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.

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...