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Mr.. Robinson, Mr.. H. Thomas Robinson, of Robinson’s Diner, died on August 6, 1996. Within six days of his passing a strange-looking gentleman from somewhere up north, maybe even across an ocean, arrived at the desk of the real estate agent, and the space was sold. Just like that.
It’s important to understand that in a town of our size, which in the grand scheme of population statistics is minute, certain businesses become staples of the community, like how gyms and bars with signature cocktails are in big cities. However, whereas the average New Yorker would not bat an eye when their nearest deli closes shop, the death of Robinson’s Diner sent mournful shockwaves throughout our small and humble community. In other words, a pillar had fallen, and the change in the foundation had been felt holistically. As silly as it sounds, there was a genuine elegiac tone that set itself upon the town when the “Closed” sign went up for the final time.
Given that the community prided itself on its intimate nature, gossip ruled the day and every day after. Thus, it’s no surprise that salacious details of the spot’s new owner made their way across town with astonishing celerity. Whether one was in the tire shop on the northern side of town or the tea parlor on the southern side, the conversation between the locals paired off in secret corners, as their children tottled on in the background, exclusively centered around the personal details (and prospects) of the mysterious new owner of the former home of Robinson’s Diner.
Allegedly, according to some whispered information passed along by old men in the barber shop, his name was Gustav Holinger, a Swede that had been in America since immigrating in 1978. Beyond that little was known/available in regards to Gustav Hollinger. His allure and the mystery regarding his intentions grew exponentially, and soon he was the only topic of conversation in the entire town. Everyone had their own concerns, their own perspectives on the matter. To some, the stranger was a phantom, a boogeyman from a foreign land of evil; to others, he was an opportunist and an example of capitalism's last assault on the final bastion of ‘Old America’—the Mom and Pop Diner— now being washed in the tides of greed and real estate politics.
Regardless of his intentions, Holinger seemed impartial to everything and everyone around him. On the rare occasion that he would leave the now-gutted property, he would walk to the pub, sit in the corner alone, and sip at two whiskey neats before standing up and leaving without eye contact or a word in anyone’s direction. His nonchalance infuriated nearly everyone, and by the end of the month, Holinger was the most despised man in the town’s limits by a wide margin.
With all of the conjecture and negative gossip surrounding the man, it was strange and surprising that there wasn’t a single idea from anyone regarding his plans for the empty space. Everyone in the town was at a loss for what could have brought such an unlikeable man to our quaint slice of countryside.
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by talks of dreams. Perhaps that perceived phenomenon led to my pursuit of professional psychology. I had been fortunate enough to carve out a nice slice of average within that small town as a therapist, occasional sleep scientist, and all-around mental health consultant off-the-record-no-insurance-required type. It suited my modest ambitions well and I rarely, if ever, had any qualms with any aspect of my quiet life. I was everyone’s confidant, everyone’s friend, yet I remained personally anonymous to most. That was a choice, a conscious choice.
That being said, and in the interest of full disclosure, I cannot continue without speaking about the scenario, the dream really, that propelled my life, and preoccupied my passions. As a child, I watched very little television. In fact, I can only remember one program making any sort of an impact on me; every Saturday at 1:00 pm, the local station would pick one of three or four classic films and play them uninterrupted. These films were nothing special, cheap public domain schlock fests for the most part, with the exception of a rather handsomely mounted adaption of Tom Sawyer.
I remember bits and pieces, fragments of imagery from the film, though one sequence forever ingrained itself in my brain, and became something of an obsession. About halfway through the film, as dictated by Twain’s novel, Sawyer finds himself in a position where he is believed to be dead by all of the townspeople. As a result, they have a funeral for him, which he promptly views in morbid delight from the rafters of the small building. From his perch, our hero is able to hear all of the good things people had to say about him, and was provided a window into how his death would impact the community. What a miracle idea that seemed to me in my young mind. Since then, whether it be the nature of how childhood memories evolve and recalibrate as we age, or simply just the brilliance of Twain’s idea, the concept of stealing away as my presumed corpse is lauded and proselytized became one of the very few dreams and desires that rose me out of my bed every morning and dragged me into my cozy little office to bear the weight of everyone else’s confessions and mental struggles. I had been a shrink for over twenty-five years before the irony occurred to me—I listened to everyone’s gossip about everyone else, except for me. I had no idea how anyone in the town that had been my home my entire life truly felt about me, neither positive nor negative a reputation had I.
