‘Every ghost story sounds like a love note if I use the right tone of voice.”
On the twelfth hour of the first day of October, 1989, forty-three women around the world gave birth. This was unusual only in the fact that none of them had been pregnant when the day first began.
Sir Reginald Hargreeves, eccentric billionaire and adventurer, resolved to locate and adopt as many of the children as possible.
He got seven.
Cornelia King was notone of those seven.
For the first time in her life, Martha King was nottempted by the promise of money and instead of giving up her daughter when Reginald Hargreeves came calling, she chose to keep her, to raise her. Finally, Martha had family of her own. And so much the better for her when little Nellie started displaying promising abilities, Martha sees them as an opportunity, and Nellie King is turned into some kind of show pony, meant to trick the poor, grieving customers who came calling with a phony medium act.
In short, Nellie King had a very different childhood than the one the Hargreeves experienced and Martha King was very careful to keep her daughter away from Reginald Hargreeves, but a chance meeting with Ben Hargreeves when they are eight years old sets things into motion, and what follows is a tragic love story, spanning decades.
Following Ben’s death, Nellie thought that was that, she had no further connection with the Hargreeves, but whether she likes it or not, Nellie is just as much part of this story as any member of the Hargreeves family.
“Which is to say-
I don’t always know the difference between haunting and hanging on.”
you guys have NO idea how frustrated i am knowing those finisher lyrics are ORIGINAL FOR THIS TIKTOK and i CANT listen to this 20s speakeasy lounge sounding ass motherfucker just spit lyrical subjugation for whole albums at a time
CW: This may contain some hypnotic elements, some teasing, and some flavors of addiction and obsession. This isn’t intended to be a proper induction, but I can’t guarantee that you’ll come away unaffected.
There are a lot of feelings that come with a kinky relationship, but none are so meaningful to me as pure desperation. On some levels, it’s such a simple feeling. It’s nothing more than a want, a craving, that has grown and grown until it occupies a space much deeper, much more intense than plain desire. It’s easy enough to understand, easier still to recognize, and on the surface it seems just as simple as that.
But there’s a tricky little thing about desperation, a quality that makes it such a wonderful feeling to explore, and that’s the fact that there’s nothing you can do against it. Take, for example, the desire to trance. It might start that way, as nothing more than a fleeting impulse, an idea that pops into your head before drifting away as quickly as it came. Even at that stage, though, we might see the beginnings of what will blossom into beautiful desperation. The impulse comes and goes, easily ignored, but that underlying drive towards wanting to trance never quite fades. It simply lurks, just below the surface, just enough that it can find opportunities to feed you that impulse again, only to watch you try to ignore it so it can lie in wait once more.
This is the first trap of desperation. It’s so difficult to catch it before it becomes something more. Those brief wants and impulses just keep coming, just keep pushing you like little by little towards that thing you crave. Whether it be trance, submission, mindlessness, obedience, it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that the ideas keep popping into your head. You think about it every few days, then a few times a day, then every few hours, and sooner or later you know you want something. You know you want to trance, that you crave it, and that you won’t be able to stop thinking about it until you get what you want.
And that’s when desperation becomes truly dangerous and, for me, truly thrilling. When you spend every waking moment wanting, aching, yearning for that thing that will satisfy that itch, that’s when there’s truly no way out. But impossibility is so difficult to imagine, and so we work so hard to convince ourselves that there’s surely something we can do.
So you try. You try to ignore it. You try to push that craving down, to go without scratching until the itch just fades away. You try to tell yourself it’s just another fleeting impulse, that you don’t really need it. All the while, that craving just keeps bubbling below the surface, keeps pushing you deeper as you bottle it all up until it’s just too much to ignore. And then what choice do you have?
So you indulge. You let yourself have that thing you so desperately want, that thing you’ve grown to need. You try to tell yourself that just a little bit is enough, that, after you’ve had your fill, the craving will go away and you’ll be back to your usual self again. So you indulge. You fill up. You submerge yourself in trance, in submission, in mindlessness, in obedience, loving every moment of it because you’ve waited so long to get it. Only, now that you have it, you remember just what made you want it so badly. Now that you have it, you don’t remember why you’d ever want to leave.
So you’re trapped. Trying to ignore it only pushes you deeper. Giving in to your desperation only makes it harder to escape. It’s a Catch-22, and the only way to avoid it was to never get the idea in your head to begin with. Only, the idea is there now, isn’t it? There was no real way to see it coming, only to recognize that the process has already begun. The road to desperation always ends the same way, no matter how hard you try to stray, no matter how hard you try to turn back. And no matter how inevitable that destination is, people will always try to find some way out, and that’s what makes desperation so fun.
So what will you do now? Will you be yet another naive soul trying to avoid the prison you’re already trapped in? Or will you embrace that path, knowing there’s no way to go but deeper into your desperation?
