by Josh Shiben
From the journals of Dr. Alan Kaspars
10/4
Nightmares again last night. I’ve never had any quite so vivid. I dreamt I carved off the rest of John’s face - I didn’t want to, but I had to. It was the only thing I could do. Is there such a situation where the only rational recourse is madness? I used one of the knives from the office kitchen, and he was screaming, and there was just so much blood. Chunks of his skin were coming off in my hands like I was carving a steak. The worst part – afterwards I was going to turn the knife on myself. What the hell is that supposed to mean?
I’m sure it doesn’t help that the damned statue is still out there on my porch. I was looking at it as I ate breakfast this morning, and the way the light plays in it, I swear you can almost see it move. After breakfast, I stopped by the library again, to see if maybe the inscriptions on the base of that statue mean anything. I feel like maybe if I can trace this thing’s history, figure out where it came from originally, I might get a better idea as to how John’s whole psychosis began. It has to be linked to this statue – why else would he go through all the trouble to hide it in that crawlspace? And if I could help John, I could wash my hands of this whole thing. No more nightmares or creeping around in abandoned houses – this whole thing has gotten far too macabre for me. But I need to see this through, because I’m so close to helping him… And maybe myself, as well. I’m wrapped up in this now too. I have to prove that it’s all just some ancient dead religion. I have to trace the thread to the source.
I asked the librarian about the inscriptions on the statue, and she took me back down to the basement. I’m still shocked how much stuff is down there! There’s a whole selection of reference books devoted to ancient translations and lost languages. I guess I completely lost track of time, because I was in the basement for several hours, but eventually I picked up a book entitled Forgotten and Dead Languages. The book surprised me, because some of the more obvious languages (like Latin or Hebrew) were omitted entirely, while large sections of it were devoted to dialects I had never heard of. They were sorted by time and geographical location, so remembering the Nekrodeus was supposedly written by a Byzantine, I started in South-Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the 10th and 11th centuries. No dice. On a hunch, I traced the Nekrodeus’ travels to the Holy Roman Empire, and was surprised to find a banned language there corresponding to the same time period. Even more promising – it was apparently known as “Flüstern der Vermaledeit” or “Whispers of the Damned.” That sounds to me like the kind of language one would carve onto the base of the Spider Queen. The librarian assured me that a book with the translations existed somewhere, and that she would track it down for me.
After I was done at the library, I stopped by the hospital to speak to John. I think I’m just going to transcribe it here, and then try to figure out what the hell he was saying later. I’ve got a splitting headache, and don’t really feel like trying to slog through this predetermination crap.
“Hi John. How are you today?”
“...” I’m not even sure he noticed me.
“I was looking at my notes from our last talk, and you kept saying ‘Dead men tell no tales’ when I asked you about where the idol came from. Want to talk about that?”
“Have you ever seen a marionette?”
“The puppets? Yes, I’ve seen them.”
“Someone took the wood, and made them, but they’re dead. The wood was dead – it was always dead. They sing and dance and talk like they’re alive, but they’ve been dead the whole time. Before they even existed, they were just a piece of a dead thing. A fuh-thag”
“Marionettes are things, John. They were never alive. Not like people.”
“Do marionettes think they live too? Do you think they forget they have strings?”
“I doubt they think much of anything, being inanimate objects. Is this what you meant by ‘Dead men tell no tales?’ That you’re already dead?”
“We are all already dead. We were never alive.”
“I’m sure most doctors would argue otherwise.”
“You will understand. You just need to see.”
“See what, John?”
“Grats clench. The puppeteer.”
“The Spider Queen?”
“...”
“John?”