I shall not hold you in suspense, Dear Reader, as I leave you with the burden of these, my final words. The ‘Death’ in the title of this note is, of course, mine own. Why I chose All Hallows’ Eve to perform my final act is pure coincidental timing. The gray aliens killed my mother. Then a group of Deep One cultists carried my father away to a watery demise. In both cases I could do nothing to intervene. The gray aliens somehow froze me and the cultists hit me on the head and knocked me unconscious. I am alone but not for much longer, Dear Friend.
I hope I prepared whoever finds me with the emergency signs I printed for the windows:
If death truly is the “undiscovered country,” then my parents are there in that world, not here in this one. I will make the voyage to that new world and find my mother and father. Will I see a tunnel and then a bright white light? Is that where you find your family, in that pure light? I can know nothing from this side of the pale. And if there is nothing? Then I am nothing. I was nothing before my birth and I will soon be nothing again after my death.
This is how I have planned to do it. I am not “crying out for help.” I have procured a tank of carbon monoxide gas with a pressure regulator, a valve and a mask. Where will I die? I can tell you. I will have been absent for hours at the very least in any case. I plan to find an old logging road and follow it up as far as it leads in the strange hours of the night. Only when I am completely certain that no one is around will I kill myself. As for the process of this suicide, I am compelled to relate it through “Ye Who Hath Found My Note”:
Why I chose carbon monoxide gas. I have chosen carbon monoxide gas to end my life because it is odorless, tasteless and bonds to hemoglobin eight times more efficiently than oxygen. I will have a brief experience of inhaling the gas, probably only fifteen seconds to unconsciousness. I will close the windows tight before I place the mask on my nose and mouth and crack open the tank. The warning signs are on the windows. In three minutes I am dead.
Whoever finds me will see the signs and call the police, certainly. A good clean death. I only hope I do not succeed in hiding my car so well that my body is not found until an advanced state of decomposition. I would be very sorry to whomever found my rotten corpse. But I am desperate and I hope that I can be forgiven this drastic measure to escape the loss and loneliness of this relentless world and the horrible things it bears!
I drove around for hours tonight, silently trick-or-treating from my car. I saw the little ghouls and pirates begging for candy. I remembered my own youth in a lighted neighborhood at night so many decades gone. I remembered green and trees. We had more trees on the block when I was a kid. My mother’s abductions had not yet begun and the cultists had not moved into the crack house across the street. It was a neighborhood of middle class families. I was happy then. I gathered bucket loads of candy and poured my loot onto the carpet. Life was like that back then.
Again, to “Ye Who Hath Found My Note”:
I have been compelled to end my life due to the unbearable suffering of loneliness. I did not make this decision rashly. It is the same as if I were diagnosed with an incurable, terribly painful degenerative disease. In that case I might choose morphine euthanasia, but I can get my hands on a tank of carbon monoxide more easily and I won’t have to pay anyone to administer to my death. I can handle that myself.
This “Note” should be far shorter but I wish also to address those who have taken from me what I most needed to live.
First, to the grays:
Goddamn you little gray fucking bastards! You repeatedly abducted my mother for years. You inserted an implant in the back of her brain. Two months ago you activated the implant to murder her with a massive stroke. By the time the doctor examined her the effects of the stroke were horribly obvious—I heard the chilling emphatic whisper of the doctor, “Tell me! Is that your mother?” That? Was my mother a that? Like a zombie? Not dead, but completely unconscious of everything but the pain. Was that my mother? And after she died you replaced her with a simulacrum! I do not know if this “Mother Thing” is alive or mechanical or both. It is unseemly convincing. My father tried to get rid of it forcefully but it returns, sometimes with repairs or improvements. But it is not my mother. If I could kill you I would.
Second, to the cultists:
You have no place in our neighborhood, no matter how much it has changed since I was a child.
You can take your Deep Ones and flush them! Pitiful idiots. Chanting ridiculous words like “Dagon” and “Cthulhu.” You were Satanists in high school and you played D & D in grade school. You killed my father with a dagger—a goddamned dagger! My father’s murder was the wish fulfillment of geeks with a hard-on for SCA conventions. I understand what you worship and what protects you. If I could kill you I would.
And finally, to you, Dear Reader:
Take the advice of a man who has lived in these hopeless times and lost. Surround yourself with loving people. If you need a family, then make one! If you see a light in the sky, run! If you hear the cultists chanting, call the police! But most important, keep your family close. Life for everybody is about to get far worse than anyone can imagine. I consider myself lucky for choosing to miss all of that. I cannot face the end of the world alone. I have seen the future. From the atomic waste will rise the Old Ones and from the skies will land the aliens. All of that is wrong and awful and yet I care only for myself in my loneliness, the terrible aloneness that has written this very note.
Farewell, on my final Halloween. Best of luck to you in the future.
I no longer have a name with which to sign.
