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One

It is hard for me to describe the events of the Yangtze incident in convincing detail. I have sat here in this chair for hours contemplating ways on how to begin. I guess it is the fear of being told I am crazy, or being shrugged off as a lying hoaxer eager for a moment of fame, that constrains me. Sometimes it is hard for even me to believe what happened; hard to believe that I am alive sitting at my desk in the safety of my home, expecting myself to just adapt and continue a normal life.

Well, there is no sense in writing about my discomposure. If it is a detailed account that you want, then it is a detailed account you will get, Mrs. Tilden, but I wish you had never mentioned your husband's death to me. It was my decision to investigate the matter, yes, but the truth I discovered in Northwest Asia on the roof of the world is one that is hard to live with, and securing the normalcy of my old life seems inconceivably hopeless.

Your husband, Mrs. Tilden, was understandably insane. I am shocked to acknowledge that I am not in the padded room where he was kept, raving as he did of nightmarish experiences. For it is all true, Mrs. Tilden. Your husband may have been mad, but his ravings were very real.

When you first informed me of his condition, I didn't believe it. Your husband was a very erudite man. I had known him for many years. We first met in Northern Arizona University when I was taking a course in Anthropology. The two of us use to engage in spirited and amusing debates with some of our fellow classmates who argued that anthropology was a white supremacy science. I remember the two of us staying up late drinking Cognac having scientific or philosophical discussions. I pursued a career in Biology, he a career in Anthropology. We shared a mutual interest in Cryptology, and in between jobs we went on excursions to unearth the truth behind myth, hoping to find the next extinct animal or something wholly unknown. Darryl Tilden was an intelligent, successful, and happily married man, not a person bound to someday find himself locked inside a mental healthcare facility.

The reason, Mrs. Tilden, you noticed a difference in him the day he returned from his study of the Drokpa tribes in Tibet is because what he experienced there was something I believe he did not wish to share with you, but could not altogether hide from you either. Just look at the effect it has had on me. My savings are slowly dwindling, and yet I am not at all eager to start looking for more work, nor have I any desire to contact any number of the eager employers that wish to hear from me. I imagine he felt as I feel -- that the world simply would not believe our stories -- and I believe that being alone with his secret is what eventually drove him insane.

I had just finished a one-year contract with the NMFS, and was ready to relax after seventy-nine deep-sea expeditions, when I got your letter. I went to his private studio where you said he had spent most of his time prior to being institutionalized. What I found in his private studio was shocking. The moment I opened the door and let myself in, I found that I was being stared at by hundreds of murderous eyes. Your husband had been quite busy sketching otherworldly beings.

I had never known him as an artist, which is why I asked you if you ever knew him to draw. You were so ignorant of the fact that I avoided answering you when you wanted to know why I was asking. He had made hundreds of attempts at capturing the essence of his insanity on paper, perfecting the freaks he had hung on every wall, while his experimental drawings were scattered all over the floor.

The Things he drew were deformed people, their profiles so awkwardly displaced that one could hardly regard them as anything but the morbid fancy of a disturbed individual. While one arm and hand may have looked like they belonged to a decrepit child, the other limb was so long and bulky that its owner seemed to painstakingly lug it around. In other drawings the crippled monstrosities seemed incapable of walking at all, propelling themselves forward with twisted, handless arms, dragging behind legs that appeared melted together. Their faces were contorted with agony and hatred, expressing tremendous pain together with a determination to kill.

It was utterly horrible, to walk into my friend's room to see all these things on the wall. I think I just stood there perplexed for a while. Never would I have guessed Darryl Tilden to misplace himself in such a deranged world.

In the center of the room was a clay figure that all the images on the wall seem to surround. The clay was still wet, so he must have just finished it after his release from the institution and just before his suicide. The sculpture depicted a less shocking image -- perhaps it was because it obtained no countenance like the things on the wall, but more likely because it was so piebald in build that it seemed too unreal to be anything to fear. This faceless creature was mostly hidden under a large turtle shell; the only hints of its fleshy design were the multiple octopus arms that protruded from the shell's opening.

After an hour of examining all the experimental drawings that lay on the floor, I ventured into Darryl's bedroom. The bedroom looked normal, as modest as I remembered it being when he would invite me to his work studio to show me some exciting project he was engaged in. But I did find a diary on top the desk and the remains of numerous broken pencils. I brought the diary with me to use as a reference on my trip to Asia, but I lost it there. I'll try to summarize from memory what it said.

It was obvious the diary was written after his return home. Most of it was your husband's inability to remember the details of his trip and complaints about a growing frustration with himself. Evidently, he had suffered from some kind of amnesia and was unable to recall the last part of his fieldwork. He wrote that he would recount his trip to Asia in the hopes of somehow stirring his memory, and I read in clear detail how he went onboard a passenger and cargo junk ship along the Yangtze River. He dedicated some pages to the enchanting beauty of the Three Gorges and his objection to the dam being constructed there, for it will someday flood many ancient relics belonging to the ancient people of Ba. He described how he got to know some of the other passengers of the vessel and talked a lot about his friendly guide and translator, Xŭ Kun, and often complained how he remembered meeting Mr. Xŭ and doing field work with him, but was never able to remember how or when they departed, emphasizing that he must have lost his memory sometime during the end of his research. He wrote how he even remembered boarding a Chinese cruise ship on his return to Shanghai, convinced that his loss of memory was triggered sometime after his study of the Drokpa tribes on the edges of the Tibetan Plateau.

When reading Darryl's written account of his trip, it was hard for me to link the sound man in the diary to the man that conceived the horrors depicted in the sketches in the room outside. .

He recounted his study of the Tibetan nomads, convinced that his memory loss was somehow related to them. There was some obscure event, which he could recall in fragments, where the nomads were taking him and his guide to so vast a height in a desolate steppe that it became a burden to breathe. However, he couldn't recall where they led him and his translator or why. The only thing he brought with him from this remote region was a small bag of fossilized human teeth, which electron spin resonance dating determined to be close to a million years old.

He described the scratches and wounds all over his body, which he originally thought were the result of the cruise ship sinking; however, he later determined that the marks looked too deliberate to be accidental, especially the scratches around his chest and neck.

And he complained of being plagued by vivid dreams so real that he would wake up paralyzed in bed. He described one event where, after a dream, he awoke believing that something was hunting him in the dark and felt compelled to arm himself with a knife but was much too afraid of being heard sneaking to the kitchen to grab one. This was some time after he had made some discoveries and was regaining his memory, when you saw little of him, I believe. In his diary he said, "I can only be thankful that I was not in bed with my wife on this night, for my fear was so great I was prepared to strike at any living thing I heard move in the dark with me."

As to the dreams themselves, he could only remember partially. He wrote the only thing clear about them was the fear they instilled into his soul. Other partial images he drew, which explained all the drawings in the next...