. I hung back in the stairwell, in the shadows, and I watched.

This is the second or third time that they've moved this infernal contraption. But why? Why do they move it around? What are they trying to accomplish? It's a mystery that I fully intend to solve, one way or another.

For all I know it could well lead to the end of the world.

One of ThEse DaYs

 There are 72 rooms listed in the brochure for this place. I have found 79, not counting the partitioned-off section of the attic and only counting the horshoe-shaped old cellar under the main building as one space despite most people mistakenly thinking it was actually two or three chambers. There's a lot about this place that isn't fully or accurately accounted for in their bochures, reports or records. I know. I've been doing some digging. Both figuratively and literally. I'm always exploring the place. Doctor West approves of my explorations. He says it's a healthy enough hobby. He even gave me a signed pass just in case the guards, orderlies or other staff get uppity. But this time I've gone too far.

There's no going back now. Not now. Never again.

I hate basements. The old cellars under the main building don't really count as they are really just refurbished caves that open out of the side of the rocky hill on which everything else squats like a cold, stone toad. But there are other places dug out below this place, tunnels and basements and another almost natural cavern back behind the old cellars. No one goes back there very much any more. There are probably only three or four people alive who even know about this place. It's cold and dark and damp and I'm never going back there again. They can drag me down to the Resonator in Room 102 or even Room 109 downstairs from the cafeteria where they store the rat poison and Jell-O. I'm not going back. Not for anything.

I wish that I'd never dug up her bones...

Night Terrors

 Coffee tastes like boiled latrine scrapings. It's good to be back. I spent Veteran's Day at Fort Snelling visiting dead soldiers. Everybody goes there on Memorial Day. Not me. I go when it's cold and windy and deserted. Usually it rains. It's just me and the hallowed dead hanging out, killing time, and bitching about the weather, coffee or the powers that be.

The attendent who took me was supposed to supervise me the entire time, instead they ran off ot the Mall of America. I was left standing out there for five and a half hours. The attendent's breath reeked of cheap beer when he finally showed up to take me back. I think he spent some time in Hooters.

I had a lot of time to really think about things. Really think. Things. I originally started this blog in order to compile a journal of my thoughts and impressions, to put my notes outside the reach of those who would suppress my voice, stifle my words, destroy my work. That had been the idea. But then I found the old, battered and water-stained portfolio of my old drawings. It had been shoved haphazardly in-between an old bookcase and the crumbling plaster wall of my attic space. My secret space. The other one.

Old drawings. Old. My hands hurt. It's cold up here and the wind is howling mournfully. Old drawings are scattered across my table, on my chair, all over the floor. Someone has been digging around in my old art. But they'll never find it. I made sure of it. Everything that I scanned-in and posted to the blog, I also burned. I keep the ashes in a rusty coffee can in the corner by the rattling, burbling radiator across from my table. They'll never find it. I made sure of it.

Five and a half hours is long time to consult with someone. But I'm going to war soon, and whom better to discuss strategy with than dead soldiers? They liked my drawings, the old ones from the Seventies, the ones that I burned for them down by the little pond. My secret is safe with them. We have an arrangement. Soon I'll have reinforcements.

Squishy

I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to write this blog. Or how much longer ... they'll ... let me write it. I've seen too much now. Way too much. And I think that something may have seen me as well. There was putrid pea-green sludge all over my door this morning. The ceiling tiles over my bed are soaked through and through with a dark, viscous fluid that drips on my covers. It started Monday night. It has only gotten worse. I got no sleep Tuesday night and I spent the better part of last night in my secret place. Things are happening here, bad things, terrible things, blasphemous and wicked things ... and I am powerless to do anything about any of them.

It's getting darker earlier and earlier, for longer and longer. I think that they've been waiting for that, waiting for winter and the pervasive darkness in order to carry out their horrific aims, whatever they ultimately are. I see strange glyph-like patterns in the condensation on the windows up here. We had frost last night. If I'd awoken sooner, I might have seen the patterns more clearly a they were formed in the frost, as if sketched there by some weird unseen hand working outside and three floors up.

Maybe things will settle down a bit. After all it's been all of since Monday night when I saw ... it ...

Maybe everything will be okay ...

Fishbelly White

 They took away my iPod. Something about switching out all of Dr. Witherspoon's collection of Lou Rawls songs with Rammstein. At least I thought it was funny. No one else did though. So I had to dust off my CDs and re-discovered Grant Lee Buffalo all over again. There certanly seems to be someting wrong with my stars. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect the old goat to take away my iPod.

Bastard.

