The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant Read Online Free PDF Page B

me.”
    Over the course of the next two years, the young man and his wife conducted hundreds of sessions of automatic writing. She claimed that a spirit named Thilliada would enter her while in the trance state and direct her hand to reproduce the exact words of Elijah Tooms. Since the penmanship that resulted from these sessions was often nearly illegible, Professor Dyson would immediately take the pages from her and begin to translate them into readable script. What resulted from their work was, supposedly, a complete and true replication of the text of the diary.
    Notwithstanding the fact that Meg Dyson was eventually committed to a mental institution for pyromania and for having held long conversations with the crows in her backyard, the diary was believed to be, by the few notable Tooms scholars who were given a brief glimpse of it, an authentic replication of the original work. It revealed the everyday mind of Tooms—the searing heat of the canyon, memories of an unrequited youthful romance in the city, coyotes along the eastern rim at dusk, experiments with the red mushroom, the bone sculptures (or osteomorphetes as Tooms referred to them), the visitors, the cures.
    After his wife was committed, Professor Dyson, having felt that the book was in some way responsible for unhinging her, burned the only extent copy in his kitchen sink while drinking two magnum bottles of merlot and ingesting his entire prescription of valium. He lies in a hospital bed now on perpetual life support, wasted to the appearance of one of Tooms’s osteomorphetes with but a thin scrim of flesh. His last words to the 911 operator were, “I have done the unspeakable.”
    Many mysteries swirl about Mortenson and the Tooms diary. In trying to sort them out, I went to visit Meg Dyson one morning at the State Mental Institution in Barkersville. At the time, Mrs. Dyson was sedated, but her mind seemed quite clear. She sat in a chair on the veranda, strapped down with restraints. I introduced myself and asked if she could shed any light on the history of the diary. Over the course of the next two hours, she revealed to me one portion of Tooms’s life as she knew it from his writings. At times, she would close her eyes and quote verbatim from the text she had helped to reproduce, at other times she would gibber incomprehensibly. I can only now give you in narrative form what I had obtained from her. The absolute truth must remain a distant, rippling mirage, a feverish heat dream of the canyon.
    On a breathlessly cold Sunday night in the month of August 1885, Thilliada Bass, then seventeen and suffering biyearly bouts of lust, which the specialists of the time had deemed hysterical in the extreme and her parish priest had attributed to possession, stepped off the late stage coach and into the starlit desolation at the southern mouth of the canyon. The lights in Elijah’s second-story bedroom window guided her. Past giant cactus sentries, thorns and tumbleweed, she found the house the man had built with his own hands. He met her on the porch, holding a lit candle.
    Tooms’s first impressions of the girl were recorded in his diary:
    It is shocking to see Miss Thilliada without her kerchief. I have never before seen a bald woman. She told me that her hair had fallen out due to the treatments she was subjected to by the therapists back in New York. Still, she is quite attractive and seems a gentle creature. I like that she speaks up and is not afraid of conversation .
    For the first week of Miss Bass’s stay there were blue skies and cool temperatures. Tooms would escort her each morning to the springs for her treatment. Sometimes the sand would be too much for her, and he would have to carry her part of the way. She was light in my arms , he writes, like a large doll or some baggage stuffed with cotton balls . When they arrived at the entrance to the cave, he would place her gently on her feet. Then he would walk down farther