Instead: Constellations or what you take to be constellations. Points of light with lines between them. Just a page or two. Each of the constellations is roughly circular. Notations in numbers beside each point. Smaller circles mapped to larger, as if the larger are replications that should show more details. But don’t.

The first pages disturb you. Can’t say why. There’s something familiar about them. Maybe in the colors. Maybe in the shape of the door that pops up on page three. The door worries you. It makes you think of something opening that needed to stay shut. You imagine a vast darkness behind that door. Darkness you never want to know.

Then come diagrams of creatures that look like autopsies or recipes. Some almost whimsical: A plant that becomes a sea anemone that becomes a squid. Others like levels of hell. Bear-men and men like bears. Scenes of slaughter you pass quickly. More “instructions,” in sentences and paragraphs written in a language you don’t understand. Spanish in high school and some knowledge of Russian, so you know other alphabets. But this matches nothing you’ve ever seen.

Page after page of this, until a few phrases in English. In a wild, uncontrolled handwriting, an alien language all its own. The English doesn’t lead to anything useful, as if a trail of bread crumbs petered out into a sprawl of mushrooms or tiny black monoliths.

“The fox is reluctant, must be forced.”

“Words coming to me remote from beyond the globes.”

“No more Company.”

Fair unfair: Most people living under the bridge over the years have been institutionalized, then released. Left to wander. True even in your childhood, or was what your parents told you to make you stay away from there. They share their writings sometimes, point at words and you nod and take them seriously, because it was serious, to them. Maybe the journal was a story of someone’s life. Written in invented languages.

The journal mutters on most pages. Like someone muttering to himself, not writing to another person. Working out issues or equations or formulas. You don’t know why you think the journal was written by a man, but you do.

The most disturbing images show mice being bred and re-bred to become smaller and smaller. In the last diagram, these new mice are being placed inside a person’s throat, in an operation that cuts a hole in the throat. The human figure like the sexless figure in CPR instructions.