Mess with a guy's music, and you mess with...oh...uh...um...yeah. Strike that. Yeah. I guess I should have seen it coming. I should have seen a lot of stuff coming. I saw the plague descending upon the winter wind like a wrathful angel with fishbelly white skin, but that was in my dreams, before they readjusted my meds. Again. I saw the footprints of something no one can see prowling around the north end of the grounds, just below my window. But the snow melted and the rain dried up and there are no tracks to be seen any more, so I keep my mouth shut. I used to speak up, speak out. Never again. They have a room down in the basement, past where they've been renovating some of the new labs, past the room with the Resonator that they say doesn't exist and the other room that always smells like an abbatoir, and I know that they have a machine there that's used for shock treatment. They're not going to hook me up to that thing. No.

At least Wilbur was able to let me know that he's still planning on dropping by, probably in time for Christmas. I wonder what I should get him in the way of a present. Maybe I can order something from a website...

Eye-sore

They took me to the movies last night.  'They' being those meddlesome kids from over at the Jermyn Foundation for Ethno-Primatological Research.  It's part of some program their management makes, I mean encourages, their emloyees to do for charity.  It also gets them some good press and they need it after the incident last summer.

Some fundamentalist freak from a radical all-but-unknown splinter congregation of the Reformed E.O.D. from North Dakota, of all places, spent most of May and June last year waging a one-madman protest of the Jermyn Foundation.  He had a set of mostly illegible old-fashioned sandwich-board placards that he wore religiously, and he scrawled a new hand-sign on scrap cardboard he retrieved from the dumpsters that got progressively more surreal and bizarre as the weeks went by.  I bribed one of the college-kids, an undergrad student, who worked over at the Jermyn Foundation to collect some of those hand-drawn signs for me.  She was able to retrieve six of them for me.  I keep them in my room, in my sock drawer, next to the vial of holy water Mrs. Winslow brought to me last Easter from her trip back to Minneapolis and the Cathedral there.  That was back when she was still trying to save my soul.  I still miss her sometimes.  She met another woman through one of her Church groups and ran off to become a lesbian witch in Saint Paul.

After the first few days the protester outside the Jermyn Foundation became something of a celebrity.  Kind of.  In a creepy, view-at-a-distance kind of way.  Then right around the end of the month, they found his body in the alley behind Gillman's Fresh Seafood Cafe & Chowder House.  (Their chowder is lousy, by the way.  It's always smoky and runny and never very good.)  Someone had bound the guy's hands, dowsed him with kerosene and set him on fire while hanging him from a lamp post with cheap wire that looked like it had been salvaged from old electrical appliance cords, like the junk that smelly old man is always collecting, the guy who used to visit blind Clarence, back before he passed away.  The wire had been all knotted-together from quite a few smaller lengths.  It doesn't get more premeditated than that.  Kind of makes you wonder about that there Minnesota Nice stuff.

We were supposed to go out to dinner after our movie, which sucked badly by the way, but the kids were under strict orders not to go to Gillman's, so of course I decided that wanted to go get seafood, maybe some crabcakes, just to have some fun at their bosses' discomfort.  That was dumb.  Stupid kids took me to the Long John Silver's drive-through instead.  I hate that place.  Their food always gives me the runs.  Damn smartass kids wouldn't even stop off at Burma Bill's for a beer to wash the bad taste out of my mouth.  I wish we'd just stayed inside and watched DVDs instead.

Burp!

Snow came early this year.  Early and deep.  I sat for the better part of the last three hours watching footsteps appear in the new fallen snow, footsteps that had no figure to make them.  They appear to be prowling around the very foundations of this place.  Around and around in a ragged circular pattern except in the North.  There, in the Northern part of the estate, the footsteps trail off into the trees and up the steep hillside towards the old stones that jut up into the cold, raw sky like broken teeth.  They say that those old stones are haunted, but so far no one's proven anything.  A couple of years ago, some old dowsing-expert came up from Iowa to see the old stones.  They had just published a book on dowsing.  They were so full of themself, arrogant and reeking of self-satisfaction, and after putting on a lot of airs and making quite a fuss over himself and his custom-made pendulum, and they went up to examine the old stones.  I never found out what exactly happened up there, but the dowsing expert ran out of here in such a hurry that they left their precious pendulum behind.  I have it now.  I keep it in an old mason jar, just as I learned from that smelly old guy who used to visit blind Clarence up until he died last year.  I think he might have been a clergyman of some sort, but I never asked.  Sometimes I ask the pendulum in the jar questions.  Often it answers me, spinning and whirling and whining and creating a humming voice for itself, or just pointing, pointing at one or another letters, symbols and hieroglyphs that I've placed around it, as it has directed me to do.  It seems to have definite opinions on those things I consult it upon.  It whispers to me on cold, dark nights.  It teaches me things I've never read of in any book.

