Human Candles
A 19th Century Occultic Horror Tale by D. Martel
You can find Human Candles in Issue 5 of The Bizarchives
Some years prior, during my brief stint haunting the halls of the University of Pennsylvania, I met a man of untold genius. A mind of exception far beyond the hinder of institutional intelligentsia. It was 1898, the Spanish-American War was at full thrust, and I, an aspiring academic, was pining for a career in the natural sciences. However, despite my best efforts, my marks were lacking prestige.
Hailing from a familial background of studious and learned men, I greatly desired to carry the torch. Folding my hand at university and settling for a livelihood among the laboring class would have been interpreted by my family as a stain upon their reputation as proper Yankee aristocrats. A prejudice I found haughty, but nonetheless, if I wanted my right to inheritance, one must acquiesce on such infinitesimal traditions.
It was a particularly stormy summer in Philadelphia of 1898. Many evenings, I scampered urgently down the flooded cobblestone streets, clinging dearly to my bowler as the howling wind tried to tear it from my thinning crown. The hardwood hallways at the university residence hall on such occasions looked more akin to a trawler deck than a dormitory. Despite its dampness, the hall was a place of stimulation and camaraderie. Students, tutors, and traveling professors found interest among the many debates and discussions often had over foaming pewter steins. The halls and harrows echoing with the murmuring song of intellectual chatter or the occasional rowdy banter.
It was one evening in particular when I met the eccentric Dr. Piers William Levick. A man some twenty years my senior with thick, swarthy features and ovular spectacles. He was of slight build and spoke with a noticeable frontal lisp. The students would oft rib about his manner of speech with an impression of “Dr. Peerth, at your thervith.” A man of easy demeanor, Dr. Levick would indulge their hecklings by responding with one of his many avoided words. My favorite of his butchered pronunciations being “presumptuous.”
Upon our first meeting at one of the many uniformly arranged mess tables, Dr. Levick unfurled a lengthy dissertation outlining his idealist weltanschauung. And with every refill of lager, he unraveled an evermore unorthodox theorem. You see, Dr. Piers Levick was a premier of the progressivist ideology, albeit an unusual variety. While his contemporaries championed revolutionary enlightenment philosophies, he argued that such positions were milquetoast and that focus should be upon a strive towards scientific apotheosis. Despite being an esteemed expert in biology and natural sciences, Dr. Levick considered the academies as rigid materialists doomed to mundane and inconsequential discoveries due to their narrow understanding of truth.
Having a young man’s streak of innate rebellious spirit, I found his dissident critique of the institutions to be wildly intriguing. I found myself attending all of his lectures and burying my nose in any literature of his recommendation. I became Dr. Levick’s most ardent pupil. And as I ventured further into his tutelage, the more adept I became. My other coursework that felt daunting months prior quickly became rudimentary for me.
One morning after Levick concluded a particular instruction, I noticed an odd tome of antiquity among his notes. A worn, leather-bound book with symbolic engravings on the cover. This artifact struck my curiosity. After some reluctance, he explained that it was the records of experimentation from one John Dee, a 16th century occultist and mathematician who claimed to have communed with angelic entities through scrying — the act of meditational focus into a reflective surface in order to contact metaphysical or supradimensional beings. I was unsure of the validity of such practice, but my mentor appeared quite enthralled by what he called “alchemy.” An antiquated conception of science that most credentialed sort would consider below their acumen.
It was then that Dr. Levick proposed I become his aid in his private research efforts and help man his laboratory. With a stoic face he warned that none of our research may be seen by anyone else for any reason. That this was his life’s work, to be guarded in secrecy at all cost, and any breach would be repaid with the absolute most severe of consequences. Without hesitation I accepted and signed a contract he presented.
The subsequent weeks were devoted to attempting to measure and document the environment during a successful scrying session. This proved problematic as almost all self-proclaimed occultists who participated in the study failed to demonstrate any sort of ability. After dozens of failed attempts, a subject of peculiar visage arrived to participate. She was unusually tall for a woman and hid her face behind an oriental silk scarf. The control room was a small area of common design. In the middle sat an angled wooden desk with the black scrying mirror before it. In the back sat Dr. Levick and I.
