When I arrived, early in the morning, I was met in the lobby by Guy Wisp. Guy Wisp is (or was, but that's the subject of this account) the Director of Research for Elron's company, Scientific Spiritual Technology. I had met him during my first visit with Elron, and had been somewhat spooked by him. He was certainly not the person I wanted to meet.
"Hello", he said. "I'm sorry, but I'm the only one here right now. Elron and the rest of the staff are in ***********. They're not sure how long they'll be there. I'm expecting a phone call any time now. Anyway, Elron told me you were coming, and extends his apologies. He also asked me to fill you in on the e-meter discoveries."
It was against my better instincts that I followed Guy into the lab. He was still so skinny as to be gaunt, and have the appearance of starvation, but his skin was not gray, as it had been before, and had more of a creamy white appearance. Somehow, he wasn't quite as creepy. I tried for some small talk.
"You're looking fit", I said. "Been working out?"
His reaction to this was completely unexpected. He whirled around with a look of consternation on his face, his black eyes almost popping from their hollow sockets.
"What?", he said. "Wait here." And he ran into the bathroom. He was out almost immediately, saying something under his breath that sounded like "They're coming back. They're coming back".
He grabbed my arm, and despite his small size and weight propelled me forcibly into a room. The room contained a table with an e-meter on it, and two chairs on opposite sides of it. He pushed me roughly into one of the chairs.
"You're going to audit me", he said, somehow menacingly. "You're my only chance, you've got to audit me".
I was so overwhelmed by the suddeness of the shift in his demeanor and actions that I could only squeak.
"I don't know anything about auditing", I said.
"You'll have to learn", he said. "I'll give you the 30-second version of it." He opened a cabinet on the wall and pulled out a couple sheets of paper, containing both typewritten material and what were apparently notes in someone's handwriting.
"Mass is intention", he said. "We have to locate intentions and incidents and implants and confusions and erase them to lose mass. You help me locate these by asking the questions on this sheet". He gestured at one of the sheets of the paper. "You have to demand it. Really mean it. Make me believe you mean it. And watch the meter. Turn the knob to keep the needle on the dial. Follow the needle with the knob, got it? The needle will go up while I'm locating the intention. If it goes up slowly, or sort of wanders around, you need to re-ask the question, even more forcibly. Don't worry about BT ARC breaks, I won't have that problem. Or tell me to identify the intent. When I locate the intention, I'll tell you. You'll also recognize it in the meter. Then tell me to go back to the beginning. The needle will go down. Keep following it all the way to the bottom. When the needle stops, the incident is erased. Then go to the next question."
I could only look at him dumbly. He shoved the paper in front of me, sat down in the chair opposite, and took the e-meter cans in his hands. "Start", he commanded.
"Spot a cognition", I read from the paper.
"No", Guy said. "Adjust the meter first. Then say 'Start'. Then demand, compel the question."
I twiddled the knob on the e-meter until the needle centered on the dial. "Start!" I said. The loudness in my voice surprised me. The needle began to move, and I wondered how I was going to be able to follow the needle and read the bizarre list of commands at the same time. "Spot a cognition!", I commanded.
And so we proceeded, command after inane command. The expression on Guy's face told me if I was doing OK, or if something was wrong, and with that as a guide, I felt after a bit that I was beginning to get the hang of it. As we proceeded, I felt that Guy's appearance was changing. He seemed to become somehow more translucent, less material, even while air the room seem to take a darker quality, sort of like a mist. I attributed this to some sort of tiring, or possibly a hypnotic effect resulting from the endless, droning list of meaningless questions and endless twiddling of the knob to follow the needle.
Suddenly the needle began to jerk violently from one side of the dial to the other. I looked at Guy, hopelessly. "The needle's bouncing", I said.
If possible, his pallor whitened. "Rock slam!" he said. "The meter's full. Get a new one!" He motioned at a cabinet behind me.
I turned and opened the cabinet. Inside was three rows of meters, of all different colors, in clear plastic boxes. I thought of asking Guy which color he preferred, but the urgency in his voice told me not to do so. I grabbed one, opened the box, and took out the meter, even as he swept the old one off the table into a corner. He grabbed the new cans, and we were off again.
The process was exhausting, and as time wore on, I had to focus more and more on following the needle by turning the knob. During one set of particularly convoluted commands, I had to watch the meter very closely. I was completely unnerved at Guy's appearance when I looked up at the end of the set. It looked like his ears had separated from his head, and were hovering about an inch away from it. As I stared, gaping, the ears appeared to reattach themselves to the head, but not quite in the same position as they were originally.
"Continue!", Guy shrieked, almost in desperation. But it wasn't just Guy's voice. There was another voice that somehow spoke directly to my mind. And as I listened, I heard yet another voice, making something like a groaning noise. And I began the next set of commands.
