The Horror of the War

Three Sets of Letters

Jaako Pelewski and Chaim ben Joses both survived their encounters with the ur-cult of the world's darkness, one by the banality of not only evil but sometimes good as well, the other as recorded on a memoir's too-damaged last pages. Daniel Haleman was still alive, though. I came into contact, not with him so much at all this time but yet his case even so, again some months after speaking with Lawrence Faring.

Federal investigators awoke me from a nap one afternoon, asking me for assistance in a certain high-profile case involving a resident of Washington State whose recent actions reflected poorly on his military inheritance. None other than my most bizarre patient had been publicly revealed to be a wild cat-torturer and -murderer, housed up in an insanity and an apartment in Seattle during his loathsome habituation.

Forgive me at least because my sin perhaps, as recounted, will serve to help others---if only to avoid following me in my dark wake. By now, subconsciously incensed, as if with objective reality itself, owing to the idea that had been forming---that Haleman had not been delusional at all---I reacted with surprising coolness as the investigators essentially begged me to share my psychoanalysis of Haleman with them. So for all that I ended up replying that I intended to go visit Haleman's apartment in person and evaluate the scene of his crimes directly.

Whether due to a virtue of frugality or a vice of miserliness, I possessed sufficient funds to cover an extended stay living in Seattle, in the same mold-warped tenements in which my erstwhile malingering theorist of a patient had of late dwelt (he was now again in official custody, for egregious animal cruelty it was of course said but more for shaming the offices of the government such as he had an unaccountably, perhaps extortionistic now-meritorious history with). I took up residence in a unit exactly below his, in fact.

For the time being, perhaps less-than-Constitutional searches of Haleman's apartment led to my plausibly deniable possession of letters from his mother. I read the first and discovered upon reading the second that he had presumably replied to neither. Now to me his "home" was off-limits, or so to me it initially seemed---the investigation was not being conducted at that point in such a way as would permit an outsider to so officiously behave---wherefore I was simply hard put to analyze the greater environment in which the man had lived, to derive propositions such as would represent the story of this life as it so sourly, of late, unfolded.

The place was, as even investigators' rumors informed me beforehand, a grab-bag of bed-bugs and cockroaches---but not rats, surprisingly or not. Luckily, save in an extended sense for one solitary and incredibly grotesque cuckoo-clock left by the previous inhabitant of the unit, my own space was free from such infestations. I did have to sweep some cloying dust off of all things an otherwise amazingly immaculate bed, but otherwise overall the place was in top shape. All the sinks worked and none of the doors squeaked. I actually compared it favorably with my housing at Miskatonic.

My first nights went without event. The apartments were loathsomely quiet, I thought, as one used to the intelligent bustle of a university. Other tenants spoke little or of nothing, exchanging what appeared to be pleasantries wrapped in inadmissible prayers. I did not fit in with this crowd whatsoever and decided the modesty of making no pretense to would serve my purposes well (enough). Accordingly, even greater luck would have it that one of the maids would end up confiding in me, regarding the ordeal of the cat-screams that is.

The official files of course related the "verified" instances in which the wailing of feline charnel had been detected at the apartment, squarely wherein Haleman resided. But the maid explained that it had been going on since almost as soon as the man had come to reside there at all. At least, everyone in the building immediately pointed the finger at Haleman when a certain three-legged, one-eyed kitten, saved from ruffians from among a sordid high-school clique, turned up missing back then. And a faint mewling had been heard from time to time when the unbearable silence between the apartment units had thickened like blinding mist for a dead moment.