The woman entered with little interaction and sat at the desk. After an hour or so of indecipherable whispered chants, she appeared to enter a focused state. As she rocked to and fro, her eyes winced visibly and she began to perspire. Our lab tables were outfitted with various peculiar and archaic instruments — metal orbs dangling from wires, swaying antennae, and copper tuning forks. As her focus began to crescendo, to our shock and surprise, the forks hummed with vibrational energy. In unison with the forks, a swirling and disjointed apparition appeared in the mirror’s glass. Then in a moment it all abruptly stopped.
With a deep breath the occultist woman calmly rose to her feet and approached us. Staring straight at the door she spoke in a hoarse voice.
“You will find what you seek, boys. Unfortunately.” She said as she turned the bronze door handle before passing into the dark hallway.
Dr. Levick and I were at a loss for words, staring at one another with widened eyes of profundity. After numerous fruitless experiments, this one mysterious woman had provided exactly the results we so desperately desired. Immediately, Dr. Levick began speculating upon what may have been the source of causation, what she and the magicians of old could have channeled in order to emit this energy.
I raised concerns about the cryptic warning she proposed before taking her leave — that our experimentation would yield an unfortunate outcome. However, such concerns were wholly ignored as if Dr. Levick heard nothing of the sort. He was drunk with intrigue and nothing could break his focus.
After much pontification, Dr. Levick lifted his finger in epiphany. “Pain! Focused pain!” He shouted.
“If you noticed, my good lad, our subject seemed to have been forcing herself into a meditative state of suffering. It is widely known that such states emit signals, vibrations perhaps, when one experiences extreme pain. Many studies demonstrate that twins will experience shared pain or be alerted to the condition of their sibling even though they are not present.” Levick said.
This revelation led to a peculiar series of experimentation. Under Dr. Levick’s order I went about the city to find downtrodden and derelict individuals willing to participate for small amounts of compensation. Individuals who, due to their desperate circumstances, have less regard for their personal well-being — hobos, urchins, and the like. Despite their reprobate nature, many of these sorts were restive in regards to agreeing to such requests without knowing the manner of that which was being asked of them. While frustrating, it was not unreasonable. I didn’t even know what Dr. Levick had in store for them.
Until finally, a drunkard who simply introduced himself as “Thompson” agreed to be our subject, with the caveat that it would not include anything of a lewd or salacious act. Although unsure of the exact details myself, I was confident that nothing of the sort would be involved. Thompson was a slovenly and portly fellow with a thick, greying mustache and swollen features. He rarely spoke above a mumble and cast a sour odor from his tattered clothing. When we arrived at the lab, Dr. Levick was ecstatic. Like a fluttering hummingbird, Dr. Levick began to brief Thompson with his typical neurotic ramblings. Unable to keep attention, the hobo nodded along as if he understood. Unawares, Thompson was led over to the desk still sitting before the black mirror.
“I am going to inject you with a very miniscule dose of fish oil. Do not be alarmed, it is not lethal; however, you will briefly feel the effects.” Levick explained with his hand on Thompson’s shoulder. Thompson nodded, and Dr. Levick pulled a syringe from his back apron. The needle plunged into his arm as Levick slowly squeezed the plunger, injecting its contents into the man’s bloodstream.
“Fish oil?” I whispered.
“A blend of my invention containing Tetrodotoxin, extracted from a breed of fish the Japanese call Fugu. It is not yet known here in the western world.” Levick whispered into my ear.
The rotund derelict began to convulse and foam at the mouth. With each twitch his body became more rigid, not even able to shift his gaze. The doctor caught his falling head before it collided onto the desktop and gently set it down.
“The metal cart — please roll it over here.” Levick pointed to the far side of the room.
