The Mystery Surrounding Hamplock House (2014)

A twenty-three old girl who had a breakdown had ghostly visitations in a half-way house ends up in clearing up a mystery and ends up engaged to be married to the boy she fancies. The text is 12 chaps

The Mystery Surrounding Hamplock House (2014)

By John Tan

(Start 2^nd June 2014)

 

      “Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat, “we’re all mad here.  I’m mad.  You’re mad.’

       “How do you know I’m mad!” asked Alice.

       “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

     

                      -- Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson); Alice in Wonderland

 

       “How you see your future is much more important than what has happened in the past.’

 

   --Zig Zigler                        

 

PART ONE:  THE STORY BEGUN BY THE HEROINE, A MENTAL PATIENT (of Queens, New York)

 

                        1

 

 

I remember the roads getting there impressed me with a quaint feeling of oddness which grew�"with the general sights and indifferent bustle, of housing and commerce�"a forty-mile stretch that gradually thinned and was trimmed to shops and flats and the occasional villa�"so that I was out of sorts, when, finally, I went up the steps towards Hamplock House, my new home, that was part of the asylum establishment, for, having a breakdown eleven months earlier and unable to cope in my father’s house,-- it was the beginning of September, and here I was for an indefinite stay.  Even in town, where I had had lunch though it was only sixty miles from the City, in Upper New York State, seemed a world away; and from the first, it was its foreignness that irked and piqued me.  I had decided to stop in one of the coffee-shops, called Tavistock Café, bearing the name of that town, and had pronounced to myself the lamb sandwich tasted dry and the cheese had no flavor or savoriness about it, and the pepper, right out from the pepper-cellar, bland to the point of being devoid of any piquancy.  Having quickly paid the inquisitive and neatly-coiffured waitress, I left, feeling thirsty and as if I had eaten sawdust.  Even the detective show on Tee-vee, Starsky and Hutch, and the M.A.S.H rerun brought resoundingly home to my mind�"which I caught fleeting glimpses of�" as prominently set up behind the counter for the patrons’ viewing�"that everything was detached and distant.  Nothing seemed interesting�"not even the red and gold of the countryside peeping out but on the whole showing green under the sunlit blue vault and the white bridge as we drove up the gate-- that was to enclose me indefinitely, but now, this loss of appeal to my palate and my sense of smell, what did they signalize, what did they presage in regard of coming days?

    ‘For your great convenience, Miss, and you did say you are going to Hamplock House and not to the hospital, I will drop you at the main entrance,’ said the about sixty-year-old taxi driver, grinning through his oily face, ‘is that all right?’ I was jolted from my reverie, as my eye scoured the scene before me. ‘This corner, Miss, is the new wing of the hospital and your building is down the avenue through another gate at the bottom of the drive.  Do you see the grey building with the curious turrets and the cupola with the ornamental weathercock, surmounting the wind-vane? and sheer black roofs?’  The man’s voice was still buzzing in my ear as I got out, carrying my bags, and he, my luggage, and thus I concluded it was going to be a contrary day today�"in all sobriety, although I was on a mild dose of tranquilizers: doctor’s orders.  The impression, however, which stayed with me the whole time I was in Hamplock House, was definitely a definite something…

   He said, ‘The place is haunted, Miss, they say the place is definitely haunted.’

   ‘Who said?’

   ‘The people who live around here.’

   I was firstly ushered by a helpful and genial attendant to the social worker’s office, who was called out of delicate duty of lecturing to an intractable inmate, a middle-aged lady who was salivating and kept on rolling her eyes, when I made an appearance, and when this person dressed in white saw me, she dismissed the inmate and ordered the attendant to fetch me a fresh cup of tea, adding, ‘I hope you take tea, but if you prefer, the Columbian coffee they have here, of course--’ She left her sentence unfinished, and I answered brightly and tried to smile, saying as the tea no doubt was bound be excellent, so I don’t mind taking a cuppa with her. 

    While we were daintily sipping our tea, this official asked to see my papers and to check to see if they were in order, and she produced her own documents from her cabinet which she asked me to sign in triplicates, and gave me one set to keep, then, letting her eyes scan over her own, folded her arms against her mahogany desk finally, and pronounced everything was good as gold and in order.  ‘Let me see here, according to our file on record, an intern will come later to have a chat with you at 4 PM and Dr. Cranston will be your psychologist and you will board in the same room with old Mrs. Cavendish, let me see, no: 44, that is on the left wing of this block, up a short flight of stairs, the last room facing east, on the second floor.  The ground floor is taken up those by our inmates that are either on wheelchairs or are bedridden.  I hope that doesn’t sound too worrisome.  I will come and check up on you to see how you are getting on before dinner-time which is served at six in the dining hall.  Welcome to Hamplock House, Miss --’ giving my limp hand a hearty shake and saying, ‘Bolton will help you carry your things up, and I hope you enjoy your stay with us.’

   Following the obedient Bolton, I saw I was immediately now in the visitor’s hall and wandering about was one or two of the bulbous-eyed inmates, shambling along, which the attendant greeted, but without receiving any answer, and there were many rooms facing away from the octagonal vestibule�"of which the social worker’s room was one.  There was an atrium revealed behind a wall alongside of which was a walkway leading to the left wing of the four storied building, and both of us walked up to it.

   ‘Nice façade,’ I murmured, not knowing what to say, ‘so many nice bow windows,’ because I remembered my impression of the front.

   ‘For your information this building was built by Augustine Tecumseh Hamplock the Third, the millionaire banker, if I’m perfectly correct,’ returned Bolton. ‘In fact, he built the entire mental institution, as he was a man of a philanthropic bend.  I am taking a course in psychiatry and between us, I prefer Jung to Sigmund Freud, myself.  This house rose on its foundations in 1882 A.D. �" if I’m not mistaken, and the hair-brained architect had built it partly Gothic and partly in the Gregorian style, so that it might seem odd to you.  Have you seen millionaire Hamplock’s painting that was in the corner facing the occupational therapist’s room outside the corridor on your way going in?’

   ‘Millionaire Hamplock’s painting, madam?’

   ‘Of course, I mean a portrait of him with two of his children,’ Bolton corrected herself, pretending to preen, and by this time, we were walking along the corridor with rows of rooms on either side, rooms with white doors, which sometimes opened to disclose whatever tracasserie was inside, and there seemed a perpetual hum or droning and I seemed to hear people groaning or calling out in their drug-induced delirium or something�"until, on the second floor, we stopped outside no: 44, my mind still lingering on what Bolton had said about the portrait which I will devote a few lines to next,--while I waited with a mixture of curiosity and dread, the attendant unsmilingly knocked.

 

 

                                 2

 

 

I was struck, after I had tucked in the corned beef and the spuds and vegetables at their dining-table because I was famished�"and although the food also tasted odd�"and it was afterwards I went to explore the grounds and came upon the painting where the attendant had indicated to me, that was done in the Holbein style by some wandering European artist�"of the man who built Hamplock House himself.  Mr. Hamplock was certainly striking to look at, dressed in black, a broad-shouldered man of about fifty-five years of age, with fiery liquescent eyes, sitting, I suppose in an upright position, where two little children, a boy and a girl, of about the age of seven and four, were supported on his knees; but it wasn’t a full-length portrait.  Having some time, I studied the man’s face at leisure since I wasn’t interrupted, and I thought I caught a look of some mortal terror in his eye�"which could, of course, only be a blob of paint that was highlighted by the evening sun through one of those big windows I had earlier mentioned.

   Then I went straight up to my room, thinking, from glancing at the week’s menu, tomorrow will be lamb basted in its own sauce with onions and pureed tomatoes�"I hope that lunch will be better.  On opening the door, I discovered my roommate was arranging and rearranging her bric-a-bracs on her bed, with her feet under the covers, and her bony finger pointed to a pile of blue-flowered linen on my bed and nodded her white head towards me and said without preamble in a mysterious tone, ‘She wanted you to have these,’ and then, indicating the cane chair that occupied a prominent place in the center of the room, said the same thing.  ‘This was hers, and she made me promise to give it to you.’

   ‘Who?’ I asked, spluttered rather, with wonder.

   ‘Mrs. Elkland who passed away on that same bed that is now yours, not more than three weeks agone.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘I don’t know much about her; but I have heard some things.  I shouldn’t like to talk about her too much, you know?’ she lowered her voice into a whisper.

   ‘Why?’

   ‘These walls, they have ears--’

   ‘What do these walls have--?’

   ‘Nothing.  Do you like to have a look at some movie magazines,’ shoving one under my nose as I had come close to her bed, and I saw that she had that emaciated look they all had, ‘you should like this one,’ she gasped as she tried to chuckle.

   I saw it had a cover with Marilyn Monroe all in white, clasping her all-aswaying skirt, and by this time I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and fell promptly into a dreamless sleep--the first night of my sojourn in Hamplock House.

 

 

                                  3

 

 

Now, if I hadn’t wakened up in the middle of the night, I would perhaps have formed a better opinion of Hamplock House in the morning.  But as a matter of fact, I did woke up, having been overtaken by an unaccountable feeling of impending danger, and went to stand in the corridor with the door of no: 44 half-opened and I could see from their glass panes that most of the inmates’ venetian blinds were lowered, and some of the inmates had their night-lights on.  The truth was I did not realize at first, I was awake then, and I must have been like some somnambulist standing fronting the dark passageway, of which the other end was the staircase.  From a side-casement, a tall one, I saw the spidery branch of an old oak, and the blue moon: a shining orb, in unyielding splendor and throwing into stark relief part of the old bony banisters, against the somber gloom in which it seem to rise�"a palpable shadow just as seeming to quicken my pulse just from where I was viewing it. (Then it sunk in, I was wide awake, and this wasn’t a dream.)  I heard or thought I heard someone’s belt being beaten against the floor or something, and for a moment, it seemed to be someone whose face was hidden behind a cape was coming to get at me�"and it was then, suddenly, I remembered Augustine Hamplock from the Holbein-like portrait of him.

