THE CEMETERY PAPERS: FROM THE NOTES OF JOSEPH CAMP, PH.D.

SUBJECT: Excerpts from pp. 15, 16, 17 from the personal correspondence of Dr. Joseph Camp, Ph.D. (item #3455, dated 9 MAY 48), assembled as a summary of OPERATION MULLIGAN (10 FEB 55). 

—and Daniel, you should put that out of your mind entirely.

    You asked previously about the idea that the reality thought-model I proposed in the examination of the formulae in the [REDACTED] was somehow the answer for us. That the Hindu concepts of the maya and the shaping of reality, and that creatures such as tulpas could be a manifestation of human thought form. You also (and now, perhaps this was implied between the lines) spoke of this being the basis for all the horrors we’ve seen. Maybe these boogeymen are shapes drawn by our mind which the raw stuff of the universe is pressed into, like some damnable mold. Does that about cover it? If I’m reading too far into anything, pardon and excuse, if you please. Goodness knows you owe me one (or three, drink up). 

    Still, if this is your implication, I think it’s a very dangerous game you’re playing with yourself, and I must object to it especially if you are hoping to espouse it as an ethos for the [REDACTED]. What we’re doing is important, but why we are doing it is more important, and it always must be. We are not damping down the fire of human consciousness; instead, we are custodians at a very primal and ancient passage—one placed in the firmament before the first earthly things walked on the land. We must keep it shut. The key to this is understanding what is on the other side. Or, perhaps it is better to say to understand what those things on the other side are not.

    The other side of the door has absolutely nothing to do with humanity. Yes? Can we agree on this point? Anyone who has seen as much as we have must at their core knows this.

    Yes?

    But then I get into my cups, and I don’t know. Who am I to rain on your parade? If this was simply some religious thing perhaps I could let it go, but that’s not really who I am now, is it? (And, perhaps, this was why you wrote to me of all people in the first place.) You asked me what I thought, and so I will put it out plain.

    Here’s what I think Daniel:

    The earth is a door. It’s referred to over-and-over again as a door, a gate, a window, an eye, a lock. The imagery is always similar. (Why earth? Who knows? Why not here? Perhaps the earth is filled with life because of this fact; perhaps the whole universe is a door? Questions. Questions.) In any case, this world is filled with remnants of cultures, peoples—non-human intelligences—that pre-date the modern world by tens of millions of years (ask me about Myong sometime. Ask me how I’m so certain. Trust me, it’s a good story).

    Drink up.

    So. Earth is a door. A huge, vast, alien, incomprehensible, door. And human science has taken ten centuries measure of it and has gone, well then, it’s a planet. It’s this old, and this big, and these things lived and died on it, and then there’s us. But the time since we dropped from the trees and took to the cities is a tick on a clock that has spun out endlessly. Many, many, many creatures have lived and died and plied their cultures long before even mammals arrived on the scene. These befores were huge and as compelling and long and varied as all of human history (longer even), and they were scraped and drowned and shaken and erased by time. Who knows how many things came and went? Remember the Iceland thing? The plant? Imagine cities of that thing. Building and breeding and spreading and thinking.

    Dreaming.

    Certainly, they were there. I’ve seen the surveys from [REDACTED]. They’re spinning up some study even now, I’m certain. 

    This door, our world, it’s open just a crack. And things come through. Small things. They infect and infest and spread and grow. We’re the latest of those things. Or the summation of the latest leak as it winds upwards along a path of raw and simple evolution. We’re inefficient and poorly matched for the task of understanding the door, but we’re here. There were others before, and now it’s our turn. They each took their stab at the door and they each, in turn, failed to open it. Some worked out ways to peer under the door (and you know ALL about that), others snuck things through gaps in the door. Still, others managed to shake the door but not really move it. Even so, such vibrations were enough to consume entire civilizations (Lomar, et al.).

    Who knows? Perhaps in other times and places, there were beings like us trying to stop the door from moving? Snake-headed priests slaying those who had learned the improper formulae so it might not spread? No? Too outrageous? Forgive me. 

And do drink up.

    So this is what I think. I think the door is a machine that makes conscious beings to open the door. Unlike previous creations, we are not attempting to work the door directly, instead, a thousand individuals fumble at meaning and purpose and attempt to shake the world. And at least we have that going for us. But we’re wily. We’re clever. We were meant to perish in some icy wasteland and found ourselves suddenly on a sunlit verdant grassland. We took every random advantage and ran the ball downfield. I’ve thought before, certainly, we’ll never… And then I see rockets. I see a bomb level an island. I see us punching—if you’ll forgive me—far above our weight class in the cosmic arena. Though we have no clue what we are really playing at.

    The same feeling of pride I feel to think of all that our kind have created, changed, overcome, all the challenges we have leveled in our time in this world, that same pride fills me with the blackest dread I have ever known.

    Mankind was designed to open the door. 

    That’s what I think.

    God help us, I think we can do it.

    And drink up now, it’s getting very late.

Your friend,

-J.