To think back on that mindset now renders me a neurotic mess. Ignorance truly is bliss in matters such as these.
Anyways, I felt this document would not be complete lest I finally committed that piece of me to text.
Reading it now, it seems so frivolous.
We should move on to the gallery.
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The first invitation went out roughly two months after Holinger had first appeared. The recipient was a beloved schoolteacher named Bert Hummel. Hummel was just four years from retiring as the most popular of all the local high school Spanish teachers. One Friday morning, Hummel went to the mailbox to find that, amongst the pile of bills and coupons, there was an ornate brown envelope hand-sealed with what looked like something from the medieval period, a bright right pressing with a strange crest in the center.
He opened it.
The rest of the story is pure conjecture, pieced together from town gossip and brief glimpses I gathered from a few of the police offers that were patients of mine.
Allegedly, Hummel’s letter was an invitation to a private event at an art gallery owned by Gustav Holinger that was to take place that very evening. Apparently, it heavily suggested secrecy. The other contents of the letter, the words that must have paired with sheer human curiosity that led to Hummel going to the gallery that night, were lost.
According to witnesses, the teacher was in the building for no more than half an hour before he came barreling out the front door, his eyes wide with terror and sweat dripping off every angle of him.
Nobody heard anything else from the usually chipper Bert Hummel.
Three days later, the police responded to a welfare check request from the school. They found him in the small living room of his tiny house, in his favorite recliner, mouth agape in permanent screams. Large sewing needles protruded from both of his eyes.
The best the police could figure is that poor Bert did it to himself.
––––––––
After that, the letters came bi-weekly, and seemingly at random. Nobody in town, from the smartest lecturers all the way down to the mentally incompetent, could posit any theory in regard to a pattern. The mysteries only began there and got much darker the further down the rabbit hole one went. As more and more of our citizens received their invitations to the dark gallery, it seemed more and more that we were on a trajectory of some kind, a path towards a reckoning that only one person knew the details of.
Two weeks after Hummel’s (presumed) suicide, the mayor of our town, Bernard Kincaid, got an invitation in his box at City Hall. This particular invitation was noteworthy because the letter had been delivered to a public official whose mail was vetted first by his secretary. Whereas the previous invitations had been delivered to people living alone or at the very least known to be private about their personal matters, this letter had been delivered in a very public manner to the mayor. Essentially, a spectacle could no longer be avoided.
There was a town meeting the next day. Unsurprisingly, everyone within the town limits crammed into the tiny room, anxious to understand what the city officials intended to do in response to the stranger, his strange gallery, strange invitations to the strange gallery, and the strange suicides of the recipients of the strange invitations to the strange gallery.
Mayor Kincaid took to the podium and began to speak in that faux-small-time politician tone. Everyone was immediately hanging on to every last condescending word.
“Friends and citizens, this conference has been called to address the community’s concerns regarding the new business established in the former home of Robinson’s Diner. I would like to publicly assure you all that the new iteration of the space is currently not under any official investigation by the city or the city police department. All is well in our town.”
Everyone suddenly felt a lot better.
It is our understanding that three hours after giving that conference, Mayor Kincaid accepted Holinger’s invitation and went to the gallery unaccompanied.
The next day his body was found in the mayor’s office. His body hung from the ceiling, mouth stuffed with the bloody mass of his castrated genitals which had bled relentlessly onto the brand-new carpet.
His secretary disappeared soon after.
