Those Fine Young Gentlemen – Part Three: Dandy.avi

This is part three and the final portion of the Those Fine Young Gentleman series.

Dandy.avi

First off let me say that I am ok, these past few weeks I’ve been in and out of the hospital. Ever since I spoke to Sarah I’ve been getting sicker and sicker but the doctors say I’m on the up swing. Even though I’m still stuck in this bed I’m feeling well enough to get the word out to you guys. I suppose I should start when I went to go and find the old man that sold Brad the Dell.

I can’t understand what happened but there wasn’t an old man. I don’t think Brad lied to me but when I went to the address where he had said the man had set up his yard sale I found only an empty lot. There wasn’t a house anywhere near it for almost half a block. I went to a few gas stations in the area and asked around about local yard sales or flea markets, thinking that maybe Brad had just gotten confused as to where he picked it up. The only flea market I could find had a strict rule about what as allowed to be sold. No appliances of any kind and the lady stressed that this included used laptops and computer parts. She said it was an attempt to make sure people weren’t ripped off.

No new information on David and when I search for him on sites like facebook I can’t actually find him. Now if I look for him on the Dell it is a different story and one that is really beginning to bother me. I can find his facebook page but the information keeps changing. His address is never the same, neither is his job history. Sometimes he worked as a toll operator for a bridge in Point Pleasant, WV. Other times he was a First Sargent at the Dulce Air Force Base in Dulce, NM. It is like this damn computer is taunting me. Also I see the eye icon now on everything. My own computer, my personal laptop, my tablet, hell even my phone. No viruses are detected when I check, everything is squeaky clean. I even factory reset my main rig and it was still there.

While the search for David didn’t yield much, I did find some information on Sarah. She was the one he was looking for after all but she wasn’t all that hard to find, well what’s left of her anyway. I found her after checking hospitals for women being admitted around the date that is time stamped on dandy.avi. (I will…I will get into that in a minute) A young woman was admitted to Chandler memorial hospital around that time suffering from shock, malnutrition and trauma.

I went there and pretended to be looking for my sister Sarah. Gave the woman at the front desk a sob story about how I had been out of the country for college and my friend told me she had been admitted here a while ago but that I hadn’t been able to contact her or find anything about her location since I got back. She seemed pretty skeptical till I broke down and begged her to help me find my only family left, since our parents were both dead. I laid it on thick and she finally told me that Sarah had been transferred to the Fairchild Treatment Facility for Mental Illness.

Getting in there wasn’t actually as hard as I thought it would be, they allow and seem to encourage 24 hour visitation. I just had to call and explain what the hospital had told me and they said to come down whenever I wanted. They verified she was there and I just walked in, got a badge and found her in the day room. That whole place had that sterile stink to it, like you know that if you breath in deep enough you might get a whiff of the malignancy in the air. One man sat in front of a TV masturbating vigorously, the TV was tuned to a children’s show with hand puppets. The whole time I was there he never once looked away or stopped. Sarah wasn’t very talkative and by that I mean she only said one thing over and over no matter what I asked her. “How’s the weather?”

She looked so thin, like all her meat was gone and all she had left was a little gristle under the skin. She was pretty once but now her face is gaunt and her brown hair, dull and ratty. It was her eyes though that struck me the most. They were orange and I don’t mean the kind of orange-red from irritation, I mean seaside sunset bright. I sat with her for hours, trying anything and everything to get her to say something other than “How’s the weather?”

Nothing

I think now it is time to talk about what was on dandy.avi and what I think really happened. The video was about her, it was about Sarah.

The video starts in darkness and laughter. The camera focuses in and out, bringing blurred shapes together. Someone says something about low light settings and with some ruffling in the background everything suddenly comes into focus. Sarah and four other people sit around a wooden table covered in beers and glasses. She looks so happy and healthy, one of the men at the table leans over and plants a kiss on her cheek and she swats at him playfully. You can hear over the sounds of the party a loud “HEY! HEY!” and the man puts his hands up smiling.

