The Grimscribe's Puppets
Page 31
August 1, 2012:
Dreamed I was pregnant & had been for maybe a year & the doctor wanted to induce me but instead of going to the hospital we did it right here, in the living room. & then I started to feel sick & thought I was going to puke but instead I just doubled up & my stomach came open like a zipper, & inside there was just dust, red dust. & it all spilled out on the floor so I clawed at my own neck so badly I pulled my jugular open & bled to death, I could feel it happening. But I didn’t care.
August 2, 2012:
A knock at the door. It’s a package & I open it without thinking. A photo-frame with one tiny hole in it, like an ikon, black magic Advent window. An eye, peering out. So I slide off the back & find out it’s a picture of me laid upside-down, staring eye transmuted to blank terror simply by being reversed.
August 3, 2012:
Nothing.
August 4, 2012:
Nothing.
August 5, 2012:
Just floating again, out in the black on an orbital track so elliptical I knew I’d reach the thinnest part of my gravitational field & just slip off like a bead from a thread, go drifting away into nothing & never stop unless I hit something.
August 6, 2012:
Dreamed I was a horse with bones braided through my mane being ridden by something gigantic, this crushing weight, faster & faster, being ridden to death. Every breath a razorblade turning in my chest.
August 7, 2012:
Trapped under a car. I could feel oil dripping on me, maybe gas, or maybe I’d wet myself. That weird smell of hot rubber and dusty asphalt. & at any time the car might collapse further, something might spark, I might burn alive, but I don’t think I was scared. I could hear the Signal far off in the distance, getting stronger.
August 8, 2012:
Corpse posture meditation, & I felt like I was going to blend into the floor, all heavy & cold & hot at the same time, every part of my body ticking with life I couldn’t control. & then I was standing up & looking down on myself, & I looked so good empty, so perfected. Transitioned. But then I started to rot, & then I was melting, I then I was gone. Just the mat left behind.
August 9, 2012:
I was a man who wanted to be a woman, or maybe a woman who’d been a man. But one way or the other I was bad & wrecked now, broken & I knew it, & there was nothing I could do about it, because whatever choice I’d made was the wrong one. So I took a knife from the kitchen & started cutting parts of myself off anywhere I could & eating them, hoping that would help.
August 10, 2012:
Nothing.
August 11, 2012:
Nothing.
August 12, 2012:
Dreamed I was up on a hill & looked down into the valley & there were three people standing there with bags over their head, clear plastic bags, so I could see their faces when they all turned & looked up at me, but I didn’t recognize any of them. & I think they were trying to tell me something but it was too far away & I couldn’t hear them because of the bags & then I just woke up.
August 13, 2012:
Dreamed I looked in the mirror & I was somebody else, & then that person told me to go get ready because we were going on a long trip together & pretty soon it would be time to leave. But instead of packing or anything we just sat down in the living room & kissed each other & said goodbye. & then we both gave each other pills & we took them at the same time & then everything went dark & that was the end.
Yelena Rostov, Notes:
Some dreams seem specifically parallel to previous tenants—Bissionette (post-partum depression with self-harm), Siemanczski (Vicodin abuse after vehicular injury), Lin (body-image dysmorphia with false transgender self-diagnosis)—even though no way T. could know about any of that. But pattern v. clear, impossible to ignore.
All dreams end badly, but with no sense of unhappiness. Transfiguration imagery. Change resulting in bodily dissolution.
Who else lived in here, before the Big Three?
Check to see if pattern continues in either direction.
~*~
From the Obituaries Section of the Toronto Star, September 21, 2000:
Leora SOONG, beloved daughter and sister, 1968 to 2000. Passed away suddenly but peacefully of natural causes. Her father Pak, mother Nureet and brother Doctor Tardesh Soong ask that in lieu of flowers, cash donations be directed to the department headed by Dr Maurice V. Corbray at Shumate House, in gratitude for their caring and professional treatment of Leora’s condition. No memorial service will be held.
From the Star’s Local News Section, same issue:
Almost one year exactly after the shocking discovery of thirteen dead bodies in a private Rosedale home, Leora Soong, the final survivor of Marc-Andre Rozant’s Pure Signalism cult (a splinter faction of the larger Anunnaki Signalist Movement) died in her sleep late Sunday night. She was discovered early Monday morning by the staff at Shumate House, the care facility her parents had placed her in.
A former University of Toronto medical student, Soong first came to national attention after she fled the Rozant house early in the morning on September 19, 1999 and flagged down a passing police car, informing the officers who stopped that Rozant had ordered the rest of the group to commit a Heaven’s Gate-style mass suicide. By the time an armed response team had been summoned, however, Rozant’s plans had already been put into effect, with only one other cult member—ex-NHL goalie Tyson Legasse—left alive. Legasse claimed he had been waiting for Soong, his “double-harness team-mate”, to return so that they could “Transition together properly”. When Soong still refused to go through with the suicide ceremony, Legasse cut his own throat with a concealed knife and then bled out before paramedics could get close enough to treat him...
