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.