––––––––
That brought the grand total to seven. Other than the two already described, there had been a homeless man (the only one to receive a hand-delivered invitation), a 90-year-old widower who knew no one, and a pair of 16-year-old teenagers that had snuck out of their house to uphold their reservation at the gallery and had been missing ever since, though they were presumed dead in the court of public opinion.
Even though we were fairly isolated and insular, the number of suicides led to rumblings that the national news circuit might soon be upon us. We thought it best to take care of it in a communal way before that came to pass.
I of course heard the worst of the town’s anxieties about it all over my weekly sessions, bearing witness and scientific confessor to all of the ways our citizens saw the situation panning out. Not one single patient saw a happy prognosis.
When I was honest with myself, neither did I.
For some reason, perhaps just general inherent narcissism, when my invitation arrived I was very surprised, shocked even. So much so that I held it in my hand for over half an hour before I had even the slightest inclination to open the thing.
When I finally did, I forever wished I hadn’t.
To: Dr. Justin Lerner
From: Dr. Gustav Holinger
I will not dance around with pleasantries for a man of your intellect and social standing. I have no doubt that by now someone from this community has mentioned unsettling notions about me and my connection to the recent deaths.
I assure you that I have nothing to do with these deaths and their tangential connection to my gallery is purely coincidental.
It is true that the victims did visit my gallery by invitation, the recipient selection of which is completely randomized, and that they all followed through with their attendance at the gallery. That is where the relationship between the incidents begins and ends.
I fear that I will no longer be able to continue my very unique work here without an endorsement from someone whom the public has trust and respect for. Thus, I am writing you to not only invite you to my gallery this Wednesday but also to humbly ask that you report your experience to those whom you see every week as to dispel this burgeoning conspiracy that I fear will be detrimental to us all should it be allowed to reach a fever pitch.
If you choose to accept my invitation and proposal, meet me at the front door of my gallery on Wednesday at 11 PM. The exhibition will be specifically curated for you, thus it would be best to come alone.
Sincerely,
Gustav Holinger, Ph.D.
I closed the letter and folded it back into the envelope. I had no doubt in my mind that the entire angle of my opinion being publicly broadcast in whatever way possible was a tactic to lure me to his little shop of abstract horrors. It was a convincing written performance, but ineffective, nonetheless. Furthermore, I suspected that Holinger had taken my suspiciousness into account and had simply written it that way to cover his tracks should anyone come across the invitation after whatever was going to happen to me happened.
With all that being said, there was also not a doubt in my mind that I would be able to resist the invite. In fact, like I had been reverted back to childhood on Christmas Eve when I laid down that night, I was unable to banish my excitement and anxiety enough to fall asleep. When I went to the office the next day, none of my focus would leave the gallery long enough to focus on whatever weight was bearing down on the lives of my patients.
That was Tuesday.
The next day, Wednesday, the lack of sleep caught up with me. The result of that was falling asleep in the middle of multiple sessions, a mistake that would no doubt be on the lips of everyone at the bars that night. I had a hunch that in the long run, it would not matter much, if at all.
The night came on slowly, dragging its feet to hand me the baton in the final stretch of the marathon. Finally, the little clock above the stove clicked 10:30, which was my cue to put on my tie and suit coat and leave out the door, abandoning guaranteed safety in the face of pure curiosity and ego.
When I arrived, the lights were off in the gallery, and the front doors were locked and bolted shut. The place was lifeless. Perhaps I had been played, perhaps the letter had been a fake, a prank pulled on me by some disgruntled patient who felt they had not received adequate attention.
I was early, yes. But I also assumed that Holinger would be there, putting on any finishing touches to whatever presentation he had curated for me. I would wait until exactly 11:00, then I was good as gone.
Sure enough, and to my honest surprise, as soon as my watch read 11:00, the building lit up, the sounds of pleasant classical music rang out across the space, and the electronic bolt and lock shifted, allowing the automatic doors to open. I stood back, gathering myself as I did, and allowed the doors to latch into place at the end of their hinged runs.