   At any rate, my heart rose to my mouth for this incident seemed so real�"that I imagined if I had not witnessed the whole thing right now.  But, when it came to me again in the form of a dream afterwards�"a recurring dream at that�"the man’s face was always concealed behind his cape, and there was a little boy, dressed in blue vestments of some satiny material, and at first I thought it was Mr. Hamplock’s boy, but as I hadn’t examined the portrait with the boy as closely as I should the first time it was a worrying thing that I didn’t remember seeing the blue frock he wore, but the boy was always crying plaintively and being chased by the mysterious man who was tanning him with his belt with might and main.  I remember the scene was enacted on the stairs that first night but I had no clear sight of the boy’s face and only his matted hair and clothing and his purportedly small frame, and the big black thing was hitting him with a brutality that was a shocking thing just to see.  The two did not come up to the second floor but disappeared once again downstairs, and as the apparition vanished, I thought I heard a loud cry followed by a sob that was more like a ghastly or gruesome yell.

    With what appurtenances of reason in this half-crazed state was I to make of all this, I thought!  For, soon after that, the whole floor was quiet, except for Mrs. Cavendish’s snoring that came to me, ‘like artillery going off in the park’ to borrow from a phrase of Dumas’, and I came back to my senses and went back to my bed.  From my room-mate’s alarm clock I saw it was two AM, but my eyes refused to shut for a long time afterwards because I was in a state of great agitation, and as a consequence slept late and nearly missed the nine o’clock breakfast, after which, the intern who was to put in an appearance the evening before came at last; and had his long-awaited chat with me.

   ‘So you have come to stay in Hamplock House, and I see your application has been approved.  For an indefinite stay of not less than a period of six months I take it?  Of course, you know this house is for the chronically ill but stable mental patients who, under our careful medical supervision, can live semi-independent lives together with other inmates.’

   I looked at the intern’s face and saw there were smallpox scars which most had faded completely, and he said his name was Liam Alvarez and he was twenty-eight years old. I knew his smallpox was not recent; but he seemed all too self-consciously to adjust and readjust his tie.

   ‘What I don’t know is this is such a large place, with gardens and even a nice pavilion, and I had applied here on account of my breakdown last year when I was studying at college and after that I tried to learn something of hairdressing.  Life was a bit tedious at home after that, until I plucked up enough courage to come here.’

   ‘Yeah,’ said the intern, with pride in his quavering voice. ‘Rather!  This is quite a place, and it has sixty-four rooms, every one for the inmates; and an upper hall, a dining hall (you have been acquainted with this one, eh?) and several tea rooms, the warden’s quarters, the other officials’ rooms, the recreation room, the library�"although this is always shut�"the Laundromat, the buttery and kitchen, the gymnasium; and, in a separate building on the side that abuts the east wing, the treatment room and the dispensary.  It is some place, like I say, don’t you think so?’

     I thought the brick and mortar Hamplock House was an emotionally charged place, in which traces of fear, rage, remorse, and some other negative emotions, were like pheromones, chemical traces, of which seemed to rise out of the dark floorboards and woodwork, and even from the brick walls themselves; but I didn’t say so because it wouldn’t be polite.  I had felt something that, the night before, gave me quite a turn, felt it that first time I set foot inside its walls, and this was something that cast my mood into sheer gloominess and I thought Hamplock House was even worse than its exterior looked, and this was, by the way, my second and more real impression of it.   From the exterior, and the angle which seemed to draw up both wings of the building, if one was in a stark and preoccupied mood, to one’s chagrin, one might chance hear loud wails, cries of grief and inane laughter, drifting to you across time, so as to leave you disemboweled with�"a unique set of experiences.  There, need I say more?  Hence, it might have been a place of disquietude, quickening with gruesome memories of some mayhem perpetrated long ago, or some suicides, that seemed to give rise to a riot of demoniacal voices or noises right from Tophet that would make the most stout-hearted weak in her knees.  But, all of this is concealed in the daylight by the park-like atmosphere of the grounds, and the innocuous appearance in their shiny cars of the daytime staff.  It was in the midst of a deteriorating relationship with my Father that September of 198-, that I decided to move out, after the death of my Mother from a stroke that she never recovered from, and the fact that my Father being an alcoholic and my Mother was bipolar might have something to say that urged me to stay on despite a beginning that was unpropitious.

   The intern chatted and talked about himself, and said he was a seminarian once for a year; but, he added quickly, that he didn’t have a vocation.  His vocation in life was to be a clinical psychologist.  ‘I like to talk, especially if I have a wide-eyed and appreciative audience, and the reward for one’s learning is one gets to have the inspiration of ideas�"not a delusion, because it comes from a disciplined and experienced intellect, and his pate is ripened by experience.  We see and laugh because we see a discrepancy, a mistake, a gross error, as one say a child’s nose is pulled out of joint at the arrival of another baby, and in this case who is the one that we direct our humor at?  Who could be the butt of our joke?  Nay, exuding an air of maturity sufficient for the purpose�"isn’t laughter a sign of mental instability?  Couldn’t a person laughing inanely be thought of as unstable?’ What about a murderer laughing his head off like a jackass after he had done his evil deed?  An uncontrollable chuckling fit, --isn’t that a sigh of evil dislocation of mind and soul?  Exaggerations, grossness, euphemisms, double entendres, are humorous because they come up on the wrong side of propriety. Must we make fun of propriety, and call someone a prude, or prim and proper�"to lower others so that we are above them�"so why do we make fun of propriety?  I think it’s because when we act and think, we don’t have the proper air about us; and it is as if we have to breathe a purified and rarefied air and have that air trapped in our lungs, that it becomes part and parcel of our psychological system to avoid this.  Are sinners redeemed?  Are the humble exalted; but to know that is to know God’s time stretches out even to eternity.  Is any human being born a mistake?  Every person’s life is so ordained by God, and in all ways, graced living leads to heaven.  Is the multiplicity of religions as they exist in this world, to be seen as a momentous mistake to embarrass the believer, and should at all costs be blotted out at once?  Do infidels go to hell? I do think in the light of God’s plan to create and built community, this is not so!  Is Allah and Jesus mutually exclusive and one is to be set at variance against another?  Again, I think not!  So I said to that woman wearing the hajib, ‘Go in peace! Be not afraid! To practice your faith in good faith--do it with a good conscience as best you can; because all have limitations and can only sit and look and employ herself with that is set as preordained before her.  The clever sees and laughs at the simple salt of the earth and calls him a dolt and a poltroon; but repentance is that most exquisite feeling which on one’s own accord one admits to oneself the error of one’s ways, and therefore, the natural desire to make amends.  There is nothing comical about being a heroine, and although a heroine can be reviled, but the witnessing of this often excites the piety of human pity.  Bad humor comes when you are trying to get connected up to yourself, and it insinuates itself between thought and thought and thought and feeling.’

   ‘What is bad humor, Mr. Alvarez?’ I found myself asking.

   ‘Bad humor, eh?’ said the intern judiciously, rubbing his chin with his thin, spatulate fingers, ‘Let me answer your question by illustrating this point.  Better to have the wrong hair, the wrong skin, the wrong physiognomy, the wrong stuff, like your trappings and bank account, rather than the wrong air.  You have to cultivate the right, unhumorous air, and that is the constant and vigilant effort to keep your mind in check, because the right air is the mind in its proper working order moving you forward to your goal!  Catch all scurrilous and insidious humor you must!  Peel away all the evil humor and at bottom is an insult against somebody or against God, for a stable mind is a mind in the state of equilibrium.’                           

     ‘Should I use my intellect or my heart to claw my way back to complete sanity, Mr. Alvarez?’ I said, looking at him coolly, as he tilted his head back and replied after a moment’s hesitation:

   ‘A man because he is built by nature to use his reason above his feelings, to counter that tendency to over-intellectualize, he should cultivate his emotions; he should be more and more heart, that is, he should feel more intensely rather than feel less.  That much is clear so far, I will warrant.  For a woman, because nature has given her heart, and a woman’s heart is the thing�"she should use her head more, so that her reasoning powers are stirred up and sustained in a relationship; for a man and woman it is different, don’t you see? Such a man and such a woman would no doubt meet somewhere in this mind-heart dichotomy in this rough and tumble world; and of course, get along swimmingly after that: and everything achieved and nothing more, of course, need to be said after that.  Have you taken a walk about the three-acre secluded grounds in this lush and pleasant countryside, of which the sky is often pleasantly azure during the summer, simply delicious�"and today being October the 17th, and well, I hope the anxiety of arriving at a new place won’t get you down excessively. I am having a meeting with the senior social worker and the consulting psychologist this morning,--about you if I may add,--and if there is anything, say, you would like me to convey a message, let me know.  I hope you find this place fine enough and to put you at your complete ease, let me assure you we will do all we can to make your stay here a productive and an enjoyable one.’

    I was perhaps a trifle too noncommittal, and this mood communicated itself to him; and so he added, ‘Let me shake your hand, Miss, here,’ and he followed this up with, ‘Oh, these chambers are not so secretive and the rooms not so gloomy, as if it was totally real that some private sorrows, some secret agonies were ever and anon being played out--for more than a hundred and fifty years, where catatonics and schizophrenics and phobics and obsessive-compulsives and those struck down by depressions and multiple personalities to name a few of these diseases that blighted humankind,--horrors galore, that haunt the living and the deceased inmates day and night and forever.’ Such was the singular comment he made, which, I thought, was nevertheless stranger than my singular nocturnal adventure of the previous night-time.   

          

 

                              4

 

 

I stand corrected with regard to what Liam Alvarez, the intern had; it was not chicken pox and not small pox.  Also, I had started out by saying that this was September but in reality it turned out that I had made a slip again and got hold of the wrong month.  This was well into the middle of October, and my thinking fixedly and lapses in my following the march of hours, days and weeks had resulted in my falling one month or so behind by my own capricious calculations which were no proper computation indeed, to say the least.

