Penderghast Asylum

F'Thag'n Y'all

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:02:00 +0000

Penderghast Asylum, Volume One is now complete, in terms of this blog. The entries are being gathered and converted into both a hard-cover and soft-cover book, the black-and-white version through one service, the Full Color (expanded) version via another service. When these are finalized and ready for release, you'll hear about it here and over at the Netherwerks Blog as well.

Beginning in July 2010, Inmate93 will be doing a monthly post for the Netherwerks blog, featuring out-takes, deleted posts from Penderghast Asylum, new Asylum-Art, fresh designs at Zazzle, and any news about the upcoming (potential/possible) Volume Two for Penderghast Asylum.

This has been a fun experiment and Inmate93 & Netherwerks thank everyone who followed the first series of mis-adventures of one lone madman who got fed-up staring blankly into the abyss and traipsed daintily into the dark worlds beyond madness to find himself only after crossing-over to the otherside. What monstrous thing hath been wrought in this dire transformation? Maybe we'll find out starting around Halloween...if anyone is interested.

Zero

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:07:00 +0000

One

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:05:00 +0000

Two

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 19:01:00 +0000

Three

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Four

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:59:00 +0000

Five

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:58:00 +0000

Six

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:57:00 +0000

Seven

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:56:00 +0000

Eight

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:55:00 +0000

Nine

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 18:58:00 +0000

Ten

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 18:55:00 +0000

...they are coming...

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:43:00 +0000

The transition was rougher than I anticipated. But I made it. As long as the Resonator keeps working I'll have internet access as well. Good thing that I brought along my camera. And the Slim Jims. Now it's time to try some of this stuff out from this side of things.

They Aaarre cccComing

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:42:00 +0000

One more adjustment.

Just a little more to the Right.

No.

Left.

There.

Tttthey Aaarrrre Coming

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:41:00 +0000

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It Burns

It hurts

hurts

Its so cold

I'm full of stars

Iiiiiimmmmmmm Ooookkkkkkkaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:45:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:43:00 +0000

Jon? Are you there Jon?

Look In The Mirror, Boy...

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:17:00 +0000

I no longer recognize myself in the cracked mirror up here in my attic retreat. I've got The Who on repeat on my iPod, now that I was able to steal it back. I've got my lap-top. And the Resonator. I've become something of a thief I guess. Not how I expected it to end, but there it is, whether I like it or not.

Stress is the accumulation of force impeded by a blockage. Something has to give, eventually. Something, or someone, breaks. A board, a brick a human mind; they all have weak-points and vulnerabilities that can be exploited to break them. You just have to know where to look, how to apply the requisite force, and voila the damn thing snaps as if on cue.

Except when you get it wrong.

Not every board, not every brick, and not every mind is exactly the same. What might have broken one may only deform another. That leads to tension. Pressure. Energy pent-up and confined looking for some sort of release. By definition that's a volatile situation. Explosive.

It's cold, dreary, raining and soon we'll have snow. My breath billows out like little clouds of desperation in the dimness here just below the eaves. I fell asleep earlier dreaming about running through crisp brown-gold fields of tall grasses. I never made it to the tree-line. Maybe I should care about that. But I don't. Not any more.

I don't care anymore. I don't believe anymore. The flickering purple haze of the Resonator washes over me and fills this place like ectoplasmic Jell-O and I watch it all unfold before me.

You can only put your hand in the fire for so long. You only get to fall so far, for so long, then you either turn it around or crash into a bloody mess. I've been falling for a long, long time now. It's time to break on through to the otherside. Crash and burn, slash and burn, smash smash smash -- I'd play the Cure's Burn, but I lost that CD.

I've lost a lot.

I've lost myself.

They say you have to hit rock-bottom before you can really turn it all around. The rocks are close now. Closer than they've ever been and I'm moving fast.

I'm cold. So cold. My fingers are slipping on the keyboard as though they have a life of their own. Cold, pale spider-things at the ends of my arms.

They shouldn't have hurt me, not like they did. But they did.

Maybe I shouldn't have broken the mirror with my fists. But I did.

They shouldn't have lied to me, manipulated me, deceived me and misled me. But they did.

Maybe I shouldn't have gone digging in the dirt for things better left buried. But I did.

They shouldn't have started all this thinking that I'd just cave-in and collapse, that I'd give up and get out. But they did.

They don't know anything. But I do.

Terrible things become terribly banal with prolonged exposure. Terror corrodes ones nerves too quickly, too deeply to be sustained. Successive shocks break down barriers, clear the channels, allow for the re-programming of what once was into something otherwise unattainable, unreachable, unimaginable.

I'm not afraid anymore.

Here, in the chill dark loneliness of this last hiding place I watch the slow trickle of purple-tinted red, the curling vapor of my breath, and I pay the price for what it is that I must now do.

I'm going to war.

