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...