   All this I told to Doctor Cranston afterwards�"that the whole of my being after the breakdown seemed desirous to sleep mountains of sleep, without getting out of bed for a week or month and my singular existence seemed just like one long day forever harking back to the one moment, stuck in my mind when I found myself going over the deep end.  The fact that I had cracked never did let me by without being reminded by some malicious imp with my own voice, within the circuits of my brain that I had cracked and psychic material had leaked out from that perfectly wholesome egg that was my former ego.  Like the people who lived in the land of deep shadows, will a light shine on me, borne out of the therapeutic encounters and relationships with the staff and inmates of this place?

   Suddenly, in perfect mimicry of a young lady’s voice Doctor Cranston was intoning, ‘Doctor, it’s always back to square one in my mind, and I fear I am not making any progress�"because aw, my God, you are a shrink, and I am to undergo an ongoing head-shrinking process and my head will be smaller by the time you get through, and what will happen to me!  Is that what you are thinking?  Do you sometimes have these thoughts?  Ninety-five percent of my patients admitted to having some kind or version of these thoughts six months after they had had a breakdown, their crisis, and I feel if I might joke here a little�"they all felt like they are Humpty-Dumpty after he had fallen off the narrow wall, and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty back again.  Do you, my dear, have in some measure this kind of fantasy, though in not so many words?’

   ‘I do. Poor old me!’

   ‘Poor old you, eh?  Let me tell poor old you, then, something of the reality of the thing they called a breakdown.  No doubt a line that nobody should cross has been crossed and dire consequences follows just as swiftly as a crow flies, because the person has put all his eggs or her eggs in one basket and tempts fate, trying to force the situation in order to change his or her external circumstance.  He or she finds that he or she has leaned too far out of the balcony,--and in fifteen minutes or half an hour’s time, injures himself or herself seriously, irrevocably in that he or she allows his or her mind to snap in two.  He or she then finds the four grey walls of a mental and emotional prison had risen up to enclose him or her in, which the person lacks the strength to break out of, and on top of this, the person suffers a fit and finds himself or herself in a mad stupor or lying down in an acute state of disorientation.  He or she might see visions during this time or grasp insights known to no mortal man or woman but this is locked inside the person’s brain and here is a sign of a new and diseased orientation�"which the person will hang on to for dear life for: till his or her days on God’s ephemeral green earth is over; unless through a doctor’s intervention and counseling he or she trustingly follows the advice and the explanation given to him or her, and gives up his or her false vision.  There is a consensus that it would be difficult to predict the course of the disease after its onset but a few patients from time to time are thought to have been able to rise above their self-induced spell and returned to live a life of normalcy�"but the normal adage applied to mental patients is once a mental patient always a mental patient: though we of the hospital staff do our level best to alleviate human misery and suffering, as you might be well aware.’

   This thus was Doctor Cranston’s illuminating little speech, and as he was often paired with the intern, Alvarez, this person in white overalls hung a little behind his back while he spoke�"an understanding and mutual sympathy between the older and younger man was that which I was able to see,--and now, Cranston intoned in a low tone but curt and familiar to the junior man, ‘Anything to add, intern?’

   ‘Well, there are a few things but I don’t think it is necessary to go into all of them now.  Only, two or three things will suffice at this juncture.  Firstly, I would like the patient�"I mean, inmate�"to keep written notes in her diary which will be provided to her by the housekeeping clerk.  Give her several reams of paper, too, and more than a few pens, as many as they could find, and a large bottle of ink.  I am instructing her to jot down her thoughts and sundry feelings and ideas that pop into her head at any given time�"those that rose spontaneously to mind, especially,�"every day, because she is to make this a habit that she is to cultivate while her stay is with us here, for her to make sense of herself to herself through the simple but effective exercise of putting words to paper�"in the form of circumspect entries, assisted by a modicum of creativity and ingenuity�"and thus, she may turn her breakdown into a treasured resource in which she can grow from the maturity gained from insights received�"all in all, a blessedly therapeutic undertaking.  Didn’t I say, receive? because�"she is to look over her scribbling and jottings when she is in a receptive mood�"and this is when she is ready to receive from natural phenomena, as to the value and truthfulness of these jottings.  It lies in the ability to discern well, that’s all.  Here’s how�"according to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, she is to do it.  If you are trying to make a decision whether a thing is good or bad, how do you know you have made the right decision, Miss?’

      I shook my head and pursed my lips sheepishly, indicating I didn’t rightly know the answer.

   He went on: ‘Secondly, don’t make decisions when you are angry or upset, disturbed, worried, perplexed, fearful, moody, having mood swings, depressed, excited or troubled�"in other words, I mean, other than when you are your most normal self.  I mean, make decisions only when you are calm, cool and collected and that is when you are most yourself and your mood is on an even keel.  Such is the time to consider the matter dispassionately and think things through, and here we are talking about your future scribbling; and something more besides.  If you think there might be something in them, other people are most likely to think the same thing also and be of the same opinion as you.  This is a testimony that it is good!  And�"this is important�"don’t change your mind afterwards and think the thing lousy when your mood is depressed or when you are feeling tired or sleepless, for what you have settled in your receptive mood is the correct opinion; not when you are again troubled or dejected and your spirit is now turbulent because, as I have tried explaining, this will only lead you astray.  Another subject I would like to touch on, albeit a related one is psychological fear�"the fear you feel inside your head, often without outside cause.  When you feel fear of this kind, the chain of thoughts or ideas spurring you to action that your fear holds out to you is a seduction, and its object unbeknownst to you; unless you can discern properly, which I am teaching you!  For the seduction will lead you to experience more fear or to keep the old fear intact ad infinitum.  I say, it’s a seduction, because fear, according to a spiritual law, is a sinister signpost and the fact of the matter is, that you should be its master and not let it master you by thinking the opposite thought to the one presented by fear, and doing the opposite thing pointed out to you or suggested to you by fear.  This can be tested inwardly, and you can run over the scenario in your mind and heart and obtain the same results because the results will always be the same.  This rule is a hundred percent reliable and it is always true.  If you do follow it, and you act opposite, at some point shortly afterwards you would have realized that you have made the correct decision, because the worry and the anxiety just flow out from your face and from then on, your conviction grows by the minute, and you feel sure you can put your problem to bed and sleep soundly and have a good night’s rest.  Okay, Miss?’

   ‘Thank you, Doctor Alvarez; thank you very much, Doctor Cranston; I feel I have gained so much just by listening to you both.’

   ‘You are welcome; for we are just doing our job,’ the both of them answered with beaming faces. 

 

 

                             5

 

 

That everyone here without exception had a relationship with her bed was without a doubt true�"an intimate, cozy relationship with the bed’s headboard, the soft mattress and the plump pillows and so an inmate would sprawl lazily with her arms behind her ears and luxuriate on the bedspread, or tuck herself underneath the quilt or coverlid, and of course, this was understandable.--Our beds are our very best friend; and just as a marathon runner was wont to take little sips of water now and then when he was pursuing his object which was to finish the race, we are pursuing our object to get better; or failing that, to better our coping skills, and we make little dives into the white linen ocean of our beds to prevent feeling a little odd or dizzy, from time to time, as well.  Lying perpendicular was our favorite posture and past-time, and we do all sorts of things we would normally do sitting down on a chair such as reading or darning or keeping our diary up to date.  We even took our bottled drinks lying down when we couldn’t help it; and polishing off our dried foods such as tidbits and our snacks, reclining on bolsters and cushions.  Then, we brush the crumbs off or put the wrappers and the plastic bags in the wastepaper basket, but were glad when the cleaners came on their appointed twice-daily rounds.

   I was coming back from the sunlit terrace downstairs that morning, I remember, dressed still in my pajamas and had scalded my thumb with the boiling hot milk at breakfast-time, and instead of going straight to my room to nurse my hurt, I decided to hang around the Tee-vee lounge which was at the low end of the recreation room.  There were two inmates I knew by sight already there, who were from the same floor as me, and together with a stranger they were engaged in playing  ‘Hearts’.  The two, a plump and fair redhead and an ugly, hook-nosed sandy haired girl in her late twenties looked across the table to me, and I returned the faint gleam of acknowledgement in their eyes.  They were known to the other inmates by their nicknames, and I knew one was called Ovaltine and the other was known as Milo, because they shared the same room, and were inseparable.  As I walked towards them, someone gave a grunt of disgust and abruptly left the room, and it sounded very unfriendly.  There were now four of us in the Tee-vee lounge: the Tee-vee was showing Pink Panther cartoons and the volume was turned way down low.  But I thrilled as I hugged myself inside my pajamas--to hear Henry Mancini’s theme which gave me a considerable boost, with its upbeat mood.  I sat down a little distance away on a sofa and out flew my pen and my diary and I was wondering what to write because my way of writing is more based on madness than method, and my pen was poised above the new opening page but I could not conjure any word to come to my mind!  I tried to think what feelings the present moment evoked, but all I felt was a grating sensation: as of tires burning rubber, in my temples, and I hesitated, as I used to because my mind felt uncomfortably blank.

   The three heads near me were bent together as they engaged each other in low conversation which went on sporadically.

   ‘Always happens, you say, before the school term begins in the fall…?’

   ‘But this year it took it’s time and was well overdue, wasn’t it…?’

   ‘It happened two nights ago, when the new inmate moved into our floor…’

   ‘Was it waiting for ‘that’…I wonder…?’

   ‘Yeah, I have heard it myself… but I never saw anything…’

   ‘All I ever did see is a man’s leather belt writhing on the floor and thrashing or coiling like a serpent and the front metal part beating itself on the landing…’

   ‘On that stairs…?’

   ‘Yeah…’

   ‘Gave me quite a start it did…’

   ‘But it seemed to have disappeared or vanish after that…?’

    ‘Yes…’

   They were not talking now and they didn’t look at me, but kept their eyes adverted on each other’s faces and mechanically toss out their unwanted hearts and one of them�"the redhead, I think �" was unlucky and was always gathering these up, while on the tables the piles of other cards were scattered here and there untidily; and as the idea occurred to me, so I quickly jotted down their conversation, exactly as I had heard it.   At last, the strange girl I was not acquainted with adjusted her red headband, and said with a polished bell-like tone, ‘D’ you want to join us and play?  Do you like to play?’

