Psychography of Fear

May 25, 2024

Lieutenant Michael Donavan

Homicide Division

Harrison Police Department

465 Avenue A

Harrison, Michigan 87078

Lieutenant Donavan,

Should this letter reach you in time, you will find me entombed within the Bartholomew family mausoleum at the Bayview Cemetery. Buried in the floor near the north wall is a crypt covered with a clear quartz-like stone which forms the lid. Depending on when this letter reaches you, I may still be alive.

Now, before you judge Clarisa, know I loved her dearly. My wife enjoyed a generous trust and she gave back willingly to the community through the Bartholomew Foundation. Before my acquiring the calcium carcinogenotic disease, we enjoyed a full, albeit private life. Unfortunately, the progression of my malady caused a severe deformity to the bone structure of both my spine and face giving me a chalk-like necromantic disposition. Could you live with protruding spindles of white abnormalities in your cheeks, jaw, and neck? Can you imagine the pain from a severe left leaning gate caused by spinal collapse, the sad joke of the neighborhood brood calling me The Hunchback of Notre Dame? And yet, so like The Hunchback, I possessed a kind soul.

Our run-ins with the Harrison Police Department began some years ago when Clarisa became, if you will, off-kilter, caused by her living with the progression of my physical misfortunes. I refused to ask for help, a mistake on my part in hindsight, and stood by as her pathologies gained in concert with my own, but not in her body as in mine, but her mind. She became obsessed with the belief that by experiencing fear, a euphoric state could be obtained when adrenaline and stress hormones within the amygdala of her brain spiked. She believed the exhilaration generated in her psychosis came from beyond the realm of human awareness. Who can argue?

I catered to her delusions. She demanded I accompany her as she drove our Porsche up the Mt. Dome overpass at enough speed to frankly terrify us both; she screaming wide-eyed with delight, me praying for it to all end, white fists on the dash, while the lights and sirens of the department pursued us. Later, Clarisa insisted her fear level dissipated too quickly and wasn’t nearly enough in intensity to achieve the arousal she desired.

So next we tried drowning. While holding her head beneath the emerald lily pads I loved so dearly, her body thrashed, the water churning with her panicked kicking, her clawing at my bleeding forearms. But again, it was not enough. Rising from my release sputtering and choking, she soon screamed at me for holding back, claiming me weak. She needed an extended fear episode, and she needed a higher level. She needed not fear, but terror, and for a long time. What could achieve this?

I’ll let Clarisa describe the effect achieved from her own diary.

_________

May 1, 2024

I know it’s wrong. It makes no sense to speed recklessly, to drown yourself to near death, to lie in desperation for rescue in a grave. And yet, what is the harm? I am not hurting another soul. Henry is helping me, my poor malformed Henry, you dear.

May 5, 2024

Even now, I re-live the event in my mind as a dream.

It’s at night and Henry and I enter black iron gates. The sign, Bayview Cemetery, creaks in the dream as the wind rises. It must be fall, as brown leaves tumble ahead of us. We soon find the Bartholomew mausoleum. Henry turns the key in the oak timbered door, but he must throw his shoulder to force it open, each thrust causing another scrape against the marble pedestal of the entry, the moon glistening on the white rock. We enter and the odor of dust raises my adrenaline, my heart rate. Fear rises up my back, a tickling sensuality. Should we have brought a flashlight? We’re idiots not to bring a light. My iPhone! I fumble with the ap.

Henry has brought a crowbar from the Porsche and we pry open the lid of my parent’s crypt. It takes both our strength, but with a sound of heavy clear quartz against granite the eight by five-foot lid slides away. In the shaking light the sightless eyes of my parents stare. I gasp as my breath is plucked from my chest. My bearded father is dressed to the nines in a rotting black tuxedo, my mother’s white wedding dress is shredded, by, I surmise, tunneling incubuses. My parents are shriveled, dry, and dead. How long? Five years. I ask Henry to help me lie on my parent’s bodies and feel the lumping softness on my back, down the back of my bare legs. I should have worn trousers. My long-ago mother’s embrace holds me as I settle in. I still feel her love. Is this possible? There is a rush up my back, the tingling of nerves. Slide the lid closed, Henry, I say, peering up at him. Take my iPhone, please. Are you sure? he asks. No. Give it back. He smiles and hands down the phone, slides the lid closed, and leaves. Pitch black arrives when the mausoleum door echoes closed. No more Henry.