The cart’s wheels clacked on the tiles as I rolled it briskly across the floor and over to him. He pulled back the draped cloth to reveal a disturbing array of various tools — augers, claws, toothed clamps, and hooks. He grabbed a leather lash from the end of the tray and began to whip the paralyzed man in rapid succession. Still conscious but frozen in place, Thompson was as a sedated lab rat, with Levick’s strikes snapping against the flesh of his back. After several minutes of the lashing, Levick looked up in excitement to notice slight movement from the metal orbs and tuning forks.
“Yes! Yes! Here, quick! Take the lash and continue probing the subject!” Dr. Levick shouted as he handed me the whip. I continued to beat him with the same timing in order not to disrupt the experiment. Dr. Levick ran over to the mirror as it started to blur and swirl.
“Yes! Hello? I am Dr. Levick, can you hear me? Can you see me?” he said frantically with his hands on the glass.
“Harder! Beat him harder!” Levick shouted.
My swings became swifter and more heavy-handed as the various contraptions began to resonate with more intensity, a similar vibration in the room to when the strange woman performed her meditations. The doctor’s excitement rose as apparitions began to form from the swirling abyss in the mirror. Then abruptly it all stopped, and the bowels of a now lifeless Thompson evacuated down his trouser legs and onto the floor. His limp body tilted sideways and collapsed onto the hard tiles. Vacant and bulging bloodshot eyes stared up towards the ceiling.
“No! No! You pathetic lout!” Thompson’s hefty corpse wobbling with each of Dr. Levick’s enraged kicks. He stopped to take a deep breath and regain his composure.
“Wasn’t that magnificent?! A failure of an experiment but not fruitless. This has proved my theory correct! Concentrated suffering activates the mirror. It must be the vibrations in the aether? No, it’s the heightened bio-electric response? We’re going to find out. But my hunch was right — that’s all that matters. We’re going to need some time to concoct an even more effective method.” Levick rambled, standing over the tortured body.
“And what about Thompson?” I asked.
“Thompson? Oh, the subject. Yes, an unfortunate end. Please, dispose of it, if you don’t mind.” He said.
A cold chill went up my spine as I looked down upon the purpling face of Thompson, which was now frozen into a twisted expression of hideous anguish. In the heat of the moment I failed to realize the gravity of the situation. It was pure rapture; my adrenaline was at its peak, and this poor delinquent was a mere subject, or shall I say object, to be used for our experimentation. A human being reduced to the status of a frog to be dissected in order to venture further into our Faustian thirsts for discovery. It is unlikely anyone would miss or notice a street dweller like Thompson. But I couldn’t help but question the ethics of this. Furthermore, what chilled me most of all was Dr. Levick’s dispassionate reaction. A corpse lay before him yet he had no panic, nor anxiety. We were now murderers, but no such consideration entered his mind. I worried that his obsession with this thesis was corrupting his ethics. Or worse perhaps, he never had any to begin with. He did, after all, shroud all of this in secrecy. Did he know the trajectory of this path would yield such monstrous fruits? It is unlikely a man of his intellect wouldn’t be able to foresee such outcomes. Or perhaps, worst of all, that I too was a mere subject in Dr. Levick’s machinations.
If the latter was indeed true, I had no recourse. If I was to go to the authorities, it was I who lured the man to his doom, and it was I who held the lash in his final moments. Even a bum deserves greater dignity in his final moments than what we gave ol’ Thompson. I can’t think of a crueler death, if I am being honest. Trapped within the prison of your own flesh, unable to move, unable to scream. Having full awareness and sensation while being methodically beaten like a dusty rug. It was barbaric in ways that would make a medieval dungeon guard squirm. Even if equal punishment was awarded to both Dr. Levick and I, the stain of shame upon my family for being involved in torturing and murdering a man would be ineluctable. And if indeed we ended up standing before a judge, whom would they have believed? The brilliant and prestigious Dr. Piers William Levick? Or me? A nameless student desperate for accolades in a highly competitive field. My fate was already set in motion. I was at the mercy of Dr. Levick’s vision. A pawn in his enterprises, and what hath been woven for us by the moirai is now inexorably conjoined.