   ‘Oh, no,’ I quickly replied and replaced the cap of my fountain pen, ‘Thanks; but what is your name may I ask?’

  ‘Ellie Curzon,’ she replied, with a tremor rippling across her blushing lips, ‘May I have your fountain pen for just a second?  What is your name?’

   I told her my name, in an unflattering tone.  Then, I gave her my pen, and looking at me with a gay smile, she wrote the words, ‘Mental illness, like a haunting, has a life of its own,’ on her left downy arm; and then she grinned and showed it to me.

    ‘What did you write?’ said Milo.  ‘Show us, Ellie!’

   ‘Oh, you are loco, Ellie Curzon!’ cried Ovaltine, looking inartificially and properly shocked.

 

 

                             6

 

 

How could I articulate my sensations when I glanced over Ellie Curzon’s pronouncement I had written in a freakish mood in the fly-leaf of my diary, and proceed to beat the blue diary against my head.  The diary clipped the corner of my head where it made contact, but I did not hit myself too hard; this was after I had just showered and some psychic experience that I will turn my pen to in these pages to describe had occurred--when I was having my shower, as the water was running down from the shower-head in sprinkling jets and washing away the soap puddles on my feet and the tiled floor.  The four walls of the shower were also tiled with smooth and oily white tiles of about five square inches each.  I was feeling dizzy and out of sorts, and feeling hot as if I had an attack of fever, but my state of mind must have been unusual with something indescribable stirring beyond my level of consciousness.  Just this sensation of dread I felt�"without knowing where it was coming from, why, or what it signified�"just as--when I was afraid the walls were closing in on me; the objects and the distance before me seeming flat as if they were pictures formed by light waves on the retina which the brain interprets; as passively as if I were in a place outside time and space, or these had no objective reality!  It was what someone might have called an existential moment, but only I have these moments frequently, and my whole existence seemed to be called into question by them�"as if I was out on a limb, and I was disconnected from the current of life in the ordinary work-a-day world.   I realized my mind had turned because of my breakdown; would it turn another corner further?  I had to admit it; that because I had had a breakdown, I was now different from other people; and would be till the end of my days�"but I could ameliorate, learn, try to rebuild myself not back to the original; but a transformed, different self; perhaps, richer because of my experiences and knowing that surely, I will never suffer another breakdown again, as this one inoculated me against any such terrifying upheavals in the future�"if I did get that far and managed to recover myself, sufficiently.  I thought of it then, and I say it now: it was a hair-raising experience.  You may picture me in the shower, minding my own business and giving myself a thorough washing, as best I might; my head feeling balefully heavy, when, happening to look at the tiles on the wall that was beyond the path of the sprinkler, as I turned my head, my eye-tail caught in a moment of unenforced contemplation--some of the little droplets of water running down off the tiles; these were like silver beads and they grew a tail and they were one after the other running down the tiles with the regularity of dominoes falling, just as my eyes light on these  As soon as I would look on these beads of water, they were like tadpoles swimming downwards with a kind of dread inevitability that made me sickened to my stomach; but was it some kind of telekinesis?  However, I didn’t triumph at the thought I had special powers, it felt horrible and insane, because it felt that I was still experiencing declension, and afterwards, a month later, after having similar experiences in the bathroom, I asked the intern about it, and was glad to have his input which satisfied me and made me worry about it less.  Liam Alvarez told me a theory of his, but you shall later know about it, in this story.

    Meantime, although water was still soaked in my skin, I felt as if I had been perspiring and the bathroom was warm with the smell of my body heat; and so, after ten minutes I had another shower again, but turned my face from looking at the walls and also shutting my eyes.

 

 

                                 7

   

  

The dreadful undercurrent of declension, which was what it was, had kicked up its little spurts, thus, impinging on my consciousness in regard to my present existence what had been leaked psychic material from my own inner being.  This was apart from the feelings of normalcy which I haven’t any quarrel with; but rather, this was something else.  Something not particularly outside and not particularly inside that was being kindled or was stirring; this was an extraordinarily heightened consciousness, behind which was a compelling force, a torque or compulsion�"I suppose, that might make somebody develop obsessive-compulsive behavior; an attempt to try to outwit something nebulous yet dangerous in the inner recesses of my mind, something that felt like a personality, if I might put it that way, or, some kind of evil construct that needed to be urgently and constantly outwitted to give a sort of coherent meaning in the understanding of and a new relationship to one’s mending selfhood.  It was the mind grappling with some evil barrier that hindered that person’s mind from BECOMING�"which all creation whose relationships with inmates like me had become changed in unfathomable ways, perhaps, and shall ever be�"are conspiring to affect us-- into more durable creatures.  Because the mind was injured, a thickening layer or whorl had formed when there was a split�"was it a molecular breakdown?, I ask myself�"like the calluses on the surface of the skin, and in this state the epidermal cells now hung in existence, with a life that was different from those earlier times there was no injury.

   They were talking, Mrs. Cavendish and her friend from across the corridor (from Room no: 36), and as I listened--sipping my soup got from the vending machine downstairs in the vestibule, the two elderly ladies, both of whom wore woolen cardigans of deep violet or purple, sat darning,--and I pricked up my ears when I heard them speak about the late Mrs. Elkland the following way:

   ‘Don’t take her too long to go, hey?’ said the lady from no: 36.

   ‘Of course, it didn’t, she knew it was her time, and she came here for complete bed-rest and to die without fuss�"all her children are living in other states, and her husband, poor man, had the temerity to have departed before her.’

   ‘What was she like�"when she had to give up her ghost?’

   ‘Eh? I don’t rightly know; I think she expired without a struggle, very peacefully, it seems and it’s what I told the Warden James; she died, you know, in her sleep, and nothing unusual passed in the night.  It was all quiet and natural-like, but the next night there was a howling gale over our roof-tops, do you remember�"and the furze bushes were tossed, and the p***y willows, uprooted,--such a freak thunderstorm I never did yet experienced.  They say the sky was overcast when they laid her to her rest in Wardorfburg Cemetery and may God rest her soul.’

   ‘She donated her brains to the hospital down the road: did I hear that a-right?’

   ‘Yes, you did; er--that is correct.’

   ‘What do the researchers want with dead brains of ailing old women, such as Mrs. Elkland, but I heard her saying she was lobotomized in her early twenties the other day, and later taught singing and English in a private school, but all this is beyond me.  What do they want with Mrs. Elkland’s brain?’

   ‘Why, I don’t suppose, they will freeze it, after all, it’s smaller than a small cabbage, or they will preserve it in spirits and then it is taken out to be viewed by the medical students; or, perhaps, it will be stained and microtomized into transparent sections to be mounted on slides and then, examined under a microscope.  But perhaps, proving to be an excellent specimen it might end up being sent to medical facilities all over the world�"so much for dear Mrs. Elkland’s brain.  Do you want some fruitade, fruit juice, dear?’ said Mrs. Cavendish to her friend, ‘She�"Mrs. Elkland, our late friend�"has made me promise to give a bundle of her papers and letters that is bound with tape and a few black and white photographs to the next occupant of her bed, and I thought it was a kind gesture to gain her a purchase of the heart.  But she made me bide my time to find out what kind of character our next occupant has.’

   Thus, being referred to somewhat implicitly, I was gradually brought into their conversation, and Mrs. Cavendish was about to say more, but I interrupted her, ‘Please, ladies, I do not mean to overhear but I could not help it.  But I was wondering if any of you have sticking-plaster, for, you see, I have a blister on my thumb and it hurts frightfully; I would be awfully glad for a loan for a strip or two.’

   ‘There is a box on my dresser-top; now, let me give my back a good rub while I get up, and I will get it for you,’ said Miss Wysocki, a spinster, to me rather kindly.

   When she came back and brought the needed article, the conversation had unfortunately fallen asunder; and having flung myself on my bed, the recent death-bed of our late and lamented Mrs. Elkland, I turned up my Toshiba Bom-Beat, because I felt an urge to listen to whatever was coming through the airwaves.  For a time, I lay easily on my bed, which smelled faintly of flowers, because the bedspread was the linen that Mrs. Elkland had bequeathed to me, and suddenly, I became very�"overtly receptive, or annoyingly so: too sensitive because I was still too highly strung, and coming through the speakers was what seemed a concert performance of some with-it, sexy and dangerous eighties pop group, but the layers of sound reached my ears strangely altered; or so I thought! It was the British group, Duran Duran performing the dramatic, The Reflex.  Something’ seemed to be throwing up suggestive nuanced voices, or partial semblances of voices above the music of the instruments and LeBon, the singer’s raucous and suave vocals, just slightly beyond my range of hearing, blending with the other sounds�"sundry wails, screams, catcalls, and laughter�"a mad cacophony or perfect caterwaul; that could only be perceived and heard using the ear of my mind!  I was perfectly stupefied, but I suffered myself to hear this music, sounding so loud that it rattled my nerves; but Mrs. Cavendish still went on with her darning, and I did not tune the knobs and I thought my room-mate did not hear or perceive anything that was above the normal.  She said nothing, and seemed to be in a meditative mood over what she said to Miss Wysocki, and soon she was in a brown study.  For my part, I couldn’t stand it anymore and so I pulled out the electric cord from its socket; got up in a huff, and went to look at the picture of Mr.  Augustine Tecumseh Hamplock, and have a better look at the boy and the girl in the family portrait.  Suddenly, I was aware of a flash of ideas coming like telegraph signals along the humming lines.  I thought Mr. Hamplock had married a German lady, the daughter of an immigrant from the Rhone Valley, possibly, because I studied about the Ruhr and the Rhine in Geography in school, and had always like the sound of it.  Father; a captain of industry, coal and iron ore; I thought, without any basis or supporting facts!

