13 Oktober, Year of our Lord 1886
Dr. Henry James Kremmin, formally Heinrich Jacob von Kremmin to
The Very Rev. Dr. Joseph Augustus Bommenhauser
Greetings:
It has been a sincere pleasure working with you these past seventeen years and with the Most Rev. Martin J. Henni building our orphanage and our university dedicated to the blessed Saint Boniface. I hope and pray earnestly that with my family fortune depleted, save for what I need to provide for my wife and children, some ghosts of the past may find final rest - a small price to pay! As my family travels west to begin a new life, I wish you to pray for us. Too many specters haunt my dreams. There are too many dark memories of what had taken place where our university now sits. I like to think that we came to this place of hell, but are now leaving it in your hands, re-consecrated and newly hallowed ground. It is no longer Hell, but rather a Pleasant Prairie near Lake Michigan.
There is only one thing that remains - that you hear my earnest confession revealing all the facts of what has led us to this time and place. The sins that were committed were of the most heinous sort, and I played no small part in the whole tragic opera. I only ask that when the curtain closes, you take this testimony of mine to the hallowed spot they will lay your body. There it must remain until our Lord comes to judge, and may He be merciful to me, wretched creature that I am.
Father, forgive me, for I have gravely sinned. Here is my confession:
It was the year 1851. At the tender age of thirteen, I had already begun my pre-medical studies in my native Prussia. Our names were different then, and we were part of a prominent family that supplied much of the Prussian army, at the time. The members of my family were among the Kaiser’s most trusted advisers and my father was, in fact, his personal and trusted doctor.
My father seemed to me a good man, but I did not know at the time of his penchant for experimental science. He had a secret laboratory where he would conduct the most unholy procedures upon all manner of beasts, hoping to extract from them something that would add to our humanity. My father would whisper in the ear of the Kaiser, promising a sort of tonic that could enhance the soldiers of his army - perhaps giving them increased strength or aggression on the battle field. I found out later that my father had indeed distilled such a tonic, and he experimented first with members of our own family. The results were catastrophic. The madness that descended upon our entire house was swift and vengeful. When all looked hopeless and irreversible, my father stole away with me in the middle of the night. Reports later came to us that the keep was to be found with the blood of our family covering the walls as the people therein let loose all their basest desires in one night’s orgy of blood and insanity. The few that were left by the time the dawn’s light had broken the next morning, were dispatched by the army soldiers that had come to investigate. My father and I had already fled at that point. As we left in haste, the only indication that anything was amiss were the screams I heard behind us as left.
With his forces depleted and shaken, the Kaiser thought it best to cut short his first invasion of Denmark that was underway and peace came following the first Silesian War of Prussia. I mention this only because it gives me cold comfort that something good could come from the depths of such bottomless evil.
We came first to America by the mighty river, the Mississippi, and sailed northward from Louisiana to St. Louis and then to Davenport and Rockford. Going from place to place, my father would find work plying his medical profession, with me as his assistant. We traveled further north and east, and came to the state of Wisconsin and friends of our family who had started a small medical college near Lake Michigan. My father, Carl Augustus, had this all planned out in advance, apparently. Our family friends had possession of a portion of our family's wealth as well as some of my father's equipment, wwhich he had the foresight to send ahead of him. We retrieved these and helped to found the medical college they were building near a way station near Milwaukee. My father became the school’s first headmaster and I completed my training.
Several years later, the United States was at war with itself. Along with some of the other young men at the college, I became enamored with the cause of the northern states. I left my father and our family fortune to pursue what I felt was the cause of freedom and justice. If I may be permitted a small boast, I was found to have a taste for working under the terrible pressures of war. I first made my way back down to the Mississippi River and found myself aboard an Ironclad ship, the U.S.S. Essex. We had the advantage of the most modern armaments thanks to our benefactor and Captain, a man of means. It was after I had proven myself time and again, saving the lives of several sailors, that he truly thought of me as his son, and I thought him my father. I also made the fast acquaintance of two Lieutenants by the names of Osborn and Sullivan.
