The Dark Rites of Cthulhu Page 23

  At least I can be sure they’ve had to tell you something. You may not have been old enough to remember when I went away, but they can’t deny I ever existed. No, you must know you have a sister.

  Or … had one, at least.

  They could claim I’d died, I suppose. Who would have doubted it? And if so, how far did they go with the ruse? Was there a funeral? A faked death certificate? Would I see my own name on a headstone, or engraved on some urn, if I ever went home?

  Not that I can leave Evergate.

  Well, I could. Maybe. I’ve made great progress.

  I am all right.

  Now. I’m all right now.

  That’s the catch.

  Well, that and the rest of it. What we do in the mindhouse helps us, but what about the long run, the big picture, the grand scale? The fate of humanity? The fate of the world?

  It’ll happen anyway, though. Why fight it? It’ll be far in the future, long after we’ll still be around. We can’t change things. We can’t stop it. We have to look out for ourselves and our own best interests. Is that so wrong?

  My friend Nathan agrees with me. Of course, he also knows what would be waiting for him outside of Evergate. It’s one thing to admit the guilt and feel the remorse. Having to be held accountable, to take responsibility … it’s daunting. It’s daunting for people who’ve done lesser wrongs than his.

  We can’t help wanting to take the easier way, the less painful or less shameful way. It’s just instinct, preservation, simple human nature.

  Like our parents did all those years.

  I was never sick.

  Not that way. Not in the way they wanted everyone to think.

  There was no cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments didn’t make me the way I was. That’s just how they explained it away. It looked better, you see. It made them look better. How brave they had to be. How brave and noble and strong. To be pitied, and admired, for bearing up so heroically.

  And did they make the most of it! Basking in the sympathy, milking the attention for all it was worth, if not quite to a Munchausen’s-by-proxy level. They didn’t try to exacerbate my condition. They didn’t want to keep me like that. When it finally really got to be too much, they relented and sent me to Doctor Hasturn.

  What I did to them was beyond unforgivable.

  Worse than if I had gottten cancer.

  Worse than drug habits, sex scandals, pregnancy or a criminal record. Any of those could be written off as a phase, the wild waywardness of youth.

  Or joining a cult … which would have been ironic enough, the way things turned out …

  These days, some things once deemed shameful carry a certain cachet; our parents would have earned bonus points among their social circle if I’d been a lesbian, and they could be just so very tolerant, so open-minded and progressive and trendy about it.

  But, no. No such luck. Nothing that dramatic, exciting or politically correct. I couldn’t even be something controversial like a vegan, a liberal, an atheist.

  All right, at least I wasn’t fat, but still!

  Insanity is never going to be a cool stigma.

  I don’t mean eccentricity, oh, no. That’s for the quirky, temperamental artistes. I don’t mean ordinary mood swings or picky people calling themselves OCD. I certainly don’t mean edgy but endearing sociopaths as depicted on television.

  I mean mental illness. I mean schizophrenia. In the real sense of the word, not the usual stupid Sybil-joke misconception. Paranoia. Delusions. Hearing voices. Hallucinations, by no means limited to the visual.

  Did they tell you your sister went crazy?

  Somehow, I doubt it.

  Oh, denial, that river in Egypt. Our father was the pharaoh, and our mother had her own personal Cleopatra barge.

  They didn’t want to admit it, acknowledge it. Of course not. It’d reflect badly on them. Cancer was one thing, but madness? Imagine the talk, the whispers, the gossip. Imagine the disastrous effect on the family’s reputation! Business! Political ambitions! The country club!

  And so on.

  Yes, I was insane.

  Either way, sick or insane, I suppose you’re surprised to hear from me. At all, let alone after all these years of silence. I’m surprised, too. I expected it’d be discouraged from both sides. Our parents wouldn’t have been in favor of it, and Doctor Hasturn says that contact with anyone from our former lives tends to be less than therapeutic.

  An exception was made for us, though.

  I’m better now. It won’t seem that way once I explain, but you never saw me the way I was before. How bad things got, there toward the end. In the hospital. The psych ward. The locked unit. The restraints.