 

 

                              8

 

 

Some loving soul said to me since I took up my pen to write these lines,-- something borne out from personal experience--is that what clinches the matter whether a person recovers from mental illness or not is attitude; simply put--a tenacity born of a willingness to exhaust possibilities to overcome long odds, a Never-say-die Attitude!  Before I elucidate on my experiencing the portrait afresh which I intend to do, I want to fill up this chapter on what happened in the dining hall during lunchtime that same Tuesday.  At nearly noon, I headed to this place, anticipating my stomach would be better, being persuaded by some kind of appetite or hunger pang that it should be so!  I was elegantly mired with dust as having gone for a walk in my white cotton frock and Merino blouse, and came back with my mind full of the autumnal drapery of particolored hues and tints, creative arabesques of the beautiful pavilion, and the shapes and the nomenclatures of the flowers and plants in the garden lately hanging on my tongue.  I thought life has been a masque and solicitousness that happenstance threw in one’s way were cloud-racked and not much to be over-trusted!  What kinds of persons outside their professional personalities were Doctors Cranston and Alvarez?  When I had dropped my diary on an empty place on one of the long tables I saw two doctors there, engaged in a conversation, and I saw at once they were discussing an ex-mental patient, within or without earshot of the said ex-mental patient himself,--for I guessed correctly from one with a long, down in the jaw, wolfish glare, to wit,--one of the assistant cooks, who counterchecked (or at any rate, tried to) the speakers’ knowing glance:--as if the world were full of slanderous liars and winsome, perverted cheats that it was he, indeed!                  

   This downy assistant cook had a scraggly brown moustache and rings in his yellowish, mildewed eye, of the darkest grey hue.  Fixed in is perpetually evil-humored countenance was a very wry smile, as if live eyeballs of his were held within deadly sockets, where thoughts like wild plants flowered and thrived were flitting or flickering out; as accustomed to the deadly disease of sheer, loneliest pains!  The two doctors’ conversation progressing and unfolded for me something of the character and the troubles of this man, I saw the sharp glances the cook threw towards one doctor, whom I was later informed to be Doctor Alan Scipio, and his interlocutor too; most of which was purposive and full of impotent rage because he was steeling himself against the moment some embarrassing disclosure would fall out of the tongue that was tasting the peaches and cream that he himself had ladled out.  The cook was known to me as Georg “creepy” Clearwater.  I thought a mosquito was waxing lyrical in his ear, and he looked like one of those cautionary pages that sound dire warnings and sharp moral rebuffs!

   Old Georg was intoning in a singsong, low voice: ‘Rums out!  Rums out!  Rums out!’ looking as perplexed as can be.

  Doctor Alan Scipio had been sharing a vignette with his white-gowned colleague, something about Georg, the assistant cook, who was turning up his beet nosed anger, so Doctor Scipio addressed him over his shoulder, ‘How many jugulars have you eaten today, sir?’

   At this, the man visibly shrank away and blanched.

   The doctor continued, as his colleague applied his teeth and sucked the goblets of flesh from a sheep-bone, with admirable dexterity and masticating the peas slowly, as if he subsisted entirely on peas and beefsteaks and mutton curry. The second man clearly looked like he would encourage  his man to punctuate the air with a cry of foul over what he was doing in full sight of him, saying, ‘The fellow (Georg) is a desiccated little man with many foul antecedents.  I used to treat him at the Hospital, and I had been thoroughly acquainted with many of his phases, and I should say and, I think you know, he was once known to stick hairs into the kitchen washbasin, as some kind of important, elemental gesture of his battling against the irrational forces that continually hounded him.  Freud’s irrational forces, of course!  And of course, this place abounds with Freud’s irrational forces, as a matter�"of course!’ (He laughs.)

   ‘Your teeth looks yellow, Michael Ransom Arthur,’ said the same Doctor Alan Scipio, after he had been observing his colleague for a while.

   ‘No toothpaste has ever been invented that could remove the tartar stains from my teeth,’ replied Mick, ‘you know that, Alan. It’s the nicotine, of course.’

   ‘As Doctor Scipio treats schizos, I know, Mick.  You smoke overtly much, I’d say, by the way.  Moreover, you should know better also.’

   Doctor Scipio went on: ‘But then again, you might say, sticking hairs down the holes in the kitchen sink is in itself irrational, don’t you think so?  For I had observed him, casually and not so casually, of course, and it seems what seemed like an ordinary and simple task was prolonged inordinately long�"as if some god-awful force was preventing him from doing it, or bringing his task to satisfactory completion.  He must have made up his mind at the outset how many hairs and through which hole he wanted to stick a particular hair in, and meant to stick to his guns until he had finished his task, or until he was forcibly stopped by someone who took some alarm from accomplishing it.  Like I say, I had been observing him, and I saw or felt his triumph turned to chagrin the next moment; when he was detained�"by what I thought, hairs that simply come out again the moment it was thrust in, or more hairs appearing from who knows where.  While the mood lasted, he kept up this rigmarole for two or three weeks, altogether; and then his interest waned, or at last, he was finally satisfied.  Deeply satisfied that he had beaten back something he needed to defeat and stopping it from overwhelming him.  Like I said, he had gone through many such phases, but at last, as his doctor--I thought he could get no better, and the people here offered him a job, as he sorely needed one, and he became an assistant cook, in charge of chopping and dicing and shelling and buying supplies such as apples, oranges and canned peaches from the supermarket in town.’

   ‘He spends most of his money on drinks, too, so I have often heard,’ said Mick off-handedly, ‘or is that the same man?’ quite loudly that to have overheard was easy.

   ‘Same man. Your estimation is correct,’ said Doctor Alan Scipio.  ‘Do you want to know what the quip I made is about?’

   ‘Yes�"what is it about?’

   ‘It’s a reference to what T.H. White’s described in a chapter that concerns the Wart being changed into a bird in The Once and Future King.  Cully, the peregrine falcon’s instability�"or at any rate, the boy’s standing near him was the Wart’s trial by ordeal, you see, so that he has right to membership in their “Spartan mess” the hawks’ I mean,�"and Cully said something that to me smacks like a capital, spot-on description of a madman’s mental condition or emotional state, a fellow whose skin was turned outside in, with all the hairs rubbing against his organs and the raw flesh exposed to inclement conditions outside, the dust, dirt and grime, to say the least about it, though, not so many of Mr. White’s words!)  That’s precisely what a mad man is, he is one bleeding wound�"and Cully bemoaned he was flabbergasted to see “so much blood in him”, at the madman’s having murdered an old man�"and howled fearfully like a wolf.’                  

   ‘I am of one mind as you, my esteemed Doctor Scipio,’ returned the other psychologist, ‘and I have seen my due by studying the life and habits of mental patients, also.  Instead of processing information that comes through the media of the senses itself,--I mean, doing it properly like everybody does�"these people have insane emotions! But, most sane people have some insane, unhealthy emotions too, and the most insane people have some sane emotions, by the by!  That’s right, your Freud’s irrational forces are constantly at play in all of our lives:--All of us have to cope with the usual human foibles and mistakes one makes, but on top of that Freud’s irrational forces, such as irrational fears, infantilism, rage, unreasonable guilt, unbridled instincts, tend to push us over the edge if we’re not careful, and one of the danger signs is that one gets depressed, or gloomy most of the time, or one is always edgy, nervous and restless; and then, if uncurbed, one gets funny ideas that some impending doom is going to fall on us or on humanity.  And, another thing, although seeing is believing, a person under a spell can no longer believe his eyes. Why is that, eh?  Oh, merely because our emotions reflect or are a reflection of how we are connected to our world.  God is in relationships and in peoples; and I mean, in relationships to self as well, and chemical relationships, as well; as well as relationships to nature in a complex web of relationships that are interlinked or mutually influencing links, or chains, or influences that are mapped into each other called Natural Phenomena, and furthermore, He is in relationships to money, worldly goods, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs such as shelter and prestige, and in social and political organizations, and in every way how mankind organizes himself.  If the presence of God is high in our relationships we are happy, and we are satisfied with our own particular lives, and that mean our relationships are mostly good.  If the presence of God is low, we sinned and are unhappy at the end of the day�"and note�"I mean, at the end of the day.  You do not necessarily have a good personal relationship with God, if you let other people fill your head with a lot of nonsense about Him and about Revelation, because you are what you read and heard spoken by some Christians, I mean, about being religious, and these uncomfortable or seemingly canonical bits get stuck somehow inside your head.  These undigested profound morsels then get to sour inside your satirical stomach, eh?  About a person who had insane emotions�"isn’t that an indication that he was having trouble, most of all, with his relationship to himself?  Because what was inside a man--in his internal reality�"always came out and impinge on the external world sooner or later (it’s a natural law or phenomenon!) and the external world mirrors what is tormenting a soul and a heart that is in turmoil, like a violent storm, in the pathetic fallacy of our literature, which is the intuition of the poets before psychology was ever invented!  So, a person’s emotion has a power to influence how he experiences reality.  Might not it in some way, change the normal reality to an abnormal reality, for these patients?  I am not just talking about a hallucination which happens inside a person’s brain like seeing pink elephants or purple dragons; or pseudo-hallucination, when a person realized what he was seeing is not real, but nonetheless participated in something which none other can see. Do you ever wonder why a mental patient would keep drinking from a purportedly dry cup, when he had drunk it continuously down to the last drop?  That was because the cup still yielded yet another drop, and as long as he raised the glass to his lips the liquid inside was not verily exhausted.  Might sound a bit like nonsense, this but--’

   ‘No, don’t think it’s a perspicuous flight of your own fancy, my dear Mick.  You are right, truly.’

   With every one of my nerves was tingling, I had just finished my lunch and got up from my chair, not looking at the two doctors, and I slowly approached the same cook, who was then serving one or two of the inmates, and said I would like some peaches with a little cream.  I wasn’t troubled by the man’s behavior:  and I heard a sympathetic Mick said, ‘About her --’ indicating he meant me with his sly thumb, ‘I got the take on her from one of the doctors, and they have spoken to her mutual friend about her.  Seems she had fallen in love with a handsome young man, and she and her elder sister had fought over this beautiful boy and had exhausted themselves, one to the very death of herself, literally, and the other, stricken with brain fever so that she stayed in this friend’s house for four months.  Refused to go home plainly after that.’  

