Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft(583)
“March 3 — Can’t get Rose to drink any wine. I hope that stuff is tasteless enough to go unnoticed in water. I tried it in tea and coffee, but it forms a precipitate and can’t be used that way. If I use it in water I’ll have to cut down the dose and trust to a more gradual action. Mr. and Mrs. Hoog dropped in this noon, and I had hard work keeping the conversation away from Wheeler’s departure. It mustn’t get around that we say he was called back to New York when everybody at the village knows no telegram came, and that he didn’t leave on the bus. Rose is acting damned queer about the whole thing. I’ll have to pick a quarrel with her and keep her locked in the attic. The best way is to try to make her drink that doctored wine — and if she does give in, so much better.
“March 7 — Have started in on Rose. She wouldn’t drink the wine so I took a whip to her and drove her up in the attic. She’ll never come down alive. I pass her a platter of salty bread and salt meat, and a pail of slightly doctored water, twice a day. The salt food ought to make her drink a lot, and it can’t be long before the action sets in. I don’t like the way she shouts about Wheeler when I’m at the door. The rest of the time she is absolutely silent.
“March 9 — It’s damned peculiar how slow that stuff is in getting hold of Rose. I’ll have to make it stronger — probably she’ll never taste it with all the salt I’ve been feeding her. Well, if it doesn’t get her there are plenty of other ways to fall back on. But I would like to carry this neat statue plan through! Went to the cave this morning and all is well there. I sometimes hear Rose’s steps on the ceiling overhead, and I think they’re getting more and more dragging. The stuff is certainly working, but it’s too slow. Not strong enough. From now on I’ll rapidly stiffen up the dose.
“March 11 — It is very queer. She is still alive and moving. Tuesday night I heard her piggling with a window, so went up and gave her a rawhiding. She acts more sullen than frightened, and her eyes look swollen. But she could never drop to the ground from that height and there’s nowhere she could climb down. I have had dreams at night, for her slow, dragging pacing on the floor above gets on my nerves. Sometimes I think she works at the lock on the door.
“March 15 — Still alive, despite all the strengthening of the dose. There’s something queer about it. She crawls now, and doesn’t pace very often. But the sound of her crawling is horrible. She rattles the windows, too, and fumbles with the door. I shall have to finish her off with the rawhide if this keeps up. I’m getting very sleepy. Wonder if Rose has got on her guard somehow. But she must be drinking the stuff. This sleepiness is abnormal — I think the strain is telling on me. I’m sleepy. . . .”
(Here the cramped handwriting trails out in a vague scrawl, giving place to a note in a firmer, evidently feminine handwriting, indicative of great emotional tension.)
“March 16 — 4 a.m. — This is added by Rose C. Morris, about to die. Please notify my father, Osborne E. Chandler, Route 2, Mountain Top, N.Y. I have just read what the beast has written. I felt sure he had killed Arthur Wheeler, but did not know how till I read this terrible notebook. Now I know what I escaped. I noticed the water tasted queer, so took none of it after the first sip. I threw it all out of the window. That one sip has half paralysed me, but I can still get about. The thirst was terrible, but I ate as little as possible of the salty food and was able to get a little water by setting some old pans and dishes that were up here under places where the roof leaked.
“There were two great rains. I thought he was trying to poison me, though I didn’t know what the poison was like. What he has written about himself and me is a lie. We were never happy together and I think I married him only under one of those spells that he was able to lay on people. I guess he hypnotised both my father and me, for he was always hated and feared and suspected of dark dealings with the devil. My father once called him The Devil’s Kin, and he was right.
“No one will ever know what I went through as his wife. It was not simply common cruelty — though God knows he was cruel enough, and beat me often with a leather whip. It was more — more than anyone in this age can ever understand. He was a monstrous creature, and practiced all sorts of hellish ceremonies handed down by his mother’s people. He tried to make me help in the rites — and I don’t dare even hint what they were. I would not, so he beat me. It would be blasphemy to tell what he tried to make me do. I can say he was a murderer even then, for I know what he sacrificed one night on Thunder Hill. He was surely the Devil’s Kin. I tried four times to run away, but he always caught and beat me. Also, he had a sort of hold over my mind, and even over my father’s mind.