Behind Closed Doors: The Final Tetimony of Gregory Hamilton | Teen Ink

Behind Closed Doors: The Final Tetimony of Gregory Hamilton

March 21, 2009
By The_Madcap GOLD, Vancouver, Washington
The_Madcap GOLD, Vancouver, Washington
13 articles 0 photos 8 comments

“Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”

~H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature


Part 1

I have never quite understood fear, save the fears of everyday life which I had thought were tumultuous already. Men can barely bare to speak with his fellow, in fear of being attacked. We all look straight ahead, for we fear provoking the powerful by staring in the wrong direction. But as humans we argue that we are the most social animal on the earth? I have observed better and more social behavior from the chimpanzees we evolved from. We claim to be social, only based on our conjecture that we have created a complex society of backstabbing, murder, and profit from these and, sometimes, more atrocious actions. But this was not my cognition only but a few years ago. Now I write my true story, in hopes that any who will read it will finish what I could not bear to do. But what might this reader know of me? Nothing for the most part, I am but another commoner in one of the great seas of faces. Nothing pretty and nothing no one would expect to make a great impact on the world. But beyond the quiet face that is mine in the vast sea, and perhaps a small handful of others, is a face that has seen what it must not. I have seen what is known as true fear at a young age, a mere 16 years. What the vast and silent majority will have never seen in a lifetime, I have at an age where I was still in school. I had taken a precarious step from my already philosophically dependant and fragile impressionable mind, making observations of the state of the people around me, to a dark world that would forever be alien to me. Not a lifetime has aided me past the surface of this mystery, and the surface is but an inch in this infinitely deep sea of secrets.
The ‘True Fear’ is a natural and primal fear of the animal that lies above you on the food chain. We humans believed that position has belonged to us for so long, that we have given up on the belief that we still hold this fear. However, this will never be the case, but we believe so strongly that it is. This has given us what I think is the greatest curse that any man can have forced upon him, one that disguises itself as a blessing and proclaims itself a useful and safe attribute; Curiosity. Because we are curious, we don’t run from the things that cause a bump in the shadows, instead we run to it, we examine it, we use it, deem it ours. Our arrogance has not improved over the thousands of years, unfortunately. We have continued in our curious pursuits of knowledge, we claimed that humans are the top of the food chain, claimed that no other creatures can possibly defeat our race.
But what did I see? It is difficult to describe a creature so horrid and frightening that your mind actively tries to blot out its image and deny it existence. But I cannot deny it any longer, for this is my last testimony and the truth of a terrible tragedy that happened 30 years prior to this date. I am dying as I write this, slowly, but so very surely. I fear death, but I fear hell far more, and hell is condemned for those who have wronged man. To let man die is to wrong humanity, and I have. Recently, my nights have witnessed me wake screaming from terrible nightmares, and wake with a mad man’s laughter from atrocious dreams. I beg anyone of the few who will read this to not discard these last words of a man guilty of his terrible crime; betrayal. I ask you to at least hear me to the end, and to at least hear my final words. Believe me or not, I know I speak the truth and I know I will find no peace until the creature is murdered.








