Patreon Reveal - Testimonies of the Damned

0:00Greetings, ladies and gentlemen of hell. The shadows are stretching long and the air grows heavier. After this episode, we descend into the mid-season finale of The Gentleman from Hell. Secrets will surface, debts will be called in, and the fire will burn brighter than ever. Catch up while you can. Prepare yourself and be ready to step into the dark when the grand moment arrives for hell awaits. If anyone can hear me, please respond. You have to reach your turn. There are other clients

1:05ahead of you. This is not a client. I am speaking to you for a living world. What is your name? Another case of schizophrenic delusions, I see. But where are you? You're not in my office. No, but by said I'm from a living world. Now please tell me your name. How? How is that possible? I haven't talked to anyone other than. How are you speaking to me? My people have divorced from a machine that allows us to speak to those no longer in the living world. Can you cut me out of here? Please, please just let me out. We do have a way, but first we must speak of suspicions. Will you cooperate? Yes. If I must, it will get me out of this place.

2:0830th. What is your name? Holly. Dr. Holly Girard. And you know what you are? I'm your world office. What's wrong? It's like different. Is there any reason you're there? Do you think of? A hill. Are you aware that you're dead? Yes. And really aware? Can you tell me about yourself? What were you in life? You mentioned your world doctor. What kind? A psychologist. And what evil did you perpetrate in your privileged position? Do you know? We both know where the office you're in really is, don't we? Yes. So please tell me about your life. I graduated from you. See, Parklee, I did my postdoc work. It's Stanford in the psych clinic. Pretty standard stuff.

3:11So what good doctor was it that made you different? Made you evil? Did you know that sociopathy and psychopathy aren't actual clinical diagnosis? Everyone thinks they are, but they're just informal terms to describe other disorders. Like anti-social personality disorder. It's all part of the world of psychology. How could you tell me that I saw a whole really? It's quite a generic thing about it. I select portion of society, but it's a secret of the universe. And then you use it for the betterment of that kind or for their own purposes. Isn't that something? Large institutions and trusting individuals with such powerful knowledge, not knowing what they might do with it, not knowing the horror that it can cause.

4:13Oh, bro, something don't care. I do get you a response month with your knowledge. Psychology is an interesting field. Since I was a little girl, I was obsessed with how things worked. My mom and dad bought me dolls, but I was more interested in their motivations for purchasing them. So they want me to emulate the little plastic beauty queens, mimic their cosmetic artifices, play with them. As I grew my parents animosity for each other, did as well. It didn't bother me. Not like it would other children anyway. I was more concerned with how I might influence that bitterness. Play with them, like they would have me those atrocious dolls. Not only did I wish to understand the inner workings of the mind, I sought to exploit them. I wanted to use them to cause.

5:21To cause what? There are no judgments here after Gerard, much like a therapist's office, you might say. There's always judgment as per kiss. There is or not. We're just not enough to voice it, but we can implement it. Are you for careful? I fear. We're deliberate. Along my fixation on the wise and wear force of the human mind were commendable. How I wish to use that knowledge was not. I never told a soul, of course. Not my parents, not my friends. Not even my own therapist. How do you tell another you have a pension? No. A desperate need. To harm others. To watch them unravel like a morphine sweater.

6:27From afar, a person looks like a neatly knit tapestry. But when you get up close, you can see the frayed edges. All those threads just dangling there. Just dangling there for someone to... It started with my parents. I diagrammed them like you would any mapper puzzle. Place the characteristics into neat little pins. Each one carefully curated until at last I understood every inch of them. Psychologically, anyway. What lies on the surface has never concerned me. I take a year with a reason your parents were at each other's throats. Of course. Watching them fall apart was much more interesting than us coming together as a family. Picknicks, drive-in movies, reunions. What if they'd cry and spell screaming matches and eventually infidelity?

7:34The crumbling of the portrait of the American family. All undone by me. Two things are more satisfying than watching a carefully crafted sandcastle collapse under the rush of the incoming tide. Yet it doesn't happen all at once, does it? It erodes slowly. First, it just depends. Then, yes, wave after wave comes in and no forms. Decraints until there's nothing but ruin. Of course, neither of them knew I was the cause. In fact, I was their little helper. Innocently reporting on the activities of one to the other, accidentally letting slip my nisha that would lead them down certain paths, collision courses, the light of icing.