A young woman, no older than 16, appeared at the door, scantily clad. She held out her hand.
“May I see your invitation?”
I snickered as I reached into my coat pocket and removed the folded envelope, placing it in her palm. Without even opening it, she nodded her head and motioned for me to follow her into the building. I obliged.
The girl led me through a dark foyer illuminated by a dimming string of blue lights. I suppose it was meant to evoke some kind of mysterious ambiance. Once we cleared that area, we arrived in a small carpeted room with no windows. There were red curtains everywhere, and cheap Sainted candles from the local market. This was starting to feel more like a local theater’s haunted house or a tourist seance than it was a life-altering/ending experience. I stifled a slight chuckle when the music switched to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
The girl noticed my expression of light mocking and frowned at me. Clearly, the other guests had been more respectful of the campy presentation. Still, I elected to play along and see the whole thing to its conclusion before passing final judgment.
At the head of the room was a large set of brass doors. The girl walked up to the doors and removed the wooden beam keeping them closed. She stood in the doorway, preventing me from entering what I assumed was the main attraction.
“Can I not go in?” I asked.
“Not yet. Not before the doctor explains what it is he’s prepared in there.”
“I see. And where is the doctor?”
“I’m right here, Dr. Lerner. Right here,” his voice said from behind me. I lurched forward with the reaction one gets with a jump scare in a cheap horror flick.
“Jesus, Holinger. You scared me,” I admitted.
He came around to face me. “My apologies for that. I can tell you were anxious to get in and see the gallery. But if you will allow me a few minutes to explain a few things, to provide a bit of context. Dr. Lerner, it is important that you listen closely to what I have to say before you allow yourself the experience of my gallery. Can I count on your attention?”
I did not care for the condescending tone, especially in the face of the overwritten flattery of the invitation, but nevertheless, I agreed.
“Good. Good. I suppose I should begin by explaining to you what the gallery is, and what its overall function is. Like all modern innovations, I believe my work sits on the line straddling art and science, where the distinction of the two is blurred. That blur, that nexus, the center of the Venn diagram, whatever you want to call it—that is where I found my niche, where I am supposed to operate. Not to be too obtuse, but does this make any sense, at least as a launch pad?”
“Doctor, I am well versed in matters of rationalization. I can’t say or answer without having seen the result, which I presume is the gallery?” I replied.
Holinger nodded, cleared his throat, and continued. “Right, yes, of course. Well, I will just cut right to the chase then. Dr. Lerner, when you step into the gallery, no amount of intellectual prowess or academic wall-building will protect you from the shock you will initially feel. When you gaze upon the first exhibit, you may feel...unsettled, to say the least. Some of our previous guests have been inclined to leave after a few moments at the exhibit. If you should feel so inclined, nobody will stop you, but we do humbly implore that you do your best to see the gallery to the conclusion. We have worked tirelessly to prepare a once-in-a-lifetime experience, indeed a spectacle, for you and we would hope that you will allow us the complete breadth of our vision.
One last thing. Because of the nature, the inherent intensity, of the work we do here, you may at times feel a bit, well, unsafe in a manner of speaking. I assure you, Dr. Lerner, you are and will not be in any danger while you are in the gallery. We have taken great strides to guarantee the safety of every single guest we invite into that most serious and unusual of spaces. Again though, should you feel as though you are in mortal danger at any point, you are always free to exit back through where you entered and be done with it.
Unless you have any other logistical questions, you may step through that entryway just there and begin.”
Holinger motioned to the girl who walked up to the set of brass doors and, with great dramatic flair, she opened the
I stood there staring into his eyes, searching for any hints of irony or theatricality; there was neither, he was dead serious. I admit, even with my mind trained to the strictly logical, I felt myself growing more and more unnerved as I prepared myself to enter the mysterious gallery.