Part 2

When I was 16 years of age, I was a “Lost Teen,” just another one of the Hippie Children. Spending nights at parties at another persons house whom I’ve never met before. I spent away days on drugs and alcohol, sex and parties.
It was on one night when I was going to an abandoned house in a field behind some warehouses in Vancouver, Washington, where I had lost my friends who were running from police officers after we were caught with marijuana. I was very tired, and decided that the house was my best bet. We called it ‘The House,’ we smoked marijuana and drank beer if it was available at The House. The House was an old abandoned shack, forgotten after being engulfed in a fire about 40 years prior, it was very small, maybe 250 square feet, and was walled by loose and broken brick, it had a smaller wooden floored second story. But what happened next was a painful degree of ‘un-groovy.’
I climbed on the second floor, no stairs available any longer, and decided to wait out the night. Unfortunately, as the night wore on, I was periodically awoken by sounds of a peculiar nature coming from the floor beneath me. With its fourth time startling me, I devoted the better part of an hour, at my guess, to finding its nature. After I had tripped over a pile of rubble I had discovered a hole beneath the pile, where the sound was much clearer. With only a lighter as a source of illumination, I saw it was a crudely cut and cramped cavern, fastened by wooden beams. It had what one could call stairs, and it descended deep. The strange noise was coming from the cavern, so I proceeded to enter.
I would never again understand the peace and happiness of the Hippie scene again…
After about 10 minutes of walking down the stairs, the sound was becoming more frequent and horrid. I was filled with the greatest curse of humanity; my curiosity was battling my primal fear by explaining away the sounds. I descended further into the stairs until I finally hit a base. The ground was wet and the space was large enough to be considered a mediocre sized living room. As I continued looking around, I discovered the nature of the place. Animal bones were scattered and test tubes and beakers littered wooden makeshift tables. But down here, the sounds were at their worse.
The sound was surrounding me; it was the sounds of cats, dogs, birds, indeed all sorts of animals, being played from a source that was constantly moving. The sheer terror of the moment warped my senses; I had begun to see things that were simply not there. This fear was something I have never experienced before; so great that my curiosity could not help me. All the knowledge I had before about anything, was useless. This fear, True Fear, was morphing my brain. The room was swaying back and forth, expanding and contracting. And all the while, the sound was moving, until I heard a door open behind me. The door was a wooden door, old and wet after decades of condensation from an unidentified source, but the door was not the mystery. What I saw was one last remnant of the creature. It was like a 10 foot vine, but it was shifting of its own accord, twisting into shapes unnatural, it was sickening to look at.
As I saw it slither into the room and slam the door shut, I heard what could only be barely described as a sound like an echoing babble inside my head. Finally overcome with fear, I fled in terror. Dropping my lighter, I quickly crawled up the stairs, blinded by the darkness.
I had left the house and went immediately home, where I stood in my room, hearing voices, with an echo like feedback. Saying things like “what am I doing here?” and “I can’t think straight.” As soon as I heard my parents yell at me to shush up, I realized that the voices in my head were me talking to myself. I never told a soul in the world what I saw that day, but I knew, even then, it was unnatural but more natural than anything I have ever seen in my life. When my friends wanted to take me to that cursed house, I would turn them down using various excuses. I tried to never think about the strange creature, but whenever its image forced its way through, I would immediately get into a state of panic.
Eventually my friends asked why I was unable to go to the house, but I was inclined to not tell them the truth. However, as they were hard pressed to know why, I told them one morning when I was twenty six. My tale was unbelievable and they naturally had a reserve about it, but also a curiosity. That same curiosity that caused me to see what I had hoped to forget those 10 years of mental turmoil. They beckoned me to come with them; I had refused and told them that going was not wise. But we were young, and the young never listen to reason.
I was not sure of it, but I was not about to let my dear friends go there alone…
We left for the house that night, me and two of my friends, names of which I will not speak. When we arrived at the house, I was breathing heavily and I was sweating, but I continued on. Our party carried two flashlights, a shotgun, and a lantern. I removed the covering that was still blocking the hole, and we heard what sounded like a scream coming from the hole. I wanted to run away immediately, but I had no true say in the matter my friends pressured me this far, and I had not yet loss my composure.
As we went down, the screams would come periodically, and would also come with the sounds of the animals I had heard a decade ago. We eventually raced down; I had a flashlight fixed to where we would soon reach the base, the friend who ran in front of me had the lantern, and the friend in front of all of us had his shotgun looking prepared for battle. We reached the base, and all was silent. The creature was gone, when asked which way he’d gone. I pointed to the wooden door where he had hid in from my first encounter, and my friend with the shotgun opened the door.
His eyes became blank, his face pale, and he let out a great scream. The creature broke down the door, moved past my distraught friend and hung in a corner and rested on the ceiling. It was like a vine plant grown far beyond any means of control, it morphed into itself and out of itself. But the most disturbing part of it was the eyes. The eyes, there were so many eyes, of different shapes and sizes that no sane man can imagine. And they morphed with the morphing body, one eye falling beneath another or randomly surfacing. Oh god the monstrosity of it! The creatures smell, it was so putrid. I couldn’t remember if I cried from its sight or its smell. But I had explained the screaming, it bellowed the same noises I made when I ran in terror from it, it had learned! It can mimic the noises it heard. The sounds of cats and dogs were the sounds of the poor animals that died there for god knows why. The Beast had mouths of monstrous size and intent, multiple mouths that swayed with its reched form, great teeth that could go through vehicles. It seemed to breath a monstrous green gas out of every part of its body, its skin, its eyes, and its mouth.
My friend who wielded the shotgun, clearly mad with the sight of this terrible thing, began to open fire into the beast. Being shot in the eye, the beast reacted with a cry that must have been its own, for truly it was as alien and evil as the creature was. It sounded like a great gargled blackened roar that can barely be justified as sounding like TEKELI-LI TEKELI-LI. The creature grabbed my friend and dragged him beneath its vine like structure. Where he was being crushed and dissolved before our very eyes, my poor and dear friend died before my eyes. Desperately trying to keep composure, I looked to my remaining friend to try and escape with him, but he was in a deep state of shock. He stood blank, staring at the beast and at space. Screaming and begging at him that now was the time to flee was futile, he remained unresponsive even as the creature grabbed him and dragged him to the floor. That terrible monster fled behind the door, still pulling my friend behind the door with him. Hearing no screams save from that beast and the sound of squishing coming from behind the door, I predicted the worse. Now overcome with the same fear I felt from the last encounter with that damned creature, I left the house immediately. I ran madly into the night screaming at the loudest noise I could muster, calling for help from the people who would do nothing but throw me into an asylum for eight years of my life. Doctors were always examining me, asking me what happened, but I was always silent. I would not lead to another foolish investigation into that damned house. I had barely spoken a word until those six of the eight years of my incarceration in West Seattle Psychiatric Hospital, deciding to speak only to convince the doctors there I was well enough to exist in the outside. This was a blantant lie, I immidetley went to live alone in various apartments and survived off of welfare. I became an old drunk hermit living in the Projects.
I had not even so much as tried to kill the beast! I lacked the weaponry of the caliber to destroy it… No, no I was just too afraid to even try. I abandoned my friends to a fateful and painful death. But the question has always haunted me, why did I survive? And why didn’t I save them? Society tells us that it is grand to die nobly, but some fears are greater than nobility. True Fear had destroyed all ideas of culture, morality, and nobility. But above all, it destroyed my need for curiosity; I have no longer had any desire to look where I shouldn’t, I have learned what is the natural impulse; one must look away from shadows when something peculiar is afoot if you have any will to survive. With my new found wisdom, I have found a blessing and a curse; in short I have become a recluse afraid of the humanity I pity.
Now I sit alone, a dying 46 year old man who aged much, giving me the appearance of a 70 year old dying of cancer. Plauged of some disease, the doctors diagnosed me with some unidentified illness and asked that I be examined. Not only am I a dying old man who has lost all curiosity, but ironically I am a test subject for the curiosity I have always fought to dwindle. I have become a hippocrate as well as a coward, I sit begging hospital staff to keep me alive as long as possible, depleting my family’s savings. I deserve no pity, no remorse, I am already damned. I must find a way to come to terms with that…


