March 4, 1975
This afternoon’s constitutional was bracing, if short-lived. What is it with an urchin that makes him so immune to a carefully crafted aura of menacing contemplation? I do not wear forty amulets and wards for my he—No, perhaps I do. You can imagine my disgust, upon being the target of snowballs and shrill cries. It was as a cry from my past – as if that doddering carpetbagger had returned from the grave at last.
I hasten to underscore the term “as if”, for it was only a young boy: Les Sherwood. He used to stick icons of famous baseball performers on the spokes of that Waltherson boy. The attendant parents put an end to that, soon enough. Perhaps that is why I was caught off guard, hearing the lad finally speak. His conviction had finally broken through the old weave – splendid of course, but during the twenty minutes in the day that I take to center myself and refocus upon the worlds upon worlds endless? It could not be helped, I suppose.
The boy proferred a slender volume to me before fleeing back to whence he came.
Knowing me from the Waltherson affair, I have no doubt that Les trusted me with his great aunt’s diary – although it is also possible that being the only accredited translator of manx verse in this quadrasphere had something to do with it. Sending my thanks to follow the moppet despite his earlier role in my discomfort, I returned to my sanctum sanctorum quickly. The story of Miss Sherwood must not be forgotten.
In her youth, she possessed talents most peculiar. By passing within several feet of any corporeal malfeasance, Miss Sherwood would absorb the deficiency into her own frame. Following a near-deadly youth involving several strains of pox that thankfully no longer flow pestilent, the legend of the pincushion girl spread far and wide. I hear that several poems are still making the rounds in certain quarters and leper colonies.
Although misidentifying the cause for their daughter’s illness, her parents eventually took the proper measures and isolated Miss Sherwood from the world in an unnamed sanitarium in the Virginia hills. It was there where she met Dr. Xavier Szelkac, then one of the orderlies.
Over a period of years, Szelkac learned of Miss Sherwood’s talent and what it could mean for his future career as a doctor of medicine. Szelkac soon had the perfect opportunity to assert his plan: his sister who had left the family land with a dashing young bravo named Percival Spruce had fallen ill. Pronouncing Miss Sherwood cured, Szelkac invited her to join him on a journey to Qualm’s Hollow.
Miss Sherwood’s writing becomes difficult to decipher at this point, but it is not difficult to surmise what happened: after absorbing Ellen Spruce’s unearthly affliction, she entered a state of dissolution. Seeing no other way out of the pain that wracked her every particle, Miss Sherwood ingested bremaria morens to end her sad tale.
(Source: The private journal of Dr. Orlando Laswell)