But the pendulum refuses to tell me anything about those strange footsteps that go up to the old stones and back again, circling round and round the very foundations of this place, making a circuit in the still falling snow, and filling me with a sensation of dread that makes my blood run colder than the dirty icicles forming on the crumbling eaves.

They're calling to me now.  It's time to go down for supper.  I'm not hungry, but I had best get moving before they come for me.

Falling

I've been having those dreams again.  The ones where I'm falling through cacophonous spaces, lashed by brutal dark winds roaring off of tumultuous black seas that I never seem to reach in my headlong plummet through space. 

I awake screaming.

For three days now I've woken up screaming.

I'm not sure if I'll scream tomorrow.  Mostly because I don't know if I'm going to wake up again.  The doctors mean well, at least some of them, most of the time.  But I'm not sure that I can trust Dr. Van der Heyl.  I find his squinty, piggish eyes disturbing.  And I didn't start having the nightmares again until after he began taking an interest in my case.  I wish that Wilbur was here.  He'd know what to do.  He always does.

Collect Call

It's gray and wet.  Overcast and rainy.  Summer was murdered in cold blood and we're stuck with a dismal, dreary autumn sliding inexorably into a cold and bitter winter.  Already the wind howls like disconsolate witches through the poorly blocked-off chimneys of this place.  My hands are stiff with the chill that emanates from the walls of funguous plaster and grotesque...yellow...wallpaper. 

It's difficult to use the keyboard.  I wish that they hadn't taken away my old typewriter.  It wasn't that haunted.  Doctor Curwen is a fool.  He listens to those prigs in the East Wing too much.  Old biddies with nothing better to do with the dried-out remainder of their shrill and selfish lives, they sit and gossip and struggle to milk anything entertaining from their sordid little minds.  Bah.  'Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.' I read that once, somewhere, probably in one of Wilbur's letters.  He tends to write a lot of letters.  I often wonder how he manages to get any of his work done, or if he'll ever finish his seemingly never-ending novel.

Wilbur is very possibly the only friend I have left in this cruel, intemperate world.  He called this afternoon to let me know that he'd be visiting again soon.  He has matters of great import to discuss with me, apparently.

I fear that I increasingly find it difficult to converse socially any more.  I cannot bear to talk much now.  I am becoming silent, relying instead upon my pens and the computer to handle most of my discourse and communication.  Indeed, far from criticizing Wilbur's usual penchant for epistolary expression over casual conversation, I am a bit discomfitted by his sudden need to visit this drab old manse with its dusty windows, cool air and unpleasant mold stains.  It is an unsightly abode that I now inhabit, for I am sunk to a low estate, not wholly by my own past actions.

But enough of such concerns.  My friend is coming to visit and I am most curious as to his recent trips to Harvard and the ancestral estates of his family back East.  Perhaps he will bring along some of that excellent chowder that he managed to bring back last time.  I've never had anything quite like it before or since.

Sight For Sore Eyes

I missed all the excitement this morning.  One of the other inmates tried to eat the face of one of the other inmates.  Literally.  He used his fork.  It took over fifty stitches to get the victim back together again.  The attacker is in solitary.  We're having soup tonight.  And pudding.  Stuff we can eat with a spoon.

I was exploring the third floor media room.  The one that has the old film projector.  I found a bunch of old French films.  Some really bizarre surrealist-crap from the Fifties and some 'avant garde' stuff that makes even less sense now than it did originally.  There were a few English-language movies in the stack, one was marked 'Abby of Thelema,' and another 'Senators in Bondage,' and another one titled 'Lucifer Rising,' all three by some guy named Anger.  The cannister on the Lucifer Rising film was really banged-up and quite dirty, as if someone had buried it for a few years.  I set it on top of the stack. Those old films might prove amusing to watch, and even more useful in providing a means for a really good diversion as the old film stock is really quite flammable. 

If a fire were to start up there, it would certainly keep the orderlies busy, and a determined man with a plan could very likely make good an escape in the midst of the ensuing chaos.

I like chaos.  It's very useful.  I have a feeling that chaos and I are going to be very good friends.