It was a burdensome and grim task to dispose of Thompson. Even the most herculean of grips would have found hoisting his carcass a troublesome feat. To ease the awkward sway of his lifeless limbs, I wrapped him in burlap and bound him head to toe in hemp rope. Using a rafter-fastened pulley, I lifted his shrouded body into an old wooden cart. I then chained him to a concrete block and covered the entire cart with a canvas tarp. In the cover of night I wheeled it to an old boat dock and tipped it. I miscalculated the buoyancy of the corpse and watched as the wrapped body of Thompson slowly floated downcurrent like a piece of wayward driftwood until he was out of sight. For the first time in broad memory, I said a prayer for Thompson’s soul. And for mine.
As the weeks went on, Dr. Levick grew ever more neurotic and avoidant in divulging the details of his theory. My disposition on the matter of Thompson must have been obvious to him, as his trust in me waned — but not in regards to my involvement in executing the experimentation. He was clearly concerned about protecting his research. I would oft look over to find him nervously hunching over his writings, protecting them from my possible gaze even when I was nowhere in vicinity. Rarely would more than a few moments pass before his paranoid eyes shifted to the side to monitor my movements. Increasingly, his concern for possible “plagiarists” became a frequent topic in our discussions. We both became truants and left the lab less and less as the days passed. I would oft wake in the night to find Dr. Levick pacing and rambling under his breath. I was unsure he slept at all, as the color in his complexion became yellowish and pale and his figure became more emaciated. I too wasted in health and form as I spent my days fulfilling tasks of scouring books and retrieving equipment for his next experiment.
Even during the most mundane assignment, he would reiterate with nauseating repetition about the plagiarists. As if the omnipresent gaze of these caitiffs was waiting to strike the moment a cloth was lifted too long or a page was left uncovered. The plagiarists were always watching, even when he was alone in a locked room. I very much enjoyed my time away from the lab, where I could smell the fresh air and hear the voices of others as they spoke of even the most rudimentary things. As I was standing in line at the grocer, I overheard an elderly woman discuss her recipe for poppyseed muffins. It wasn’t the allure of hot muffins that intrigued me but the sound and cadence of how she spoke. It was almost like a symphony beckoning me to reclaim my humanity. The isolation in the lab had clouded my mind and plunged me into a numbing, depressive state. I suddenly had the urge to run — to flee back to my family estate and confess it all to my father. I am his son, after all. Perhaps he would protect me if I admitted that I was manipulated and coerced by Levick. But, nevertheless, I played this fantasy in my head as I slavishly marched back to the lab with a satchel full of canned food. And like every time before, Levick hurried me inside before scanning up and down the alleyway for lurking plagiarists and locking the door shut with a series of deadbolts.
I installed more pulleys, wheeled in five seven-foot-tall glass vats, and stacked jugs with various odd fluids in them. I built a rack in order to stack four-foot-long rods of magnesium, about half an inch in circumference. Under close instruction, I climbed a wood ladder and dumped exact amounts of different liquids into the large glass tubes. Formic acid, saline solution, and gelatin, among other ingredients, were poured into the vats, creating a foul-smelling slurry that I mixed with a long boat oar. After each use, the oars had to be sanitized in a pot of boiling water and alcohol. After several days of preparation, Dr. Levick’s next task was to acquire more subjects — five subjects in total. It was at this moment I realized that these five vats of concoction were going to house five unknowing subjects.
“I can’t do it. I can’t lure more men to their deaths.” I said.
“I’ll tell you what you can’t do, my boy. You can’t renege now. I assure you, this is the finale — the final experiment to bring this all together. Don’t you want to be here when we make the greatest discovery of human history?!” Levick explained with wild eyes.
“Thompson now floats in the Delaware River because of me. He was a living, breathing man and now he is feeding the fish.” I said with swelling eyes.
“Who? Thompson? That fat cretin? A worthy end to a meaningless life. He died for something far greater. When we show the world what we’re about to uncover, there will be no regard for the lives of derelicts. He feeds the fish now. It was only a few winters until he fed the rats.” He argued.
