The Journal of William Davis

Shelly discovers what happened to the owner of the castle she and Jessica stay at from time to time.

I don’t remember much of that following week, after finding that journal. I do know that it seemed as if my parents were fighting more often than they ever had before, but I paid such little attention to them that it seemed as if their fighting really had nothing to do with me at all. It seemed as if their troubles were trivial and pointless to me now that I had finally found a window into the soul of the man who had owned the castle. I was so sure if I had given them half a thought, all I would have heard from them was the usual problems; money and such. It didn’t occur to me at the time that it could have been anything else, so I just didn’t think about it. I’d come to regret this later, but not for sometime. The journal held too much of my attention. The journal had become too much a part of my life to let anything else interfere, and so I simply didn’t give them a second thought during that time.

At school, I did force myself to become more focused on the lessons and tasks at hand, and was able to convince my teachers that the previous week’s inattentiveness was nothing more than a passing thing. It was hard, what with everything else that was on my mind, but I somehow managed it. My grades started to pull out of the nose dive they had been in, and I started getting more things done at school, so I had less homework to do at home. Jessica was having a much easier time with it, since she wasn’t the one reading over the old journal we had found at the castle. She wasn’t splitting her attention between school and what he had discovered at the castle, and I would have envied her this if not for the fact that I was too enthralled with what I was finding out to even think of giving up the journal for even a moment. It had been decided that I would be the one to go over the old journal, since I did have some background concerning science and biology, and that we would discuss my findings at the end of the week, when we went out to the castle again. It was thought best that we save our conversations about the castle until we were absolutely sure that we would not be overheard, and the only place we could be sure of this was our secret place. My parents said nothing about us going out so much on the weekends, and so I figured it was something they were getting use to happening. Jessica said her parents didn’t notice her in the first place, so it really didn’t matter to them at all that their only daughter was gone so much of the time. She thought they were even enjoying their time away from her. Pity the same couldn’t have been said for my parents.

I read over the journal at home, after I finished my homework. I kept the thing safely tucked away under my bed in a box just big enough for it to fit into. A bit of tape over the lid let me know that my parents were not snooping around in it, and so I felt safe with it there. My parents seldom talked to me before, so they thought nothing of how much time I was spending in my room. No one came in or bothered me. It was the perfect time to spend to myself, poring over the pages that had been written by a man who was long gone.

I finally found a name written in the book, and assumed it was that of the man who had owned the castle. The name was William Davis. I had heard nothing of him before now, and, therefore, assumed that he was no local legend. One would assume that if it had been public knowledge at one time that a resident of the town had tortured and killed people in his own home that it would still be circulating around today as a sort of urban myth, if nothing else, so I could only assume that he had not been found out during his time there. How could that have happened? How could he have killed that many people without being found out or caught? Did he stick to people who were not members of the town, or had they not been well known? Who had been his subjects for his experiments?

Well, Mr. Davis, according to his journal, had inherited the castle from his great aunt upon her death. Before that, he had been a simple merchant over in England who had made barely enough of an income to support himself. He had never married, for the love of his life had passed on before he had come into his inheritance, and he had known during her life that he would have been unable to financial take care of her. He had chosen to let her go, and she had been killed in a tragic automobile accident only weeks before his aunt had died. Little was mentioned of her after that, and I could only assume that he accepted that she was beyond his reach, but had been too loyal to her to take anyone else as his bride after her passing. It was sort of sweet and romantic in a way, even though it must have been a fairly sad and lonely life for him after that.

His great aunt had left him enough money to be financial secure for the rest of his life. Instead of selling the estate and staying in England, he had decided to move to America and take care of what his aunt had apparently worked so hard to create here. Besides, aside from a failing business, there was nothing to keep him in England anyway. According to the journal, he took up with no women while living here, and never even seemed as if he were the least bit interested in seeing anyone. It seemed that, for the most part, he kept to himself, working on different experiments. He had a number of acquaintances he would invite over to his home for meals and discussions, and it was from these, I assume, that he took his subjects. The method he used to choose his guinea pigs was not obvious at first, and so I had to read on. Also, the reason for his extreme experiments were not obvious right off either, and so I spent quite some time reading over his entries to see what had happened to him to cause him to go to such extremes when it came to scientific exploration.