If Only I Could Sleep

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:27:00 +0000

Hello. It's me. Everything is falling apart. Disintegrating. Before my very eyes. I may be having hallucinations, despite what that quack Dr. Williams tells me. I don't trust him. He's up to no good. I can tell. I've been watching him slip downstairs to the room behind the old pantry, the one with the wire-reinforced windows that have been painted over from the inside with some crumbly-looking cheap brown paint. It's where they've set up the Resonator. I watched them move it into that room last night. I was coming back upstairs from the cellars where I'd been doing some digging around and I nearly blundered right into the broad backside of a sweaty ape of a guy who was huffing, puffing and lugging along great jumbly chunks of machine-parts and bizarre apparatus on a dolly. I hung back in the stairwell, in the shadows, and I watched.

This is the second or third time that they've moved this infernal contraption. But why? Why do they move it around? What are they trying to accomplish? It's a mystery that I fully intend to solve, one way or another.

For all I know it could well lead to the end of the world.

One of ThEse DaYs

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:43:00 +0000

There are 72 rooms listed in the brochure for this place. I have found 79, not counting the partitioned-off section of the attic and only counting the horshoe-shaped old cellar under the main building as one space despite most people mistakenly thinking it was actually two or three chambers. There's a lot about this place that isn't fully or accurately accounted for in their bochures, reports or records. I know. I've been doing some digging. Both figuratively and literally. I'm always exploring the place. Doctor West approves of my explorations. He says it's a healthy enough hobby. He even gave me a signed pass just in case the guards, orderlies or other staff get uppity. But this time I've gone too far.

There's no going back now. Not now. Never again.

I hate basements. The old cellars under the main building don't really count as they are really just refurbished caves that open out of the side of the rocky hill on which everything else squats like a cold, stone toad. But there are other places dug out below this place, tunnels and basements and another almost natural cavern back behind the old cellars. No one goes back there very much any more. There are probably only three or four people alive who even know about this place. It's cold and dark and damp and I'm never going back there again. They can drag me down to the Resonator in Room 102 or even Room 109 downstairs from the cafeteria where they store the rat poison and Jell-O. I'm not going back. Not for anything.

I wish that I'd never dug up her bones...

Night Terrors

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:13:00 +0000

Coffee tastes like boiled latrine scrapings. It's good to be back. I spent Veteran's Day at Fort Snelling visiting dead soldiers. Everybody goes there on Memorial Day. Not me. I go when it's cold and windy and deserted. Usually it rains. It's just me and the hallowed dead hanging out, killing time, and bitching about the weather, coffee or the powers that be.

The attendent who took me was supposed to supervise me the entire time, instead they ran off ot the Mall of America. I was left standing out there for five and a half hours. The attendent's breath reeked of cheap beer when he finally showed up to take me back. I think he spent some time in Hooters.

I had a lot of time to really think about things. Really think. Things. I originally started this blog in order to compile a journal of my thoughts and impressions, to put my notes outside the reach of those who would suppress my voice, stifle my words, destroy my work. That had been the idea. But then I found the old, battered and water-stained portfolio of my old drawings. It had been shoved haphazardly in-between an old bookcase and the crumbling plaster wall of my attic space. My secret space. The other one.

Old drawings. Old. My hands hurt. It's cold up here and the wind is howling mournfully. Old drawings are scattered across my table, on my chair, all over the floor. Someone has been digging around in my old art. But they'll never find it. I made sure of it. Everything that I scanned-in and posted to the blog, I also burned. I keep the ashes in a rusty coffee can in the corner by the rattling, burbling radiator across from my table. They'll never find it. I made sure of it.

Five and a half hours is long time to consult with someone. But I'm going to war soon, and whom better to discuss strategy with than dead soldiers? They liked my drawings, the old ones from the Seventies, the ones that I burned for them down by the little pond. My secret is safe with them. We have an arrangement. Soon I'll have reinforcements.

Squishy

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:21:00 +0000

I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to write this blog. Or how much longer ... they'll ... let me write it. I've seen too much now. Way too much. And I think that something may have seen me as well. There was putrid pea-green sludge all over my door this morning. The ceiling tiles over my bed are soaked through and through with a dark, viscous fluid that drips on my covers. It started Monday night. It has only gotten worse. I got no sleep Tuesday night and I spent the better part of last night in my secret place. Things are happening here, bad things, terrible things, blasphemous and wicked things ... and I am powerless to do anything about any of them.

It's getting darker earlier and earlier, for longer and longer. I think that they've been waiting for that, waiting for winter and the pervasive darkness in order to carry out their horrific aims, whatever they ultimately are. I see strange glyph-like patterns in the condensation on the windows up here. We had frost last night. If I'd awoken sooner, I might have seen the patterns more clearly a they were formed in the frost, as if sketched there by some weird unseen hand working outside and three floors up.

Maybe things will settle down a bit. After all it's been all of since Monday night when I saw ... it ...

Maybe everything will be okay ...

Fishbelly White

noreply@blogger.com (Inmate93) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:45:00 +0000

They took away my iPod. Something about switching out all of Dr. Witherspoon's collection of Lou Rawls songs with Rammstein. At least I thought it was funny. No one else did though. So I had to dust off my CDs and re-discovered Grant Lee Buffalo all over again. There certanly seems to be someting wrong with my stars. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect the old goat to take away my iPod.

Bastard.