“Dr. Levick, I have surely been expelled from the university. I am going to be shunned by my family. I must draw the line here.” I said.
“Draw the line? Okay, I will now draw you a line. I have here a few bottles of whiskey. In them is a dose of chloral hydrate. You are going to take them and give them to five derelicts. A few minutes after they drink them, they will go unconscious. You will then load them up into your cart and bring them back here.” Levick said.
“I refuse. And if you try to force me, it will come to blows.” I threatened with clenched fists.
Dr. Levick drew a revolver from his waist. “No. No it will not. You are going to complete this last assignment. And if you do not return in two hours’ time, I will inform the police of your crime. You see, young man, every document in this lab — and the ones I’ve placed among your belongings back at university — are signed with your name, which I copied from our contract. Every piece of evidence demonstrates that this entire experiment is of your invention.” He explained deviously with his revolver pointed at my chest.
“What?! But why?! What about the plagiarists? I thought this was your life’s work?” I asked in a panic.
“A means to an end. None of this will matter. Papers and studies and endless superfluous discourse speculating the most tedious details of mundanity. All filth! Science is just pigs rolling back and forth in their own mud. Now they speak of progress and revolution — as if that isn’t more of the same. We, my boy, we are going to speak with God!” he shouted with ecstasy in his deranged eyes.
There was no way out. My naivety had led me into the web of a predator. A psychopath of the highest order. I was first enamored by his unorthodoxy and prestige and then simply considered him a victim of his own genius. I pitied him, thinking he had sunk into an obsession and gone mad. But I was correct in my worst fears — he was mad from the moment I met him. He carefully selected me due to my desperation and desire to pursue an easy path to esteem. He knew that my status as a blueblood would cloud my judgment, as I would be concerned with familial ramifications. And he predicted that I wouldn’t detect the scheming motives behind his behaviors. I was unsure how much of this was an act and what was genuine. My discernment between truth and untruth began to unravel in my sleep-deprived mind. The isolation, the sleepless nights — how much of it was by design to procure me? How much of it was authentic? I couldn’t know, I couldn’t tell. Was that part of his plan as well? To incrementally separate me from normalcy in all fashions — even detach me from my ability to discern reality itself.
I wasn’t sure if I seduced myself with false logic or if the prospects of the conclusion Dr. Levick described truly excited me. But I went to the streets in the dark of night with enthused vigor and did exactly as he commanded. With relative ease I found five drunkards, gave them their drink with the deception that I couldn’t partake without the bedevilment of a tyrannical wife. With little argument they all drank, and one by one they all fell unconscious. I stacked them into my cart, covered them, and wheeled them back to the lab. It was near comical that no policeman stopped me and no passerby even looked suspiciously as I wheeled a cart of sedated bodies around the city streets. On one occasion a man even stopped to ask me if I needed a hand. In lackadaisical fashion, he leaned upon my cart and told me about his time as a laboring youth. I briefly indulged him and apologetically explained that I’m on a short schedule and must be home to study. The man tipped his hat and commended me for my work ethic.
Upon returning to the lab, Dr. Levick had already prepared what was needed to continue the experiment. We placed a rubber breathing hose down their throats and sealed their nostrils with glue and staples. We then wrapped them in porous burlap and bound them in hemp rope. An extra length of rubber band was used to pull their heads down in a permanent, chin-tucked position. With use of the pulleys, we lowered them one by one into the vats of fluid with breathing hoses draped over the sides. After a few hours each of the men awoke and began to panic as they realized they were bound, blind, and submerged. Most of them gave up within an hour; however, one of them flailed rather ferociously through the night. But after realizing no escape was possible, he surrendered to just float, suspended in the fluid. When walking by the vats, near the breathing tube, one could hear the deep, labored breaths of the men. Dr. Levick made it a point to ensure that each man stayed alive. This close monitoring went on for several days until the heavy breathing reduced to gentle breaths and the occasional panicked kicks became involuntary twitches.
