Out of the Canyon
After his wife was committed, professor Dyson, having felt that the book was in some way responsible for unhinging her, burned the only extent copy in his kitchen sink while drinking two magnum bottles of merlot and ingesting his entire prescription of valium. He lies in a hospital bed now on perpetual life support wasted to the appearance of one of Tooms’ osteomorphetes with but a thin scrim of flesh. His last words to the 911 operator were, “I have done the unspeakable.”
Many mysteries swirl about Mortenson and the Tooms diary. In trying to sort them out, I went to visit Meg Dyson one morning at the State Mental Institution at Barkersville. At the time, Mrs. Dyson was sedated, but her mind seemed quite clear. She sat in a chair on the veranda, strapped down with restraints. I introduced myself and asked her if she could shed any light on the history of the diary. Over the course of the next two hours, she revealed to me one portion of Tooms’ life as she knew it from his writings. At times, she would close her eyes and quote verbatim from the text she had helped to reproduce, at other times she would gibber incomprehensibly. I can only now give you in narrative form what I had from her. The absolute truth must remain a distant, rippling mirage, a feverish heat dream of the canyon.
On a breathlessly cold Sunday night in the month of August, 1885, Thilliada Bass, then seventeen and suffering bi-yearly bouts of lust, which the specialists of the time had deemed hysterical in the extreme and her parish priest had chalked up to possession, stepped off the late stage coach and into the starlit desolation at the Southern mouth of the canyon. The lights in Elijah’s second story bedroom window guided her. Past giant cactus sentries, thorns and tumbleweed, she found the house the man had built with his own hands. He met her on the porch, holding a lit candle.
Tooms’ first impressions of the girl were recorded in his diary: It is shocking to see Miss Thilliada without her kerchief. I have never before seen a bald woman. She told me that her hair had fallen out due to the treatments she was subjected to by the therapists back in New York. Still, she is quite attractive and seems a gentle creature. I like that she speaks up and is not afraid of conversation.
For the first week of Miss Bass’ stay there were blue skies and cool temperatures. Tooms would escort her each morning to the springs for her treatment. Sometimes the sands would be too much for her, and he would have to carry her part of the way. She was light in my arms, he writes, like a large doll or some baggage stuffed with cotton balls. When they arrived at the entrance to the cave, he would place her gently on her feet. Then he would walk down further into the caves where they gave way to unexplored passages and chambers. Once he was out of sight, she would undress and slip into the waters of the springs.
While Thilliada let the chemistry of the pool leech into her trouble spots, Elijah was deep in the earth, sitting cross-legged in a chamber that had long ago been painted by the cave man whose skeletal remains lay in the dust strewn with flower petals thousands of years old. Tooms refers to this place in his diary as the ancient man’s grave. The wall paintings depicted the hunting of an upright, horned creature, who had left many men dead in its wake. Very lightly etched into the wall holding the scene was a spiral that encompassed the action, the center of which was the left eye of the beast.