    For the moment, my mind was totally blank for I could not recollect any of these things.  In fact, none of it tallied with what I had known about myself, or had remembered about my own breakdown.  Notwithstanding,  I had supra-clarity about my own dignity in order to emotionally survive�"to revitalize my drooping spirit, especially, after the death of my mother, and I had great right to see and understand things from my point of view: things which meaningful significance and even secret morphologies that hidden a deep emotional life trying to sort itself out.  Yea, an emotional life of the sort that is a kind of life-in-death out of a death-in-life; or deaths-in-life?  What kind of configurations do these things feature I hadn’t known, and, perhaps, even a doctor of the wildest imagination cannot grasp what lifts life up a little and keeps one going, carrying on in a peripheral existence, and perhaps, also�"it is them, the others�"that ought to be pitied because the none of these knew what had been going on in one’s secret life, beyond one’s power or desire to communicate to others!  A complete mental detachment to one’s outer world is certainly a different kind of life.  Is it totally bad?  I can’t rightly say.  Born of secret terrors and naked emotional collapse�"more impressive than a slight systemic jarring�"I had lost my self-confidence as a previously known identity, and a loss of meaning to the structures of meaning I had presented the interior and external world to myself somewhat.  Like the flotsam drifting in the ocean after a vessel had sunk, I was still at the mercy of the wind and rain and internal storm, my impulse had been to abjure everything that was previously known�"an abjuration by my whole mind, body and spirit�"which tries to sever everything as completely as cutting the Gordian knot.  What takes over one is a new story that replaces the old story, a story about one’s life, for, where one is going overshadows where one has been; and seen in an entirely new light, as my mind’s myth-making faculty kicks into high gear�"and is urged to work overtime.  This has been the result of arduously piecing together many things in my faulty mind, and in glancing over my notes what had been my impressions over a period of eight months.  And believe me, eight months in Hamplock House was a long time.  My intuition and my doctors’ efforts had made me believe I had seen a sort of light, and because I saw the light at the end of a long tunnel, I had to journey through the dark night of the soul, and join up all my lucid moments that I had a intervals, so that I might end up having only lucid moments, and, since then, that meant going the extra mile, because it takes the mickey out of one when one does something special or other people all the time, and my completely lucid, unclouded self is one that takes at least twenty years in the making; making other people prosper by one’s own unrelenting efforts till one lost being over-focused on oneself which has resulted in the breakdown in the first place. And, at last, when I had joined up all the bits and pockets of light, and an unending light bathed me with its shafts; it means I had conquered all my demons!  I don’t think seeing a false light can do anything for me; because I would be stark, raving mad.   

 

        

                                9

 

 

As would have been obvious by now, my impressions of myself and the influences of Hamplock House�"in changing my personality, perhaps, subtly at first and then more and more later, as the drama enfolds, is that, I was to succumb�"by how much or little you shall know�"was--I was the beneficiary of a double-haunting; first, Mrs. Elkland’s ghost, a  slight haunting, in that it hinted at certain things, and gave me thoughts and experiences, in the shape of dream visions and tame nightmares, which made me wake up in the morning with blood in my saliva�"and second, an entity whose identity had not yet come to light. Something seemed to pervade the House and especially my room, which should perhaps be said justly to be less mine but an agency congruent with the late Mrs. Elkland be it for good or evil, I and couldn’t say, at first.  However, I anticipate, and these experiences and what loomed or happened later will be shared with you too, dear reader, more effectively in the second and third part of my book.  It suffice me to say, all my impressions come to me in overlapping layers, the facets which came to light later tending to modify or strengthen the earlier suppositions, or glimpses of ‘truth’ as the case may be; and this is still operative in me today.  The salient features of the House is the emotional landscape that came wrapped up in its own emotional climate, and I find this reinforced or fall away as part of my ongoing experience.  Dimly intuited at first, I write this with the aid of my diary, which was many a summary and compressed nuggets --few succinct descriptions of events that came along; concerning a recurring dream I had while sleeping in the room.  In my dream, I was a young woman from a different, earlier era, which had the effect of making me wake up, thinking I had a brother, when my mother only bore daughters.  This older brother took me to rides in his shadowy conveyance and we had long summer walks in the country, and picnicking together with luxurious spreads of food and drinks fit for a king!  I had one distinct boat ride, whereby I felt and saw the placid blue sunlit river sliding from under me; and wading in the water, attending plays and visited the museum and going to flea-markets with a feeling of wonderment and having kindness bestowed on me; and I remember, watching a circus’s command performance from the stall among country yokels: my brother was well-off and generous.  From these intense dreams, I truly wished I really had a brother!  And this brother in my dream was a pastor and wore a roman collar, and I was his favorite relative.  These vivid dreams were elegant as they were intriguing; but I could not see the originator who was controlling the scenes.  The creature of my dreams was always kind and sweet and it had a kind of sermonizing air about him; and he visited me many nights for some weeks the period of my stay in Hamplock House between January and May.  At first its contents made me pleased, as progressing along the same established lines; so that I wished to have the same dream every night. Incidents, sometimes spectacular were beyond credulity, whimsical, loving and slight tinted with capriciousness, its imagery rich with symbolism, but for a different themed dream, while I was leaning on my side against the sagged-in moldy wall on the right side of my bed, on the afternoon of 4^th of April, as I jotted it down afterwards, whereby I dreamt I was Davy, my brother; and in it I was both actor and observer.  As actor I was asleep, and felt a man, I supposed was Davy’s father, came up and voided all his rheum from his snot onto my hair and face; a most smeary drenching for ‘twas a tremendous quantity of gunk.  My head was thoroughly wet with the stuff but I, as Davy, didn’t get angry, or voiced my remonstration at the dastardly deed.  I just accepted it in a consciously constrained way, and went to clean myself up afterwards.  I thought I saw the man, after the act was perpetrated, and he was full of keen malice.  Then, Davy was completely disconnected from my dream-persona and he looked suspiciously like the boy in the downstairs portrait, outside the occupational therapist’s office.  I mean, of course, the Augustine Hamplock Family portrait.  It had the same rare and low keyed emotional voltage!  After considering and pondering it for some time, I concluded that Davy was Millionaire Hamplock’s boy.  The resolution was formed long before I put into words those portions of my experience, which led to notes that form the part of this chapter about the two offspring of the man in the picture.   Some external circumstances and perhaps a genetic predisposition or perhaps chance had led to an other-worldly kinship, a propinquity, perhaps, established in an emotional connection as regards us: as something had sought bonding beyond death and the grave.  Soon, I was indulging in the fantasy I had a brother, but he had died because of stillbirth, and began to speak openly to people about this unknown brother of mine whom I named Watkins.

    Back to the dining room, the erratic assistant cook had cringingly removed his apron wrapped around his embonpoint with the buttoned up attire; and as he turned to go, I likewise, finished my last mouthful from my dessert-spoon, and went up the two short steps; walked casually to the front of the main building.  Of course, there were subtle signs all was not well, and even the cook seemed to be very put out, on account of the doctors’ abusing his ear, no doubt; and all of a sudden, uttering a violent expletive which started me with a jolt, and from then on, I was edgy and nervous.  It did but took me half a minute and I found myself standing before the aforementioned portrait, staring at it carefully, and this second time was beyond a mere cursory study.  I stood actually contemplating the boy’s figure and its eyes met mine in a moment, and we hung for a space, mutually acknowledging each other and each other’s deeply felt, intuited pain.  The strange boy spoke to me from across the wide gulf of time and space; this stranger whom I would never meet and didn’t know in real life.  But, still, my experiences were more than a mere half-dream.  I must have begun to twitch or else I had developed a nervous tic before I was aware of it, looking at the entire portrait, which was dominated by the huge man wearing black.  From the man’s face I again studied the boy’s eyes, and I tried to mentally articulate my experience so that I’d remember my experience as I was absorbed by the boy’s power and innocence.  It had boiled down to the fact that I was in Hamplock House because I had to cope with my mental pain, and rather hoped that something good might come out of it; and yet, it might offer some consolation out of this ‘friendship’ with me�"as being aware of my deep sense of loss, revealing to me both had purloined souls, so to speak; and through this mutuality of circumstance through time and space and distances between us, it was urging me, well and good, to recognize it soon!  Even as I stared at it, if I might couch my words in such terms�"so to speak: for, here, was a presence that was more than mere paint, and forthwith seeming to brood upon my own affairs, which had brought me to live at Hamplock House this fall.  It was hoping to pierce through my unshared life, that part of me that was bolted tight shut, and un-blot my memories that it wanted to re-conjure up; and�"to replace a new key to the one I had discarded, so that perhaps, it might release me from the prison of my own mind, in order that my life be lived no more beyond the uncharted, unreachable seas of madness. Me-thought I caught his smile�"that seemed to go with his slurred, proud, silent speech of his unmoving pouting lips: which at once recalled me to Davy’s slouching gait in one of my dreams of him; and then, my eye left his face to search for his little sister’s; and then, her evasive smile flashed up at me; as at some startling notion of mine or bee, buzzing in that bonnet of hers; which produced a kind of un-lisped or unspoken ‘eureka’ that both of us seemed to recognize, at once.  The high diamond-shaped panes on the opposite and to the right caught the sun, and even before the sky was overcast again, something had set my mind’s alarm-bells ringing with apprehension; for despite the frigid attempt of a smile, there seemed to be some kind of incipient lunacy in the girl’s drooping expression, or strange bodily angle, as if nature peeps forth despite the painter’s intentional handiwork to disguise this fact.  The two children seemed to be contemplating something that was an impenetrable mystery; as what they deigned or had chosen to hide for now, that they, perhaps, had reserved the right to disclose with the most earth-shattering, telling effect.  They will spring it on me one of these days!  For all I know, they must succeed in this endeavor to catch me unawares when the moment seemed most apt.  And, it was after much consideration that I thought the case was so.