Every third morning, Dr. Levick would climb the ladder and stab a foot-long needle down into the shoulder flesh of one of the subjects. On the first occasion, the subject reacted with noticeable recoil. Several weeks passed of monitoring and probing the subjects. Day by day the relationship between me and Levick began to improve once again. We exchanged stories, had laughs, and even spent a night or two partaking in a few pints of beer as we did back in the university hall. He apologized for the encounter with the revolver and claimed that if the situation had escalated he would have lost his greatest pupil and colleague. I knew in the back of my mind that he was a madman holding me with threat of coercion. But I couldn’t help but feel elevated by his words. It was at that moment that I realized I too was a madman. Yes, Dr. Levick extorted me. Yes, he manipulated me. But it was I who stayed. It was I who forgone these supposed ethics and morals I pretended to be outraged about in my own mind. This entire time I feared the repercussions of disappointing my family. I scurried in the shadow of my father, knowing that they expected me to just meet the bare expectations in order to gain my inheritance — to shovel me off to school in hopes that I retrieved a pittance of accomplishment so as not to embarrass them. Well, it is they who disappoint me. They shall grovel at my feet when Dr. Levick’s and my vision comes to fruition. All of their meager earthly efforts will be but a squirt of piss in the face of a man who has spoken with God.
On the fifth week, Dr. Levick probed the first subject to find a fascinating discovery. As he plunged his needle into the shoulder flesh of the still-breathing subject, there was no reaction. Breathing accelerated, but no physical reaction was apparent. In addition, Levick could drive the needle into the flesh until he ran out of length.
“It is time, my boy! It is time! Hoist the subjects and suspend them by the mirror. We can unwrap them and let them dry.” He shouted.
I did as told and hoisted the subjects out of the vats using the pulley. The stench was pungent and sharp, like pickled rotten meat. After cutting the ropes and carefully unwrapping the men from their soaked shrouds, their appearance was quite peculiar. Despite the faint breathing of the subjects, there was no motion from the chest cavity. They were deathly still. Their skin had taken on a pale and dark greenish character, and those with open eyes were unblinking. Despite being swollen and discolored, the men were alive and breathing — frozen like pickled statues of inanimate flesh. The doctor and I set about dabbing them dry with cloths as they slowly spun and swayed, suspended by hooks with their heads facing downward.
“Grab the breathing hose and listen for a change in pace,” Levick requested.
I placed my ear to the hose as he pulled a carving knife from his wheel cart. He slowly sliced a finger from the rigid hand. The breathing accelerated as his knife passed through the man’s flesh, severing the finger. He was as still as a statue. Dr. Levick came over and placed the severed finger into my palm. Upon inspection, I noticed the texture of the flesh was strange — no bleeding, as the blood was coagulated into a similar texture as the flesh. It resembled a piece of soft cheese.
“This is amazing. No bleeding? And they’re still alive?” I asked.
“Yes. Their internal systems are still intact. They can breathe and feel sensation. However, the solution has softened their flesh and much of their skeletal structure.” He explained.
“So they can still feel pain but they can’t go into shock.” I said.
“Precisely! Now for the finale, my boy. We’re going to take those magnesium rods and plunge them behind their necks. Be very careful not to damage or make contact with the spine. You’re going to press them down until just above the tailbone.” He said.
“And then what?”
“And then one by one we’re going to light the magnesium rods. They will slowly spark and burn, melting the flesh away inch by inch for hours. We angled their heads downward so that it wouldn’t burn into their skulls and kill them. Each subject should give us approximately six hours of concentrated suffering.” Levick continued.
“Human candles…” I uttered with an astonished smile.
“Right! Brilliant!” He exclaimed.
“Can they hear us?” I asked.
“Let’s hope not. Lord, wouldn’t that be cruel.” He said as we both laughed.
With surgical care I took the magnesium rods and plunged them down into the flesh of the subjects. I could hear their breathing accelerate but couldn’t help but feel detached from these human candles — as if their humanity had already been removed. Or perhaps it was my humanity that had been removed. Nevertheless I carried out my task with perfect form. The rods were pressed down into the flesh of the subjects. Their panicked breathing created a disjointed rhythm as they slowly rotated in air. Dr. Levick dragged his chair to go sit before the mirror and sat there staring into its reflective black in silence for a few moments.
