I dreamed that one had died in a strange place
Near no accustomed hand;
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
“A Dream of Death”
William Butler Yeats
Prologue
My name is Arthur Chaldeon, and the narrative I offer here is the journal of my nephew Victor. His own disappearance occurred nearly three years after that of his wife. She was presumed dead but never found, and that event set into motion the bizarre series of circumstances related in Victor’s journal. I will let the story be told primarily by that journal, nearly word for word. It seems to be dated, based on its contents, about a year before he vanished.
The events following his wife’s death, as you will see, caused him to be largely a stranger to most of us. When we did hear from him occasionally, frankly, it seemed he might be losing his mind. Initially, this journal only furthered that judgment of his character. However, after speaking to certain parties mentioned in the journal--and being a lawyer I usually know when one is lying or delusional--it appears that the events described certainly have at least some basis in fact, even if they may be somewhat far-fetched. After much deliberation, I have decided to publish this work and allow its readers to be the final judge of its authenticity.
I will now provide a brief account of how I came into possession of the collection of notebooks comprising Victor’s journal.
I had not heard anything from Victor in over six months. I knew he had moved to another town. I am Victor’s lawyer, and his only living relative within a hundred, perhaps even a thousand miles—the Chaldeons are spread all about the earth—so it was natural enough that Victor placed me in charge of selling his house and any other issues that may arise from his prompt and unexplained exit from the city. Thus, I was one of very few people, perhaps even the only person, with his phone number. He made it clear, as he hastily gave me full power of attorney of all his affairs that his phone number was to be considered confidential. He obviously did not want to be found or bothered, but I chose to keep in touch, and when my last contact with him aged six months I decided to call him.
The phone rang and rang the first four times I called, at various times throughout the day. The fifth attempt was made at quarter past ten at night, and finally the phone was answered, though not by Victor.
“Hello,” whispered a distant, croaking voice. The word was intoned more as a question than a statement, almost as though the speaker did not know how to use a phone.
“Is Victor there?”
A long pause. “Who are you? This number is—“
“Oh, yes. My apologies, Madame. Arthur Chaldeon. To my knowledge,
I am still the only person who has this number. Others have asked, but I do know how to keep one’s confidence. It’s my job. Is this Peggy?”
“Yeah,” she said, exhaling a long sigh. “Arthur. Please don’t be offended, but it will be better if you just hang up and forget about us.”
“I will do nothing of the kind, Peggy. Where is Victor?”
“I don’t know.” Another long silence. Something in the sound of her voice told me to keep my mouth shut for a change, stop being a lawyer for a moment. Then, finally, one more word. “Gone.”
“Gone? You’re saying he left you?”
“No, nothing as simple as that.” Then, she began to whisper again. “It’s them I tell you.”
“Who? Is Victor in some sort of trouble?”
“I think they took him.”
“I’m coming to see you. You can tell me then.”
Though highly agitated and not making a lot of sense, Peggy settled down enough to give me directions to their hideaway in a town about a hundred and fifty miles from my residence. I informed my wife and business colleagues of my need to travel suddenly, not mentioning Victor at all, and was on my way within a couple of hours.
As I drove, I thought of Peggy. I had only met her once before she and Victor moved away together. I was initially shocked to find out that Victor was moving in with a woman so soon after becoming a widower, but he and Peggy had certainly met under bizarre circumstances. It wasn’t like he decided to date right away, rather they had become friends and bonded as they worked together to find out what happened to Rita. But I don’t want to jump ahead—you will learn all of this directly from Victor.
I only need mention having met Peggy before so I can explain my shock when she opened the door and let me into their townhouse. The woman standing before me had the same long dark blonde hair and blue eyes, and her basic features seemed to indicate she was the same person. However, she looked not months, but several years older, weary, not at all the spirited attractive woman at Victor’s side the night he signed his life over to me.
