Out of the Canyon
In late October of that year the body of a female student was discovered in that very alcove, lying in a pool of blood. The autopsy confirmed that she had her throat slit by a sharp instrument, most likely a razor. Students reported having seen a tall, thin figure, either with a very large head or wearing a huge hat, lurking in the shadows of the campus at night. This was the center of the investigation for a short time before Mortenson’s colleague came forward with new information. Because of the location of the body, Hyde-Summers notified police as to Mortenson’s strange behavior. “I went with the officers to find him,” said the department head. “I knew he would be heading for his night class just then. We caught up with him as he entered the alley between the Chemistry and Physics towers. The policemen called to him and he ran. They gave chase, but never found him. It was as if he disappeared somewhere between those two structures.”
To this day, no one knows for certain what fate befell the enigmatic J.T. Mortenson, but a year after his disappearance, when the university was having his office cleared out, a young scholar by the name of Ned Dyson found photocopies of ten entries from the Tooms Diary. Without telling anyone, he removed them from the archive box and took them to his own office and then home after work. That night, he read them to his wife as they got progressively drunk on merlot.
It was Mrs. Dyson’s idea to burn the pages one by one over the sink. “Think of it,” she had said, and he stood by and laughed, watching Elijah Tooms’ words ripple into brown and disappear. The next morning he awoke with a terrible hangover and a recollection of ashes in the sink. He groaned, but his wife told him, “Don’t worry, I have it all inside me.”
Over the course of the next two years, the young man and his wife conducted hundreds of sessions of automatic writing. She claimed that a spirit named Thilliada would enter her while in the trance state and direct her hand to reproduce the exact words of Elijah Tooms. Since the penmanship that resulted from these sessions was often nearly illegible, professor Dyson would immediately take the pages from her and begin to translate them into readable script. What resulted from their work was, supposedly, a complete and true replication of the text of the diary.
Notwithstanding the fact that Meg Dyson was eventually committed to a mental institution for pyromania and having held long conversations with the crows in her backyard, the diary was believed to be, by the few notable Tooms scholars who were given a brief glimpse of it, an authentic replication of the original work. It revealed the every day mind of Tooms—the searing heat of the canyon, memories of an unrequited, youthful romance in the city, coyotes along the eastern rim at dusk, experiments with the red mushroom, the bone sculptures (or Osteomorphetes as Tooms referred to them), the visitors, the cures.
