FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF DOCTOR STEIN
THE patient DW was brought by her parents and an aunt. DW a girl of nineteen, tall, rather slender, of English-Scottish stock. Mother called earlier, asked I come there, see her. Nurse refused but gave her emergency appointment after hours.
Mother says acute onset, girl normal until yesterday, naturally quiet girl, no flapper, somewhat religious, “great reader,” knew few boys. Confirmed by father. Aunt says willful, “flighty,” sometimes made unnecessary noise to disturb her (aunt). Agrees normal until yesterday.
In interview DW appeared tense, twisted handkerchief and repeatedly picked up various small objects from my desk, replacing them whenever her attention was directed toward them. Johnson, transcribe from Dictaphone.
* * * *
Dr. Stein: Now, Donna, what seems to be the trouble?
DW: I don’t know.
Dr. S: You know what kind of doctor I am, don’t you, Donna? I am an alienist. Why is
it you think your father and mother wish me to treat you?
DW: I have people inside me.
Dr. S: Do you mean you are pregnant?
DW: I have people inside me, walking around, pulling the strings.
Dr. S: You are a marionette—is that what you’re saying? You feel you are
mechanical?
DW: No. I feel like myself, but they’re in there. The woman is looking out through
my left eye now.
Dr. S: How many of them are there?
DW: Three unless you count the other one.
Dr. S: Do you know their names?
DW: The man, the girl, and the woman.
Dr. S: The man is your father, the girl is yourself, and the woman is your mother—
isn’t that right?
DW: No, I’m outside.
Dr. S: You are holding your arms oddly and twisting your legs. Why do you do that?
(Patient was sitting in an extremely contorted position which gave the impression that her knees and shoulders were dislocated, but seemed to suffer no discomfort.—HS)
DW: The other.
Dr. S: The one who is not the man, the girl, or the woman—is that correct?
DW: Doctor, this is going to be quite difficult for you to understand, but this girl is
not ill; we—my friends and I—have found out that she is being used as an energy base by Thag, and we’re trying to protect her from him until we can dislodge him.
Dr. S: You have a deep voice. I presume you are a man.
DW: My name is Harry Nailer.
Dr. S: Donna, what are you doing?
(Patient had left her chair and was walking about the room on all fours with a motion sometimes bestial, sometimes insectile.—HS)
Dr. S: Donna, if you don’t get back into your chair I’m not going to talk to you
anymore...That’s better. You may lie on my sofa if you like. Do you mind if I smoke? Does your father smoke? Do you know that my wife won’t let me smoke in the dining room at home? She says the smoke gets into the drapes, but I like a good cigar.
DW: We could evict Thag by killing her, of course, but besides the moral issue we
don’t think it would do much good—he’d probably find somebody else, and we’d have a hard time finding him. If we can cut him off...
Dr. S: I don’t like the light way in which you dismiss the moral issue, Donna. Your
life is very valuable.
DW: You see, from our point of view she’s already dead.
Dr. S: No, no!
DW: What year is this?
Dr. S: It is nineteen thirty-five, Donna.
DW: We are from nineteen ninety-seven.
Dr. S: I would like to talk to Donna, please.
DW: All right, but she’s not going to be able to tell you much.
Dr. S: Donna, you are going to break your own bones—you frighten me. Have you
been practicing to become a contortionist?
DW: No.
Dr. S: That is better, now you sound like a pretty girl. Can you tell me who these
people are?
DW: My father’s already told you about Thag, and there’s Laurel Baker. I’m June
Nailer.
Dr. S: I have told you that I wish to speak to Donna—the voice is fine, much better,
but it must be Donna. I will talk to no one else.
DW: I could pretend to be Donna and you wouldn’t know the difference. But we
need your help. In our time, you see, there were too many people, so some of them became nin—that’s what we called them. It meant that you resigned from nature to exist in a purely subjective framework. Since we exist at a lower energy level, independent of physical reality, we’ll last much longer, and fade away instead of dying. . . .
(The man’s voice here, Doctor. I assume this is still the patient? ?—jj)
The nin approach a zero energy level asymptotically. Theoretically we will remain in existence forever—or at least, indefinitely. That was my father. I was going to say that when you’re a nin you don’t consume the planetary resources. But you bounce back and forth for a long time—father and I are still bouncing, and Laurel, too, now that she’s close to us.
Dr. S: Joan! Will you come in here a moment, please?
Nurse Johnson: Yes, Dr. Stein.
Dr. S: From this girl’s parents I want the blanket release, or I’m not accepting this
patient. You know the one I mean? Everything. All. If they say yes, get them to sign and show them out. If they will not sign tell me and we will give her back to them. Nurse Johnson: I understand, Doctor.
DW: The bouncing—as June calls it—isn’t important. Personalities newly arrived
carry a heavy life-charge that draws them back from time to time, and draws others with them. Thag and those like him are important—we don’t know how many there are.