“Well then. Let’s see what we have in here. Let’s find out what ol’ Robinson’s Diner has become...” I stalled. My palms were sweaty, and my breath irregular. I didn’t understand what had subconsciously set my body into a fit of slight panic and obvious apprehension.
Holinger and the girl stared into an unknown space slightly above my head. They were waiting for me, their part was done for now and it was my turn.
I took a deep breath and stepped into the dark space in front of me.
––––––––
The doors shut behind me and then there was black silence.
There was a distant sound, like an old projector staring up or something similar. A few moments after the sound began to intensify, a dim light in front of me slowly came to life and illuminated the small room I was now standing in.
A series of vintage speakers that were positioned along the corners began to shake as they broke the silence with an old recording of Mozart’s Lachrysmosa.
Just under the light, which hung straight down from the high ceilings on the end of an electric cord, there was a pane of glass separating me from both the light and the large easel it was centered over. Once I adjusted to the shift in light, I focused on what was painted so masterfully upon the canvas.
It took me a handful of seconds for my brain to catch up to itself, for the raw data archived in my mind and my conscious awareness to synthesize, and for me to realize just what the hell it was that I was looking at.
But then it clicked, and I understood.
For anyone else to cast eyes on the painting, there would be no discernible difference from their reaction to any other piece of art from an unknown and unacclaimed artist. However, for me to cast eyes on the painting was to all but look into the eye of chaos itself. It defied understanding.
The first time I had seen the image, that image, was as a child, no older than ten or eleven. I had been asleep in a twin bed with my cousin on a family trip to the woods when I had become entwined in my first real visceral nightmare, the one that you remember and keep tucked into a tight little bundle in the very back of the mind theater’s archives.
I had spent a few months in grad school diving down the rabbit hole of dreams and all of the various theories on how they function, their purpose, how they are composed, and so on down the line. It was tantalizing, full of mystery and potential for scientific progress, but I found the work too hypothetical, too specific to mitigating factors in the dreamer that were of such psychological obscurity that they would never organically arise from any type of therapy setting. The result was a frustrated throwing up of my hands.
With all that being said, I had found it a personally useful practice at that time to try and recall the dreams I had had over the years, even if those memories consisted of only the vaguest of shapes and silhouettes, it was a way to engage with my own subconscious cosmos.
Bearing that in mind, you can understand how I felt in that moment, melting into the soles of my own shoes, basking in the intensity of Mozart’s last piece of music, staring at a perfectly uncanny rendering of that image that had haunted me for the vast majority of my life. The original specter of my torpor brought to the plane of the awake.
There, in the very center of the piece, was the woman. As though I had painted it myself in a fit of inspired sleepwalking, the artist had identically captured the woman’s garish features—her crooked knees pointing in opposite directions at all times as if magnetically opposed, her wilted gums layered with disease and patches of blood sacs, the straw-like strands of hair coming from random parts of her body, her breasts, and their distinct circular scarring, and her eyes with their irises constantly shifting in size in an off-kilter rhythm were all intact in vivid strokes of color and technique.
It was simply impossible; I had never mentioned the woman to another soul. She had appeared again and again in brief flashes, cameos throughout the years, as a phantom, a feature in other nightmares with less striking figures at their core. The Old Woman had been there throughout every phase of my life, though it had been almost five years since I could remember seeing her.
Lachrymosa ended and began again.
Maintaining my composure as best as I could with my body as my mind did a thousand front-flips trying to conjure up any grounded explanation for how Holinger and his team could have presented such a thing to me in this way, I locked eyes with her, I could feel her connection with me, this inanimate image ripped directly from the raw lab of my mind.
A somber and foreboding chill settled itself at the base of my neck, throbbing with fear and a significant lack of understanding, a paralysis in the face of something utterly without reason.
She had been brought here, he had brought her forth, called her to this realm to sit idly on a canvas and mock me with her terrifying existence, waving her broken fingers and croaking out insults about how we are doomed to be intertwined in slumber forever; after all, it was I who had created her, molded her frightening image from the clay of my own young experience. She was my burden to bear in silence.
