5:47 a.m. - 2022-10-19
Gnome Gnotebook
I can't recall who I was there to pick up. A cousin? A friend? A friend's cousin maybe--I remember it was wintertime though. Overcast, with an onshore breeze pushing a frigid mist in off the bay, everything all washed out and gray-looking. It was warm inside of course, but there's something about the beat sameness of Greyhound terminals that gets me down; the worn linoleum in front of the ticket window, the banks of battered pay-phones and vending machines. And for whatever reason (the Christmas holiday, maybe) the waiting room was full of passengers. With their makeshift luggage, their snacks, their restless children...not my scene. So I was outside, pacing the deserted streets of downtown when I stumbled upon it, abandoned on a bus bench.
It had a denim cover, the spine and fore-edge of which were worn and begrimed with that sort of oft-touched, seldom-washed sheen one associates with homeless detritus/artifacts. But the title was clear and handsomely printed: “Gnome Gnotebook”. A glance at the contents revealed a handwritten journal. I looked around, half-hoping to spot its owner in the vicinity, but there was (g)no one on the streets. Nor was there any traffic or open businesses...just the distant clamor of seagulls and the repetitive, metallic clang of a windblown snap-hinge striking a flagpole. I turned my collar up against the chill and sat down to read.
The author was male and wrote with black felt-tip in a legible script that sat neatly upon the pre-printed lines. Apparently he was about to start college. It's unusual for a young man of that age to keep a diary, and less usual still to keep one that made no mention of chicks, cars, rock 'n roll or the like. This documented instead the sort of mundane anxieties and anticipation anyone would have when leaving home for the first time...what to pack, the pressure to make his family proud, choosing classes for his semester schedule. It was the specifics of that last item that clued me in, and my suspicion was confirmed when he mentioned the name of the college he'd be attending--he was a seminary student. This might explain why there was no description of a tearful goodbye w/a high school sweetheart, and it definitely explained why his first impressions of college life made no mention of crippling rush-week hangovers or dorm room hook-ups. He spoke instead of his sage professors, of the student cafeteria's breakfast options, or of something mentioned during morning chapel that had struck a chord.
I should (g)note that none of this was boring. He wrote in a peculiar style that imbued certain details with seemingly-disproportionate emphasis, an approach that piqued one's interest. And since this was a private diary the language was succinct and peppered with esoteric references. So the summary I provided above would only become clear over the course of multiple entries. But my brain enjoyed this sort of detective work, and I was making pleasant progress when, some ten pages in, I read of the first unsettling occurrence.
His dorm room overlooked a sports field surrounded by dense forest, and it was on the periphery of these woods that he first spotted the black figure. Not a black person, nor a shadow or silhouette or someone in dark clothing. No...every bit of this individual was as black as the ink from his felt-tip. And whoever it was was watching him back. Over the course of the following entries it became clear that our author believed this to be some sort of (or possibly “the”) devil, and that it had manifested because he'd been masturbating, sinfully, in his room. These alarming encounters would wholly consume the diary moving forward, and he would describe them with anxiety and fear. Nothing florid like Lovecraft, no calculated suspense a la Steven King...just genuine, first-person terror at the prospect of being taken by this Stygian shadow. His penmanship began to suffer, passages became illegible and the Gnotebook's pre-printed lines were disregarded in favor of an errant, urgent scrawl.
It was shortly after the black figure emerged from the woods and stepped onto the sports field that the down-strokes began. These were brief vertical lines, the kind you'd scratch on a cell wall to count off days, only without any diagonal counter-strokes demarcating sets of five. Just vertical lines. I thought at first they might be scribed in lieu of a name better kept anonymous, or a profanity he dared not write, but they proliferated; evolving from word-length percussive asides into line-long intermissions that would begin abruptly, mid-sentence. All of this as declining legibility made the narrative harder to follow. Still I was able to gather that, even when our author closed his curtains and turned away, he understood that the black figure remained, watching. If not from the sport field then perhaps from the stairwell of his residence hall, or immediately outside his dorm-room door... At some point during one entry the down-strokes commenced and continued to the end of the page. I turned this page to find more of the same, line after line, verso, recto, crowding every available space; down-strokes. The height of a line might change, as might the spacing, and the ink would sometimes blot from the pressure applied...but the procession proceeded with insistence. This went on for eight pages. The rest of the book was blank.I'm not a psychiatrist, but from what I've heard and read, our author seems to have been documenting a schizophrenic episode. How the evidence of this ended up abandoned on a lonely bench downtown is no doubt a story unto itself. I do wish I still had the Gnotebook in my possession, but I've moved many times since and have shed more than I've carried along. I also have a habit of lending things out to friends...all of whom are well-intended, but some of whom were heroin addicts. I did look it up online, just to check my memory, and although it's out of print you can still buy one, albeit for an absurd amount. But I mean, if you are going to write about the devil while he watches you masturbate, you may as well come correct.
