Writing Exercise #1 - Dr. Severin's Diary

A small expansion of one of my characters from a myriad of different stories I have worked on or am currently working on. This is merely a distraction and a little exercise away from the writing I really should be focusing on instead, but whatever. 

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From the Diary of Dr. Severin (with apologies to Thomas Ligotti’s The Red Tower) - 

April 12th, 2023

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Leaving another appointment with that sniveling fuckhead of a patient. How I detest those shifting, minuscule eyes of his that look at me like an abandoned, malnourished, imbecile child. Desperately reading my reactions to every single piece of mental nonsense that escapes his fetid throat. I can see what he’s trying to do, his sad attempts at scanning my face for any sort of empathetic reaction to the miserable drivel he unloads on me. He will forever find nothing aside from malice raging behind my eyes and fermenting thoughts of pummeling his ugly face with a torrent of bricks and shards of glass. 

    Bi-weekly I listen to his insipid dreams and his maligned woes as well as the several different difficulties involved in taking the endless medley of medications I frivolously prescribe him. Some weeks his nose twitches, some weeks his pupils dilate, some weeks his limbs and digits buzz, and some weeks he spends the entirety of his sleepless nights painfully vomiting up the empty contents of his noxious, pill-filled stomach. Oh, poor him. 

I was sick to death of all of this - that is until he revealed to me a particular reaction to a new combination of pills I’d given him. A series of dream visitations and phantasmagorical hauntings that painted a picture of something I’ve been seeking for what feels like the limits of eternity. 

    But let me tell you, my troubled love, his dreams have revealed themselves to be precisely the source of pain and trauma that I need to continue to siphon in order to not only find you but to cure you of yourself. I’m on your path now, my darling Laura, yet I’m sure you thought I’d never find you. And to be perfectly fair and to honor your clever little plan, no one in this realm of reality would have ever thought that the Red Tower would ever be found or be proven to even exist by any kind of mortal. But we both know what you are and how someone like you could have created their own hiding place there, don’t we?

    My horrifically effulgent and inhuman Laura, you gravelly forgotten about all the occult connections I have my diseased fingers entwined in. The Red Tower, it has been invading my pathetic insomniac’s sparse dreams in vivid detail, of course, he has no idea the sheer magnitude and grave importance of what he is being made witness to. His idiot skull can’t ever come to realize that he is seeing what I wish I could see. His moronic, shriveling, sad excuse for a brain couldn’t ever quite grasp the idea of what exactly he is being haunted by. That being the scintillating, resonating visage of you. Undulating and squirming with all those tiny pill bugs and fat, squelching maggots ready to bud and blossom out of your pockmarked flesh. Toiling away in the darkest, inescapable regions of a place far removed from all time and all space - he sees you, and through him, I see you. 

    This whimpering fucking mockery of a man that is my patient has no earthly idea how lucky he is to be graced by your image. The vagrant, the soiled, ineffectual mental vagabond, he doesn’t deserve this - he doesn’t deserve to lick the shit from my heel. I deserve this. I deserve to see you - your real self that I tried so desperately to bring out of you, the real self that you so strongly denied. Now I see you. And the more I force myself to indulge in my worthless pissant of a patient’s pharmaceutically infused dreams, the closer I find myself to the Red Tower. And the closer I am to finding you in what will be the final resting place of your current form. 

    I hope none of this serves to cause you any sort of worry or panic. After all, I know you can read all of this well before even my pen fills in these gnawed-at pages - but there’s no cause for alarm, believe me. My tenebrous little dolly, I couldn’t possibly begin to replicate the harm and raw panic I felt when I discovered you hiding away in the manifesting subconscious of my most loathsome patient. No, I couldn’t even bear to describe it, let alone cause even a modicum of those feelings to be elicited in you, my beatific, twisted insect angel. How my entire unquiet skull filled with violent shutters of clattering psychosis thoughts when I heard my asinine patient repeat your last words before you hid away from this mortal coil. Do you even recall them? Do you have memories or any sort of human perception of time since you’ve gone away? “All this world makes great blood”, you uttered without moving your lips before snapping out of my existence for what I once thought was forever. 

Now I feel nothing but your pull, and the initial pain I felt…that is to be something to be celebrated. It will cause you no harm, I am sure of it. If I can simply distill even a fraction of that feeling I experienced and pour it through your bug-manifesting pores, then the hatred and the trauma and the despondency and the horror will all surge through you and push you into your final transformation once and for all. There’s no more denying what you are, my sweet. And you no longer have to face what comes next alone. 

But who knows how many more sessions I’ll have to painfully endure with this reeking, nonsensical cockroach patient before I finally discover the right concoction of medication to irrevocably cleave open his subconscious and crawl my way inside. There I will find you scurrying in the shameful shadows of the once believed to be nonexistent Red Tower. My beautiful bug priestess, my enflaming moth of nightmare chaos, my dazzling tapeworm engorged on my heated blood, my long lost love, my darling Laura, I’ll get to you soon enough. And I’ll consume your true self to end my ceaseless sleepless nights of delirium and rend my physical form free from this disenchanted, nihilistic wasteland of a population once and for all. Remember, my hidden lover, together we will birth a god and remake this world that is ready to be spilling over with great rivulets of its own suffocating blood. 

- Doctor E.M Severin