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Chaosium Digest Volume 31 Number 10
Chaosium Digest Volume 31, Number 10
Date: Sunday, June 25, 2000
Number: 2 of 4
Pulse Fear, pt. 2
It showed a fuzzy and distorted picture. The lines blurred and wavered in
bizarre
fashion, undulating and seemingly alive before the fog of bad reception lifted
to show two men in bedraggled clothing, looking incredibly worried and with
sweat beading their foreheads. The one short but smoothly dressed held a
revolver professionally in a slightly wavering hand while a taller, more
erratic-looking man with a snake of long brown hair muttered fearfully to
himself, eyes darting with paranoia. My eyes widened and my mind reeled as the
air around them wavered and warped in a way that stretches the boundaries of
sanity and while their voices were inaudible the clanking of some huge, powerful
machine ground away with a slightly distorted sound. Transfixed and dumbfounded
I watched as just off the screen something caught the attention of the worried
men. Their faces visibly blanched and after a whispered conversation they keep
the guns leveled and run as if the hounds of hell were snapping at their heels.
Above the insanity inspiring whir of demonical machinery the echo of a
terrified wail arced through the abominable wall of sound.
"RUN, ASPERA! RUN....."
My mind rearranged the words, juxtaposing them with my own name before they
broke through into my consciousness in a wave. I almost obeyed their terrified
commands, but something rooted my feet to the spot as if a single movement would
jar my body with an inexorable paroxysm of agony.
A grim figure walked in front of the screen, a man with a multitude of piercing
and other mutilations. His voice contorted grotesquely, as if overlaid with a
mechanical stridulating, but with a recognizably Austrian accent he addresses me
with eyes reflected unimaginable perversity, 'Pain is the only eternity for you,
Crawford.'
I screamed.
My limbs suddenly were my own again, and I folded into a fetal position, eyes
still locked on the nightmarish images. The psychotic man beyond almost seemed
to reach through the screen to seize my mind in a subtle, toying grip that would
find the most dreadful, sensitive way to calmly dissect my soul from within.
The screen flickered off, bulged bulbously and horribly, and then shards and
fragments of glass peppered the walls as the TV expelled its medium as if in
electronic suicide. My fetal position protected me, I think, but the blast
shook the foundations of my sanity to its bedrock.
I gaped, mutely uncomprehending at what I saw. The screen blown to fragments,
the innards of the TV are missing, chips and connectors fastidiously removed
from charred circuit-boards, evilly placing that little display just over the
wrong side of impossible.
For a time I didn't move, but hugged my legs as tears of terror coursed in
rivulets down my cheeks, the heavy tears of a frightened child faced with the
fullness of its fear. I don't know how long I occupied that despicably dirty
floor with my arms clamped about my ears, the professional investigator lost in
a fog of uncontrolled dismay and fear. I knew that the voice had spoken to the
youth in me. When he had still existed, he had encountered a face and voice like
that before. But my stubborn adulthood had repressed it, as it tried to do with
my father's death, and I could no longer recall when in between my
1970 birth and the current time that it had seared such a fierce impression into
my being. I did not doubt that I had encountered again some nameless thing from
my clouded younger years, but why here? In a dilapidated Brichester house on a
chilling February night? Why now, when the alcohol had muffled my recollections
and blunted my acerbic drive with world-weary cynicism. Maybe I just needed to
feel honest, human terror again.
I hugged my knees a little more.
The clutter in the dining room suggests a sudden outburst of violent behaviour
at least and a localized tempest of biblical proportions at worst. A heavily
embellished, but splintered and badly kept dining table had been flung into the
wall hard enough to split the thick pine cleanly and quickly. There are
considerable dents and gashes in the wall where plaster hung loosely on strings
of primitive wadding in between the cracked bricks. The shattered fragments of
crockery were spread all across the shoddily carpeted floor and occasionally
lodged in the plaster evidently from high velocity. My unease now coupled with a
crippling anxiety I had resolved to stand and get through this house as quickly
as I could. Seeing this my resolve weakened. Would there be no normality to
comfort me? The chaos reminded me of descriptions I had read of phenomenal
dimensional uncertainty in esoteric books of Quantum Physics. A thick covering
of plaster dust gave everything a phantom-like appearance that was not welcome
to me.
