[This is my first attempt to write IC on this message board. Hopefully I haven't violated any protocol with this post, but let me know. ]
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Oct 10, 2008
Dearest Wallace,
By now you know the truth; I am leaving you and our business behind. Perhaps you first suspected when you found my bedroom office strangely sparse, stripped of its few personal mementos. But when you discovered that my treasured headset was no longer in its proper place, you must have understood. As close as we have been, the astral gears that grind the universe into motion turn continually, and I must move with them or be crushed.
I am unsure whether my departure will cause you much personal pain. Last I spoke to you, we argued. We were an unlikely pairing from the start. Perhaps it is inappropriate of me to lead you to reminisce in this painful moment of parting, but when you were a married father of four, a professor at a small community college, did it occur to you that a partnership with one of your most thoroughly dispassionate students might lead to the path we have traveled together? Although neither of us possessed the gift of foresight we later offered to the credulous for 4.99 a minute, we both must have sensed something of that future from the first time we shook hands in your classroom.
I was an Aquarius and you a Leo; Fire and Water. Where you envisioned greatness I craved the mundane. We were opposites who could only do great things together, each of our weaknesses our partner's greatest strengths. We were destined, as it were, for success.
Together we built 1-900-PSY-SCRY, and in a way, it really was magical, even if we both understood it was a scam. Oh, you were always optimistic, and you may have believed your powers were real. You trusted the generosity of anonymous gods and demons, and it is because of your blind faith in universal munificence that our business boomed at all. But you never possessed actual power. What you possessed, I've come to believe, was a philosophy, a curiously lacking quality in many people that I myself have only recently come to acquire, and only after a period of denial that I could desire such a thing.
Recently, you accused me of cheating on you, and I denied it. You saw how I was scurrying away to talk on my headset after hours even when you knew no checks from clients were arriving, and you discovered me more than once discussing strange matters over the sound of a bathroom sink. I regret to inform you now that you were absolutely correct. There is someone else. Actually, a few someone elses. I hope that you are not so angry as to quit reading yet. I am 100% honest when I say it has been some time since I enjoyed the intimate company of another human being. No, my infidelity is far more sinister. It was an emotional infedility, a sublime recommitment to a previously undiscovered faith.
You see, for some time I have been hiding from you a strange client. It calls me at any hour it pleases, dialing PSY-SCRY using mechanisms I'm unable to contemplate. I am equally unsure how to describe the sound it makes when it speaks my name through my headset, in a voice like a hiss that tickles the back of my brain, in the same way that sticking a Q-Tip in your ear can make you cough. When it speaks the room fills with cold, and my conscious relationship to both people and objects shifts substantially.
My caller has moods, too, and over time I have come to believe that the caller is not a thing but many things. Each voice it assumes addresses me in a different cadence, a barely distinguishable dialect through a filter of static, and after many listenings I've slowly become able to tell them apart. I've given each entity a name in alignment with a saint in order to station them accordingly in my mind, as they are my new religion and my headset a rosary with which to receive them. There's Cecilia, who speaks to me in mellifluous tones, her revelations the manifestations of some meta-physical song that sounds immediately familiar but whose next lyric I can't remember until the moment she speaks it. There's Jude, who always remembers where someone has lost a thing, and Peter who is brash and tells lies. And then there are the others, some who speak through searing pain, and some looking to cause it.
As to the actual origin of my spiritual benefactors, I am uncertain. Aliens? Government agents? Ghosts? Demons? I am unconcerned. What matters is what they have brought to me, which is mental peace. I know that over time you have seen that change in me, as it reflects in every aspect of my recent existence. My smile is hung by the hooks of planar satisfaction. I am suddenly aware of how complete I am becoming, and how with every new ghostly whisper my own paranormal strength grows stronger and stronger.
By now you are wondering why I wrote you at all. Perhaps it is to clear my conscience. I admit, I am a selfish person. But it was the voices—Cecilia, specifically—who implored me to provide you a final explanation for my departure. If I am to be with the voices, it means I must leave you, and on terms they dictate.
I cared deeply for you, Wally, and do not wish to make things worse than they already are. As such, do not think that I have left you to suffer financially. I am many things, but I have never been a man to run out on an unpaid debt. As such I have made an arrangement with our landlord, Mr. Philip Robicheaux, to have the rent on our King's Row apartment pre-paid for a period of the next eight months. I have cancelled the paper subscription and informed the neighbors we will both be gone on business. Your children will be well cared for. I do regret that you had to be killed; but Cecilia and Jude have told me that by the time someone finds your body, stashed in the freezer in the kitchen we once shared, it will matter no longer. Are you able to read this note in the after life? You do not have to answer. Soon, I will know that too.
