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...