I tried to get a firm grip upon my emotions, calling on my iron constitution. I
tried to reassert my self-control, firmly reminding myself that I had a task at
hand for which I was being paid a considerable sum. It didn't seem especially
comforting, rather a decidedly thin argument.
A flicker of colour caught my suddenly weary eyes. Beneath the mayhem, dusted
with plaster but still recognizable a book lay impervious to the onslaught by
the door. Hastily brushing it off as a diversion for my fear-addled brains I
scanned the cover for a title. The pit of my stomach upended, dispensing
churning nausea as my head became light at the revelation.
"THE WHIPPOORWILL HOUSE AFFAIR"
By JAMES ASPERA.
The gaudy painting of a bizarre city bathed in unearthly red light chilled me. I
had read this book before, an enjoyable piece of occult fiction that seemed
far-fetched but somehow comprehensible. It did not seem nearly as dramatic and
exciting now. I recalled the scene in which the unnamed narrator encountered the
insane Samuel Jensen, perverse slave to a demonic force known as the machine.
With a kind of weary anguish I correlated the narrative with what I beheld upon
the television screen in Broussard's sitting room. Now that my mind traveled
through the dark universe of the book, I found it hard to understand why my
childhood memories had not struck a chord during the reading of it. Then,
sourly, a part of my mind that I had never liked snidely brought memories back
of empty Brandy glasses scattered about the table as I leafed through the
beautifully written text then. My revulsion was only countered by my desperate
desire for the drug that had enslaved a substantial part of me. Both voices, and
the unaccustomed honesty with myself, were too loud to bare and I shut them out.
So that was who the narrator had been then. Aspera himself. My mind reeled back
from the sudden question that my soul exuded rather than asked.
Was it true?
Dumbly I fingered the front pages. I sought and found a contact address with
strained, watering eyes. Aspera, Camberwick House, Nr. Christchurch Meadow,
Oxford. I had to find Aspera and soon to ask these questions of him. But he was
not here now, so I pocketed the book with a silent prayer to a non-existent god
to cease the attacks on my sanity.
I raised my head suddenly with my sickened dread overlaid with an iron resolve.
Not soon, after alcohol had clouded my reasoning and let a soothing,
gold-tainted fog drift over this ordeal, and kick-started well-worn cynicism to
dissect these events into the fancies of an overactive imagination.
Now. Screw the job, the money wasn't worth a needlepoint of the blood that
desecrated old wounds. Why had I come to Brichester? Again and again here my
father's Brichester face and wry smile was flashing into my recollection as it
hadn't in years. A rush to my car, hammering the key into the ignition like a
chisel into a block of rotten, lice-infested wood, and a maddened drive were all
it took to carry me to my destination.
My feet made intricate swirls of clouded dust as my desperate fingers sought the
doorknob and a welcome salvation. They found and clung to the smeared, faded orb
of once-polished oak and turned. The door refused my fervent wishes and then my
irrational, pounding fists. Infinitesimal tendrils of polished metal that I
could just perceive glittering from where the frame cracked. Being birthed from
the door itself to sink vampiric talons into a metal track in the frame. A
metallic security keypad, a flickering evil red LED like a maleficent eye
mocking me as within my head the stars of terror whirled in hypnotic unison.
An eccentric designer. A convoluted and efficient locking system. How could I
have been so presumptuous and careless? Couldn't I have predicted something like
this? Didn't the oddity of the click behind me warn me as I incarcerated myself?
The click of scores, hundreds of metallic needles securing the door in unison as
soon as I casually, complacently waltzed through an eternity ago in some other,
less crazy existence. The front windows I rejected instantly. From the outside I
had seen the wire fencing stretched across them, barbed in places to fend off
likely vandals and other delinquent
compadres of the gutter.
A back window, perhaps? Rudimentary logic seemed practically quantum physics and
I almost felt genius twinkle in my eye before it was mugged by fear. Again my
feet hammered the dust-covered floorboards, blowing miniscule desert storms up
my once immaculate trouser legs and the flapping, unruly shirt tails that hung
out with creases that seemed to defy the natural laws of possible angles.
