Setting and Background

It is 1953 in Massachusetts; an exclusive sanatorium up state, off easternmost Rockport. Previously a prison for a handful of malcontents and undesirables during the War. Now decommissioned. A small staff of researchers acquired it in trust years ago. They work with an exclusive clientele of whom you are a part.

A lighthouse stands to the Northeast on an adjacent island; a small causeway provides access during low tide and at night the lamp sweeps the rocky shores.

A single boat brings provisions once a week from the village. The island has no roads so they need no cars. The local fisherman won’t come near the place and a decommissioned PT103, that stays onshore, can be signalled via a shortwave radio or by the signal lamp from the top of the lighthouse.

Fog sweeps through at certain times of the year and folk stay a little closer to the fire. Doors are locked by routine. People travel in pairs and are armed. There is the occasional drowning. Old men and fishing boats don’t mix with  waters that can turn hostile in minutes. Great storms hammer the shore and the tip of the rocks see storm-swell large enough to kiss the top of the lighthouse.

But none of that matters because your world is not that big. Where you are and why you are here is something whispered to yourself at night. You understand rationally, that ‘it is for your own good’. Everyone seems reasonable, calm, professional, yet it is all slightly ‘off’.

You’ve never seen a colour palette quite like it. The building is constantly lit but the corridors have shades, no door is the same size. Some of the corridors appear to slope ever so slightly down in places and up in others. Everything is vaguely moist. There is a smell like something you remember poking with a stick at the seaside once. Other than the strange pieces of electrical equipment there are no other reflective surfaces. There are few windows due to the climate and you are not sure whether or not you are underground.

There are no animals here except for humans. No insects. No spiders. The walls are licked clean of anything except for the room numbers, and the occasional name written in exquisite penmanship on tiny slips of paper that slide into the metal door holders under the viewing slot. That was how you learned the names of your fellow admitted. You share the same routine. You dress in hospital scrubs and walk around in soft moccasins. It is permanently cool except for the interview room with its hot lights and buzzing equipment. But they feed you well.

You can roam anywhere on your own except two places. The main doors are locked and guarded by a large male orderly who never seems to sleep.

“[This] Pear-shaped Man lives beneath the stairs. His shoulders are are narrow and stooped, but his buttocks are impressively large. Or perhaps it is only the clothing he wears; no has ever admitted to seeing him nude, and no one has ever admitted to wanting to.  His trousers are brown polyester double knits, with wide cuffs and a shiny seat; they are always baggy, and they have big, deep, droopy pockets so stuffed with oddments and bric-a-brac that they bulge against his sides. He wears his pants very high, hiked up around the swell of his stomach, and cinches them in place around his chest with a narrow brown leather belt. He wears them so high that his drooping socks show clearly, and often an inch or two of pasty white skin as well.

His shirts are always short-sleeved, most often white or pale-blue, and his breast pocket is always full of Bic pens, the cheap throwaway kind that write with blue ink. He has lost the caps or tossed them out, because his shirts are always stained and splotched around the breast pockets.His head is a second pear set atop the first; he has a double chin and wide, full fleshy cheeks, and the top of his head seems to come almost to a point. His nose is broad and flat, with large, greasy pores; his eyes are small and pale, set close together. His hair is thin, dark, limp, flaky with dandruff; it never looks washed, and there are those who say that he cuts it himself with a bowl and a dull knife. He has a smell, too, the Pear-shaped Man; it is a sweet smell, a sour smell, a rich smell, compounded of old butter and rancid meat and vegetables rotting in the garbage bin. Hi voice, when he speaks, is high and thin and squeaky; it would be a funny little voice, coming from such a large, ugly man, but there is something unnerving about it, and something even more chilling about his tight, small smile. He never shows any teeth when he smiles, but his lips are broad and wet.

Of course you know him. Everyone knows a Pear-shaped Man.”

George R. R. Martin.

They tell you the sessions are working. After all – they have your best interests at heart. You remember your previous life… vaguely, but the trauma has led to disturbed sleep – nightmares and the constant feeling you have of being watched, of feeling dissociated with your surroundings. Everyone is a stranger. Your mind wanders and you find yourself watching the single large metal clock set high above the director’s door. Its electric second hand creates a hypnotic familiarity.

You jog yourself awake after hours sitting in the same chair. You remember why  you are here – a new, revolutionary treatment. A dream treatment where a small contingent of scientists – three in fact: Thompson, Burroughs and Waits – are undertaking pioneering work into the effect of a mixture of psychotropic and hallucinogenic drugs and low level electroshock therapy as a way to treat trauma endured by soldiers during the war – shell shock and related hysteria.

The key though, is sleep. They believe during Delta Sleep cycles there is the chance to reawaken and remove the trauma. The related drug therapy and intense counselling gives patients the opportunity to face their fears and have an above average chance of beating them; of living a normal life, free from the nightmares, the flashbacks, the crippling fear.

You want to get better, but you’ve noticed that there is an almost constant cycle of new inmates passing through the doors. Not dozens mind, but there is a new face every week, maybe two. Some are completely deranged – they come in on stretchers and stay in rooms without windows. There are screams, thankfully infrequent or perhaps just far away. Some are fine – you have come to know and even speak with a handful.

The other place, and where you suspect these poor souls are incarcerated, is beyond the large green metal door in the western wall of the facility just off the exercise yard and infirmary. Occasional glimpses of a long grey corridor that leads off around a slow curve. And brief actinic bursts in the patients’ rooms. You watch strange tubular equipment wheeled around but for what purpose?

You carry with you a dark secret. You know the world is not what everyone else sees, experiences. There are shadows waiting on the edges of vision. There are…things. Cold, wet, suppurating, oily, sharp things that you shot and you stabbed and you burned and you ran and you ran but you could never completely outrun them because every time you go to sleep, they are waiting.

And therein lies the key – a certain level of sleep deprivation. At a point of the therapy you will each walk the corridors and face your daemons. You have seen some of your fellows in a sort of fugue state, walking around, sometimes talking. They are watched by the orderly and the doctors flitter around taking notes, taking blood pressure, occasionally shepherding them back into rooms for long talks and more therapy. Their scrubs read “Do not disturb” across their backs, unlike your own.

Your sessions have not yet started. You all have assessments to undertake. A battery of tests – both mental and physical if you are prove capable of returning to humanity, to your family, to decency. The doctors are nice and smile but they record everything on their clipboards. Answers to your questions are evasive. Those in charge have some sort of agenda but you don’t understand what it is and thinking about it has lead to your beginning to doubt your own faculties.

Your past histories have brought you to this place, to this moment. You reflect once again when you crossed a line you did not previously know existed. You have heard the gibbering, felt its hungry gaze, fought with a bestial madness – something raw and primordial. And it is here and it wants you and it will be with you soon…