Transcripts of Defectives

Chapter 1 - Ryder

Warning: Does include cursing

11th January 2013

That One Time I purposefully did something illegal - BY ACCIDENT

Ok – just a heads up, I never meant for all this shit to happen, so you can't blame me for all this. Well, you can. And this was my intention but trust me this once when I say I didn't actually expect it to work. That's on me, I guess.

The point is, I did something not so great. As you can probably tell from today's title, it wasn't technically legal. And yes, it did involve ghosts.

It was a regular day – well, as regular as a day could be. My village is under another temporary lockdown arrest because a ghost had been spotted by the fountain at the village square.

Ok, so I know this is only a diary, and people aren't gonna simply read it unless I show them at some point in the future, but I have this compulsion to do run downs anyway, so even though I know all of this, I'm just going to pretend you're someone who doesn't!

The Citadel, the officials in charge of initiating lockdowns and keeping us safe from ghosts are very strict about these kinds of things, because many of the people who encounter a ghost have gone mad from their minds being messed with – the number of insane asylums has grown significantly since ghosts began popping up more and more often around the towns. Our neighbouring village is experiencing a Level 5 lockdown, and has been for... some time – which means no one is allowed in or out.

The problem is that insanity from the ghosts or 'ghost insanity' as the Citadel has so creatively named it, isn't reversible. Once a ghost tampers and twists with your mind, you're stuck like that forever. You see things which have been lost to history, or even things which don't exist in our world at all.

There was one case however, where an insane person, or a 'Defective', as the Citadel calls them, regained their sanity. I've done a lot of research on it – if she was cured then perhaps my brother could be too.

She was called Valerie Galethorne, 46 years old, mother of two daughters and one son, happily married to Castor Galethorne. She went to a market that had been abandoned because of a ghost sighting, but the word hadn't got around yet, and she saw it.

We still don't know how ghosts mess with your minds, or what it exactly is that they do to it, but however it happened, it happened to Valerie. She would mutter to herself constantly under her breath, saying things which made no sense and leaving her house in the dead of night to go God knows where. Her family set traps for her to prevent her from leaving, but she always escaped. She would return in the morning, in bed, fully clothed but filthy, leaves in her hair and scratches all over her arms. She would start crying out of the blue, eyes glazed over as she mumbled words which no one could make sense of.

She couldn't work properly and was eventually fired from her job. Her family were devastated at her loss and were at their wits end on how to get her back. Eventually, they called the Asylum caretakers to take her away, as they just couldn't deal with her eccentric behaviour anymore. 

Then, a week before the doctors came around to pick her up, she returned to normal.

It was as if nothing had happened to her. She was interviewed about it of course – we need as much knowledge as we can get – but she didn't seem to even remember being a Defective, let alone how she was cured. It's a sort of mystery, which is what I love about it.

The point is, that week had been very boring as I was holed up in my house with my family – not that I don't love being with them, but God I was tired of doing nothing.