[This is my first attempt to write IC on this message board. Hopefully I haven't violated any protocol with this post, but let me know.
]
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Oct 10, 2008
Dearest Wallace,
By now you know the truth; I am leaving you and our business behind. Perhaps you first suspected when you found my bedroom office strangely sparse, stripped of its few personal mementos. But when you discovered that my treasured headset was no longer in its proper place, you must have understood. As close as we have been, the astral gears that grind the universe into motion turn continually, and I must move with them or be crushed.
I am unsure whether my departure will cause you much personal pain. Last I spoke to you, we argued. We were an unlikely pairing from the start. Perhaps it is inappropriate of me to lead you to reminisce in this painful moment of parting, but when you were a married father of four, a professor at a small community college, did it occur to you that a partnership with one of your most thoroughly dispassionate students might lead to the path we have traveled together? Although neither of us possessed the gift of foresight we later offered to the credulous for 4.99 a minute, we both must have sensed something of that future from the first time we shook hands in your classroom.
I was an Aquarius and you a Leo; Fire and Water. Where you envisioned greatness I craved the mundane. We were opposites who could only do great things together, each of our weaknesses our partner's greatest strengths. We were destined, as it were, for success.
Together we built 1-900-PSY-SCRY, and in a way, it really was magical, even if we both understood it was a scam. Oh, you were always optimistic, and you may have believed your powers were real. You trusted the generosity of anonymous gods and demons, and it is because of your blind faith in universal munificence that our business boomed at all. But you never possessed actual power. What you possessed, I've come to believe, was a philosophy, a curiously lacking quality in many people that I myself have only recently come to acquire, and only after a period of denial that I could desire such a thing.
Recently, you accused me of cheating on you, and I denied it. You saw how I was scurrying away to talk on my headset after hours even when you knew no checks from clients were arriving, and you discovered me more than once discussing strange matters over the sound of a bathroom sink. I regret to inform you now that you were absolutely correct. There is someone else. Actually, a few someone elses. I hope that you are not so angry as to quit reading yet. I am 100% honest when I say it has been some time since I enjoyed the intimate company of another human being. No, my infidelity is far more sinister. It was an emotional infedility, a sublime recommitment to a previously undiscovered faith.
You see, for some time I have been hiding from you a strange client. It calls me at any hour it pleases, dialing PSY-SCRY using mechanisms I'm unable to contemplate. I am equally unsure how to describe the sound it makes when it speaks my name through my headset, in a voice like a hiss that tickles the back of my brain, in the same way that sticking a Q-Tip in your ear can make you cough. When it speaks the room fills with cold, and my conscious relationship to both people and objects shifts substantially.
My caller has moods, too, and over time I have come to believe that the caller is not a thing but many things. Each voice it assumes addresses me in a different cadence, a barely distinguishable dialect through a filter of static, and after many listenings I've slowly become able to tell them apart. I've given each entity a name in alignment with a saint in order to station them accordingly in my mind, as they are my new religion and my headset a rosary with which to receive them. There's Cecilia, who speaks to me in mellifluous tones, her revelations the manifestations of some meta-physical song that sounds immediately familiar but whose next lyric I can't remember until the moment she speaks it. There's Jude, who always remembers where someone has lost a thing, and Peter who is brash and tells lies. And then there are the others, some who speak through searing pain, and some looking to cause it.
As to the actual origin of my spiritual benefactors, I am uncertain. Aliens? Government agents? Ghosts? Demons? I am unconcerned. What matters is what they have brought to me, which is mental peace. I know that over time you have seen that change in me, as it reflects in every aspect of my recent existence. My smile is hung by the hooks of planar satisfaction. I am suddenly aware of how complete I am becoming, and how with every new ghostly whisper my own paranormal strength grows stronger and stronger.
By now you are wondering why I wrote you at all. Perhaps it is to clear my conscience. I admit, I am a selfish person. But it was the voices—Cecilia, specifically—who implored me to provide you a final explanation for my departure. If I am to be with the voices, it means I must leave you, and on terms they dictate.
I cared deeply for you, Wally, and do not wish to make things worse than they already are. As such, do not think that I have left you to suffer financially. I am many things, but I have never been a man to run out on an unpaid debt. As such I have made an arrangement with our landlord, Mr. Philip Robicheaux, to have the rent on our King's Row apartment pre-paid for a period of the next eight months. I have cancelled the paper subscription and informed the neighbors we will both be gone on business. Your children will be well cared for. I do regret that you had to be killed; but Cecilia and Jude have told me that by the time someone finds your body, stashed in the freezer in the kitchen we once shared, it will matter no longer. Are you able to read this note in the after life? You do not have to answer. Soon, I will know that too.
Until we meet again,
Evan Trueday, aka The Cold Reader