8:37That's what was the thrill. Not that I had undone them, but that they actually thought that I was helping them. The joy of their life was really the tool for their destruction. And so... It was too Christmas, too birthday, too everything. And then what? My adolescence and early adult life were relatively normal. At least that's what it looks like. In truth, I did the same with my friends as I did with my parents. I fanged to help them when I was really hurting them. All while they thanked me for my steady shoulder and great advice. But their problems were juvenile. So after high school, I went to Stanford for my undergrad and Harvard for my graduate work, with a specific focus on cognitive appraisal theory.

9:37With accolades from two of the most esteemed academic institutions in the country, the world even, I was able to establish my own practice. And from there, my journey really began. Also, subjects of my youth were pedestrian. Their problems were garden variety, common weeds sprouting from the cracks of their lives. Easily plucked. The patience of my practice, however, were exotic plants. Age needed their own treatment, their own trajectory, their own pitch of despair to fall into. But it was the path to that terrible place that most excited me. How would I guide them? How would I walk them down that dark path, for convincing them the sun was shining? At the excitement, don't you see? To convince the fly that the spider is its friend, that the webs are not there to trap it, but to steady it, call it, bring tranquility to its life.

10:50Even as the spider sucks the juices from its body, the fly thinks it hurts health, drifting slowly into the abyss, thoughts of its adoding eight-legged friend accompanying it into the soft, nothingness. So you killed your patients, drove them to suicide? No. No, not often. Metroid was in the process, the labors of attractive wrong turns and the far-strand dead ends. The feeling I caught when they sat on my couch, their burdens heavier than before, caused a kind of worth, rarely attainable through more traditional means. How many clients did you have over the years? Hundreds, I imagine. Each one is unique, bland, a personality and pathology. Each a novel path of destruction. And despite their lives gone worse, I convinced some otherwise, and they thanked me for it. All except...

12:02Except? The clients responsible for my undoing. The one who killed me? One of your clients murdered you? The word murder implies wrongdoing. I would argue that his actions were justified. Given the mystery I put him through. But yes, my pleasures were my undoing. Oh, suppose it was only a matter of time before I came upon someone... A stooch, enough to uncover my motivation. You don't seem to hold me kind of malice for the man. On the contrary, you see only one of my patients I came to respect. His mind, delusion, adult as it was, proved his sharpest mind. He took the time to analyze my patterns, to deconstruct me as I deconstructed him. And so, when he finally realized what was happening, he brought a gun to a Thursday session.

13:06The mages are accusation. And unsurprisingly shot me in the head. I don't wonder, from time to time, what happened to him? I hope he was able to get away with it. Perhaps on an insanity plane. Because you feel guilty. You're repentant. No, of course not. Which intelligence and cunning should be admired, Miss Berkus? He was the only one to see through the illusion. To see through to the real me. No matter his actions. Credit is too. An interestingly steregrine way to look at one's end. And whatever. After. Like a September. Hey, babe. Yes. A Tamil. A storm of spoken words, cries and bombs. The bitter and metallic taste of pills in my mouth, they fell through an endless void.

14:13I could hear the anguish of my patients and my fellow. They whispered unanswered prayers. Their tears as they clashed their pillows at night. Hoping things would somehow get better. If I'm honest, it was less like falling and more like being in the eye of a storm. A storm of conscious torment, a tempest of unease, that only the most unsound minds could muster. After. God knows how long. The chaos began to sound monotic. The screams of the soul. The whispers have no. The pleas and melody the soul cannot forget. Perhaps it was the month's propensity to seek patterns that the cacophony became lyrical. Or perhaps it was the cool sarcasm of the universe that my sins and be played back with such mocking wincy. Whatever was I endured. I endured it for many lifetimes. And then some. And when it stopped.

15:21When it stopped. I learned I had not yet begun to experience hell. Tell me about it. What is it like where you are? Mine is not a hell of brinstone and fire. Nor burning lakes or icy rains and mud. Instead, it is a warmly lit office with art by Francis Bacon and Edward Munch hanging from yellow walls. It is a place humming with a subtle overtures and looks at Requiem and Enius sail away. Both reverberating within each end by 12 square. A company by a noisy air conditioning unit in the window. Such is the hell of my own device. And well. The fog kept playing interior designer I hired for my office.