The last room along the dimly darkening corridor opened before me. The contents
swathed by the veils of February dusk, my worried hand sought a light switch and
found a dirt smeared, old fashioned one of cracked plastic which yielded
enlightenment to my touch. Even then my attention sought only one thing; a back
window or door. On the former case only was I satiated, with one blacked out as
in a paranoid war hallucination. My unseeing right hand sought a surface for a
reasonably weighty, regular object, and closed on a grease encrusted tin opener,
ends blackened with age and use. The fragments
of broken glass pirouetted with graceful chaos to the glittering cold symphony
of a shattering window drawn into slow motion by the disobedient perception of a
romanticizing mind. The tin opener bounced heavily off suddenly revealed wire
fencing and spun in an inevitable arc somewhere beyond my hastily covered face.
I really should have guessed, had logic not deserted me after my last flash. My
resolve tangibly weakened, that to escape this endlessly protracted nightmare I
must climb those rickety
stairs into the unknowing that paranoia peopled with malevolent shadows. I let
my hands drop by my sides and slowly took in the room.
A utilitarian kitchen unmarked by the frantic chaos that decimated the dining
room. Congealing fragments of food and meals gathered on work-surfaces and a
veritable mountain of unwashed crockery sat in the basin in its own cloud of
stench. Something drew my eyes to the sink with an unwilling hypnotic pull
devoid of will, wrenching them around in their sockets by force.
It wasn't even the fact that the taps were clearly dripping thick, dark blood
from their filthy, puckered ducts. It was the fact that the heavy, pregnant
drops cascaded upwards, towards the ceiling in silent mockery of the weakness of
gravitational forces. The coppery-red droplets spattered across the whitewashed
ceiling, staining it irrevocably. The silence seemed heavier and more
oppressive, a feeling of resentment towards me building up in the very
atmosphere from some unimaginable source.
This wasn't the disconnected oddity of nightmare. I was something worse, the
considered and thoughtful manipulation of horror to focus thin, invisible blades
of fear into the core of being. Why did I warrant such attention as this? What
sort of benefits could be drawn from tearing down the comforting walls built for
so long around a mind slumbering in an alcoholic miasma, to replace them with
preying, shadowy unnamable things?
A trickle of inane, irrational laughter bubbled up from between my dry and
cracked lips. I was being toyed with like a disposable little plaything to be
dispensed with at the leisure of some force or other. I didn't want to prolong
an impending doom. How would it happen?
I wondered it disconnectedly, the eye of the storm in a swirling chaos of
grievous fear. Would my death be an instantaneous death of merciful pain or a
millennia-encompassing, white-hot smear of agony grinding into torment for the
entertainment of unearthly things while mere seconds cascaded in earthly time?
What am I even thinking about, I mused irascibly. This must have been what the
depression was to my father, the weeks before he died. NO! I threw the thought
away with desperation, trying to eradicate those images of him from my mind as I
never had to do before.
I tried to get a grip.
A breakable window, a careful and familiar one-story leap, and freedom in a
world of cold and clinical sanity locking the primeval horror out. Once again an
iron resolve awoke in me, and sternly, readily, I placed a foot on the first
uneven step.
The rickety stairs creaked uneasy warnings beneath my feet, all the steps
seeming to be set at slightly miscalculated angles as I made a troubled ascent.
They threatened to tip my feet and made my ankles ache to climb them. The dust
got eerily less omnipresent the further I made my ascent. The transition could
not be detected at any single point, which filled me with a frightened disquiet
at the state of my own perception. An almost clinical cleanliness devoid of
warmth greeted me at the pinnacle. I felt wildly disorientated at the
insurmountable change within one building. It was no less horrible, believe me.
It was as if I'd climbed from a slum-dwelling into a scientific research centre.
I think I might've.
The upper landing was meticulous and fastidiously cleaned but the strange
atmosphere of decay was still ever-present, as if the very air had been befouled
by powerful chemicals and esoteric incense, mixing into an aura of threat and a
declamatory insanity shrieking silently from behind the walls. I felt even more
as if I was entering a different world, somehow more perverse than possible in
such an environment. The landing stretched away with the same orientation as the
derelict downstairs hall, with four large and almost hospital-like doors,
equidistant, two on each wall, standing darkly and beckoningly with a hidden
perdition that seemed more sickening by its subtlety. There were no windows, to
my avid consternation and sorrow, and the corridor was lit by a long, thin
strip-light emitting a pure and cold whiteness like the reflection of sunlight
off the snow of a nuclear winter.
My goal was simple. Methodically and calmly as possible, I would try each room
for an upper-floor window and engineer my escape forthwith. Sighing unhappily
and expected my seconds-old calm to be eradicated with a new flash of something
despicable. Holding my breath for some insurmountable benefit unclear to my
conscious mind, I tried the nearest door with a sweaty, convulsive touch. It
silently and effortlessly swung open into new darkness reminiscent of a yawning
gateway of a long-neglected tomb.
