I find myself sleeping little these recent nights - I am haunted by a past thought dusted and forgotten in the wake of more important things; a ghost I'd thought I'd left behind.

Father, what hell have you brought upon our family?

My father's writings have consumed me; I spend my nights poring over his journals and his letters, trying desperately to pull the arcane from the financial. There's a morbid banality to the records I now know tally the fortunes of matters beyond mortal ken. In the reading, I am summoned once more to my boyhood, when he would sit me at his desk on summer evenings and enlist my aid in balancing his ledgers, so that I may someday learn to do the same. I wonder, in my ignorance, did I send any poor souls to meat the same fate as my mother? With the art of a child's arithmetic, did I condemn unknowing victims to a wasting death? Damn him! Damn him a thousand times for what he's compelled my complicity in, long before I had the understanding to know different.

I wonder, do I now damn myself the same? Do I plunge myself into the same pit of depravity and malfeasance as my accursed sire?

More importantly, can I afford not to?

What have you left me to, Father? What world did you live in, that you kept hidden from your family, and to what end? Was Mother a hapless victim to your machinations, or was she your conspirator? If so, to what purpose did the two of you exclude me from an education in the occult?

I find myself not embarking upon but in the middle of a perilous journey; a ship I boarded before I knew how to chart a course. I am adrift - lost at sea, with naught but devils and monsters to guide my way.

Would that I had a lighthouse - some guiding principle by which I may ensure my course is true - but I am caught in the dark of night, and I know not when dawn will come.

Mother, how I wish that you were here...