Dearest Reader
Have you decided?
Have you cast your judgment upon me?
It is quite fair if you have—indeed, I expected nothing less.
What sane mind would not look upon my accounts and see only fevered imaginings, hysteria, or wickedness festering beneath a fragile veneer?
And yet, this tale is not quite through.
There are still truths—dark, winding truths—I must place in your hands before the end draws near.
You see, people assume madness blooms all at once.
But it does not. It is a slow drip, a patient whisper, a shadow that lengthens each passing day until the light recoils.
I have walked through this house as both prisoner and wife, beloved and suspect, cherished and hunted.
And though you may think my mind fractured long before now…
I ask you to wait. Just a little longer.
Before you read these final chapters, I wish to leave you with this:
“For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not—and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but horror—to many they will seem less terrible than barroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place—some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.”—Edgar Allan Poe
And so, dear reader, I leave you with my trembling hand, my unraveling heart, and the small, stubborn certainty that I am not mad.
Not yet.
But soon, perhaps.
Soon.
—L