“Light the first one and then another after that one has burnt to completion. Let’s try that in succession.” He called to me.
I lit the first magnesium rod. It sparked and burned until the hot glow made contact with the flesh. I could hear labored breaths become more and more intense. At a snail’s crawl, the glow melted away the skin around it, exposing pink jelly and vertebrae. The tuning forks, hanging spheres, and other instruments began to vibrate and spin about with an intensity we had yet to see. Abyssal swirls and patterns began to appear in the mirror to Levick’s excitement. He started again with his lines of basic questions, attempting to get a reply. After a few hours a disembodied figure formed from the mutating shapes and patterns in the mirror’s glass.
“Yes! Hello! I am Dr. Piers William Levick — can you hear me?” he stated.
A ghostly, sepulchral tone vibrated from the mirror in stuttered syllables. A hideous choir of disharmonious pitches spoke forth in alien tongue. It responded but not in any recognizable human language — a series of low, humming shrieks and guttural trills. The figure’s visage of stewing grey cloud, splitting, forming, and folding in on itself, became an ominously expressionless face with simultaneously too many and too few features. Dr. Levick fell to his knees before the chthonic incorporeal entity with tears of joy streaming down his face.
“Yes! Please, my lord! Show me!” He begged.
His crying joy became confused panic as his arms jerked towards the mirror with otherworldly force. His hands bent backward as the skin around his forearms accordioned; splintered shards of shattered bone stabbed through his flesh. A blood-curdling roar of terror echoed from his mouth as his torso sucked against the glass with terrible magnetic pull. His screams pitched upward and became muffled as his ribcage flattened with a wet crunch. The skin around his skull ripped away, exposing the pink-white bone underneath. The soft flesh of his belly split and peeled back as the ropey contents of his insides were torn out and sucked into the mirror. I ran over as his body was twisting and breaking in ghastly ways, being pulled into the glass by the entity as it continued speaking in its ancient, funereal tongue. I leaped to grab the last flap of wet flesh. I dug my fingers into the eye sockets of a formless face, but it was ripped from my clutches and drawn into the mirror. I heard the clang of the rod’s iron core onto the tile floor as all commotion abruptly ceased, as it did with experiments prior. The mirror was now blank again and the room was eerily still. I turned around and stared blankly at the human candles suspended in air, slowly rotating, the rhythm of their labored breaths amplified in the empty room. I began to feel light-headed and made a few steps towards the desk to sit down. I lost my balance and fainted before I could sit, hitting my head on the thick plane of the desktop.
While unconscious I dreamed something that I cannot recall. It was a near-schizophrenic fever dream of fragmented memories and anxieties, the details of which probably couldn’t be articulated even if I could recollect them. All of the days and weeks of sleeplessness and exhaustion overcame me, and I lay there for hours. Eventually I pulled myself up and lumbered over to my cot. In a slumbering comatose my body forced me to recover all of my lost energy. With no discernment of time or day I finally arose. I cranked open a can of luncheon meat and a can of cold peas. I ate them slowly as I gazed upon the oddities of the human candles — the used subject with his spine cavity carved out, exposing a burnt spinal cord. I paced back and forth conspiring and pontificating. There was no other way than to continue the experimentation myself. If the authorities were to enter this lab they would find a disheveled young man, a few hanging pickled corpses, and a bloodstain in front of a mirror. Are they supposed to believe that the great Dr. Piers William Levick was sucked into another dimension by some extraplanar entity? And if they did believe it, I would surely be labeled as a practitioner of witchcraft by the looks of this morbid display.
So I gathered myself and decided I would continue on. I lit the first subject and walked over to the chair where Levick had been sitting before his demise. I sat with pen and paper to record the interactions with whatever strange entity I encountered, be they angel or devil or other. As before, the instruments began to react with similar intensity. The mirror came to life the same as before. I braced myself for my final moments, expecting an ethereal entity to pull me into this immaterial realm. I sat and stared into the swirling mists of the mirror until a figure formed that horrified me in a way I couldn’t fathom. It was Dr. Levick — in ghostly fashion as the entity came to him, but it was him as I knew him. He was discolored in a monochromatic grey similar to the other images.