  It was terrible. The suffering, the torment. I don’t mean the way I was treated, or the drugs they pumped into me … the way they never let me have a moment’s privacy, a moment’s freedom. I don’t even mean the food.

  The worst of the torment was in my own head.

  You have no idea.

  Or … do you? Sometimes there are hereditary components. Sometimes these things run in families. And you are now about the age I was when I had my first major psychotic break.

  But, no, if you did, you wouldn’t be so accomplished already, so successful. There’d be signs. Early indicators I’m sure they would have been watching for. Watching closely.

  Then again…

  Well, someday you might have children of your own. You should know the risks, what kind of legacy you might be handing down to them. You’ve seen what it can do to a family. Whether you understood or not, you grew up surrounded by it.

  I’m sure you’d handle it better than our parents did. I’m sure you wouldn’t let any child of yours go through that. You’d do whatever you could to help, wouldn’t you? To spare them the torment I suffered?

  If not for Doctor Hasturn, if not for Evergate, I’d still be there, in the hospital. Doped to the gills, on meds for the symptoms, and on meds for the side effects caused by the meds for the symptoms.

  Or I’d be out on the streets somewhere, me and the other homeless crazies, camping under overpasses, panhandling, scrounging through the trash, doing what’s called ‘self-medicating’ on cigarettes and cheap booze.

  Or I’d be dead.

  Instead, I’m much better now. I’m cured. Thanks to Doctor Hasturn. Thanks to the mindhouse.

  My hair’s grown back, by the way. You’ve probably seen the old pictures; they must keep them around to shore up the sympathetic image. Awful ones where I look like a skeleton in pajamas, all pallid and bony, dry skin, scabby lips, burning-mad eyes sunk in bruise-purple sockets. Ready for the debutante ball, right?

  We kept her at home as long as we could, they’d say… but she needed the kind of care not even a live-in nurse could provide… see how thin she is, she could hardly keep anything down, they had her on those nutrition shakes… and her hair, her poor hair, it got so wispy, falling out in patches, so they shaved it…

  That wasn’t how it happened.

  Look closer at those pictures next time. If they’re the ones I’m thinking of, my hands will be wrapped up. Bandaged, or in these padded glove-mitten things.

  Trichotillomania. How’s that for a word? I pulled it, you see. My hair. Pulled it, twisted it, and plucked it out by the roots, one by one, strand by strand. Eyebrows, too. And eyelashes. Even with my head shaved and the mittens.

  Some people eat it, too, chew on their hair, swallow it, risking it clumping up in their intestines and causing a blockage. Not me. That isn’t why I lost so much weight. I wouldn’t have eaten it. I wanted to get rid of it. To yank it out of my scalp, out of my face, and get rid of it. Burn it, if I could. Flush it down the toilet, if I couldn’t burn it.

  It’s grown back now anyway, as I was saying. My hair. It’s past my shoulders. I know I used to pull it, I remember doing it, and I remember it made sense to me at the time. It seemed like the only thing I could do. The smart thing.

  I thought – don’t laugh;
I know how crazy it sounds – that it wasn’t my hair. That it wasn’t hair at all. That it was something else. Cilia, maybe. That it was alive, that these alien spores had burrowed into my head and were extruding themselves in these fine wiry filaments, threads that looked like hair, that fooled everyone but me. The longer they got, or the more of them there were, the stronger they’d become. Until they took me over. Replaced me, or kept me trapped inside while they used my body to do things. So I had to pull them out.

  Crazy, I know. But that’s why I didn’t chew my hair, the way so many other trichotillomaniacs do. Mine wasn’t a compulsion. I didn’t do it without thinking about it, as an unconscious habit. I did it deliberately, because I had to, in order to save myself from the cilia spore aliens. And the last thing I’d want to do was ingest those filaments, take them back inside myself, like tapeworms. Bad enough they sprouted from my scalp and face and eyelids, where I could see them, where I could reach them to pluck out. I couldn’t stand the idea of having hairy tangled knots collecting in my guts.