At first, his entries seemed harmless enough. He had been interested in the study of life and how living beings functioned, and so he had caught a number of animals, and had studied them to the fullest, first observing them in cages, and then dissecting them once he thought he had learned all he could from watching them. He had taken detailed notes on things from behavior to oxygen use, which he measured using a complex equation and a vacuum sealed container, putting the animals inside until they suffocated. As gruesome as this was, it was a useful way of measuring some of the data he was curious about.

He continued his research in this manner for years, having an excessive amount of time to spend in his hunting and experimenting due to the fortune his aunt had left him. After a time, he became bored of the wildlife the area had available for him, and he started sending off for more exotic animals, even paying professional hunters to capture and deliver rare specimens to him from all over the world. As far as I was able to tell, the most bizarre animal he had delivered to his castle was a full grown, male lion. It lasted only a few weeks before he was forced to finally dispose of it, since it required more food than he had been willing to acquire for it. Not wanting to be wasteful in the least, he went to great lengths to study the beast’s demise, and dissected it afterwards to see how its insides looked, if it were any different from the cats he had had available to him beforehand from around the area.

It was five years after he started his studies that they started to turn bizarre. There were entries on searching for the part of an animal that controlled how long it lived. Extending the normal lifespan of the animals became like an obsession to him, and he started doing more and more extreme experiments on animals, trying to discover each and every limitation they had, and what could be done to extend these very same limitations. If an animal died when exposed to so much heat, what could be done to increase its tolerance, and such. He would drown, torch and mutilate his animal subjects to see how much each, different species could tolerate. If it hadn’t already been discovered, I think this guy could have added a heck of a lot to medical science, just as long as no one found out how he came to his findings.

As sickening as all this became, I couldn’t seem to stop reading it. I would set up late at night, going over page after page of dementia this man wrote. He was brilliant, in his own right, but it soon became obvious that he had little in the way of moral judgment. Morality seemed as if it was as foreign to him as a boxing kangaroo match would be to us. It seemed as if he and his darker self were in conference often, and he heeded not his better half. It took some doing, but I finally started to figure out what had changed in him to make him become so terribly monstrous in the latter part of the journal.

He was dieing.

It had been made known to him that he was suffering from, what was then, an absolutely incurable form of cancer. The thought of this slow and torturous death was simply too much for him, and he turned to the only place he could think of to find a cure; science. He had studied life for as long as he had lived in America, and couldn’t come to accept that all his knowledge would fail him in the end, and so he had jumped it up several notches. He was becoming desperate for a solution to his problem, and in the end, it had driven him to pure madness.

The coming of the end of his own life caused him to think so very little of the lives of those around him, and so, one day, he invited a number of his acquaintances to spend the night with him. He chose those that had no family of their own, those that would not be missed, or whose disappearances could be easily explained away. He also made sure to pick those that didn’t know each other well, so no connection would be made between all of them when the police finally became suspicious of all these sudden disappearances. He wanted it to look like a number of random, unexplained disappearances, and that was exactly what he had managed to do. When they had all disappeared, according to his journal, a short article appeared in the papers for a few days, but the cases were soon dropped as no signs of foul play were ever found in or around the area. It was assumed that they had simply left, or had met with some sort of accident that had left no bodies to be found. No blame was ever place on Mr. Davis for these disappearances during the entire course of the journal.

He lured them off to his home to drug them and then place them in his dungeon, where he did to them what he did to the animals he had been collecting, sometimes even worse. The longest any of his subjects lasted was three weeks, and you really had to feel sorry for that guy. It seemed that it would have been better if he had just let himself die, like the others had. They had lasted less than a week.

After the last of his subjects had died, he had been too weak from his illness to continue on with his gruesome experiments. He passed away shortly afterwards, or so I assumed from the lack of further entries in the journal.

One sort of had to feel sorry for him, considering it was probably his condition as much as the fear of dieing that drove him to perform the madness he had.

William Davis had died of brain cancer.

Author's Note

First Draft