   Had the reader himself had gone to Hamplock House himself, and studied the portrait, he would not gainsay this, and you would have seen more besides, in the way of paintings and prints, like the ones by Van Gogh, depicting a subject of sunflowers and starry, starry night in Holland,--and that should sufficiently convey the atmosphere of the Hamplock cultural pedigree, with its chestnut-tree lined driveway, the arch over the gate, and artificial shallow pond, with goldfish in it, exotic potted plants from the world over, chilly rooms where a draught always finds a way in, and log-fires in winter-time; and perhaps, visitors to Hamplock House would like it much better when smoke is coming out of the black, sooty crooked chimneys and there was a light upon the windows, especially during the seasonal holidays, when some of the inmates were going home.  Before too long, I got used to its rhythms and its moods, and I was making reasonable progress most of the time, and didn’t have a relapse; but I was also being stuck forcibly that some supernatural eddy circulating about the house, especially from the recesses in my floor, and no wonder, too; after seeing ghosts and a buckle belt that whacks itself that first night in Hamplock.  Yes, oh, yes, the children in the painting were handsome children in the way all children are, yet a suppurating sadness pervades everything in this place, together with an unsuccessful attempt at forgetfulness and an unavailing regret or remorse; and the feelings permeated me now�"looking at the boy’s regular features; but it popped into my head, some notion of an unhappy relationship with his parent, that was to be realized early in its life�" all too soon!  A pious, warm hearted boy, all in all, as evidenced by his hands folded over one another and slightly holding a pin-wheel, which was a stark contrast with his father’s manly if cadaverous and agnostic expression and bearing; and self-worship.  In contrast to the boy’s straight nose, the father could only be described as a Lollard with a debased Frenchman’s hooked nose!  The lad wore a brown suit over his blue silk�"the very picture of a young Andalusisan boy, so fresh-looking still in the painting, looking as if he had been briskly walking up a mountain trail, in charge of his master’s pack-mules.  But, instead of the little pin-wheel he would of course have a child’s stiff blackthorn cudgel.  About his sister, I will write about her more later on; because, she indeed features as a main personage in this story�"or, at least, her ghost did later; I didn’t see her, but hers was the presence that colors everything about that place.

 

             

                        10                              

                

 

In getting back to my room, the first thing as I shut the door behind me was that I felt a change in the air, for the usually uncommunicative Mrs. Cavendish looked up and called out to me in a mysterious raspy voice, ‘Miss, I think it is apt�"appropriate for me to ask you a question to test your perspicuity�"whether you are quick on the uptake�"unlike me.  Pardonnez moi, mademoiselle, mon ami�"and I understand, you had had a breakdown recently yourself, therefore, as you have been improving�"you might be able to answer this quiz.  It was a quiz devised by the late, good Mrs. Elkland herself.  The question is this: if those parts of your brain that are able to tell you what color you are seeing are juxtaposed together �"er�"with�"I mean, if it had happened by an evolutionary quirk in mankind’s physiological development as a complex life form, the most complex�"somehow, are you able to see sound and hear color because you have brain centers that let you to do so!  Ha?’

   I gazed at Mrs. Cavendish’s white and blue and yellow ochre shepherd boy, one of her many knick-knacks, and, side-spied her thoughtfully.  I thought there was a glimmer of glee as her expression of suppressed excitement, came to me she was trying to stifle her bronchitis attack as she observed me shyly back.

   I said, ‘Sound is produced by vibrating sound waves, and hence, the appropriate organ to detect sound is the ear, where the sound is caught by the structure of the outer ear, and transmitted through the membrane, and then it is amplified, and sent as nerve impulses to be interpreted by the brain.  To see sound, the entire ear would not only have to be entirely different altogether, as sound waves are by its very nature, different from light waves or particle, though both have varying wavelengths, it pulsates in a different way in the air, so no one is unable to see sound.  By the same token, one is unable to hear color which is light waves of varying lengths being reflected by an object.  Maybe, unless someone is on drugs and one’s brain chemicals are skewered.  There is a reason why evolution has caused us to develop an organ for catching light waves and another for catching sound waves, which nature is very different.  A different organ for sound, and an entirely different one for light, and these can’t mix; they are keep separate on purpose by nature, because light and sound are different things.  I hope my answer will do�"although I don’t know how good it is�"and it’s given on the spur of the moment�"yet I am by the way rather pleased, that I could give it because, if you like to know, science has been one of my favorite subjects in school.’

   ‘That’s a good answer and it will do,’ said Mrs. Cavendish with a little chuckle, while trying to affect an important air at the same time.  She said, ‘It was Mrs. Elkland who devised the test and I am glad you passed it with flying colors.  You do have potential: otherwise, she would not waste ‘time’ on you.  This was exactly how she explained the answer to me herself before she went off, you know, went just like that--’

   ‘What was the test you gave me all about?’

   ‘It’s only to give her packet of letters and her papers and things, including a few diaries and some old photographs, old dog-eared photographs, if you are able to answer her question.  And you are.  Congratulations!’

   ‘Why should she want to give me her stuff?’

   ‘I don’t know, but she was rather�"er�"eccentric about it, you know?’

   ‘Tell me more.’

   ‘She said, in the end, the person who was to occupy her bed would know; and I think, towards the end of her life, she had foreseen it would be you, or somebody approximating you.  But she asked me after she had made me comply to her request with the promise, to ask you: would you accept her gift?’

   ‘She intrigues me: I guess it would do no harm, and it might be interesting.  And Mrs. Elkland, looking down from a great height in heaven might be rather pleased if I accept her gift, so I will take it.  And, thank you, Mrs. Elkland.  I accept the letters and your scraps of paper and stuff.’

   ‘Shake my hand on it, then,’ said old white-haired Mrs. Cavendish, tearing up; and she then said, she was rather glad herself to have finally executed her duty towards her late friend, for it had been a weight laid on her mind ever since the time the bed had been left waiting for an occupant.  Her knobby hands trembled with emotion and she gave me Mrs. Alice Elkland’s personal effects without further ado.

   ‘It would be something to remember this place by when I get out of this place; whether to go back to Queens or not, I am not sure.  But I don’t think I have any emotional investment in my father’s house anymore.’

   Mrs. Cavendish said she was from Denver, Colorado, and Mrs. Elkland from her own mouth that the latter was from Miami, Florida but she grew up in California, and lived somewhere by the Santa Monica pier.

  ‘Why was she lobotomized?  Do you know?  It was in her late youth, wasn’t it?’

   ‘They�"of the medical profession were crazy about the technique, then, to cure the severely depressed patients.  I guess she was severely depressed, and unable to cope, and wasn’t responding well to the usual treatment: all those first-generation drugs that were just being developed.  She said, it was a cruel thing, no doubt, and shortly after the operation which was performed by surgeons in Berkeley, she came to stay in Hamplock House for the first time.  From the photos which was taken at this period, that she showed to me, she was a pretty little creature, with bold, round eyes and sassy hair and tallish; and from the pictures taken in her earlier years, you would never have thought she would have mental trouble of any sort.’

   ‘Did she get better at Hamplock House?  How long did she stay here?’

   ‘Two years, exactly.  In regard to your first question, you can find out for yourself, I suppose, by reading her letters and papers�"her effects, yourself.  That is why she wanted you to have them.  She wanted you to be acquainted with her, and if you really want to know about her, hadn’t you better begin reading them soon, eh?’

   ‘You are being too uncommunicative.  Hold on a minute, so�"you say, if I hear you correctly,--that her papers are mostly about her stay in Hamplock House, is that correct?  And they chronicle in part her struggles to get back on track in life?  Didn’t she tell you anything?’

   ‘She was half-Hispanic�"you know?  And, from young she had an aversion towards learning English, but she started writing poetry in English while she was living in Hamplock House, and later became an English teacher and taught music in Elementary School as well.  She also acted in one of Goldsmith’s plays, and was Cilia in Oscar Wilde’s famous satire on modern manners. (I think, The Importance of Ernest, it was.)  She sang and danced as a prima donna in a ballet, and all these, after her breakdown, and her lobotomy, and her having left Hamplock House.  She had a happy marriage, of course, later; and, what was her secret�"you might come to discover because I never did�"when the rest of the people who stayed here at her time were stuck being ne’er-do-well’s and human nonentities�"by examining those piles of old writing and shift through her stuff that is now on her chair.  Are there any more of her things, I can’t seem to remember.’

   I was glad seeing that old Mrs. Cavendish was animated, and in an agreeable, talkative mood, which had rarely came upon my friend of late; ‘I hope you to prosper in your quest as you rummage through her things for whatever clues you might discover.  For the time being, I am all talked out, and I see the nurse is here to give us our daily regimen.  I was severely depressed once, you know, but having been on maintenance dose for a long time now, my mood is mostly stable,’ she said.

 

 

                           11

 

 

I obtained the key to the Hamplock House library from the assistant clerk and betook myself to examine Mrs. Elkland’s papers, at seven o’clock at the day’s termination, after dinner.  The prospect before me, of a quick, startling discovery set my heart beating; and the blood in my veins coursing in my temples--throbbing pleasantly.  It was a relatively cold night, and I had learnt from the assistant who doubled as the librarian that Mrs. Elkland had donated some of her books to the place, and looking through their titles, I saw these were mostly children’s books such as The Little Foundling Fox, and a tattered, purple-colored copy of an illustrated Kingsley’s Water-babies.  Some of her other books were her books from her school-days, which include Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.  Then, unwrapping her packet and taking out her first brown sheet, I examined it, and saw her poem, titled, ‘The Sea Has its own Folk-lore.’  And, typewritten underneath the title, was an introduction or explanation: ‘This is sheer bliss: You can look around you three hundred and sixty degrees, at the loving, sheer sea-scape.  I just love it very much, with a love that has just got to be as wide as a special sea, my concrete love that never wavers, despite the waves do.’

   Next looking down the page right down, the mysterious words: ‘The whole philosophy is right there, designed to protect me, the new inmate; and her works are bearing fruit, because she did that--for me.  I am the new sapling that was planted two months ago.’

   And then, I guess the first thing that stuck me when I opened up the next source of writing, her diary, was Mrs. Elkland’s note to herself, presumably.