I then noticed another thing that reawakened a stab of dread. There were thick
and deep claw-marks slashed into the institutional metal doorframe. With
trembling fingertips I traced the edges. They were still warm from friction
heat. Bracing myself for a sweep of a hungry claw to sever my soul from my body
and fuse my soul to torment with the acute boiling touch of agony, I edged
inwards and cursed. No window.
The room was a Spartan and sanitized bedchamber with neatly folded sheets, white
walls and a plethora of medical charts, as if the occupant had a perverse desire
to imitate the cold, emotionless feel of an asylum. I looked at the medical
charts and shuddered, noting that they went into much more detail about
dissection than was humanely comfortable and clearly indicated esoteric uses for
preserved human organs. The bedcovers were hummocked, as if someone were lying
motionless beneath the neat, crisp sheets. I sheered away from investigating
that, trying to keep as silent and cat-like as my tension and irrevocable
shaking would let me.
Insatiable curiosity in me, however, tentatively noted that the body was far too
motionless, and that there was no evidence of breathing in the chilly,
threatening air. I backed through the door, leaving the bone-chilling sight
still utterly unmoving with a spine-tingling hideousness permeating the air
around it. The corridor was as empty and clinical as I had left it. I hurried to
seek any salvation from the strangely beguiling awfulness of that motionless
form that gripped my stomach in stiff and gnarled fingers......but already I
tried to drive my fevered imagination from the possibilities of that thought. I
fumbled awkwardly at the doorknob for the next door.
It must once have existed as a rather old fashioned bedroom, but everything had
been overtaken by the scientific furnishings that choked this floor like
lifeless ivy. All was white and absolutely devoid of any semblance of humanity.
Metallic hospital tables dominated one wall, piled with an endless array of
chips, wiring, circuit-boards and metal casings pilfered from any available
appliance. The bed is stripped of all but a plain and unadorned sheet, scattered
with soldering irons and other pieces of electronic equipment lying cluttered
around them. And on the far wall....
My heart soared. Finally, a window! The curtains hung loosely, twitching in a
breeze and a flickering light sliced down the vertical slash where they didn't
quite meet.
I suddenly drew my eager, grasping hands back to my body. The glowing sliver of
light was a baleful red. I glanced at my watch. Late, far too late for the last
flickering embers of sunset to be gracing the window, which didn't face westward
but southward into supposed darkness.
I thought of the cover of Aspera's book. A churning, writhing, billowing red sky
over an alien landscape and a city, bizarre and incomprehensible. A vile
crossbreed of the most advanced and esoteric of hospitals, and funereal gothic
cathedrals. I could hear distant sounds wafting over me, endless, eternal
wailing soaked in unimaginable pain and cosmic horror, echoing in my overworked
imagination. A growl that could not emit from any human throat resounding across
a bizarre plain. I didn't want to know. I don't know why I was so assured of it
inside those insanity spawning walls, but I left the curtains hanging as they
were and hurried from the room. I had been manipulated again, I was convinced,
that
I would eagerly jump through an open window into another space from which I
could never hope for salvation. I shut the door especially hard.
Two more doors. Methodical, I had said to myself, calm, but the fleeting
iridescence of my rays of confidence was fading inexorably and fast. After an
inane choice of doors, mumbling an immature child's rhyme to dictate the
decisions of an adult, I selected my next destination.
A bathroom in near-pristine condition. The porcelain gleamed in that
characteristic liquid way, the toilet-bowl still coated with a green veneer of
cleansing bleach that fills the room with a chemical aroma. I availed myself of
the facilities and eyed an open medicine cabinet on one wall. It was packed to
the gills with strange substances, preservatives and acids. Several of the
bottles were stoppered with unusually thick rubber and embellished with emphatic
warnings. Most of them appeared not to have had their sealant broken, seemingly
brand new. One bottle caught my eye. The label of a company called
Mythotech, angular and strident. The name awakened something inside me. My
father's revolutionary new anti-depressants, just a week before he died. Learn
peace and harmony in your dreams. For a few days, I shivered to recall, he had.