Wikipedia Entry: Signalism
Anunnaki Signalism was a Millennialist cult developed and based in Toronto, Canada, though many members were recruited from America, Europe, Russia and parts of Asia through Internet proselytization. After a schism split the original Movement, the fourteen members calling themselves Pure Signalists retreated to their leader’s Rosedale house in 1999 to commit ritual suicide.1 The massacre’s single survivor died of natural causes a year later, while still in deprogramming after-care therapy at Toronto’s Shumate House facility.2
Doctrine
According to their internal newsletter, “The Secret Knowledge”3, the Signalists subscribed to the Tiamat/Anunnaki Theory, a variant derivation of the 12th Planet Theory of Azerbaijan-born American author Zecharia Sitchin, whose books propose an explanation for human origins involving ancient astronauts. Sitchin attributes the creation of the ancient Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, whom he identifies as a race of extra-terrestrials from a hypothetical planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. He believed this planet to follow an elongated, elliptical orbit in the Solar System, asserting that Sumerian mythology reflects this view. Sitchin’s books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 25 languages.[citation needed]
The mathematical progression of Bode’s law suggests that a planet should exist between Mars and Jupiter, some 260 million miles from the Sun. 12th Planet Theory posits that this planet (which Sitchin identifies with the Babylonian monster-goddess Tiamat) did in fact exist, but was struck and destroyed by Nibiru as its orbit intersected with our solar system, thus giving rise to the myth of Tiamat being “torn apart and spread across the sky” by the usurper-god Marduk. Gravitational redistribution from this event pulled some fragments of Tiamat and its moons into the orbit of the remaining planets, while others were driven further to form first the asteroid belt, then the Kuiper Belt.
The Signalist Movement builds on Sitchin’s theories by claiming that the planet Tiamat was not entirely destroyed. Though its inhabitants did not possess the technology of Nibiru, they did possess a hypersapient spiritual tradition, which led to their precognitive realization that such a collision was coming, and could not be avoided. They thus developed the Signal, a psychic “anchor” whi
ch would allow them to phase-shift the “best parts” of their planet and themselves into another dimension using zero-point energy. Like the Heaven’s Gate cultists who believed they could abandon their flawed human “vehicles” and catch a ride to Paradise on the Hale-Bopp comet’s tail, Signalists believe that by tuning themselves to the Signal’s frequency, they will be able to translate themselves to a perfected version of Tiamat through a process called Transition.
While most mainstream Signalists consider this process a lifelong evolution that concludes with natural death, a radical fringe current continues to advocate “active abandonment” of the body, as fleshly detritus, through suicide.
Signalist Litany of Intent
The Litany is printed in the masthead of each issue of “The Secret Knowledge”:
When the Signal comes, it will decode everything it touches.
When the Signal comes, nothing will be left unchanged.
The Signal will be a type of terraforming. A psychic terraforming. Our world will be remade from the inside-out.
Those who are Horses for the Signal will be Translated and Transition correctly.
Those who are not Horses for the Signal will Transition incorrectly, in that they will not Transition at all.
Horses must run in tandem, or the Transition will be disordered.
Team-mindedness is key.
Rehearsal is the single most important element in a correct Transition.
Rehearsal assures that the Final Checks are performed consistently and in unison, with perfect intent in action.
Two on two and two by two is the proper order, so both partners can support each other throughout.
Team-mindedness means: No one goes alone.
Team-mindedness means: No one is left behind.
To abandon team-mindedness is to abandon your partner, condemning them to an incorrect transition.
To abandon team-mindedness is the only unforgivable sin.
Yelena Rostov, Notes:
According to the Pure Signalism website (still online!), Final Checks =
Pair up.
Assemble materials.
Put bag over head (leave open at bottom, for mouth access).
Face each other.
Each team-member hands the other their dose.
Doses taken at the same time.
Wash down with vodka.
Repeat until dose canisters/vodka bottles are empty.
Tie each other’s bags.
Lie down in paired corpse posture, feet touching.
Begin Litany.
Wait.
But Leora Soong didn’t wait. She turned over and tore a hole in her bag, puked up her dose, ran out of the house before Tyson Legasse could catch her. Coroner’s records show he was already dying when the police got there—amazing he lived long enough to kill himself. But maybe he wanted to see her again, see her eyes when she turned him down. (Like he knew she would?)
IR on Leora implies that by the time she came to Shumate, she thought she made the wrong call.
Okay, so now we know why Shumate doesn’t take cult survivors/deprogramming jobs anymore. But
“The Signal” = Signalists? How can that
Checked Thordis’s browser cache. If she’s been looking at Signalist materials, I can’t find any record of it. But that wouldn’t explain how she knew about the other three patients, anyways. Or what Leora Soong and her Signalist crazy had to do with
No no no.
NO. No, that just doesn’t
Fuck.