As I worked through the commands, focusing on them and the meter, the voices increased in number and intensity. They made all sorts of noises, groans and squeaks, whistles and yelps, jeers, and strange whimpering sounds. Now and then I would hear a word. "Marcab", one whispered. "Coltus", another said quite clearly into my left ear. And they resisted me. They resisted my commands, and the intention I put in my commands. I wanted to go away, to rest, to sleep, to put this nightmare behind me. Yet I felt that I couldn't, I feared if I did the nightmares would never cease.
I glanced up at the end of the set of commands. The room had a thick, black haze in it, like a fog, except somehow sinister. A black, evil mist with a tinge of red that made it impossible for me to see Guy clearly. And the horror of what was Guy! The eyesockets were hollow. What became of his eyeballs I couldn't tell. The skin was peeled away from the head on the left side, exposing his skull. As I watched, His right arm appeared to detach at the shoulder, and fall down in his sleeve. He deftly slipped off his shoes, and having no socks on underneath, placed his right foot on the can.
"Continue!" A cacaphony of voices shouted in my brain, a terrible rasping chorus of ugly intent against the other voices resisting me. And I continued.
There comes a blankness now. Perhaps the ever-increasing volume of noise and resistance took me to exhaustion, and I blacked out for a moment.
"CONTINUE!" exploding in my mind awakened me. I glanced at what was once Guy. His pants were slack. His shirt hung loosely on what appeared to be mainly skeleton. The leg bones, bare of flesh, seemed to be in the process of falling to the floor; but as I watched, dumbfounded and numb, they seemed to rise and reattach themselves and the flesh to return to them, condensing out of the ever-thickening black haze that filled the room. Except never in the same position. One leg attached itself above the hip *through the cloth*.
And as still I paused, his eyesockets filled with two large, bulbous, fleshy, hairy masses, giving him an bug-eyed insect-like appearance, and what looked almost like a bird's wattle attached itself to the middle of his forehead and fell down over the facial bones that once supported his nose. Mr. Wisp's genitals had returned. What had been Guy leaned over the meter and calmly placed what was now obviously a penis growing out of his forehead on the can that neither his hand nor foot now held, completing the meter circuit. The hand attached to his back rose as he did so.
And I continued on the next set of commands, watching the meter, more numb now and exhausted by the continuing resistance, a most foul odor made me look up. Sitting on the table in front of me was a rectum, a piece of flesh with a puckered-in brown-rimmed hole, oozing a dark substance, and trailing what appeared to be bowel segment. And the whole thing writhed and the hole formed words, saying "I am a Marcab officer, and I order you to halt".
Somehow I willed this apparition out of existence and continued, hour upon terrible hour, numb and terrified, but determined not to quit until the horror somehow ended. Finally the strength in the voices began to ebb, and the sets of commands went easier, and the needle moved less rapidly.
Then Guy's voice spoke in my mind. "Yes!" it said. "Free!" There was a pause, and then a sort of strangling sound. "Nooooo" the voice shrieked, and ebbed to nothing..
A macabre sight greeted my eyes. The horrible black mist had largely cleared from the room. On the chair and table in front of me lay Guy Wisps clothes and bones, all in a heap. His skull grinned downward, it's eyesocket impailed on one of the cans of the e-meter. I was filled with the horrible realization that I had in some sense, possibly in the eyes of the law, murdered Guy.
My mind raced wildly over the possibilities. Would I be arrested? Executed? The skeleton is evidence. Got to do something with it.
I realized something else drove me. As long as any part of Guy remained, I was terrified at the thought that he would come back, rising phoenix-like, the flesh recondensing out of the black fog on his bones, the bones coming together to remake Guy, like a vampire in an Ann Rice novel.
There was only one answer. With trembling hands, and gagging as I did so, I gathered the bones of Guy Wisp in a heap, and placed the cans in them, insuring a circuit was made. Then I trimmed the meter and continued auditing.
It was horrid work. The resistance was not active, as it was with the voices, but it was obdurate. 'Intent mass old as stone and hard as bone' filled my mind as a description. And I audited, and audited, going through set after set of commands, perspiring in what was now the early morning hours of the following day, driven by the twin terrors of the law and the return of Guy Wisp. And the pile of bones diminished, until finally it disappeared altogether, a kind of a loose poweder blowing away in an unseen wind from where they had been.
I sat at the table, trembling, mindless, for I don't know how long. The sun was well up when I stirred. I felt heavy. I looked at my hands. They were swollen and disfigured, with strange warts and bumps on them. I tried to stand. I could barely do so. My legs were similarly swollen and disfigured. My clothes were tight around me, the buttons straining, as though I put on clothes several sizes too small. I felt my face and screamed, and screamed, and screamed for a very long time. Somehow, in the course of an evening, I had become obese and ugly.
I dragged myself, or waddled perhaps, to my car, and drove home. I wrote this report when I got there, while the events were still as fresh in my mind as possible. I am crying now, and I will probably cry for a long time. I will try to sleep, and to understand what happened, and to recover what I can of my life now. I will report to you again when I can.