As our tour of duty ended in 1865, my comrade, Sullivan, fell ill with tuberculosis. We were wondering where to take him for treatment, and I thought of our medical college in Wisconsin. It would be a long journey, but the alternative would be to head to the west toward Arizona or California. Certainly the climate would be better suited to one ailing from the kind of condition that my friend, Sullivan had. Yet, I felt certain that my father and his fellow doctors at the college could help him. This was confirmed in a correspondence I had where I had told him of our plight and was promptly invited back to my former home. I felt like the prodigal son embraced by the father, again.
At the time, I did not know the full story, nor the full reason why my father and I came to the United States without the rest of our family. I believed him when he said we had fallen out with the Kaiser and had to make a new way in this new land. I further believed him when he told me that his experimentation was all for human advancement.
We took the journey in June and then arrived in Oktober that same year of 1865. What I relate here I write with the utmost fear and trembling, and pray that God have mercy upon me and upon those poor, dear souls that had foolishly entrusted themselves to my father’s teaching. I dearly hope and pray that it was my father’s formulas that altered his brain. I further pray that the demon that I and my fellows confronted was not truly him, but some being that had taken possession and used his body to commit atrocities most foul along the lake of Gaston’s Pass.
The night we arrived, the night sky was clear and alight with so many bright stars. It was difficult to imagine anything amiss. The moon was bright and directly above us as our wagon slowly made its way through the winding trail in the woods along Gaston’s Pass. It was a narrow road that led to the lake and the one building that housed both the classrooms and dormitories of Milwaukee’s medical college. This was my home for several years, so to me all was as it should be. My companions, though were unsettled by the quiet ride where one could hear every clop of the horses and every creak of the wagon. I too thought it queer that there would not be more creatures roaming about on such a clear, moonlit night, but I put that thought aside. The air was bitter cold and almost winter like. If there had been any clouds in the sky, they might have stored the first snow of the year.
The college was built next to a small lake. As we approached the water, a fine mist ascending from it and rolled out a thin, ethereal carpet to greet us. We walked along the misty road until it bent upward along a hill and onto a stone bridge that took us over a small fishing creek that fed into the lake. It was here that I started to join the two men of action I called “friends” in their unease. The torches that normally lit the road were out. Were it not for the light of the full moon, we would have gotten out and walked to the bridge to ensure the horses did not accidentally stumble into the ravine.
I ordered our driver to stop, while Osborn and I got out to try and light the torches on the bridge. We were able to take a lit torch off of our carriage and Osborn, a muscular figure of a man, took off his bowler and overcoat to climb up the ten feet of square granite on the one corner to place the flame on top of the signal. He nearly singed his handlebar mustache as he clumsily kept his grip around the cold, stone pillar while foisting the torch up and over on top of the bowl of oil that pooled at the top of the pillar. As it lit, I said a small prayer that there was enough oil from the previous night.
I was not idle during the time that my companion was demonstrating his climbing prowess. I am pleased to say that I located a long tree branch that could be converted into a torch and thereby replace the lamplighter’s normal lucifer, a tall lighting torch that was taken around by the groundskeepers at dusk.
When we had lit the last torch on the bridge, I began to feel slightly more assured, taking confidence in their warmth and glow. My thoughts turned now to getting my poor, tuberculosis ridden friend, Sullivan, next to the warmth of the main sitting area of the college. As I climbed back into the coach, and just before giving the driver the signal to move forward, we heard a savage and vengeful scream set upon the chill, mid-autumn air. That is precisely when the madness began.
Author's Note: This text was written in a flurry of madness as I speed through my first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) novel. It has not had the benefit of a good proofreading, much less an editor. You are more than welcome to comment and suggest improvements, which may or may not be implemented depending on how close to the November 29 deadline I get! Thank you for reading!