Mess with a guy's music, and you mess with...oh...uh...um...yeah. Strike that. Yeah. I guess I should have seen it coming. I should have seen a lot of stuff coming. I saw the plague descending upon the winter wind like a wrathful angel with fishbelly white skin, but that was in my dreams, before they readjusted my meds. Again. I saw the footprints of something no one can see prowling around the north end of the grounds, just below my window. But the snow melted and the rain dried up and there are no tracks to be seen any more, so I keep my mouth shut. I used to speak up, speak out. Never again. They have a room down in the basement, past where they've been renovating some of the new labs, past the room with the Resonator that they say doesn't exist and the other room that always smells like an abbatoir, and I know that they have a machine there that's used for shock treatment. They're not going to hook me up to that thing. No.

At least Wilbur was able to let me know that he's still planning on dropping by, probably in time for Christmas. I wonder what I should get him in the way of a present. Maybe I can order something from a website...

Eye-sore

noreply@blogger.com (Bindruner) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:10:00 +0000

They took me to the movies last night. 'They' being those meddlesome kids from over at the Jermyn Foundation for Ethno-Primatological Research. It's part of some program their management makes, I mean encourages, their emloyees to do for charity. It also gets them some good press and they need it after the incident last summer.

Some fundamentalist freak from a radical all-but-unknown splinter congregation of the Reformed E.O.D. from North Dakota, of all places, spent most of May and June last year waging a one-madman protest of the Jermyn Foundation. He had a set of mostly illegible old-fashioned sandwich-board placards that he wore religiously, and he scrawled a new hand-sign on scrap cardboard he retrieved from the dumpsters that got progressively more surreal and bizarre as the weeks went by. I bribed one of the college-kids, an undergrad student, who worked over at the Jermyn Foundation to collect some of those hand-drawn signs for me. She was able to retrieve six of them for me. I keep them in my room, in my sock drawer, next to the vial of holy water Mrs. Winslow brought to me last Easter from her trip back to Minneapolis and the Cathedral there. That was back when she was still trying to save my soul. I still miss her sometimes. She met another woman through one of her Church groups and ran off to become a lesbian witch in Saint Paul.

After the first few days the protester outside the Jermyn Foundation became something of a celebrity. Kind of. In a creepy, view-at-a-distance kind of way. Then right around the end of the month, they found his body in the alley behind Gillman's Fresh Seafood Cafe & Chowder House. (Their chowder is lousy, by the way. It's always smoky and runny and never very good.) Someone had bound the guy's hands, dowsed him with kerosene and set him on fire while hanging him from a lamp post with cheap wire that looked like it had been salvaged from old electrical appliance cords, like the junk that smelly old man is always collecting, the guy who used to visit blind Clarence, back before he passed away. The wire had been all knotted-together from quite a few smaller lengths. It doesn't get more premeditated than that. Kind of makes you wonder about that there Minnesota Nice stuff.

We were supposed to go out to dinner after our movie, which sucked badly by the way, but the kids were under strict orders not to go to Gillman's, so of course I decided that wanted to go get seafood, maybe some crabcakes, just to have some fun at their bosses' discomfort. That was dumb. Stupid kids took me to the Long John Silver's drive-through instead. I hate that place. Their food always gives me the runs. Damn smartass kids wouldn't even stop off at Burma Bill's for a beer to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. I wish we'd just stayed inside and watched DVDs instead.

Burp!

noreply@blogger.com (Bindruner) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:36:00 +0000

Snow came early this year. Early and deep. I sat for the better part of the last three hours watching footsteps appear in the new fallen snow, footsteps that had no figure to make them. They appear to be prowling around the very foundations of this place. Around and around in a ragged circular pattern except in the North. There, in the Northern part of the estate, the footsteps trail off into the trees and up the steep hillside towards the old stones that jut up into the cold, raw sky like broken teeth. They say that those old stones are haunted, but so far no one's proven anything. A couple of years ago, some old dowsing-expert came up from Iowa to see the old stones. They had just published a book on dowsing. They were so full of themself, arrogant and reeking of self-satisfaction, and after putting on a lot of airs and making quite a fuss over himself and his custom-made pendulum, and they went up to examine the old stones. I never found out what exactly happened up there, but the dowsing expert ran out of here in such a hurry that they left their precious pendulum behind. I have it now. I keep it in an old mason jar, just as I learned from that smelly old guy who used to visit blind Clarence up until he died last year. I think he might have been a clergyman of some sort, but I never asked. Sometimes I ask the pendulum in the jar questions. Often it answers me, spinning and whirling and whining and creating a humming voice for itself, or just pointing, pointing at one or another letters, symbols and hieroglyphs that I've placed around it, as it has directed me to do. It seems to have definite opinions on those things I consult it upon. It whispers to me on cold, dark nights. It teaches me things I've never read of in any book.

But the pendulum refuses to tell me anything about those strange footsteps that go up to the old stones and back again, circling round and round the very foundations of this place, making a circuit in the still falling snow, and filling me with a sensation of dread that makes my blood run colder than the dirty icicles forming on the crumbling eaves.

They're calling to me now. It's time to go down for supper. I'm not hungry, but I had best get moving before they come for me.