December
19, 1995.
Stanley Miller was a disquisitive necromancer from the time he got to St. Catherine’s Mental Hospital right up to the point of his death. He knew that place inside and out; he knew it better than the staff that worked its long dark halls for so many years. He knew it was a socio-architectural phenomenon of dim beauty and ageless fortitude, he said there were many more windows in that place than the ones built within its walls.
Stanley Miller was mentally ill, he was a schizophrenic and he’s been at St. Catherine’s for much of his adult life. Stanley killed his entire family 17 years ago with a garden pick and a butcher’s carving knife. He believed his family was all being possessed by fiends, he felt that his actual family had been killed by them and that they were using their bodies as vessels to spread their malice upon the earth. Stanley believed it was his duty to cleanse each body of its dreary depravity.
He has always seen himself as a warrior that wore hidden armor of steel all over his body, invisible to the humans in this realm but visible in all other realms. He believed there to be nine other realms that sort of poured into one another like rivers flowing into oceans. He saw himself as a shaman, a caller of the dead, and a communicator with those that live in the middle worlds.
This belief consisted of what he called the all-dead and that was when all nine versions of a particular person in all nine realms were dead. He felt that his communication with the dead was misleading because the spirits he spoke with were in fact not dead; they just existed in the other worlds. He was able to cross-communicate with them due to his illness. An illness that allowed him to see beyond the purview of human languages and the metaphysical understandings that regular people felt they were tuned into.
I was brought in to visit Stanley on a number of occasions before I became his regular doctor. I studied psychology and medicine at Harvard University and I graduated with top honors. During an internship here I became quite interested in Stanley’s case, so much so that I can safely place myself as being gripped with it.
As a psychologist, self-examination is common practice so I was very much aware of my personal connection with Stanley and what he claimed he could do. Months prior to meeting him on February 19, 1995, I was in a Dyer gas station paying for gas when I exited I noticed my car was gone with my wife and child still in it. Two days later my car was found off of Interstate 95 but there was no sign of my family. Three weeks later my wife’s body washed up on a shore of the Charles River, she had been murdered and disposed of. But there was no sign of my daughter, a baby girl who had no idea what was going on.
During a dark, cold day when the mist in the air clung to my bones, I arrived at St. Catherine’s and was hasty to get inside in hopes of warmth. Then I saw Stanley, who was quick to tell me, without ever meeting me that he was sorry about my wife but my daughter was, in his words, “Still alive to sing to.” I stopped him and asked him what he knew about my family and particularly my daughter. He then ceased talking as if seeing a ghost behind me ordering him to stop.
I read his file and I learned what he did to his family, the grotesquery of the scene will stay cemented, haunting my mind till death. He not only killed them, he cut their bodies open from head to toe, exposing all their bone to the air. The five of them all laid dead in the living room with their heads facing the center of the room, forming a circle and their bodies in straight lines pointing out, forming a star. In the center of the circle was a large eye drawn in blood with a smaller eye drawn in the pupil of the larger eye. He said in his file that a group called the Vanglineae taught him how to perform this cleansing ritual. He said the Vanglineae were an ancient secret society of men that called themselves Healers of Worlds. They were set upon this earth to purify it of the darkness that was consuming it.
When I got in and sat with Stanley he’d often say nothing and sit in a chair and murmur, or just do high-pitch squeaking and sometimes low droning. His psychiatrist had him on a slew of psychotropic and antipsychotic medications, such as Thorazine and Mellaril, also Prolixin, Navane and now he’s been on Clozapine but mainly Clozaril. Stanley had a very high resistance to most of these drugs. As a result there were times I came to visit him and he was suffering from decreased motivation and also lacking emotional expressiveness. Other times I come here and he was suffering from hallucinations, delusions, thought disorder, loose association and ambivalence.
Through all these drugs that I know he needs, I’m trying to understand this man’s psychological disposition and his past history that led to him to killing his family in such a bizarre ritualistic way. Through all these drugs and psychological issues I’m trying to ascertain some form of truth about what he claims to understand concerning life and death and multi-universes.
Stanley was harmless, since his arrival here at St. Catherine’s 17 years ago, he’s only had one episode and that was 11 years ago resulting from a mix up in his medication. He hurt a nurse while she was working on a file in an office; he went in and attacked her, bruising her face and breaking her right clavicle. He was restrained to the floor by staff and sedated. The nurse swore that the person that came in the room and attacked her was not the Stanley she knew, no matter what his condition was, Stanley was harmless. She said the man that entered her office was someone else because, as she put it, behind his eyes was nothing, a sharks eye. The eyes are strange windows into the past of a person, they tell us about the joy, pain and sorrow as if it was printed right there on the retina. She said this man had no story in his eyes; he had no life pumping in there anywhere.
The medical board dismissed any wrong doing on Stanley’s part due to the drug mix up. The nurse that he attacked went about her business with him as if the incident never happened. After I read the report, my hat went off to that nurse for her professional devotion to her job and her understanding of her patients.
But for me there had to be more to this story because it was Stanley that walked into that room and attacked her. With that though, I must say I do take the side of the nurse; I don’t find myself worrying about being hurt by Stanley.