~*~
Therapy Blog of Thordis Hendricks, August 15, 2012 (2:55 AM):
Found teeth in the wall today. Like there was a lump in the plaster I could barely see, but I could feel it when I touched it, so I went all through the place looking for something heavy enough to break it open, and then finally I did (edge of a plastic file-box from the closet), and I did. And it opened right up like a seam, and inside were these teeth buried deep enough I had to dig them out, roots and all. Too small to be an adult’s, with their enamel the colour of milk gone off.
How does that even happen, though? I mean, it must’ve been deliberate—somebody did that, but why? To leave something of themselves behind here, just in case
(that’s if the teeth were even theirs)
One way or the other, I think I maybe need to start writing down exactly when I take my meds, again. And how many.
Slept maybe an hour around midnight, and had that same dream about somebody standing at the foot of my bed, looking down at me while I slept. And it was me? Me looking down, me sleeping? And when I opened my eyes I was surprised, genuinely, to not find her still standing there. Surprised, and a little disappointed.
It’s very lonely, in here. I’m beginning to wish
(only beginning?)
well, more like—after all this time in Apartment Five—that I’m finding it hard to remember what it was like to ever be someplace
(anyplace)
else.
And the other thing that’s funny, just a bit: When your diagnosis includes suicidal ideation, why do the side-effects of so many drugs also include suicidal ideation? Cymbalta included, if I recall correctly; hoping you have a handle on that, at least, Yelena. Hoping you’re keeping track.
It just seems...contradictory.
rostovy@monitoru.net Dr Corbray, it’s Yelena Rostov.
rostovy@monitoru.net Dr Corbray?
rostovy@monitoru.net I sent you a report, Dr Corbray. Did you get it?
corbrayml@monitoru.net
corbrayml@monitoru.net
corbrayml@monitoru.net Yes, I received it.
rostovy@monitoru.net All right, then
rostovy@monitoru.net Mind telling me what you thought?
corbrayml@monitoru.net Will be sending you my response in email form, so please check your in-box.
corbrayml@monitoru.net Signing off now.
~*~
From: corbrayml@monitoru.net
Date: August 15, 2012, 10:42 AM
To: rostovy@monitoru.net
Subject: Report (Thordis Hendricks)
Dear Yelena,
Following your account of what you term Thordis Hendricks’s “psychological degeneration” over her stay with us here at Shumate House, I went back and examined the Therapy Blog posts and dream diary entries you quoted in detail. Having done so, while I will admit the symptoms she’s been experiencing are extreme (enough so to definitely merit a pharmacological shift off Cymbalta, perhaps substituting Paxil or Celexa, followed by a full-scale treatment protocol reassessment), I’m not quite sure what else I’m supposed to take away from this laundry-list of additional implications, some of which appear to verge on the pathological.
To answer your questions, however: No, there is no way Ms. Hendricks could have learned the details of how Apartment Five’s former tenants died. No, I don’t believe there’s a “pattern” to those deaths, aside from the unfortunate tendency of addicts to overdose and depressives to commit suicide. And though I suppose it’s possible Ms. Hendricks might recall something about the Pure Signalism cult denouement—it would have been hard to escape that year’s news coverage without picking up any reference to it, especially here in Toronto—this idea of yours that Leora Soong’s completely coincidental stay at Shumate may have left some sort of toxic “psychic residue” behind that infects Apartment Five’s residents with Signalist ideas is both highly unprofessional, and scarily close to veering into the realm of paranormal mumbo-jumbo. We work for MonitorU, not the Freihoeven Institute.
I don’t want to re-assign you, Yelena, since I believe that would be bad for Ms. Hendricks—she needs continuity, especially now. But this is a conversation I really don’t want to find myself having with you again.
(By the way, in future, I would prefer to communicate by email rather than Instant Message, since the latter format is not exactly conducive to in-depth debate.)
Cordially, Dr. Maurice Corbray, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, Shum
ate House
Yelena Rostov, Notes:
Asshole.
Okay, okay—
Supposedly, Shumate doesn’t accept cult survivors or deprogramming jobs anymore.
But Corbray was Shumate’s primary student; Corbray treated Leora Soong, so “well” her parents wanted everybody to donate to him. Corbray was the one who mentioned Apartment Five’s stellar tenancy record, in the first place. Why?
So I would go looking? So I’d figure out
(no, that doesn’t make any)
(or does it)
So here’s a thesis:
You have a—all right, say it—haunted apartment. Everyone who stays there gets sucked into the same routine: Final Checks for Translation/Transition; team-mindedness at work. She (Leora) convinces them they’re part of her double-harness pairing. And they go through with it, but they don’t stick around—they move on, somewhere else. She sticks around, and tries it again.
Because she feels bad about pulling out. Because she feels
(alone, and lonely, so lonely)
(just like Thordis)
And it doesn’t matter at this point if she really-for-truly thinks that all her dead friends wound up on Lost Planet Tiamat in the Paradise Dimension, or whatever—fact is, wherever they did end up, she’s not there, and she never will be. Not unless she can find someone else, the right someone else
to team with.
And Corbray’s not stupid, just a bastard. So what is it for him, some kind of experiment? Like: Hey, I wonder what happens if we put this sort of person in Number Five? Or this one? Or