The music slowly faded out and there was a crackle from the speakers as though someone was changing over a record. Then a modulated, hazed-out-eerie voice rang out across the exhibit.
“Dr. Lerner, gaze here upon the purest form of your young mind. We have taken many painstaking sessions to bring this here woman of your mind to life for you. You will see her again. We both know that. If you will, at your leisure, make your way to the door to your right and you will be ushered into the next exhibit we have to show you.”
I could not discern how much time I had been there, planted in my position, stewing in the anti-rapturous rush of seeing something I had no hopes of comprehending, like overdosing on nostalgia. It could have been five minutes. It could have been three hours.
Wiping a thin layer of sweat from my head, I slowly turned on my heels and walked to my left, maintaining eye contact with the hideous creature behind the glass as I moved. Reaching out without looking, I grabbed the handle of the door and stepped out of her line of sight.
The next room was much larger. Even without the aid of any light, there was an air about the room that was grander in scope, wider in ambition, that permeated the darkness. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the lack of light, I could just barely make out the general form of a medium-sized stage at the head of the room in front of me. Based on a semi-blind assessment, it looked to be around three feet raised off the floor.
Suddenly, a series of candles at the front of the stage lit themselves and an orange glow bathed the room. Now with the ability to see, I reasoned this second room was at least three times bigger than the first room had been. Looking around at the ten or so rows of old red velvet theater seats between me and the stage, I realized I was very likely about to play audience member for some no-doubt ungodly form of theater.
“Dr. Lerner, we here at the Gallery do cordially invite you to pick any seat you would like and prepare yourself for a show unlike any other,” Holinger’s voice bellowed from another set of speakers.
My palms, regrettably, were already sweating. I looked around once more, locked eyes with a seat in the middle of the room, and took my place there. As soon as I sat down, the candles extinguished themselves and a dim spotlight beamed its beacon onto the center of the curtain. I heard the sound of pulleys creaking and jerking somewhere off-stage as the curtain was pulled back in spasmodic intervals revealing a bare stage.
A deafening symphony unfamiliar to me rang out across the space and then there were dozens of people inexplicably on the stage. I assumed they were people, actors of some troupe that Holinger had employed, though their human form was unrecognizable beneath their costumes and masks, surreal and grotesque uniforms that immediately sent me into a fearful state of intense paralysis.
I had seen these shapes before, just as I had seen the painted woman before. These were specters, haunters of my worst deep-sleep horror shows. They stood in formations that would appear random to anyone else other than me, but I had seen them in those positions many times before. I remembered the way the proceedings would go, for these hellish figments had frequently warped themselves into my most precious of dreams.
My mind could not function, having been sent into a state of suspension by the appearance in the flesh of concepts that by-all-accounts are intangible by design, by necessity. My eyes shifted back and forth rapidly, as though in waking R.E.M., as they continued to scan the unnatural and foul features of the approximately sixty shadows of my unconscious paraded before me.
They were all there. Even the nightmarish antagonists that I had long forgotten, or never remembered in the first place, were before me. How does one fathom such a thing? In short, one cannot.
I stood up and made my way to the front of the stage on legs that would not cease trembling. The unknown symphony came to a halt and a familiar crackle filled its place.
“Yes, Dr. Lerner, surely you as a student and expert on the human subconscious can understand the significance of what you are witnessing. See them all before you! The garish creations of your own mind, the rotten leftovers sent to the depths by your intellect, these rendered demons of your own molding stand mere feet away from your waking form. Though horrific in nature, the achievement you and I have gleaned by their very existence here tonight is one you surely must surrender at the feet of.”