  Would you? Would anyone?

  But try explaining that. Try explaining that the reason you won’t eat is because that only feeds the cilia spores and maybe if you can’t pluck them out you can starve them instead. Try explaining that you can’t sleep because the moon sings and the sun groans and the stars scream terrible words into your mind, words that would kill people or drive them insane if you said them aloud… day or night, it doesn’t matter, because the stars are always there.

  It was terrible. Imagine not being able to trust your own senses, your own thoughts. Imagine watching someone waste away, tortured like that. Someone you care about. Wouldn’t you want to help? Wouldn’t you want to do anything in your power to make it better?

  Luckily, like I said, I’m fine, now.

  Since coming here. Since Doctor Hasturn.

  Since the mindhouse.

  I want you to understand that. I want someone to understand that.

  Someone who isn’t also here at Evergate. Obviously, we understand. It just doesn’t necessarily mean much, given our situation. What’s that they say? Consider the source? Take it with a grain of salt? Maybe the lunatics aren’t running the asylum outright, but, the rest of the world isn’t very inclined to believe us when we try to tell them we’re not crazy anymore.

  We’re not.

  We’re fine now. We’re better. We’re cured.

  As long as we continue our treatments. That’s why we can’t leave. If we do, we’ll revert. We’ll go back to the way we were before. Nothing else will work for us. Nothing else has. Medication, ECT, behavioral modification plans, everything short of old-school lobotomies… been there, done that, no use.

  Others have tried. They’ve decided that, hey, since they’re cured, there’s no need to stay. No need to continue treatment. Certainly no need to stay locked in the loony bin. You see that all the time, even with people who aren’t suffering psychiatric disorders. They don’t follow the full course of antibiotics, they stop taking pills as soon as the symptoms go away, and they treat the dosage instructions as optional. They sign themselves out of the hospital against medical advice. We all think we know best.

  We’re wrong.

  Some choice, huh? Between madness and seclusion. Between a sane life in Evergate and a real life in the real world.

  Here, we can be normal. We have clarity of thought. Focus. Freedom from the voices and hallucinations, the delusions. We can function. We can have valid interpersonal relationships.

  We also contribute to the slow but inexorable downfall of humanity.

  What kind of argument is that, in making a case for not being crazy?

  Oh, we’re not crazy anymore, because our doctor is a warlock cult-leader who’s guiding us in rituals to siphon off our madness and funnel it through a psychic vortex…

  Why, yes, that seems perfectly sane and reasonable, doesn’t it?

  But it’s true.

  So much for credibility, right? So much for proving I’m not delusional.

  Doctor Hasturn doesn’t claim to be a warlock. Or a cult-leader, for that matter. We don’t wear robes. We don’t shave our heads – ha, wouldn’t that be fittingly absurd?

  When we go to the mindhouse for our sessions, it is cognitive meditation and structured group glossolalic therapy.

  Otherwise known as: we sit in a circle and chant.

  Not in any actual language. They’re just nonsense syllables, made-up words. Like mantras. They don’t mean anything.

  Except they do.

  They have power.

  Did I tell you earlier about hearing the stars scream terrible words that would kill people or drive them insane if uttered aloud?

  It’s kind of like that.

  Power. Those sounds have power.

  Yagth amur fthagn yagthos rullos orann’ti.

  See?

  Thig’alla haroun, haroun ob ik’shmai.

  Do you feel it?

  The shiver?

  The power?

  But the words… they aren’t words. That’s what glossolalia is. Sometimes known as ‘speaking in tongues.’ Though it isn’t the kind of holy-roller frenzy you might be imagining. We aren’t transported into states of euphoria or manic religious ecstasy. No angels, no sobbing, no wild hallelujah choirs, no stigmata.

  We just… chant.

  Doctor Hasturn doesn’t preach, doesn’t sermonize. The mindhouse isn’t a church, strictly speaking. We don’t have the usual trappings associated with ceremonies – candles, chalices, idols, relics. We don’t drink wine. We don’t perform blood-sacrifices or burn incense or have orgies.