When psychiatry is at its best with those practicing it, what you see is a person medicating another person much in the same way as one would tune a piano or guitar. There is an art to the science of psychiatry because of the calibrating of medication that is required from one patient to the next, from one day to the next and often from one hour to the next depending on the patient. Prescribing medication properly to treat an ailment requires talent and an abundance of tolerance.
On the good days, Stanley liked to go for walks around the more, older unused areas of the asylum. One such place was a room where unclaimed urns were stored. The room looked like an aisle at a grocery store but quite dusty. The urns looked like large spaghetti sauce cans. Stanley could point to any one of the urns and tell me what that person was doing right now. Derrick Ashburn was working at his desk on stock reports while looking over at Sally Somers at a desk two booths down from him. Jen Cho was shaving her legs in her bathroom; he said there was a man in her condo about to attack her. Hermann Sullivan was in a place where he was about to attack a woman before a gas explosion kills the both of them.
Stanley was tuned into something that can’t be explained using the existing available discourse. There is psychic ability but that has been often proven false. This could be the ramblings of madman because what he’s saying can’t necessarily be proven, but some of the insights he does possess about the living breathing people here in this universe is astounding. It is my belief that my daughter is out there somewhere, alive and this man can help me get her back.
Stanley next, took me to the Autopsy theatre after passing the infirmary, where in the center of the room has a stainless steel table surrounded by steel cabinets and a smaller table for equipment. The outer part of the room has a series of different colored chairs for medical observers to watch autopsies being performed. Stanley and I sat in those chairs and looked around the room.
Stanley out of the blue told me that they weren’t in their bodies. When I asked him what he was talking about he said his family. His family was long dead and what was left was an invading terror. He said he didn’t want to do what he did to them but he was put in the position where he had to act. Their other versions in the other universes were all falling sick as a result because of these things contaminating the tether between them all. He said he had to cut that tether so the others would get better and live their lives. He had to kill them all. Stanley looked out the basement window at the overcast sky with clouds swirling, thinking.
I touched Stanley’s hand and asked him how my daughter is? He told me she’s fine, she is with me and my wife on our couch watching television in our house. He told me she was alive in all the universes. Here she’s looking at a woman’s loving face looking back down at her. The woman he said was not my wife but a woman my wife once knew. There are black stars on the ceiling with yellow walls and the woman’s hair is red he said.
My heart began to race but I remained as calm as possible, I didn’t want to spook Stanley out of his current forthcoming state. I asked him if he could see where they are, what city they were in. He said he didn’t know, he could only feel and sometimes see around the vessel. Tears filled his eyes; he looked at me squeezing my hand. We stood up and he walked me to a closet down the hall and opened the door. Inside hanging on hooks were a number of straitjackets, he closed the door on us as darkness filled the room. All I could hear was Stanley breathing heavily. He touched my hand and stood in silence as my mind filled with thoughts of my wife and daughter, the day she was born at the hospital and the day we brought her home. Suddenly in my mind a cognitive shift took place where a man was in the room with me, my wife and child, in our house. The man was staring at us but oddly couldn’t see us either.
I was scared for my family as I stood between this spooky man and my wife and child. My thoughts shifted to the day I was called by police to identify my wife’s body in a morgue, and the same man creepily stood on the other side of the table she was lying on. The police there couldn’t see him but he could see me. Outside of the hospital the man was sitting in a car looking at me looking at him. As I walked by I could see the license plate on his car but when I looked away the man was suddenly standing directly in front of me. We were inches away from each other and then I fell out of the closet into the light of the ward hallway. Stanley stood over me looking down, holding his hand out for me to take hold of.
A month later I was changing my baby’s diaper when my sister arrived at my house. Joking with her, I told her I should have waited five more minutes and I could have ducked out on diaper duty. She looked at me and smiled because I just said ‘diaper duty’.
In my car I drove up the wet shiny road to St. Catherine’s Mental Hospital. The old brick building stood high on the mountain away from civilization. This was a place where the regular working people wanted nothing to do with. Society has longed turned its back on the odd ones, the insane ones. It’s rarely a point of conversation as to whether these mentally unstable people are of any consequence to the function of society.
After my experience as a doctor of psychology, a father of one and a man, I can safely say that this place is of the utmost value. My daughter is home with me now; the man, named William Carcosa and his red-haired wife Madeline stole her and murdered my wife, they are both in prison doing life sentences because of Stanley. He opened my mind up to possibilities that are not linear but rather circular. That license plate I saw in that thought or dream or what Stanley called a crossover is what led the police to the whereabouts of my child. The couple that stole her couldn’t have a child of their own so they decided to kill my wife, who the woman saw while staking out hospitals.
Once I got into the hospital I sat with Stanley looking out the window while in the hospital barber shop. Stanley died two months later of a brain aneurism but not before he opened a window in my mind one sunny afternoon, where I saw him in another universe teaching a class on neuro-physics at a prestigious university.
Stanley had no living relatives, so I requested his cremated remains and placed them on a bookshelf in my den. While I write papers or speak to patients, Stanley will always keep my mind from closing down ideas and remaining open to possibility.
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