“Sorry David, I’m just over here trying to steal your girl. No need to get all alpha male on me brah.” He says to the camera.

“Look when I agreed to this whole threesome thing I wasn’t going to be the odd man out behind the camera.” A hand pops out from the side of the screen and gives the guy a light punch.

“Who agreed to a threesome?” Sarah tries to keep a straight face and look upset at them but she constantly cracks a smile.
“Well we were going to tell you see babe but we figured a few beers might help.” David says, his voice distorted.

“Dude she is going to kick you in the nuts. I swear it was all a joke Sarah! kill his future children not mine.” The other guy jumps up from the table, making a show of cupping his crotch. He falls over however and everyone howls with laughter. The camera shakes, causing the party on the screen to sort of bleed into each other before it finally cuts out. The date stamp on the bottom reads April 30, 2013.

It cuts away to Sarah’s face. Her eyes open and close, they are bright green and her cheeks are flushed, her lips seem swollen and you can hear small huffs of breath. The camera sways up and down. Her face suddenly tightens and turns red, she whimpers and covers her eyes with her arm. Her breathing comes in strained gasps. “You’re so beautiful.” David whispers above her, “You love me?” Sarah nods, the camera suddenly shoots forward and she yelps. All you can see at this point are parts of colorful pillows and her hair. “Say it.’

“I love you, I love you.” She repeats this over and over, broken only by the sound of lips meeting again and again. The date still says April 30,2013. This carries over to the next part off the video and never changes. It is always frozen at 00:00 April 30, 2013. I can’t find anything really significant about this date. The next scene still gives me chills just thinking about it, not from anything like what I’ve seen so far but more from the realness of it. How raw it looks, how honest.

Sarah turns on the camera and wipes at her face. Her eyes are puffy and wet, it is obvious she’s been crying. Her voice sounds dejected and weak and she keeps looking around the room, which I gather by now must be her bedroom. Some of the pillows on the messy bed look familiar.

“So who would have guessed it would come back. Been in fucking remission for 6 years but now a nice family of tumors has taken up real estate right here.” Sarah digs a finger into the left side of her head. “That’s prime space. Inoperable. I never thought I wouldn’t understand a word until Doctor Heiz said that. Inoperable. Why not just say ‘Your dead Sarah’ or hand me a pamphlet for ‘Which Coffin is Right for You?’ ” She breaks down at this point, I watched her sob and rage and scream for ten minutes. I don’t know why she decided to record herself, what it was meant to be. Maybe some sort of video blog or a message for someone, I really don’t know.

It hit me hard when I watched it for the first time. I lost my grandmother to cancer and she put out a video card for Christmas. That’s how she told everyone. Watching Sarah fall apart made me think of how my grandma must have handled the news. Did she cry and scream? Did she laugh maybe , unable to process it all? Did she just sit there in the doctors office and think that there wouldn’t be any more Christmases? Even though I’ve watched this video a hundred times, that part always tugs at me.

A good chunk of the rest of the video is corrupted. All you can see every now and then are flashes of a candle lit circle made out of what might be chalk, close up shots of a chicken’s head speckled in blood with one of its eyes poking out. The audio is a strange mix of low chanting in some language I’ve never heard before and the calls of animals; Dogs growl and monkeys scream, sometimes a loud gnashing drowns everything out. This goes on and on for almost another two hours before things finally even out in a jarring cut away to David yelling at some Asian man in a door way.

“Where the hell is she you fuck?!” David shouts at the small man from behind the video camera. He is old and balding, with his skin having an unnatural sheen to it, as if he had covered himself in baby oil. He sulks back against the door as David continues to yell at him but doesn’t turn and go inside. The man looks distressed and badly shaken. “Just tell me, I know she saw you every day. Did you hurt her? get her all doped out on this new age medicine shit and touch her? you fucking piece of shit!” David pushes the man back into the dark room and the camera goes crazy.

