September and October of 1929 took Wall Street by the ankles and shook it upside down until everything had fallen out of its pockets. The Crash was a disaster for almost everyone: fortunes and livelihoods wiped out in the blink of an eye: high diving bankers embraced by the sidewalks of New York City, and the start of the Great Depression. But for Everbleak, it bought an influx. A new wave of people broken by uncontrollable events and the cruelty of a god like Mamon.
Extra patients meant extra revenue from Government, but Sylvan Kane had gradually been losing interest in commercial matters since leaving Bedlam at the start of the century. He had founded Everbleak specifically to delve deeper into the hinterlands of alternative treatments, parapsychology and mysticism. So by the late 20’s, run-of-the-mill mental illness no longer held any allure for him. It was the freaks, the outcasts, the sideshow anomalies that he wanted to beckon him in through the tent flap.
He had already started spending a lot of time alone in Everbleak’s greenhouses, where he enjoyed (accompanied by Prokofiev 78’s and laudanum) pottering around with the psychotropic and flesh-eating plants, looking for interesting new strains and mutations. So the sudden arrival of suicidal businessmen and investors looking for neural realignment was the very last thing he wanted. His diary from this time acts as a window into his state of mind..
I tire of convention. I tire of the convention of ‘hospital’ and the all inherent convention and weight contained within that bloody word. It’s designation as a place of cures and wellness bores me senseless. Or maybe convention has tired of me and my aged restlessness. I oscillate between the desire for unbridled adventure, and the desire for uncomplicated peace. I am a coin, spinning between the head and the tail. Chance will no doubt decide which way I fall, but in the meantime, I crave whisky on ice, and nun on fire.
For Kane, the Great Depression had arrived early. He was becoming as everbleak as the title he’d chosen for his hospital-asylum. So he decided to take drastic action. Out of nowhere, he dramatically announced a trip to the village of Machhapuchre in Nepal (of all the random places in the world), thanks to a telepathic conversation with a wizened little shaman monkey who rode around on a greyhound that had been saddled like a horse.
Manish Ram, my shaman guide, told me telepathically about a rare Nepalese flower – unseen for decades – that has potent psychotropic properties. It only grows in one village – right at the top of the world, amongst the clouds… amongst the picked-clean bones of the Sherpa dead. Does it exist? Probably not. But I want to find it: to go on one last big adventure.
Sylvan Kane
That’s how Kane himself put it, but those around him said that laudanum and insanity had taken such a toll on him by this point, that he actually believed he could commune with animals telepathically. We have to consider, however, that elevating Manish Ram to ‘untouchable’ shaman status had caused a lot of jealousy amongst Everbleak’s doctors and nuns.
There was great fanfare as the staff and inmates of Everbleak bid bon voyage to their founding father one misty November morning. He was travelling alone, and lightly. His backpack contained a compass, a maritime sextant, notebooks and specimen jars. Plus enough laudanum to incapacitate a shire horse.
He french-kissed the nuns, patted the midgets on the head, and was gone.
After being swallowed by Outer Banks mist, Sylvan Kane wasn’t seen or heard from again for two years. Not even a letter or telegram. Some presumed him dead from opium in the back streets of Peking. Some predicted syphilitic madness and suicide. Some imagined him plummeting into a Himalayan ravine or being eaten by wolves.
But the truth, as is often the case, can be stranger than fiction.
Sylvan Kane hadn’t actually gone anywhere. He had walked a mere 800 yards to the old Manteo Sound lighthouse. And that’s where he had meditated, read and hallucinated for 24 long months.
He had secretly pre-stocked the disused lighthouse with books, dry goods and canned food, so had everything he needed to survive: through all the wars, winters and psychotic episodes that his outer and inner worlds could assail him with. He had even constructed a way to collect and store rain water.
Kane left whatever was troubling him at the foot of the winding stair, and climbed to the room beneath a revolving sun that had lain dusty and extinct since the Civil War. His demons had come with him to this circular womb, curling up with him for warmth as the nights grew dark and windy. Sometimes he wrestled with them: especially the libido and laudanum ones, but eventually they left him alone in quiet contemplation.
By the time that twenty four months of raging heat and frosted panes had passed, the metamorphosis was complete. The former Morgan Gresham had entered the lighthouse as Sylvan Kane, but left as Nimrod Ballentine: clean-shaven, serene and studious. As he walked back nonchalantly through the hospital’s crumbling portico, the nuns barely recognised him.
A different chapter and era of Everbleak had begun.
everbleak 