Had the pressures in Victor’s life caused similar severe changes in his appearance as well in so short a time period? Victor was a tall, broadly built man, and I am sure most middle aged women would say he was handsome. Since insurance was his trade, and thus all his work done inside, he had always tried to remain active and conscious of his health. Now, after seeing Peggy, I wondered if he had let that all go in light of whatever was going on in this household.
We sat in the living room and Peggy brought me some coffee. This was certainly a scaled down living situation for Victor. The house and accompanying lot I helped him sell was worth easily ten times what he had reinvested in this quaint modest condominium. It is like he was starting over, except with a tidy sum of money in the bank this time around.
Peggy was no less upset than she was hours earlier. She just kept speaking in nondescript pronouns, saying: “they” had taken “him,” that “they” were everywhere now and it was all “our” fault. She shook as she spoke, and kept whispering as though there was someone else in the room that might overhear our conversation. She seemed only a few loose strands away from crazy, but I knew better. Even though I did not know everything that happened at the place where she and Victor had met, I knew understanding it was far more complex than just writing them off as crazy.
She left the room, leaving me in utter confusion, and returned with a large stack of notebooks of all types and colors. All of them appeared to be written by Victor. Some were thumbed through, dog-eared, and even had pages torn out from somewhere else and then placed inside between other pages. However, despite the disheveled state of much of the stack there were three bound composition books with uninterrupted writing, as though they were some sort of cohesive draft compiled from all the other material.
“Victor has been having a lot of physical problems lately and rarely sleeps,” she said as I flipped through some of the pages. There were also crude drawings and charts among the writing, as though Victor saw the need to illustrate what he could not describe with mere words. “He has become obsessed with writing it all down. He needs to do this, and I am not going to tell him not to, but I have been trying to explain to him that nobody is going to believe any of it.”
I had to admit that, browsing through some of the written passages and looking at those pictures, I felt I was intruding on the privacy of an aspiring science fiction writer rather than reading a supposed journal. “That is one of them,” Peggy whispered as I looked at one of the drawings.
I am not a psychiatrist, but I can only imagine the impressions these illustrations provided were similar to those one often saw in the ravings of lunatics that are convinced of their own sanity. Victor was no artist, so there was only crude detail provided in his attempts to create “them” on paper. The best I can say is it looked like what he had drawn was a cross between some formless blob like a jellyfish and another creature with multiple tentacles and several eyes. Below this, Victor had written: “BUT NOT THEIR TRUE FORM—ANOTHER LIE!”
I swallowed hard, trying to maintain my objectivity in the face of such material. But if Victor was insane he had not gone there alone, for Peggy sat before me, seeming nearly catatonic, wide-eyed, watching me work my way through the notebooks.
“Take these notebooks,” she said. “I can’t live in fear of them. They can no longer influence my every move. Victor speaks a lot about will. That is our greatest defense. I must fight. Take these and read, and then we will talk.”
“What about Victor?”
“You can’t possibly be any help to us unless you read it all. At least those three books where he has written it out, like a story, leaving out some important stuff in my opinion, but still, it will tell you what you’re in for if--“ She stopped and looked around the room again and then whispered, “if you decide to help us.”
“Okay, I will read all this. But I want to stay here, in your town, until I’m done. I’m not just going to leave you like this.”
“Suit yourself. I’m okay, no matter what you might think by looking at me. I have been through worse. Perhaps I’m wrong, and he’ll walk through the door any minute now with an explanation. But it’s been six days.”
Since I had come here not having heard anything from Victor in months, I was relieved to find out his disappearance was a more recent event, but I understood six days was still a long time to have no contact with someone living with you. I left on that note, telling Peggy I would give her my number once I knew where I was staying.
Once I had checked into a nearby motel, and called Peggy and my family, I turned immediately to Victor’s notebooks. It took me from five that evening until four the next morning to read straight through it all. I offer it to you now as I found it, from those three composition books. It will be necessary for me, once or twice, to intervene and narrate events from a slightly different point of view, based on subsequent interviews with other parties involved, but I have not altered Victor’s own writing in any way.