“Hello, my boy! Dr. Levick at your thervith.” He spoke jovially but in a haunting, disembodied tone.
I spoke clearly with the apparition of Dr. Levick and he responded as he would have in life. I began with a line of questioning to confirm his identity. Although I was not a religious man, I come from strong Protestant roots. I know that demons are known for their deception. He answered in ways that satisfied my suspicions, at least to a degree that could be known. I then continued to ask where he was and if he had met God. Both answers were cryptic and unsatisfactory — to both he answered with simply “it’s complicated.” But he then divulged that beyond this world there is one where the confinements of reality do not exist. Constraints such as time and locality are not present. I asked if he was in heaven or Hades or a realm of the dead, to which he again responded that “it’s complicated.” I sat and noted everything he told me until six hours had gone by and he vanished from the glass.
I took a short rest and pondered over the results until lighting another subject. The same effects on the instrumentation once again. And like before, an apparition of Dr. Levick appeared from the cloudy, phantasmal forms. However, this time he seemed less of himself. Instead of avoidant responses, he would stay silent. The responses themselves took longer than before. The expressions upon his face grew fainter and less pronounced. After our second meeting I repeated the process, and with each session he grew more estranged and less responsive. The sound of his voice became more aberrant and hollow, often not even making eye contact — instead just staring through me as if I wasn’t there. Upon lighting the fifth and final subject, it took a great deal of time for him to appear. His visage was abnormal and elongated. There was no humanity behind his fading eyes as he stared blankly into the distance. He said nothing this time. And after ignoring my first few questions, he slowly dissipated, sinking deep into the fogs of some unknown abyss.
During my mirror scrying sessions with the apparition of Dr. Piers William Levick, he bestowed upon me some disturbing knowledge. While I retrieved little in the way of what strange otherworld he was pulled into, or who or what resides there, he told me what to expect from the passage of time.
As I write this, it is now September of the year 1898. In less than two decades the world will be consumed into a terrible war of nations. Countries will be redrawn and all the standing noble houses of Europe will be dethroned — many of whom will be brutally slaughtered. From the ashes of this catastrophe a group of great leaders will rise to restore the order of the old world. They will fail and their countries will be annihilated with fire from the sky. The survivors of those nations will be subjugated in unimaginable ways. Thus will give way to a century of evil reign at the hands of blood-drinkers. In their hubris the vampires will create thinking machines that then enslave them. Mankind will relinquish their humanity and become twisted subhumans. There will be no more nations, nor kings, nor rule of law. The sun will go into a deep slumber and all the world will become a frozen tomb of endless winter. Mankind will perish forever in less than two centuries from now.
I have been wandering the streets of Philadelphia and in my distress over this knowledge I have made the mistake of divulging it to a gathering of pub-goers. They found my grave warnings of the future to be quite amusing and farcical, as I expected. However, after confessing to how I know such things, they found it mortifying. I am certain that they have alerted the authorities, who will inevitably find our lab and the remnants of the human candles. What will befall me upon arrest will be a fate worse than death. The public will not understand what we have done here in our quest for scientific discovery, and my family will surely disown me. I have found Dr. Levick’s revolver among his belongings, and with it will exit this world upon my own volition.
I pray that these writings will not be lost to history or destroyed. I pray that I am looked upon not as a madman but as a true scientific mind misled by my own ambitions. In the desk drawer you will find an envelope containing the last savings of both myself and Dr. Levick, to which I withdrew posthumously. I bequeath that and any and all assets in my name to the families of the men who are deceased as a result of our experiments, including the one named Thompson.
The transcription of my sessions with the apparition of Dr. Levick and all other accrued research may be found in the case beneath the desk. This is my last accord. Please pray that I find mercy in the next world.
I am sorry I have failed you, father.
Henry Jacob Wharton IV