Think of the Children

Why do they have a maternity ward in this place? It's what it has always been, a mental hospital -- a sanitarium -- built upon the site of an old brewery that burned down during the early part of the Great Depression after having been abandoned during Prohibition. The wrought-iron gates still say 'Penderghast Asylum' in heavy, ponderous letters only partly obscured by the unhealthy-looking ivy that has swarmed up all around the crumbling limestone gate-posts. But nobody reads that rusty old sign. No one ever bothers to look up as they enter that gate. Most of us arrive here under heavy sedation. If we're lucky we stay that way. Of course, if we were lucky, we wouldn't be within a hundred miles of this forsaken place.

But still, I am here and I try to make the most of it as best as I can. I wander about when I can slip away from the attendents who are always short-staffed and usually fairly lazy. Sometimes I can spend a few hours in one of the libraries like the one in the West wing. They never remember to lock the back door because it's around a corner past an old janitor's closet that hasn't been used by anyone else but me in decades. It's a good place to hide, as long as I don't ever let them find me in there. I always make sure that they can find me in a hallway or some other room, like one of the doctor's offices. It keeps them from getting unnecessarily suspicious.

They're not the only ones who have secrets around here.

Who ever heard of a maternity ward in a sanitarium? It's always been part of the original building. I have a copy of the old blueprints tacked-up in my janitor's closet hiding place. I've studied those plans for as long as I can remember. I know this place better than most of the people who work in it. That part of the asylum has been in continuous use since the Thirties. I found a commemorative scrapbook in the third-floor library behind Doctor Martense's office. There was a big celebration at the time the maternity ward opened, attended by celebrities and everything. They dedicated it to some big-shot high-society widow from out East named Lavinia something-or-other. I forget her name. It's probably not important.

Somehow the tiny cries of babies that come up through the ventilation grates are more disturbing to me than the persistent scratching sounds made by the rats in the walls.

Necronomi-whatsit: sounds like a Dead Can Dance album...

I was able to slip out of my room last night for about twenty minutes. They were short-staffed because of Labor Day, probably. I snuck into Dr. Herbert's office. I saw the Book he had left on his desk. I know that Book. That damnable, unspeakable Book.

I was only able to read a few pages before one of the orderlies finally found me. But I remember what I read, what I saw, what I...felt...when I held that blasphemous, terrible Book in my hands. Oh how it writhed as I clutched it with my fingers. The letters seemed to shift and shimmer like quicksilver in moonlight. And the papercut I received from the surprisingly crisp edge of page 623 when the orderly tore the Book from my grasp still hasn't healed. I've saturated six band-aids so far. Maybe I need stitches. This wasn't just some self-help book from Dr. Phil that I saw. That I touched. That I read. It was that Book. The one my friend Wilbur claimed to have bought from a private collector on eBay last week...and the most hellish thing of all is that I know that I've seen that Book before...

The Machine

There's a machine in Room 102 that's not for shock treatment. It makes a disturbing, jarring sort of humming noise, like what you'd expect to hear from the attic of an old hag's abandoned house on a cold October night. Whatever it is, it seems to make my migraines worse. Sometimes, when they take me past that room, past that particular door, I black out or worse. Sometimes they have to restrain me, the seizures get so intense that I've dislocated my own shoulder twice now.

But that's not the worst of it. Not by a long shot. There are...things...flitting and writhing thorugh the air, things that ought not to be there, squirming, squamous, slithery things that have very sharp teeth and hateful eyes that see right through you to the roots of your very soul. I keep myself as still as possible at night so that those things won't notice me. Again.

The doctors say that they're not real, merely figments of my unsound imagination, but I know better. Twenty-three stitches in my leg prove to me that these things are quite real. Real and horribly hungry for the flesh of anything, or anyone, that they notice.

I'm reading Mister Crowley's instructions for developing invisibility based upon centuries-old secret Rosicrucian teachings. I'm not supposed to have such things, but my friend Wilbur smuggled the book in to me last week. He thought that it might help me with the things that swim through the air, through the walls, through all of us as though we were figments of their fishy imaginations...until we do something that attracts their attention. I know better than to do that now.

I wonder how it is that Wilbur seemed to know all about these things...

Rumblings From Below

I know what they're up to down in the basement of this place. I've seen too much not to put the pieces together. The digging noises that went on all through last summer, the vile stench that forced them to close the laundry room for a week, the day-laborer who just 'disappeared' after they started roughing-in the new walls downstairs. They're up to no good. They're doing evil...unspeakable...things down there. I know. I've seen too much.

Getting Started

Ahem. Hello. I only get so much time to use the computers here before they come and take me back to my room. Or to see the doctor. They say I'm doing better. Maybe I'll be able to leave someday. But I know better. I'll never leave here alive.