Then that day he woke in gasping, unexplainable terror and by evening lay
baptized by his service revolver. I fingered the prescription label. Prescribed
by Dr Q. Xavir. The name was familiar and unpleasant, but I couldn't pinpoint
it. I pocketed the pills. Mythotech and I would talk, I decided firmly. For the
first time I left a room in that accursed house with quiet confidence.
One last room. Would it yield final means of escape or something abominable? My
fear at this evil domicile had been met by a manic compulsion to achieve to
results I had intended to justify my ordeal. I had felt toyed with like a
plaything too much not to expect something climactic and awful. My hand hovered
hesitatingly over the knob.
Then something clicked. I don't know how I knew, but Broussard was a Mythotech
insider. I repeat again that I don't know how I knew, I have mused over the
reasoning again and again. Keeping my father's last anguished face at the
forefront of my mind, my hand neither shook nor hesitated longer.
I was prepared for death. I was prepared for insanity to sweep a loving caress
around my conscious mind and drag it into a reluctant surrealist nightmare. But
evidently the storm was not yet upon me. The deserted study around me, furnished
with large and bulky filing cabinets dominating the wall, a large and
metal-lined desk stacked with disorganized papers, all reflected a worker,
perhaps an erratic and harassed one, but still someone within the boundaries of
sanity, such as they can be delineated. A bookcase made of metal piping packed
with dusty and funereal leather-bound books, an incongruous sight, dominated
another wall, and these occupied my attention. Faded inscriptions in unearthly
lettering, scribed in strangely glistening inks met my eyes.
An unnamable atmosphere seemed to peculiarly resonate from their silent folds,
beckoning lasciviously. Despite the medical surroundings, the atmosphere was
even more oppressive and fear-inducing to me than even the more graphic and
sinister encounters I had suffered within these walls, that were sacrosanct, I
was sure, to something beyond my feverish imagination to contemplate. My spine
tingled as I met the saturnine and cold gaze of a huge, enlarged photo of the
house's proud owner, stood in clinical clothing and brandishing a gruesome
medical implement, with obvious relish, in one hand. A chilling recognition and
irrational paranoia slowly seeped into my brain. The photo had been taken in the
first upstairs room, and the man who I recognized as the inevitable David
Broussard
resembled the proportions of the somehow horrifically motionless thing lying
underneath the crisp and clinical sheets. As I warily contemplated this
unwelcome tableau, a new, dread-inspiring sound began to filter through the
walls of the hitherto silent office. An eerie mechanical whirring, bristling
with an implacable machinated venom and a macabre sensation of sentience. The
hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end, and the implications of
unspoken hints that I had witnessed crowded snidely together in my head.
To take my mind away from the blackening depression and doubt that was beginning
to cling tendrils around my fatigued mind, I began to rifle through the desk,
searching for anything that might tentatively illuminate me as to the
circumstances of the death of David Broussard. As I was sure was the case.
A slim and uncomfortably low draw accommodated my hesitant wishes. The whirring
everywhere around me, damnably almost behind the molecules themselves, the
fabric of a tenuous reality that seemed to me as permeable as a gauze, seemed to
intensify, and the urge to leave no matter how fast I could welled up
treacherously within me. In the cramped draw I had found several of worthy items
for my attention. A stout but functional key glittered with an unfathomable
temptation, and I concluded that it seemed useful as the key to the door under
the stairs, which I was sure now lead to a cellar, as my feet had echoed
hollowly on the downstairs floorboards. A scribbled, five-digit number caught my
attention and I eagerly folded it into my pocket to try on the electronic
locking system.
But the last two things struck not enthusiasm but cold dread and a realization
of all my suspicions and conspiratorial meandering. A photograph, taken outside
a modern institute upon a bright summer's day was terrifying in its apparent
innocent origins. But I knew better. Broussard, white-coated, and smiling
beneath his bristly facial hair, stood companionably with colleagues. Seeing
Broussard there, the face of the enemy, I shuddered despite myself. Stood with
him were two figures who sent hideous shock-waves through my brain. Samuel
Jensen, shyly smiling, looked modestly from beneath his functional glasses. I
found it hard to imagine how this face could have spoken with insane malevolence
to me through the evil television screen that I shivered to recall.