I heard what Holinger said, but I could not focus on the meaning of his words and suggestions. Instead, I found myself hypnotized by the foul movements of those vile creations before me. First, I settled my gaze on one in the back, only slightly familiar to me, with its gaping wide-eyed stare into an unknown location, its arms jerking in reprehensible ways, its vomit-stained apron swaying in slow motion; the figure seemed to me to be agony incarnate, worthy of pity at distance. Now that it had been exhibited to me in the waking hours, where my conscious mind could attempt to analyze, I realized the wraith was a ghoulish interpretation of a former patient of mine that had gone missing years ago and had since been presumed dead. I had forgotten her in the intervening decade or so, along with the temporary nightmares her disappearance had induced upon me. There she stood, unmistakable dead and in pain as she had been in those dreams so long before.
Slowly moving from figment to figment, I registered them all as people I had encountered throughout my life, mostly in the worst moments of it. In tandem with lingering shock and a fundamental lack of understanding in regard to how they were all before me, I likewise felt a ping of validation for those in the psychiatric field who championed the idea that nightmares are manifestations of the mind’s attempts to sort out the worst moments man encounters in their lives.
Even though their distorted features, the ensemble of hell-figures was indeed a collective work of art. Holinger was right, though I was now convinced he was a madman that was tempting the natural order of things whilst simultaneously violating the deepest privacies of his guests, sucking out their darkest essences and displaying them without consent. It was immoral, verging on evil.
“Dr. Lerner, your shock is apparent. When you wish to move on to the final room we have for you, please step to the left of stage right and through the door.”
There was hardly a moment that passed between the end of his announcement and my body turning towards the door and making my way over there, for I could not bear the idea of having to spend another second in the company of those bastardized forms I had sired. I wished I could banish the entire experience, scrub it from the recesses of my memory. My resolve to complete the “experience” was dangling by the thinnest of threads.
I gagged, which triggered the destruction of the last internal dam between me and a tremendous migraine. My temples grew hot and began to throb incessantly as I reached out and opened the door.
Once again, I stepped forward into complete darkness.
I smelled body odor and a faint hint of piss. The air was damp, moist with the combination of exhaled breaths and confined space. My instincts told me I was both not alone and in the smallest room I had yet encountered.
“Hello?” I muttered.
I heard a grunt and a clap. Suddenly, there were hands all over me, gripping tightly at all parts of my body, holding me in place. Then there was a sharp jabbing pain in my neck, without a doubt a needle. I felt all of my limbs begin to numb, followed by everything below my eyes. I had been physically rendered immobile, paralyzed completely by whatever drug cocktail Holinger’s assistant had injected inside me.
“Sorry for the discomfort, Dr. Lerner. This is entirely necessary, I assure you. My hope is that you will understand in just a moment, perhaps even thank me,” the madman’s voice whispered into my ear.
The hands wrapped around my legs and torso and lifted me into the air, carrying me an unknown distance before placing me down onto a hard surface. Then came the squeal of hinges followed by a soft thud on all sides of me. In the blackness, with only my eyes to feel sensation, I could detect movement around whatever vessel I had been placed in. The vessel was lifted and we were carried again. At last, the thing was placed down.
There was another clearing of the throat and a series of shuffling before silence once again descended on my lifeless form.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to pay loving respect to a staple of our community taken from us far too soon. One-by-one, we invite you to step up to the coffin and address the deceased however you may choose.”
I was in a coffin. I did understand. This was my Tom Sawyer fantasy corrupted.
The lid to the coffin was raised and I was helplessly splayed out for a room full of people. Had my mouth been able to move, it would have shifted and opened when my eyes cast themselves on the attendees of this mock funeral—everyone I had ever known, the partners in every interaction I had ever had grouped in an infinite mass, an endless line leading out into the world.
Sure enough, despite my frantic blinking protests, one-by-one the cast members of my human experience stepped to the edge of the coffin and spoke to me, some of them kissing my cheek or weeping tears onto my forehead. Here I was, the Tom Sawyer of the moment, the lucky one who could finally bear witness to my own posthumous legacy, my incalculable impact on the lives of my fellow citizens.