I am now immersed in the intimacy of death. My hands push up on the slick quartz lid inches from my face. Turning on the iPhone I strain to look and see the phone is nearly out of power. There are no service bars. Setting the phone on my chest, the light goes out. A guttural hack from my throat. Re-tapping the phone gets the screen light to come back on. The quartz lid of the casket on my fingers is cool, smooth, and unyielding. Pushing with all my strength, I try to raise it, slide it. It does not yield. I cannot move my head more than a few inches; I try to turn my body to get more comfortable but can’t. I lift my foot and it hits the bottom of the lid with just inches to spare. I know cortisol and adrenaline are being released into my body because my chest is pounding and I can’t hold a thought. I am grabbing the pieces of my mind as if each thought is a stray cat, uncontrollable and desperately yowling. My mouth quivers with a bitter, foreign, metallic taste permeating the back of my throat. I know a fight-or-flight response is triggering panic. I’m hyperventilating, breathing gutturally, panicking, and almost out of my mind in terror. The breaking point comes when a slither crosses my bare ankle. This is not an insect, it has weight. It is slick, moist, and warm.

Where is Henry? Please God, where is he? I take deep breaths. This works to calm me and then doesn’t. My heart beats in pain, a heart attack? Thirty. You’re too young. You’re too young. Hold on a little longer. But I don’t get a grip, and I can’t move. The movement beneath me rustles, it slithers? My God, what the hell is it? My parents are grabbing me with their boney fingers and I can’t take it anymore. Where’s Henry? Henry? I call. I scream. Henry! I’m ready Henry! For God’s sake, slide open the lid! My phone goes out and in the black of my mind I try to die to end this. I reach for the phone by my side and my fingers slide into the sticky torso of my father’s corpse. I strangely remember his chicken pot pie with the crust. My heart is trying to break out of my chest and I’m dying from lack of air. Beneath me, my mother whispers. She says, go, go, go, you can go. You are at a place outside of your body, your mind, your very essence. Join us.

Finally, it stops, the anxiety and fear just stop, and I am in space and I can see thousands, no, millions of stars, and I am at rest. Is this death? Am I dead? No, I am not dead. I am at peace. I found it. I want to stay.

The lid of the crypt scrapes against the granite once again, and there is Henry. He has a flashlight.

______

You can read from my wife’s diary entry, Lieutenant, Clarisa achieved an abnormal state of mind chasing her terror as a need. After returning home, she told me the level of physical horror, the white blindness in her eyes, the searing intensity of impending death, the unknown of it ripping through her brain, wasn’t enough. We talked late into the night. Let me give you the conversation as I remember it.

“I could go higher, she said. A journey in the mind such as this requires a companion, like a friend sharing a trip through the infernal of hell. Always better to have company.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She explained she needed someone to join her in the crypt, to be BURED IN THE CRYPT with no assurance of being saved. She needed to see and feel the companion’s fear of the dark, his thrusting terror trying to open the unmovable lid after finding himself in the pungency of the grave. She had to know his fingers would discover a decaying flesh while probbing beneath him. He needed to discover he was lying on a corpse, a corpse that moves, that reaches, embraces. Only then would his body clamp down, only then would his frightened gasps fill his lungs with the smell of death, only then would he experience the agony of knowing he was dying.

She needed to see and feel and take in this terror into her soul while she lay on top of the lid of the crypt looking down through the clear quartz in the near pitch dark. His terror observed. Only then could she find nirvana, find peace.

I poured my wife a glass of sherry. “Where will we find such a man?” I asked. “Who would come willingly?”

“No, not willingly,” she said.

“We have broken no laws, no serious laws, I said. Even joining with your dead parents in their final place is not—"

“In our own family mausoleum,” she said.

“Exactly, in your family’s own mausoleum.”

“Is NOT a crime,” she said, gesturing with her finger for me to drink up.

“No. Not a crime,” I said.

What about you? she asked. Do you think you could reach the level of the horror I’m seeking while I wait for you, while I watch you from above?

I slugged some sherry. “Well, I…”

“Do you love me?”

“Of course,” I said.

Clarisa tilted her head ever so slightly. “Maybe with a practice run you might feel better.”