The other man connected not to the atrocious atmospheres of this ancient and
hulking house with its dark and beckoning secrets, but to bleak memories of my
childhood. A conversation on the doorstep flickered across my recollection as I
reluctantly reminisced. Brandishing the Mythotech pills he had visited our old
family house in Brichester. My father, with an almost childlike eagerness, clung
to his apparent salvation. The doctor, looking benevolent, but with a dark glint
in his eyes which only I of my family seemed to perceive, assured my father that
they were all the cure he needed. A week later my father cured himself utterly
with the finality of bullets. In my childlike way I had blamed the doctor no
matter how much my tortured mother assured me otherwise. Those grim suspicions
welled darkly and resentfully to the surface of my mind. I turned the photo on
its back, shaking involuntarily, and then craned forward to examine it. Writing,
scribbled and excitable, wormed its way along the back.
"David-if you truly desire to be with the Machine, take the anxiolytic drugs
I've sent. They will take you through the veils to where the sentient whirring
sounds. The guinea pig-subjects suffered and attempted suicide, but if you go
willingly and ready to conjoin with those who wait beyond, you will be exalted.
Consider it well.
Dr Q. Xavir."
My hand involuntarily crumpled the photograph up then. Xavir. That had been the
name of that fateful white-coated menace, sure enough. My mind flickered back to
Aspera's book. My mind, fearfully and full of doubt, questioned its truthfulness
again. Then something in the bottom of the drawer, partially hidden under a
stack of papers, drew my eye in like a predatory insect. However it had been
grafted insanely and with an unimaginable zeal, the thing in the draw was
hideous and another sinister conformation. It was a grotesque and distorted idol
formulated out of circuitry and disused components. It weighed heavily and
warmly in my hands, and I felt malevolence radiating from it. Without thinking I
threw it with considerable force against a filing cabinet. The ever present and
maleficent whirring faltered, and then swelled with a tone of implacable anger.
Not a whirring, I realized suddenly, a pulse. An electronic pulse emanating from
beyond everything. I felt my perception shifting and within a second I was
charging headlong for the door. I slammed it behind me as a crescendo of
machination built and hammered on my eardrums, and then all was oppressive
silence. Uncaring, my feet pounded the floor, and then with a maddening resolve,
I half ran and half fell, almost sprawling when I reached the disgusting
dilapidation of the ground floor. I headed for the door, but my feet
treacherously slowed in front of the door beneath the stairs. I tried to draw
myself on, a
welter of images pirouetting in my mind with a whirl of emotion reacting on my
countenance and demeanor. Xavir, Jensen, Aspera, and most of all my lamented
father. To be taken to meet those beyond, Xavir had written. Is that what had
happened with my father? Was he a guinea pig? Did he meet "They who wait beyond"
and silence his screaming mind with an incendiary firearm blast?
No longer hesitating, not wishing to explore the late Broussard's cellar, I
slammed into the door. My fingers shaking with a new and primeval panic, I
punched the numbers I had discovered into the keypad. A click, a high-pitched
and mechanical beeping, the flickering of a green LED and the door swung
gratefully open for my salvation. I was not seen for dust.
And this is where you find me. A week has passed and my hands still shiver with
an unnamed dread which I dare not place. My mind constantly relives those
horrible moments. I have not contacted James Aspera. I have not collected my
recompense from Broussard's colleague. I most emphatically have not returned to
explore that assumed cellar and all the endless and hideous possibilities that
it contains. I have drunk nearly a litre of cheap, hard-hitting brandy and I con
fess to being considerably the worse for wear, though you can probably tell by
the slurring of my voice on this Dictaphone testimony. I swear that I will do
all these things, but first one part of my unwelcome curiosity must be satiated.
Beside me on my table sits the hastily re-read "Whippoorwill House Affair", and
the unopened bottle of Mythotech drugs. In a minute I shall be taking these with
a final hit of Brandy and seeing where they will take my addled consciousness.
If this is the last that my family and friends hear from me, I am sorry, but
they must understand why I have to do this. That awful electronic pulse!!
You will hear from me soon or never.
NOTE: This is the only personal affect that was found in the flat of John
Crawford, when he was discovered by a close friend. Crawford has been admitted
into this institution here in Brichester for Catatonic Schizophrenics. His
dubious mental acuity can be established from this transcription. He is
currently suffering from catatonia, his mind evidently elsewhere. We are doing
all in our power and range of expertise to aid his condition, but the situation
appears irreparable at this time. Updates will be duly noted.
Dr. Adam Townsend,
Brichester Home For The Mentally Ill,
Severn Valley 2000.
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