The Final Testimony of Gregory Hamilton (June 21st, 2008)
[Doctors Note: The final written words of paitient Gregory Hamilton were covered in tears and blood from his self bitten thumb wound. It is frantically written and often has breaks as if made to fast to write properly. He flatlined approximately 13 minutes after writing this letter, last words: "Someone say a prayer for me! Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"]

Oh my god! Forgive me for what I have done! I have no true way to ask you to look at me as o ne of th e fl awed human s you have creat ed. Bless me oh lord! So meone please say a prayer for me.
SO MEO NE PLEASE SAY A PRAY ER FOR ME!

No I’m not ready yet ! It isn’ t d ead! Please, not ye t
Can som eo ne f orgive me m y tr espas ses? Dante, I plead you a re wrong! I am a traitor! I de serve a horri d d eath! But not yet! I t n eeds to die fir st!
Som eone ple ase s ay a pray er for me. T here is bl oo d!

It i s pouring fro m under the doo r!
My fri ends I can hea r t hem d ying,
I ca n’t help t hem!

OH G OD DO N’T LET ME DIE!
It ne eds to die first! Please h elp me!

I SHOULD HA VE DIE D THERE WIT H MY TWO GREA T FRI ENDS BUT I RAN!
I SHOUL D HAVE GRABBED THAT LAN TERN AND BU RNT THAT HOL E TO H ELL BUT I RAN!
I SH OULD HAVE K ILLED THE BE AST AND MYSE LF BUT I RA N!
PLEASE FORGIVE ME MY FR IENDS!
Kill It!
KILLIT
KILLIT
KILLIT
KILLIT

Please Dest roy It! Someone Pl e ase kill the Beast and lib erate my fragile existance! I will not find any peace until it is destroyed!

TEKELI-LI! TEKELI-LI!

PLEASE IT MUST GO! PLEASE SA Y A PRAYER FOR ME I DIDI NT MEAN TO AW AKEN SA TAN
G OD FORGI VE ME!

KIL LME
KILLME
KILLME
KIL LME
K ILLME
KIL LME

The author's comments:
This article is an addition to the Cthulhu Mythos stories from H.P. Lovecraft's works.
Alot of it is based off of things that are at my city and off of personal experiences.

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