October 31st 1907

Medical school has become quite taxing on my spirit, not from the academics or the work load I find the long hours and studies at most mildly difficult. In fact I find myself spending more and more time exploring those area’s that my peers find disturbing, it is this that perturbs my spirit. How can we as doctors and scientist so quickly label an area of study or research as off limits or too macabre to pursue? I say we can NOT!

It is here that I find my self drawn, why must we die? This state we call death is it not like the changing states of matter that not so long ago was seen as magic by our less educated predecessors. Death what is it that frightens us so completely that we have set it’s boundaries as absolute. I dare to believe that this boundary is surmountable and that with proper scientific experimentation and the fortitude to do that which is necessary in spite of what shallow men call ethical.

This lack of vision and willingness in my peers and the medical establishment has sorely put me in a foul mood. I have brooded for some days now walking the halls late at night long after the others have turned in. Tonight my journey was rewarded with the most delightful of finds. A rat with its tail caught only ever so slightly in a trap at the far hall near the radiator. I have brought it back here to my room feeding it a crust of bread from my nights supper.

Holding it tight in my hand bring to recollection my earliest experiments in death out in the shed behind fathers house. In my minds eye I can still see that very first rat scurrying about in the jar. I put the lid on tight making sure it was sealed and watched, oh at first it simply scurried around, its nose twitching, eyes scanning, ears alert, taking in its pitiful surrounding. I watched patiently as time slowly slipped by, now of course I know of respiration rates and volume of air ratios but back then it was simple perseverance, the pure elation of knowing what was to soon come. Hours passed as the rat used up its preciously dwindling air. It began to become agitated, clawing haplessly, franticly at the sides of the jar, longing for the sweet relief of air, its lungs screamed for it, muscles starved for it, and its small brain was dying from lack of it, even now it still impassions me. It was there in that moment that my hunger was born, my desire to know death, to taste it, to overcome it, to have it submit to my will.

It drove me to devise traps to catch the rodents with out harming it and my experiments grew more sophisticated, will all manors of death, dissecting each one to see what damage, what systems of tissues and organs had failed and why. Soon I found myself having to breed them as the haphazardness of collecting them left far too much to chance. They served as companions and participant in my experiments. How I miss my rats here in medical school, it will be one of the first things I do upon opening my office, yes I will have my rats to begin my experiments afresh.

I tighten my grasp, I can fill its feet clawing at my hand, tighter, It’s little lungs become unable to breath as I constrict its little diaphragm. Tighter and tighter my eyes are transfixed on the rodent watching ever twitch and still it lives.

I grind my teeth as my grip tightens I can feel its small bones begin to give under the strain, its as if something else in me has taken control some other side of me, oh how sweet to give in to let the beast free, tighter and tighter…voices so sweet in my ear, chanting, pushing me on, oh those sweet dark voices so long I have run from you, but you are not here to drive me to insanity but to guide me to greatness. I feel its tiny heart struggling against my grip, my own heart pounding in my ears.

****All Efforts to translate this portion of the journal have failed thus far****

I found my self on the floor drenched with sweat, the rat crushed in one hand my pen snapped in the other. I found the strange writing in my journal written the blood of the rodent, the voices have chosen to give me there knowledge, I must set to deciphering it. I know it holds the key to life and death. Soon death will be my bedfellow and life my slave.

Vanburen Graystone