Flashes of every color you could imagine in shapes I don’t have names for fill the screen and all you can hear is a high pitched scream. Then that eye icon flashes for a second and the old man comes into view, sitting in the floor bathed in the stark green of night vision. David keeps shouting “Oh shit” over and over while swinging the camera around the room. There must have been dozens of small heads on the wall. Some were just skulls, others with bits of flesh still on them and a few looked horrifyingly fresh. Babies. The old man starts to yell.

“It was supposed to work. They lie, the four, not the ones I called for help. They lie, bringing it over. It over. It.” The man springs up and points at David. “They lie.” He shouts one last time before the camera is suddenly in a park. Just like that. One minute the frame shows the old man in the room and the next a sunny park. David’s ragged breathing can be heard and his shocked curses. The camera topples to the ground and I catch a glimpse of him with his head in his hands sobbing. Then the video ends, simply cutting out.

When I first saw this I decided to do some digging. If Sarah really had been seeing someone who had the dead heads of children on his walls things must have a tangible trail. That isn’t something you just keep hidden. Sure enough I poked around and found a news report about a Doctor Syun and the closing of his “Natural Healing for a Better You” clinic. There wasn’t any mention of dead babies but the place closed down around the time stamp and I found out that Doctor Syun had committed suicide right after. That little discovery turned out to lead to something unbelievable and my take on what must have happened.

Doctor Syun had been a popular man and several memorial pages were set up for him. Former patients talked bout how his treatments had managed to cure diseases other doctors has deemed terminal. Reading through his biography I became more and more intrigued. He had studied medicine at Tulane University and graduated with honors but then he went on to run a fee clinic in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It was a few years later that the good doctor went on to open a holistic center where he began to practice alternative medicine and build his reputation.

Some of David’s searches and notes were starting to make sense but it was only after I managed to track down Doctor Syun’s assistant on his memorial page did things start to fall into place. When I finally got in contact with the assistant I decided to throw caution to the wind and tell her everything. I explained the Dell, the chat logs, the Gentlemen, everything. She didn’t reply to me for a long time and I figured I might have just blown it by running her off but then she sent me this email. I’ll post the body of the text, so you can make what you want from it. This is the only thing she ever sent me.

~I don’t pretend to know everything doc was doing and I don’t believe half of it. You would have better luck telling your story to one of his root doctor friends in that bayou he loved so much. All I know is what I’ve seen and what I’ve seen is enough for me to give you this advice. Burn that computer. Burn your computer. Burn everything. I was with him when he had his sessions with Sarah and what happened was like nothing I had ever seen before. They went into her, out of her, they shone out of her eyes so bright I didn’t think I would ever see again. But they were calling something. Bringing it with them. That’s what he said anyway. I’ll never know what I saw that day and I’ll never forget it. You don’t want that. Burn it all.~

I feel I’ve managed to piece together an idea of what happened. I’m not a praying man, I don’t make many waves when it comes to faith but I do believe that something is out there. We are floating in a vast darkness, only able to see a thread of the tapestry of the universe. Who knows what wonders are out there, who knows what horrors. I think the doctor found a way to see a little bit more of our world and the things in it and he used that to help people.

Voodoo actively encourages possession by spirits, so that they might heal the body. I think Sarah was desperate enough to try anything and when Doctor Syun tried to heal her something took a turn and the wrong kind of spirits entered her. Now if these spirits are the Gentlemen I don’t know. How David got in contact with them is anyone’s guess at this point. I think something with that eye icon might be a connection and if that is the case then I’m torching every last scrap of tech when I get home.

For right now though these meds are kicking my ass and I’ve got to lay down. I’ll keep you all posted should anything else happen.

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Credit: R.A. Brewster (Official Website • Facebook • Twitter • Reddit)