convinced my privacy has not been invaded. What I set down here is for my eyes only.
November 20—Morning
I must admit that Hilliard was right about the positive effects of writing a daybook. It does tend to release tension and focus the mind though my thoughts would have better clarity if it weren’t for the damn drugs. For a long time I refused—no, I was unable—to think unemotionally and with a certain amount of clinical detachment about the magic eyes and that day in the home I shared with Lorna. It was all too painful, too horrific, the details encased in a fog like the one poor Miss Pringle wanders in. Now I’ve regained some perspective. Now I feel I can examine the events objectively and that it would be a good idea to do so by setting the facts down here.
First and foremost I did not kill Lorna. I would never have harmed her, never never never.
But I did kill the thing that killed her. The real murderer, the monstrous thing that invaded Lorna’s body and took it over and destroyed her.
The thing with the magic eyes.
Demon? Incubus? Alien entity like the ones in the
Body Snatchers
films? I don’t know, I can only hope and pray it was the only one of its kind. All I know is that on that morning two years ago I looked into the face of my wife lying beside me in bed expecting to see Lorna’s beautiful gray eyes when they opened and what I saw instead my God what I saw instead! The shock was devastating, the terror all-consuming. Impossible to believe yet impossible not to believe.
Magic
is the word that came to me as I looked into the eyes that stared out at me from Lorna’s face, a blacker magic than any ever conjured up by a human sorcerer. Deep shining pools of blackness with unspeakable horrors swimming in them, changing and shifting like images in a devil’s kaleidoscope, each one more terrible than the last. Pure living evil. Like peering into the depths of hell.
When I recoiled and shouted, “What in God’s name are you? What have you done to Lorna?” the thing that had been my beloved wife laughed at me. Laughed! And when I babbled out what I saw it laughed again then pretended to pout then grew angry and accused me of having absurd hallucinations. I cringed and fled but I couldn’t stay away, I was drawn back in the glimmering hope that I actually had been hallucinating. But I hadn’t, I wasn’t. The magic eyes were even more obscene the second time I stared into them.
I had no choice then. Lorna no longer existed, she had been consumed by whatever had entered her body and the knowledge filled me with a savage need to avenge her, to kill the hateful invader before it could do God knows what to me and others. I took the knife from the kitchen and blinded one magic eye and then the other, covered the blackness and the evil images with crimson.
I know how all of this sounds. Of course I know. That’s why I didn’t tell the truth to the police or my public defender or the judge and jury or any of the court-appointed psychiatrists who examined me or Dr. Hilliard once they put me in this asylum. They would not have believed me. They already considered me a criminal psychopath; the truth would merely have convinced them they were right and made my ordeal even worse than it was and has been, ensured I would be kept locked up with no possibility of ever being released.
Lorna. Lorna. I miss you so. I hope and pray you’re at rest and in heaven if there is a heaven and that you know that what I did I did because I loved you.
November 24—Afternoon
Miss Pringle has begun to acclimate and assimilate. She still seems dazed at times, but her movements are no longer quite so zombielike and she is capable now of holding a reasonably coherent if lackluster conversation for minutes at a time. I seek her out whenever I can before and after meals and in what the staff euphemistically refers to as the garden though it’s more difficult outside because of the constant supervision of the intern/guards.
November 20—Morning
I must admit that Hilliard was right about the positive effects of writing a daybook. It does tend to release tension and focus the mind though my thoughts would have better clarity if it weren’t for the damn drugs. For a long time I refused—no, I was unable—to think unemotionally and with a certain amount of clinical detachment about the magic eyes and that day in the home I shared with Lorna. It was all too painful, too horrific, the details encased in a fog like the one poor Miss Pringle wanders in. Now I’ve regained some perspective. Now I feel I can examine the events objectively and that it would be a good idea to do so by setting the facts down here.
First and foremost I did not kill Lorna. I would never have harmed her, never never never.
But I did kill the thing that killed her. The real murderer, the monstrous thing that invaded Lorna’s body and took it over and destroyed her.
The thing with the magic eyes.
Demon? Incubus? Alien entity like the ones in the
Body Snatchers
films? I don’t know, I can only hope and pray it was the only one of its kind. All I know is that on that morning two years ago I looked into the face of my wife lying beside me in bed expecting to see Lorna’s beautiful gray eyes when they opened and what I saw instead my God what I saw instead! The shock was devastating, the terror all-consuming. Impossible to believe yet impossible not to believe.
Magic
is the word that came to me as I looked into the eyes that stared out at me from Lorna’s face, a blacker magic than any ever conjured up by a human sorcerer. Deep shining pools of blackness with unspeakable horrors swimming in them, changing and shifting like images in a devil’s kaleidoscope, each one more terrible than the last. Pure living evil. Like peering into the depths of hell.
When I recoiled and shouted, “What in God’s name are you? What have you done to Lorna?” the thing that had been my beloved wife laughed at me. Laughed! And when I babbled out what I saw it laughed again then pretended to pout then grew angry and accused me of having absurd hallucinations. I cringed and fled but I couldn’t stay away, I was drawn back in the glimmering hope that I actually had been hallucinating. But I hadn’t, I wasn’t. The magic eyes were even more obscene the second time I stared into them.
I had no choice then. Lorna no longer existed, she had been consumed by whatever had entered her body and the knowledge filled me with a savage need to avenge her, to kill the hateful invader before it could do God knows what to me and others. I took the knife from the kitchen and blinded one magic eye and then the other, covered the blackness and the evil images with crimson.
I know how all of this sounds. Of course I know. That’s why I didn’t tell the truth to the police or my public defender or the judge and jury or any of the court-appointed psychiatrists who examined me or Dr. Hilliard once they put me in this asylum. They would not have believed me. They already considered me a criminal psychopath; the truth would merely have convinced them they were right and made my ordeal even worse than it was and has been, ensured I would be kept locked up with no possibility of ever being released.
Lorna. Lorna. I miss you so. I hope and pray you’re at rest and in heaven if there is a heaven and that you know that what I did I did because I loved you.
November 24—Afternoon
Miss Pringle has begun to acclimate and assimilate. She still seems dazed at times, but her movements are no longer quite so zombielike and she is capable now of holding a reasonably coherent if lackluster conversation for minutes at a time. I seek her out whenever I can before and after meals and in what the staff euphemistically refers to as the garden though it’s more difficult outside because of the constant supervision of the intern/guards.
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