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Entry #3: Sunday, January 20, 1925 ~ 11:47pm
I shall have to make a trip to the local speakeasy before long. The bottle of brandy I keep concealed in my apartment is three-fourths emptied. This is a matter of some concern, at least for the time being, as I certainly don't want to allow myself any degree of dependency on the stuff - even solely as a sleep aid.
I shouldn't keep liquor at all - not because I care anything for the legal ramifications, but because the underlying temptation is always there.
Oh, but I need a drink...
No.
No, I don't need a drink. That would be the old me speaking. I know I never killed her; she merely tucked herself away into the dark corners of my psyche where she could taunt me at will. Well, my method of defeating her is simple: ignore her, at all costs. I won't think about that craving. I shall consider other things, and hopefully lull myself to slumber by more innocuous means instead.
I thought about Dougal all day today. My last journal entry prompted it, I suppose. One of these days I might actually read all the mail he sent me while he was overseas...
I stated that I had "never seen the body, nor did I shed a tear at his death," but I confess I was not entirely forthcoming with that statement. It is the truth that I shed no tears - initially. I was in a state of shock. My father cried, my brothers all cried, but I, who had been his closest confidante, could feel nothing. I was the one who ultimately made the decision not to have his body brought back to the United States; it was my feeling that he ought to lie on the ground he had fought to defend.
The uselessness of it all pervaded me with a directionless rage that left me determined not to shed tears on his behalf. I nigh shook with a constant fury, an anger that fueled my already restless inner self. I became waspish and short-tempered, snarling at anyone who so much as glanced my direction in a manner I might have perceived as awry. People began to avoid me, and I am ashamed to admit, with sound reason.
A few weeks after he died - I believe it was Christmas; I recall that there were decorations and snow, at any rate - I found myself back in Arkham at university, sitting in the campus courtyard with my coat and scarf wrapped snug about myself. In one hand I carried a handful of envelopes; they were all the letters he had written to me in his absence, the ones I had never read. After perhaps an hour of blankly watching the snow fall, I assembled the letters by chronological order, opened the first one, and began to read.
I could go no farther than the first two paragraphs of the first letter before I uttered a cry of despair and unutterable loss, collapsed from the bench onto my knees, and screamed my anguish and grief into the freezing depths of a New England blizzard. For what must have been at least a half-hour, likely more, I crouched on hands and knees, impervious to the cold, rocking back and forth with deep, painful sobs wracking my frame. Try as I might, I could not force the awful truth from my consciousness: My brother, my best and only true friend, had died in some godforsaken filthy trench alone and in agony, and out of childish, selfish fury I had turned my back on him. He had not betrayed our trust in each other; I had. The guilt and self-loathing I felt... I cannot even begin to describe it.
To this day I have neither opened nor reread any of the letters, including the only one I ever attempted to read.
Perhaps one day, I'll be able to read the letters he sent. But not now. Even eight years later, the wounds are still raw, and I am still beset by demons that have plagued me since my childhood. Dougal was the only person who ever came anywhere close to understanding me. Understand in turn, diary, that I seek no sympathy for my situation. To claim otherworldly power is to risk categorization as a lunatic in this modern age and I have no wish to be labelled as such for various reasons - not the least of them being that were I considered to be insane, I could conceivably lose my license to practice medicine. My brother never once questioned my sanity when I told him of the things I had seen and heard. If he felt my sanity was less than solid, he never opined as such to my face.
I miss him terribly. I wish sometimes that I could see him, just once. If not him, then at least visit his grave and tell him I never meant the beastly things I said to him the day before he left for Southampton, that I spoke out of anger rather than sincerity. My logic tells me he knew this, otherwise he would not have faithfully sent me correspondence; however, my guilty conscience, like all guilt-ridden souls, feels the innate need to be assuaged of its sins - imagined or real.
I had little time to grieve his passing. A far more pressing matter usurped my attention, and that was the arrival of the Spanish influenza. It had been spreading like wildfire in Boston; before long, it found its way to Arkham and the neighboring communities, and ate its way through the town like a malignant cancer. Miskatonic was forced to close its doors until further notice as students and faculty alike succumbed to the dread disease. Townspeople who had managed to remain well packed their bags and fled - at least, those who had no ill relatives to anchor them, and some attempted to take sickening children and elderly parents with them to Boston in search of a cure that didn't exist.
In all the furor and panic, no one had thought to go to Arkham Sanitarium, the state-run home for the insane, and inquire as to whether or not assistance was required there. I was but a recent graduate and seeing my fellow students jump in feet-first at the local clinic, it occurred to me that no news had come from the mental hospital since the flu outbreak began. I took it upon myself to pack a bag of supplies and make my way to the eastern edge of Derby Street.
As I had expected, three-fourths of the patients were dying. Twenty had died already, and ten more took ill the day before I came. Dr. Hardstrom, the asylum director, was at the point of tearing out his hair. The house physician had died three days before my arrival. When I stated my name and explained that I was a doctor, I fancied I could see tears of relief in the poor man's exhausted eyes.
It was working at Arkham Sanitarium and using my healing skills amongst the insane, that I first truly encountered them. My hackles initially rose at the prospect of dealing with those that had lost their reason - until I spoke with them myself. Some were beyond my reach, the schizophrenics especially, wandering through their fabricated realities and oblivious to the death surrounding them - or acutely aware and attributing it to a more sinister cause as did one gentleman of thirty or so who screamed something about old gods devouring the planet.
Some seemed as sane as I, at least on the surface. I had only to look into their faces and see the haunted, broken expression in their eyes. Sad and defeated, tormented but with a pitiful sort of dignity, the scraps of self-preservation drawn about a shattered soul. It was this very thing which determined that, after requested by Dr. Hardstrom, I should move onwards regardless of the pay offered me as an assistant director and house physician of the asylum. I knew that look in the eyes of the insane. I knew it all too well. I had seen it in the face of my mother.
Moreover, I had seen it in myself. (I would see it far more often in future, after I had succumbed to alcohol and its excesses.) It was very akin to peering into a distorted mirror, and I found myself extremely distressed by it.
I wonder sometimes what might have happened had I remained in Arkham and accepted duty as a doctor at a mental hospital. I really do. I don't think I could have remained there and retained my own sanity. It was an issue I don't believe that I explained well to Dr. Hardstrom, simply because I had no solid reasoning to give him other than a feeling. As I stated in my previous entry - should I spend my days among those of aberrant behavior, my own aberrations would seem not only acceptable by their standards, but perfectly normal, when they were very clearly no such thing. I could not, in all consciousness, risk such a thing.
As it stands, my brother's words had planted a seed of disquiet in me: I feared secretly that I could go mad quite easily without any aid from outside sources whatsoever. I sometimes fear I have and simply haven't realized it yet...
I need to stop. Dark thoughts such as these only intensify my cravings for alcohol-induced oblivion.
On that cheerful note, I am due to meet with the others tomorrow so as to share our findings. Perhaps I can set up all those appointments. Work always takes my mind off personal matters...
I shall away to seek my bed, before the lesser half of my nature triumphs. Adieu.
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