___________

After my wife slid shut the lid of the crypt the first time I was enveloped in a dead silence. Immediately I gagged from an acidic smell of what could only be decaying flesh. With my nose inches from the quartz lid, I vomited on my chest, retching repeatedly. Lying in the black, sweating from nausea, I lost all sense of time. A minute could just as easily be an hour. The bodies beneath me shifted. I couldn’t stop imagining there were rats crawling somewhere beneath me. The sides and floor of the grave had certainly rotted away, permitting the entry of any sort of burrowing creature. Clarisa would not permit a phone or flashlight.

It hit me. WILL she let me out? The inside of my head, my brain, started to freeze, to lock up. I couldn’t remember my name or where I was. Like a tongue slurping the inside of my mouth, I searched for my memory. Where am I? And what’s moving across my leg? I welcomed losing my mind, to be honest. I lay there in the dark wanted to lose it faster.

When Clarisa let me out, she was breathless and sweating. I felt embarrassed to see her so fevered, like I was a voyeur in her own fantasy, not mine to share. I looked away, ashamed. But there on the stoned lid of the crypt a concupiscence of lust drove the two of us together like the spike in a steel rail.  Frankly, this was a sexuality so powerful, we became the closest we’d ever been, but there was no tenderness, only something primeval. When raised to the level of horror, an utmost horror, the kind where you feel your mind slip, when the awareness of who you are is sliding coldly down your throat, when you’re gagging to hang on, I discovered joining another human being can be intoxicating beyond measure. The violence of the taking didn’t matter. I was deformed now in body and spirit.

We eventually settled on twice a week for our sessions and this seemed sufficient to fulfill her maleficence, her craving. I admit to being trapped in the game, relishing the union, but we didn’t talk anymore, living in silence between us. After some months of us living this game, you can imagine what I was thinking when I read her latest diary entry.

October 31, 2024

Henry is a true dear. How many husbands would go to the lengths he has to please his wife? But bless his heart, the deformities he is acquiring are more than one woman can stand. The other night he lay in bed next to me, thinking, I am sure, I was asleep; while he picked and pried out the bones protruding from his face. What loving wife would put up with this for long? But dare say, I would. I love him. But my fetish, no, not fetish, but an overwhelming passion, an estrangement from him, is growing in me even as I write this. It seems all my power of will is lost to some foreign beast I have come to love more than my husband. This presence serves up in front of me a banquet full of the addictions of horror. This is Henry’s horror also, in addition to my own, but I can’t stop gorging from the table, seeing Henry squirm beneath me while I decide to let him out or not, the raw power. Knowing he is experiencing his horror is too great a desire. It calls me and I am helpless in its summons. Spoken words seem to gush forth from my mouth, not my own, ordering Henry to the crypt. Yet it’s not me. If the arms that slide the lid of the grave are not my own, but some apparition, is it my fault? Can I be blamed? I think not.

No. For me to climb the summit of where this takes me, I must experience not mine, but Henry’s ultimate arrival at the state of his horror, and yes dear diary, his death.

____________

And so, Lieutenant, you might think I’m a fool to lay myself as if a sacrifice on a banquet table laid out upon the rancid corpses of my wife’s parents. You might think I crave not love but death. And you’d be right. You see, the processes of my disease have reached a frothing state of sheer agony. The angle of my repose leans so far as to twist my spine, as if from the blooded rags of a scullery maid. My internals have become only carrion for the hounds to gobble. I don’t have long.

I have a favor to ask. Perhaps the academies of police may offer you a deserved promotion should you solve the murder which I sense is forthcoming. My own. This letter serves as notice, for each day when I rise before heading with Clarisa on to our sordid venture, the Bartholomew family mausoleum, I place the envelope containing this letter into my mailbox AFTER the postman has arrived. When I hobble home after being released by my wife without venturing to a more paradisaical destination, I remove the envelope. With this letter in your capable hands, you know I did not return to the estate with Clarisa. I did not remove the envelope and it was taken by the postman to reach you. If so, I have achieved my desire to trade pain for peace. I loved Clarisa. She was my dear wife and I think you could say I have gone above and beyond to please her. But Clarisa, my dear wife, should not forgo the penalty of murder. She should pay the price. So go, go now! You may find me alive. If not, serve out to Clarisa her just do.

God speed.

Henry Wickens