sketches of dead bodies, clinical and precise, organs exposed to the air.

Shit! He thought. The sketch was horrific. He glanced through the book. There were others, equally graphic, scattered all through it. Around them were line after line of some, strange looping script.

He looked at the writing. What? There were no words that he could recognize. It didn’t seem to be English.

He glanced at the cover in hopes of finding some note or identifying label, but, no, there was nothing but more of the strange tangled script. After a moment, he carried the notebook up to the desk where one of the archivists regarded him suspiciously.

“Any idea what this is?” he asked her. She looked at it. Then she put on a pair of reading glasses and looked at it again.

“No…” she said, hesitantly. “You’re working with the Decuir material, aren’t you?”

He admitted that he was.

“Does it say anything in the finding aid?”

He checked. All it said was “personal notebook.”

“Hmm.” She nodded. “Do you suppose there’s anything in the next box?”

“That would be 176. Can I see it?”

“Are you finished with 175?”

“Just let me copy these pages and you can have it back.”

“Fine,” she agreed. “By the time you’re done, I’ll be back with your box.”

He took the notebook to the copy machine and scanned a few pages. Then, the archivist returned. He put the notebook back and took the new box back to his desk.

He could find no other notes like those he’d found, but he did find a folder full of letters. One of these to Decuir from something called, “The Psychic Research Fellowship of New York.” It was unsigned and simply said that Dr. Decuir was now a full member in good standing.

Below that was a second letter, this one a carbon copy of an original, and dated 1934, which Decuir had apparently sent to the Fellowship early that year. It read in part, “…obviously, I must insist on the greatest discretion. If it ‘came out’ that I was conducting these researches, it would have a most distressing effect on my relationship with my patients.”

Attached to the letter with a rusting staple was a receipt, $1.50 for one copy of the “Psychic Research Pamphlet, Automatic Writing: Your Gateway To The Other World.”

Whoa!

He looked at his copies of papers from the notebook. Automatic writing, that’s what it was.

It just so happened that he knew something about it. He’d even tried it a couple of times. The idea was that you got in contact with your unconscious mind by simply putting a pen in your hand and holding it over paper. You’d try to relax and, if you were lucky, your hand would start writing all by itself. It was sort of like doing a Ouija board, except you didn’t have two other people helping you. Supposedly, your Id or subconscious or whatever could send you messages that way.

He’d even tried it a couple of times, back in the days when he’d been in middle school and he’d been looking for something, anything, to give him some sort of control over his situation. He had also given self-hypnosis a try, and karate, and meditation. None of it had worked, of course. No matter how hypnotized he was, his parents were still a pair of acerbic and cruelly witty alcoholics, mutually abusive, and hating him with a deep sense of personal martyrdom. “We stay together,” they told their therapists, “for the sake of the kid.”

Oh, hell.

But, anyway . . . so Decuir was into automatic writing? Wasn’t that interesting, he thought.. Wonder what part of his unconscious mind he’d discovered that way.

He looked again at the sketches of dead bodies, clinical and precise, organs exposed to the air.

Ugh.

Best not to know what Dr. Decuir had discovered . . . when his hand began to move, all by itself.