However, in this pantomime, the exact replicas of these people did not sing praises or place laurels. Instead, they spoke of disappointments, failures, lost chances, destroyed relationships, broken kitchenware, ugly fights, nasty bouts of alcoholism, adulterous mistakes, lapses in ethical counseling, drunken rants and slurs, inability to be decent at public functions, and every other thing one so desperately wishes would stay forever forgotten in the past. Imagine being held accountable for every single human error, every minute infraction in the messy timeline of life, every lapse in perfect behavior natural to the human experience. To make it worse, the most scathing of indictments were muttered from the cold lips of those closest to me—my mother, my ex-wife, my sister.
An eternity later, as I lay stewing in the condemnations of my life’s shortcomings, the worst was yet to come. For at the back of the line, saved for the finale, were the various patients I had not been able to keep from the brink of oblivion. Tears filled my eyes as they each stood over me, spat at me, and described in explicit detail how the last thing that went through their minds before pulling the triggers was the platitude I had last offered them. They assured me that I had been the one who had finally pushed them to the edge, my perceived impartiality to their suffering had directly resulted in their suicides.
Everyone said a prayer for my soul and shuffled out of the makeshift chapel. Unseen hands closed the coffin lid and carried me. The coffin was stood up on its bottom and turned over. My body flopped out of its position and I tumbled through the air into a large hole of dirt.
There I remained as two burly men heaped dirt onto me, burying me alive in a pauper’s grave.
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I woke up in my car, the engine still running.
Though they tingled with the sensation of having been asleep, my limbs moved, the nerves sending the signals of sensation.
I was alive. Had it all been a dream?
I felt on my neck and found a sore spot with a little band-aid of some kind plastered over where I had been injected.
It had certainly been real.
As my awareness returned in full, I could sense the dull ache threatening to move from my temples throughout my entire form. I was drenched in a cold sweat and my clothes were plastered to my skin. Inside, I felt nothing, completely without emotion or understanding of anything that just that afternoon had seemed unshakeable, all that I had held to be a fundamental truth of life had been revoked, chewed, digested, and vomited back into my soul.
I drove home in silence, my teeth chattering, my hands gripping the steering wheel until they turned translucent.
I slept for an entire day; the sleep was dreamless. I had no experience left to leech, no memory to deform.
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The next day, that being today, I sat down at my home computer and began to write this account.
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Holinger invited me so that I may provide an endorsement. This will have to suffice.
I have little doubt that the law enforcement in town will find themselves much too incompetent to deal with or vanquish whatever otherworldly pseudoscience/alchemy that Dr. Gustav Holinger is practicing under the guise of artistic creation within the confines of that building we used to hold so dear and innocent in its previous incarnation.
They will try. They will fail.
People in town will continue to be invited—Holinger cannot help but demonstrate his esoteric methods to the great defect of anyone who takes him up on his invitation.
People in town will continue to take him up on his invitation—human curiosity outweighs all other cravings natural to the human mind. They will attend, they will see their nightmares, and they will follow suit as I and the others have done.
If this account should find its way to the hands of an official in the possession of power, please heed the following warning to the extent of said power:
Stop this man by any means necessary. His secrets are dangerous, his methods are a disgrace to the public at large in whatever area he finds himself allowed to be in.
Finally, to those reading this that are close to me, those that whispered those most honest and vile diagnoses to my waning shape in the coffin, you will find the will in the safe underneath my office desk, please take note of the most recent addendums made following my trip to the gallery, they represent the most accurate and up-to-date of my final wishes.
If I were to resist the temptation banging its intentions out on the great gates of my brain, I know I would be eternally damned to a lifetime of stagnation—time and my body’s aging would press onward, but my mind would remain where it met its foe and lost: Holinger’s Gallery.
I go now to find reprieve from a mind overwhelmed with itself and knowledge of its ultimate future.
Think of me fondly, if you dare.