Dr. S: So now you are an older woman, a lady. You wish me to believe you have
multiple personalities—is that not so? That is very rare, Donna. Most often we find that those who seem to have them have really other illnesses, and this is a disguise for them.
DW: This would go better, wouldn’t you say, Doctor, if we could control her arms
and legs?
Dr. S: Also if you would control your voice. It is a good voice for an opera singer, all
that vibrato, but not for a young girl.
DW: But we cannot. It’s all that the three of us can do to hold the speech centers
and the involuntary nervous system. You see, we have discovered that many of the nin are not simply human beings who have crossed over, but creatures who by the strength of their energy can assume that semblance to the others; and by some inversion we don’t understand, they attenuate into the past rather than the future. Once there they are able to seize someone—like this poor baby—devour her energies, and use them to return.
Dr. S: You have tripped yourself up, Donna. If only the Thags, as you call them, can
go back to the present, how did your other three voices get here?
DW: We seized Thag and forced him to draw us back with him, Doctor. And I was
not a singer in nature; I was a medium, and one of the first to cross.
Dr. S: Of course. So you have been listening to the spiritualists, Donna? Or perhaps
only reading their books?
Nurse Johnson: Here is the release, Dr. Stein.
Dr. S: Thank you. We will try the Cerletti treatment in a few minutes, I think. Donna,
you seem to want me to do something to help you. What is it?
DW: This is Harry Nailer again, Dr. Stein. As Miss Baker explained, we among the
nin see Thag and others like him simply as powerful—perhaps eccentric—human personalities. The strength of their energies allows him to project this. As time passes and their energy level is reduced, we sometimes sense what I might call wrong notes. Miss Baker, who was a clairvoyant in nature, is very sensitive to this; and with my help and my daughter June’s she began keeping a particular watch on Thag. At first we thought that he might be an unusually strong and bad personality fragment—all personalities shatter to some extent when they make the crossing, unless they have achieved complete union, what Miss Baker calls interior peace, while in nature.
Dr. S: So your Thag is not a human being or even a part of one, but what is he? I
wish you would allow him to talk to me.
DW: Laurel Baker again, Doctor. I doubt that we could. Never having existed as a
human in nature, Thag is an unskillful operator of the human body as you have seen. He may be a creature of a different sphere, or a spiritual survivor of a prehuman race.
(The masculine voice again—jj)
Something that might work would be to lower this girl’s energy—that might force Thag to make some move that would let us get at him. As things are now, we’re deadlocked. If she were confined, for example, and placed on a very restricted diet; or if she were forced to donate blood.
Dr. S: Well, we may come to confinement in time, Donna, but first we are going to
try something else, something new. You would not be familiar with the work of Cerletti and Bini in Italy; but they have developed a technique that shows great promise, and I have been using it experimentally. We place metal rods—they are called electrodes—to the temples; there is a conductive cream applied also which contains metal particles so that there are no burns. Then an electric current is passed, very briefly, through the brain.
DW: Wait, Harry, let me talk to him. We are familiar with that treatment, Dr. Stein,
but it will do no good here.
Dr. S: I expected you to say that, Madame opera singer. Is it because you are above
all that? So superhuman that you cannot be removed from a poor girl’s brain by mere electricity? Or is it that so much energy will raise your level and catapult you into your future again? Or will you bounce, as you call it when you speak in your natural voice, and appear to me in my surgery wearing ray pistols and rocket belts? You see I have begun to talk like Dr. Huer in the funnies, but I’m going to try the Cerletti treatment just the same.
DW: Electrical energies are far too coarse to do the things you suggest, Doctor, but
what their effect will be upon our ability to protect this girl, or on ourselves, I cannot say. From what I know of Thag, the thing that is sucking her life-energies—
Dr. S: Ah, I have it now. The way you move around the room, Donna—it had
seemed to me that it was like the walking of a spider, yet there was something of the way a rat runs too, but now I know. You are a bat! In Germany, when I was a boy, we would sometimes throw things to knock them from the eaves of the coal shed, and when they are on the ground they walk just as you do. So your Thag is a blutsauger and next you will want me to pound a stick into you, which Dr. Freud and I understand. No, Donna, but you need help with all those people inside you, and we will try the Cerletti treatment.
DW: Dr. Stein—
(End of cylinder—jj)
The electrical treatment was administered to the patient as described on pp. 16-17. She convulsed satisfactorily and lapsed into normal sleep as soon as the current was discontinued. About one hour later I visited her bedside; she appeared rational but exhausted and not inclined to converse. Nurse reports she had said earlier, “I feel something gnawing at my heart.” I left and a few minutes later nurse, who had gone to get patient soup, found her dead. I am preparing an account of this case for forwarding to Drs. Cerletti and Bini.