16:21Are you saying you were in your office? Similar cram of it. Yes. All the way down to my grandmother's hurricane lamp, touching me into the corner. And what is the truth that goes on there? Surely you don't simply sit there all day. Certainly not. No. I am what I was in life. A therapist. A therapist to an endless line of patience. The waiting room outside my door is an eternal corridor lined with countless people sitting in cushy chairs flipping through bulk culture magazines and impatiently checking their watches. I've seen well, I've stopped counting. But it must be hundreds of thousands. If not millions, plus new and repeat patience. I see. What do these patients do? What any patient does. They have to feel better. They tell me their problems and I try to solve them.

17:30But of course, you know it's not that simple. Don't you? Yes. What is your interest in all this? I'm sure that's pre-enteryocity. Let's keep on topic, Dr. Gerrard. Tell me what makes your time with these patients unique. Very well. I've been in no position to negotiate after all. This place has granted me pure and empathy. A complete and involuntary capacity to feel the pain and suffering of my patients. This place, it has a sense of irony. Just the other day, there are indeed days here. I'm strapped in the delusion of a paranoid schizophrenic. As transported into a room, terrified that the A-camel on TV was really a gemotic visitor from another dimension. The despair that such a delusion causes is quite a mess room. No words can quantify it. No pain, scale can measure it.

18:41One light is well pre-eventuring tape to infinity. The pain is incalculable. One so it goes for depression, avoid going through it. A black well of no autumn. Words and pills might as well be wishes tossed inside it, most to nowhere. One can never climb out of it. I experience it all. The anguish and despondency of minds pertinent. The pain is my pain. And how do you treat your patients? That's a bit on the nostril. What is my punishment if that's what it is? To treat my patients, knowing that whatever harm comes to them will come to me. All strictly compelling me to try and genuinely help. Over and over. In to you? To treat your patients, I mean. Of course. At first.

19:44The anguish was constant and unyielding. Every feeling conveyed. Every delusion entertained. Every intrusive thought suffered. In desperation to make it stop. I attempted the one thing I never had as a psychologist. I tried to help. That's my torture attempt to touch more. Firmest and experienced their problems and then did my best to send them all about every recovery. Of course, my first attempts were solid by my direct experiences of the various pathologies my therapeutic approaches being influenced by my desperate need to escape the pain. Not unlike my patients, I imagine. It took. Well, I don't know how long. I don't believe time is an extent thing here. But I imagine it took me many years to devise firm plans for my patients.

20:49Ones that would surely alleviate their misery. And did they? Of course not. I should have known this place's punishment would not be curbed so easily. Every therapeutic approach I devise. Every psychological schema I created failed. Niserably. Somehow my plans would always leave them down darker paths. Worse than whatever conditions they had. Send them into the worst nightmares their battle lines could cause her. The irony is a must on me. That my endeavors to better my patients brought me back to the source of my eternal punishment. My original sins. I suffered all of it. I fell through their minds toward her like Alice down the rabbit hole. Flaming. Screaming. I find it difficult at times to know who I am. My reflection bears many faces. All of them contorted and mischaped. Symmetries of madness given flesh with which to express its endless toiling.

22:02But still, I'm not allowed to lose myself in the chaos. I always return to that small room. The room where an endless line of patients seek a firm of mind. When I asked you if you helped your patients you said at first, what did you mean by that? In the throes of my vicarious madness I felt clarity. To it all I've yet to paint my patients' punishment, a condition to be reviled and escaped. My pure empathy was the price of a life spent poorly, maliciously. After all, what other way was there to see it? But then it came to me. Somewhere in the tunnels of all those arriving in firm minds. I saw the lines which have hurt the walls of me. My capacity to feel what they felt. Herred like they heard. Suffer like they suffered. Certainly caused me indescribable torment.

23:07But it also let me inside I could never have had before. Insights that allowed me a new kind of manipulation. A new psychological approach with which to error or my patients. In experiencing their psychic turmoil, I found novel ways to stoke the flames of their personal elves. If this epiphany that caused me to stop trying to help, my infinite clientele. The further hold my skills. But this must cause more torment, does it not? Long and hard is the way out of hell. Is that not what they say? We learn to paint mispercuss. Perhaps. Is my learned learnings that have summoned you here.

24:09To take me from this place. Once again, let me do my good work. But not here. Back there in the world again. That is why you speak to me now, yes. Yes, we do intend to bring you up. But for now I must go. Do keep at your work, Dr. Gerard. When we're ready for you, you'll be bringing your help with you.