  There are books, sure. Books, but not Bibles. Not hymnals or tracts. An entire shelf of books, with worn leather bindings and gilt-edged pages gone yellowed and brittle from age. The covers are embossed, stamped with symbols and sigils. A few have titles in what appears to be some sort of crude, bastardized Latin. Librios Turpis Atroxi, for instance. And Valde Vetus Res. Others … others I can only guess at the pronunciation, let alone the meaning. Zsossonoggos U’trys Deighrn, and Cthlotha Fthagnd.

  I suppose it has been a church, at times, in its fashion, the mindhouse. It was originally constructed as a private family chapel. You know how it is with these places. Starts off as a mansion built by a land baron or railroad tycoon, gets converted to a hotel, maybe repurposed as a military academy, turned into a hospital, used as a relocation center during World War II, remodeled into a boarding school, rented out for writers’ and artists’ retreats, and so on.

  Yes, Evergate’s gone through a lot of incarnations over the years. Additions, outbuildings, updates to the plumbing and wiring, periodic redecoration. But, always, at the heart of it, at the core of it, the mindhouse. Unchanged.

  Nathan has read up on it. The house, the history. The Evergates themselves and the mysteries surrounding what happened to them, back in the 1900s or whenever it was. He’s been here quite a bit longer than I have. You’d recognize his full name if I told you. They still hold memorials on the anniversary, you know.

  He’s not proud of it, his notoriety, what he did, the people he hurt that day, the lives he ruined. He hates to think about it. Like with me and the hair-pulling, what he believed seemed real to him at the time. He was certain that he was doing the right thing. Now, he knows how insane he was.

  If anyone from outside saw Nathan now, they’d evaluate him and determine him fit to stand trial. He’d be sent to prison… where the effects of the mindhouse would gradually wear off. They’d be punishing a madman for deeds beyond his control.

  It’s one of the hardest parts about the therapy sessions… cringing at the now-clear recollections of your worst moments, your most painful choices and shameful actions. Having to confront and live with your own inescapable past.

  Our illnesses, Doctor Hasturn says, can only explain our behaviors. Not excuse them. We can’t look to others for forgiveness or absolution. We can’t look to a benevolent God. There is no moral order to the worl
d, and society’s efforts to establish laws and justice are only feeble, crumbling bulwarks against the capricious entropy of chaos.

  We are agents of it, that chaos. The very prevalence of insanity is a sign that we are on its path, a steepening speeding downward spiral into the abyss. As a species, we are mad. We always have been. In some of us, the madness is to an extent and of an excess that it can be tapped. It can be drawn off and channeled.

  That’s why we hold our sessions in the mindhouse. Something about the design of it serves as a prism, an amplifier. I’ve no idea why, or how; I don’t understand the architecture of it, but it’s curiously fascinating.

  It’s an odd-shaped space, situated where several of the mansion’s other walls come together at angles that somehow don’t add up. The roof tilts in uneven wedges toward an off-center peak; if you gaze up at it too long, the lines of the ceiling panels start to look like the strands of a web spun by a psychotic spider. I often wonder how they did that, whoever designed the room, whoever built it.

  Of course, that might just my own ignorance speaking. Someone who’s studied such things might look at it and find it simplicity itself. Then again, I could be wrong; maybe it would perplex even an expert. Maybe it’d pose a real challenge, a real puzzle. I guess that’s far much more your department than mine. You are the educated one, after all. You’d probably take one look and be able to explain the mindhouse’s peculiar geometric effects in the same way you could those of the House-of-Mystery varieties of tourist trap.

  But I honestly believe there’s more to it than that, than mere tricks of vertigo-inducing perspective and proportion. More than optical illusions and subliminal suggestions in the décor.

  The floor’s done in tiny mosaic tiles, worn and faded along the paths where people walk, but at the edges it’s still as vibrant as the day it was installed. As with the ceiling, the longer you look at the random design, the more it seems to form patterns… indiscernible patterns with meanings that can’t quite be grasped.