That evening was spent reading from the book favored during his first night, where time and a strong lamp allowed the reader to make a better study of it: A hardcover set this journal apart from the loose, friable pages of paperbacks on the same table, and the reader suspected that, like other composed elements under this roof, he was intended to examine it in an idle hour.
The book contained a record of patients from a sanitarium. The ailments described were sleep disorders, but the individual cases were addressed in the manner of a doctor’s notes and were not strictly separated.
More than this, the journal was itself a queer document, having co-opted unused pages from a private diary. Collectively, these other pages read from back to front and appeared older than those attributable to the sanitarium. While the medical record adhered to a reader’s natural preference for navigating a book, this reader could not think why a memoirist, having prior claim to the item, should approach her project in such an unorthodox manner. Equal to this strangeness, Liam had failed to note from his previous reading how this whole other book existed within these covers.
The gender of the writer was unambiguously female, and after lengthy mediation, Liam was mistaken in thinking these pages composed entirely out of a young woman’s inexperience. Distress sullied no sentence on any page, and nothing here was quotable. Still, the woman’s perseverance charmed Liam, despite the listing of few travails, and after an hour of reading, his opinion of her softened. He would not describe her writing as convivial, but it was not disagreeable. It felt possessing of a personal history: perhaps a long, courtly history to be, complicatedly, both formal and familiar to him. If he should meet this stranger in a tour group roaming through an old house of antiques, the two would likely band together, with little discussion, to conduct a private, more thorough tour of their own.
Her last entry marked roughly the halfway point in the book, and abutted, by necessity, the final page in the hospital’s ledger. (No page was spared writing.) This passage indicated no impending disruption to her world order, but there was something tragic in its superficiality, if only by omission of detail. It referred to a bonfire in late autumn, and included a brief description of someone with her: someone perhaps loved, or destined to disappear:
We met first in October, and attended a bonfire where we knew no one…
This sentence would not have been out of place as an introduction to her book, but without punctuation, and with four inches of blank page below it, its incompleteness constituted abandonment.
Was this diary of the former mistress of the house? Not knowing her fate, Liam felt empathy for the woman and shared, momentarily, her loneliness. For whatever inability she had expressing feelings to herself or to her husband, she had been, in the end, unhappy.
The last entry from the sanitarium, which lay across from the final diary page, was just as cryptic in its interruption. It was strange to imagine that the hospital’s record keeper, having run out of available pages on which to record, simply scrapped an official document. This last report was reread several times:
“Patient 137 suffered from entoptic and phosphene phenomena, specifically floaters, blue-white sprites, etc. He insisted, however, that more appertained to these phenomena than ocular effects confined to his retina. Something ‘nested’ in one of his eyes. His parasitic squatter was described in unsparing accounts, as if this entity was seen in full daylight across the room.
Other patients, as by contagion, reported seeing this dark spot looming in the corridors. It was initially thought that more sunlight in the morning would discourage these sightings, but several accounts were given of a creature possessing thready legs, not unlike harvestmen or daddy longlegs, crawling on the outside of the building. These cobweb-like structures were not dissimilar to natural eye floaters, and so curtains were judged a better strategy in dealing with them. Heavy drapes were hung in superabundance throughout the premises, and the darker environment succeeded in lowering occurrences of roaming shadows and arachnids.
However, disturbances among these drapes replaced these complaints.
A Buddhist monk, who conducted a two-day meditation seminar at the sanitarium, offered a different perspective on the problem when it was, incidentally, raised as a topic during dinner conversation. He believed the apparition was not a ghost or supernatural entity but, rather, a tulpa, or thought form, which is an emanation willed into existence by powerful concentration, such as grief or other emotion would produce. This local example, he judged, was unusually strong. The number of patients who took it up as a belief endowed it with greater power. The monk recommended that staff and residents should ignore the manifestation, and that patients suffering recent losses, namely of family members or loved ones, should be housed at the opposite side of the facility.”
Liam was convinced that the sanitarium was not the house in which he was installed, which was too small. (The mention of a surplus of curtains was nevertheless a curious coincidence.) Moreover, he had no notion of any structure in the neighborhood that would have served that capacity of a sanitarium apart from the old county hospital.
Despite his reading having roused interest in these matters, he felt unusually tired and wondered if a soporific was added to his curry chicken or tea. The food portion was larger than his previous serving, which reinforced this suspicion. The plate was left in the dumbwaiter shortly before ten and he went to bed.
It was madness to tarry in this place and eat potentially poisoned food; yet the guest was as much a captive to a mystery as to any malevolent obligation. Periodically he glanced at the ticking clock, and swore he heard the collapsing sleeping bag in the closet downstairs creeping its way down a wall like particle sand in an hourglass. He walked as far as the midpoint in the stairs to investigate, and stopped after the motion light came on.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.