I am afraid all the time.
The woman will not leave me alone. Even during the day… what I think is day here… she haunts me. She chases me through the ship. I barely made it back today. And then she was out there, scratching at the door. She knows my name. Somehow she knows my name.
Food is running short. What will I eat next? I will not eat what she says I must eat.
Robert opened his eyes and spoke to me. He said: “If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything, my pretty little darling.”
No, no, no, I wasn’t going to write that down. None of it.
Robert is dead, dead, dead. I must remember that he is dead and the dead do not speak.
Not like me.
Not like me.
Not like me.
February 10?
Yes, I am scared all the time.
How long can you be scared before you stop being scared?
Only a little bread left that is moldy. I will eat the mold, too. Yes, I will. Watch me eat the mold. It is green and yeasty-tasting. It turns my stomach.
I killed a rat.
It was delicious.
February 11?
I am not afraid of the woman.
She wants to be my friend and tells me so.
Last night or today or maybe last week I heard her humming down the corridor. That incessant, lunatic humming. I took my knife with me. My knife and a candle. I will stop that humming or it will stop me.
I saw her.
A misshapen, dwarfish creature in rags. Her face is white as a corpse. Her eyes are yellow. She was waiting in a darkened cabin for me. I wanted to kill her. She would not speak to me. She would only hum. She has a puppet. I saw it. A little puppet on wires that she makes dance. Oh dear God, it is not a puppet… it is a mummified infant. It has yellow eyes, too. It smiled at me and began to drool. It was wrapped in a dirty blanket and I could see things moving beneath that blanket. The puppet infant has too many legs.
I locked myself in my cabin.
Something has been eating Robert’s corpse. Rats. They must come in when I am out. Come in and chew on him.
Terrible.
February 15?
The woman is not my friend. She is horrible.
She does not hum now. She sits outside the cabin door and whistles. The whistling is melodious, yet eerie. She likes to whistle as I eat my dinner. That whistling makes me think things and do things I cannot remember later.
Why does she torment me? What does she want?
Why does she keep scratching at the door? Fumbling with the latch.
I will not let her in.
She wants my food and I will not share it.
She and that puppet-baby are hungry. Let them eat rats.
Robert says our food is not to be shared.
It is secret our food. Our secret food.
Let them be hungry.
Hungry.
Hungry.
Hungry.
Cook stopped reading there.
It was terrible, like a dirty window looking into a madhouse, a guided tour of a woman’s mind going to rot. It was very unnerving. There were things she was not writing about. Awful things. Like what she was eating and Cook had a pretty good idea what that might be.
“Why do I need to read this?” he asked Saks.
“You’ll see. Just keep going.”
“This is pointless.”
“No, it’s not. It’ll make sense to you when you’re done.” His eyes were bulging, his face twisted into a grimace. “You don’t like it, do you? Well, I didn’t like it either. You know what it was like for me? Down here… alone… reading that warped shit, sure I was hearing things out there. Funny things. At least you got me with you. ..”
Cook sighed, picked up the book again.
February 21?
I hear things at night or maybe in my head.
Different things now. Like snakes crawling against the door. How can there be so many snakes? And why do they whistle? But maybe it is that insane woman and maybe it is me.
I am confused.
I do not know.
The walls make me crazy. The bulkheads have rivets only they are not rivets. I know they are not really rivets. Yes, they are tiny yellow eyes that blink and watch and see. They like to watch me to stare at me I am never alone now. Never ever never. Those eyes want to know my secret things that I have locked up in my head. But only I have the key. Yet they stare and leer and watch. They’re waiting for something. Waiting for me to do something.
But what?
I cut smiling mouths into my palms with the knife.
The mouths wake me up.
They like to scream.
February 25?
The insane woman still haunts the corridor.
Oh, she thinks I do not know what she wants.
But I know because I can think with her mind as easily as with my own. Ha, ha, ha. She didn’t expect that.
Still, she creeps in the corridor. The sounds she makes. Patter, patter, tink, tink, tink. She must have a dozen legs to make sounds like that.
The creeping.
The hideous creeping.
Oh, how it echoes even now.
February 26?
I woke spun in webs.
She must have gotten in while I slept. She is very sneaky with her loathsome creeping. The webs were all over me. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them. Oh, sticky and clinging and wet with spider mucus. Gossamer strung with pearls that must be eggs. Eggs for puppet-spider babies. Hee, hee. What an image that conjures? But I know it to be true, so very true. Out there, walking and creeping about with all those legs.
Do they think I do not know?
Yes, I woke spun with webs.
As I walked through my cabin, they were strung everywhere. Like spiderwebs breaking across one’s face… but imagine a thousand million spiderwebs breaking over your face at once.
Be quiet. They’re out there now… the lady and the puppet-baby. Can you hear them creeping? They have a thousand legs.
