My life ended a breath after midnight, on October third eighteen seventy three. I have now taken to marking the walls like a convict in order to gauge the distance of this great leap into the unknown. I estimate at least five years have passed with no sign of the ground rushing up to meet me.

 You would be surprised, dear friend, to know how delicate a machine this time is, how reliant it is on nature to reveal itself to men.  Since I became caught in the room I have seen neither the light of day or true darkness. Merely this damned half light, a ragged grayness that has settled into me like wetness in a consumptives lung.

The sum of my entertainment is pacing the floor like a lion.

If I had known that search for truth would have led me to this, Id have never left my dear little house with its cheerful fireplace or my beloved children.  They circle my memory like greedy crows pecking at the most sensitive parts of me.

Had I known what fate intended for me, you could not have dragged me from my home alive. My nails would have gouged strips in the floor.  My screams would have woken the dead.

In the broken glass my face is unchanged; weak-chinned, sallow, even cruel. My father once called me a watery display of manhood. Where is he now?

In the deep sleep from which no man awakens.   I envy him his sleep and his decay. There is no human way for me to express the horror of this wakefulness, this waking nightmare.

Deep inside of myself I am aware that the mechanism of the universe has wound down.  The last stroke of the clock has rung out over creation. Inertia has become a whale that has swallowed the world.   I have no hope whatsoever of being vomited into the light from the cold belly of this fish.

You will note that I have cut my veins lengthwise and crosswise here and here, but my blood does not flow.  It is as rich Chilean wine become sludge in the barrel.  I could not say if my heart still beats, if it does it is as quiet as the shifting of sand on a beach.  Do I still breathe? It seems my chest follows some old trajectory. It rises, it falls. Yet if I hold my breath there is no burning in my blood, no stars before my eyes. If listen for the sound of my heart I hear nothing but mocking silence. I would pay in gold for a pulse in my wrist.

One understands that is wise to refrain from asking questions when you are caught up in a purgatory but still, the mind asks. The heart begs for a crumb; it is a starving insatiable animal.

I remember the exact afternoon that my tongue became numb to nourishment.

How we take it fore granted, our senses, thinking we have the measure of taste and also tastelessness. I tell you friend, you will never know true tastelessness, true dull enlivening flatness until you enter this room.

Without warning the company of my friends became stale and monotonous. Not a word would be spoken amongst us, we men who once considered ourselves the life of the town. I would wipe beads of sweat from my brow as the simplest banalities became impossibilities; thoughts ripe and promising withered and blackened in my mind in the same instant I reached for them. The most routine social occasion became a yawning chasm, a labyrinth into which I plunged only to lose all direction and hope.

My work, which I had previously enjoyed, became heavy and heavier still, like a rock around my neck dragging me downwards. In the mindless repetition of that drudgery I could perceive no beginning and no end, days looped together like strips of flannel, days which I must confess became a knot that was impossible to untangle.

I remember the night I clubbed Mr. Pendelbrook with his golden paperweight and fled, breathing great gulps of night air like an animal freed from its prison. 

I did not know it then, but I was running from a fatal disease.

I would give anything to have a life, be it rich or poor. I would give my right arm to eat the coarse black bread of human life.

You might well ask what brought me here.  I would answer your question with further questions.  How did the great mute animal of the world become senile?  Where is that decrepit god who failed me? Where is the door that will take me from this room?

Have I not already said that time is a delicate machine? Time flows forward, going from becoming to become. You cannot grow young. You cannot walk backwards into the womb. If the flow of time slows to a trickle, so do we.

I had become aware of the possibility of the disease many years before I was forced into this room but as was my custom, I pushed it aside as fears rising from stress, the mark of my mothers neurotic temperament in my physiognomy.

I was well aware that London had grown unnaturally quiet, not simply that the clatter of horse and wagon had decreased, but the city itself had become sullen, infirm. I noted that the singing of the birds had become like the chatter of an old gossip, filled with cruelty and secretive malice. I saw panic in the eyes of my wife. I saw hopelessness in the face of my friends. I saw an aimlessness that I had never recognized before. The citizens had become gaunt and vicious as feral dogs.  With hindsight I could not say I did not see it coming.

I am not a deeply religious man, but this filthy room drives a man to introspection.

Certain answers are after all, available only within the sphere of faith and intuition.  If there is a god I realize he has wandered away from his mill. He has laid down his work and slung a bag over his shoulder. He has gone over the dark hills of space. His thoughts have cooled from a white hot heat to a dull leaden coolness; into fragments of ice.

 When I became aware that this room was a tomb, I took  the lead candelabra and gouged a hole through the wall. I spent days ripping out plaster and boards, digging like some form of mite into its hollow bowels.

When, in my eagerness, I fell through the hole I had dug, smashed, stabbed; I found myself back in the same room I had just fallen from. I had been wrapped in upon myself.  I was the victim of a macabre joke.

I raged. I shrieked. I broke chairs, tables; overturned the bookshelf.  I confess I even went so far as to batter my head on the wall. Over long months, I read the books, reread them, tore them into tiny strips and rearranged them in new stories, parables, novels. I used a single bottle of black ink to paint my wifes portrait.  Later, I tore it down and ate pieces of it.

Had I asked too much of you, God? Could you not have written me a comfortable life, a dotage with a wife and grandchildren? Perhaps my demands as a young man were weighty, but that is the nature of youth, to grasp at more than he has.

Now I ask only that you write a conclusion to my storey. If you wish me to continue to suffer, by all means, make me suffer but in your infinite mercy, allow me to suffer in the company of people like myself.

I can see no gain for you in my persecution. At the very least allow me to sleep.

 No creator worth his salt would leave a man stranded high and dry.

If you waiting for me to take initiative then I have a suggestion which I hope you will not consider impertinent.   Perhaps you might refrain from staring any further stories with a single man in a sealed room. For that matter, refrain from balancing a world on the end of your finger in a pearly void.  Misery loves company.  Develop your characters!

Are you even awake? Are you enjoying your well deserved rest while I beg you for mine? Are you dead? You will forgive me, dear god, for addressing you so informally.

At the very least allow my wife to join me. Take a rib from me if you will, I have plenty and no use for them. Cecilia and I fought like cat and dog but at the very least I can address myself to a woman and not this heating vent which has taken on the quality of your divine ear.

 Can you not reproduce a few of your miracles for me?

Piousness and madness are racing neck and neck and I cant vouch that you will find me so reasonable in the future.