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...

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...