  ‘Well, Alice, my dear, you can now only get better.’

  And she had written it down so the reason for this was that, she had decided to donate ‘that organ of yours’ for research and to science,--‘and so, all to best to you in the future, A.S. ’

  From looking cursorily here and there through the diaries, I realized that she first came to stay in Hamplock House in December, 1920.  And I saw an entry dated March 23, 1921, three months later, saying she was starting to read a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury today.  Then came a list of funny, evocative words that she hinted�"or wrote in so many words, were names of demons with distinct personalities that were tormenting her, and she gave their names as ‘favela’, ‘blink, balaclava’, ‘gameover’, ‘pullover’, ‘pedantic’, ‘slaughter’ and ‘electrum’.  Later, was added the word, ‘moocow’ which she admitted she took from Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and I suppose she must have been reading the book which was first published five years earlier, and her mood might have smacked something of the Joycean moral dilemma!  Why these were the names of her demons, I tried dimly to guess, but she said that there was something�"or someone�"in her head, controlling, catching and preventing these nasty spiritual entities from doing dastardly things to her, some heavenly policeman, who was fetching them up for her to view and recognize; in regard to their personalities and characteristics�"in regard their modus operandi to seduce her to even a deeper nadir, as well; for, the tactics they employed were invariable: employed to dupe their victim and cause her to stumble.  They want her to act rashly it seemed, by stirring up vengeful emotions, and flung herself headlong in her indiscretion into trouble!  She said she noticed their tactics were few and seemed to follow the same lines, especially if they surged with evil, having succeeded earlier upon tricked their inexperienced victim.  Her friend that was also inside her and fighting on her side against these tempters were standing behind them, and the young Alice said, it was catching them by the scruff of their neck.  For the benevolent agency, seemed to require her trust and her confidence in herself, Miss Alice Salvador, so that as the days went by, she was able to rule over them and beat off their every attack�"until, at last two months later, the demons seemed to have backed off because they were quickly disheartened; and her entry on that Monday in the summer was brief as it was meaningful:

   ‘They seemed no longer interested.  I guess I have won in my battle against them, and I can foresee they will ever come back again.’

   I looked at a photograph of Mrs. Elkland, her wedding photo, and remarked to myself, ‘Such a person of great sensitivity to her inner cog-wheels and such tremendous spiritual maturity.  I wish I were like her.’

   And this was to set the tone of my involvement with Mrs. Elkland’s effects, her somewhat slim volumes, papers, and scraps of photographs and her books.  And, when I need it, could I perhaps say, there was she to take me out of my head?

 

 

                        12

 

 

I was still poring over one of the late Mrs. Elkland’s books whenever I had the time to pop into the library, and it was after dinner in early November and, I was there alone�"again!  I had made some progress going through her papers, and was at that time considering the difference between a good and a bad haunting �" a good haunting being an extraordinary condensation on the part of good spirits to uplift and to lead one along the right path to life�"while in a bad haunting not only does the bad spirits batter us but they battle against the good spirits in order to set up malefic outcomes within these ancient and venerable walls; they stir up impulses and feelings of fear and shock that reverberated long in one’s system and made one unable to forget, in its shift from the light towards the darkness in the movement of one’s soul.  It was more than a morsel of undercooked spud or spoilt food we had ingested during a meal that caused it: more than a temporary upset of the nerves.  Something�"when these hauntings were going on�"was trying its level best to throw a person out of kilter, and weaken her mind�"so that despair that she would never unshackle herself from its chains would be the outcome; and, thus, driven to desperation the person would be in a blue funk, and eaten up with worry, and in the end, she would be a pale ghost of her former self�"with her nerves all shot to pieces. I guess I had experienced both these types of haunting to varying degrees ever since I stayed in Hamplock House, although I had managed to keep my head above high-tide.  But my mood�"perhaps, as a throwback to my childhood�"would wobble and I often caught myself blaspheming or uttering a chain of expletives in my thoughts, especially, at odd moments, when my spirit was low; but otherwise, for no accountable reason at all. 

   It was as if my natural disposition had taken a whack in the face or tumble, and some kind of unholy spiritual agency was doing the whacking or shoving.  These angry feelings welled out of me in the form of sudden mood swings and impatience, and inconsequential nothings just like a chanced word or a sudden thwarting of my expectations, of the most innocent kind, would get my heart pounding like a drum and seething with the desire to hit back.  In a word, being vindictive!  This release of negative chemicals�"maybe because things was suddenly going well and it did set up the expectation of more good things to come�"made me selfish in my relationships and standoffish in regard to the other patients.  But of all a sudden I would receive a check�"and it was as if my bad thoughts and negative feelings coming home to roost; for me to rue my badness.  I became unusually wary of the other inmates; and easily taken to dislike and disapprove of anyone who was worse off than me.  I began to shun others and abjure them for their illness and look upon such as their own fault and for being idiots, because they couldn’t manage to live successful lives; it was as though these people were abnormal or harbor deep, dark secrets where sin and evil abounded in profusion; and their staying here, instead of showing how well they were coping, was a sign of divine retribution; with worse to come!

   Sometimes, I thought Hamplock House was a dark place where the diseased and the unspeakably vile flourished prolifically, hidden from the eyes of ordinary people and even the doctors, behind these grey solid walls. At such times, I could not myself escape pointing a finger at myself and considering myself an unsuccessful human being who had mess in her life, and moody, dejected and guilty�"I would consider how much of my late mother’s money I had spent in staying in Hamplock House.  At such times I would regret coming here, and took the view that things in my life was still at six’s and seven’s and they were not going to sort themselves out any time fast, and thus moving to Hamplock House was a sheer mistake. But, the consultant psychiatrist earlier had recommended that I come here; and anyway, I had gained a little respite from having to return back home.  And then I thought�"were it not for the excellent doctors in this place, I would probably have decamped some little time ago; but to where, I didn’t know.  I was undergoing counseling and group therapy, and I was encouraged constantly to talk about my relationship with my father and my feelings that I felt in regard to the loss of my mother.  I felt I was unsure of myself and couldn’t express what I wanted to express properly, and so what was inside my mind was put off from day to day.  To encourage me they started calling me Pebbles and encouraged to talk about my father as if he were Barney Rubble.  Would I still think he was a bad father?  Needless, I disliked being known as Pebbles; as if my father was Barney going off with Fred just to have a couple of beers.  That was not my father at all�"people here didn’t know my father!

   We were a reclusive family and never had neighbors over and never celebrated birthdays, and my mother’s spirit and joyful effervescence�"if there was any such�"had long been killed by my father’s indifference and callousness a long, long time ago.  She used to nag at us children, especially if we displeased her, and she picked on me�"and then, after a long time of neglect and coldness�"my mother cracked and became bipolar.  I regretted I was not there to help her when she needed my help; being too weak and wrapped in my own concerns and school.  Not that my bipolar mother was at any time a saint; even when I was very young, in looking back, she seemed to have been plagued by hormonal trouble.  Maybe because of her emotional trouble, she developed diabetes and had high-blood pressure.  I remembered the night before she passed away.  She had a row with my father, and went off alone to bed.  Now, I thought she must have gone to sleep in tears and with black depression in her mind; which made her inadvertently forgetting to take her nighttime medication.  I found her at dawn just as the sun was going up, but she had already slipped into a coma; and had a heart attack alone in the night, with no one by her side to help her, because I was out of the house for a couple of hours.  All I could say is I shouldn’t have gone out; especially, that night, since I was hounded by a feeling of dread and impending disaster.  My father was downstairs in his toolshed, drinking himself silly, and drinking himself blind.  I had a row with him when it transpired what had happened to my mother�"and I had followed the paramedics to the hospital to accompanying my mother; but she never recovered and passed away two weeks later.  Soon my father and I stopped talking with each other; and tempers flared every time we were in the same room together.  My mother used to hit him physically in addition to abusing him verbally�"when she was up to it.  And he usually hit her back, or pushed her away.

   As I started to say, I was down in the library, and today, I was not in the best of my moods, and when I stared at the few rows of books in the shelves, I fancied I could hear the life experiences of the many writers who penned these books making a ruckus�"from the shadows of yesterday.  These were shillyshallying voices�"breaking upon my consciousness with a droning: as though fragments of their lives, not from the words in their books alone, but those that were half-hinted at, in some of these volumes, were urging me to recognize and accept their presence in this little room that was adjacent to the kitchen.  I got up abruptly, and eyed the door, debating with myself if the moment had come for me to exit the library.  All of a sudden, I saw white powdery dust on the table and on a page of diary, and covering the word, ‘gameover.’ Something suddenly made me looked up at the low, whitewashed ceiling with the lamp and I thought I saw the lizard that must have dislodged the dust, but when I looked up again, the lizard had disappeared into thin air.  There was no cover where it could have moved to. 

   This riveted my attention in an instant. Something definite in the realm of feelings was coming to a head, and I looked out the window, and didn’t like it.  There was a thick fog outside that misted the black, twisted shapes of trees.  Tonight, there was something about the look of the window that was very pronounced�"like a palpable evil hovering about where the curtains were�"so that I was transmogrified; and unable to stand it a second longer, and with the hackles in my back standing on end, I unceremoniously left the room; switching off the light outside, and locking up nervously, leaving my books and papers inside. Increasing the length of my stride, I then walked past the dim-lit kitchen whereby I was lucky to have met Milo who was drinking from the water-fountain, and she invited me to her room, where she said, Ovaltine was waiting for her, wanting to share some tidbits and ginger-nuts, and some inconsequential girl-talk. 

   Later, when I was more my usual self, I slipped back into my room, and my pills and Doctor Cranston was waiting for me.  Doctor Cranston informed me that my roommate, Mrs. Cavendish had an asthma attack while I was absent from my room; and he told me to keep an eye on her, because Mrs. Cavendish’s health had always been frail.  Thus ends the first part of Miss �"‘s narrative.                            

 

Author's Note

Customary review.

Reviews

[John Tan]

Not a bad job! I think it is a profound piece of writing, with a bit of Conradian raconteur to it; but an easy light read all the same!