Winfried Cross
Residing at premises of one Mrs. Flood,
Or thereabouts,
Taulkinham, TennesseeFather,
It is my sincere hope that the receipt of my letter has provoked no murmur from your restive and ailing heart. I know it has been some years since we spoke, and indeed I have no earthly idea whether you possess either mind or body capable of taking up correspondence. Had I any other recourse, I should not presume to disturb either your person, nor my own equivocal recollections of our acquaintance; but the trouble is a Cross matter, and only one versed in the particular affliction which pursues our family can be of help to me.
Were I addressing any other, it would be deemed polite to proffer some innocuous commentary on the weather, or perhaps national affairs. There is no shortage of such matters, what with the many riots, frauds, and breaches of public trust which will not let the nation forget her most terrible and bloody civil war. Of infinitely more interest to me are events in a world historic register, which I have witnessed in my own person; for I write this letter between lectures eagerly attended at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, a festival of industrial wonders such as has never yet been organized. Were you any other man, I should expound for many pages on the marvels I have seen in a short span of days: machines which may carry a man’s voice over the span of hundred miles in an instant; the primal force of electricity harnessed to produce light of impressive brilliance; and a great spirit of international solicitude and confidence in the good fortune promised to industrious nations by the century to come.
But you are in fact no other man than Winfried Cross, who I know all too well concerns himself not with the weather, except for it spell ill favor from wrathsome Providence, nor national affairs, except insofar as they demonstrate the depravity and wretchedness of mankind, nor scientific ingenuity, except as it betray the prideful and ungrateful spirit which Lucifer revealed to an eager Eve. No, I know you will take no more interest in such developments than you showed when I first announced to you my intention to make some small improvement on this world by the study of medicine; so I shall offer neither polite pleasantries, nor reports which, in one vulnerable to simple joy and wonder, would invoke astonishment; but only the grim details of power, vanity, and obsession which, to your religiously and morbidly afflicted mind, tell all of import.
The true business of my letter, painful to you as it may be, is Comfort. I am well aware that the whereabouts of your most cherished and wayward daughter has been unknown to you for many years longer than the elapse of our acquaintance. But it has come to my attention, by means of, of all things, a public advertisement of the most salacious and unseemly character, and confirmed by my subsequent investigations into the matter, that one “Lady Comfort”, apparently afflicted by some terrible and heretofore unstudied disease, and who, to all appearances, ought not to stand under her own power, yet speaks with the authority and grace of one of the angels! And further, that a surgical demonstration of her condition, in all its gory, clinical detail, is to be carried out on her living person before The Public in two months time!
Perhaps it would be wise, at this juncture, to put down my letter, until such time as your heart may take in stride the convulsions of your no doubt racing mind, for the horrors continue. The man, or perhaps I should say the beast, who shall be performing this pantomime of a surgical demonstration is not unknown to me: one Dr. Erasmus Darwin, a man whose skill with a bone knife is matched only by his wolfish brutality. He is infamous in my profession for his utter disregard for the discomfiture of his patients, and for his total rejection of methods which he arbitrarily and unscientifically deems intrusions on the surgeon’s art. It is my professional opinion that the man is possessed of a deranged obsession with pain and torment. Perhaps you and he have that in common.
I hesitated for some weeks to seek your counsel in this matter, as I cannot be sure what is Comfort’s involvement in this scheme. I have made no secret of my disdain for your preaching, which I judge to be an affront to God and to Public Morality, closer in effect, though not in doctrine, to pagan revels than to what I deem true religiosity; nor did I ever condone the element of deception and spectacle which you deemed necessary to impress upon the willful Public the terrible force of divine love. Comfort was more strident even than I in her rejection of your ministry, as you will no doubt recall vividly, going so far as to reject the gospel, religion, and creation itself; and being so delirious with hatred that when she disappeared, never to return, we all believed she had worked some great and permanent harm on herself.
I am ashamed to admit that my first thought upon seeing her name was not joy, nor dread at what injury so cruel a man might work on my poor sister, but suspicion that she had overcome her scruples and sought, by means of the family trade, to make her way in the world. By the character of the advertisement, I judged the event to be sideshow more crass and debased than those of P.T. Barnum; and the affront was magnified by its invocation of the serious and deadly arts of the surgeon. I felt anger at Dr. Darwin, that he would expose our profession to censure and ridicule; and finally resolved, on the grounds that it would amount to professional suicide on his part, that it must be a fraud, perpetrated by himself, with Comfort’s involvement, for an unknown purpose.
Which brings me to the reason for my letter. I know we share little in the way of trust, and see not the value in each other’s work. I know your mind is concerned exclusively with the working of powers and principalities the effects of which are only dimly felt in this little backwater we call reality. I know you would like nothing better than to see Comfort Cross kneel before calvary, though surely you would not go so far as to endorse your daughter presuming to teach educated men the gospel. But perhaps it shall raise your holy ire, and I have this from a reliable and unimpeachably devout source, that what Comfort preaches is not the gospel, but a foreign and occult teaching; one which wears the skin of Christianity, but reeks of witchcraft and perversion.
Therefore, on all that is holy, I beg you: if you have had some hand in this, or worse still, if Comfort be truly afflicted, and exploiting her condition for gain earthly or otherwise, I beg you, confide what you know of this matter in me, so that I may put a swift end to this dangerous scandal. The Public risks irrevocable harm in body, mind, and soul, were this sham to actually take place.
If you are still in possession of your clarity and integrity, write to me with speed. I shall make haste to Rochester when I have concluded my affairs here, in hopes I may intercept Comfort and place her in my qualified custody.
I would not presume to hope you do not think ill of your wayward and willful children; but only that the prophet’s wrath which has been your life’s purpose shall once more stir you to save both the life of your daughter, and the sanctity of an ignorant and gullible Public.
Yours,
Edwin CrossP.S. I have found scrawled underneath these advertisements a figure which I take to be a message of an occult and unsavoury nature. I reproduce it below. Perhaps you posess the means to decipher it?
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