by Peter Rawlik
We made two more such trips to the island before we resolved that we had to our satisfaction captured all of the stone inscriptions. Though I will admit that our decision was also influenced by the somewhat pointed questions of several unsavory characters who had taken too much of an interest in our outings. It was these drawings and rubbings that Gilman carried with him when in November he burst into Professor Upham’s office, disturbing a meeting with the university president, Dr. Wainscott. Despite pleas from both, Gilman proceeded to ramble on at length on the most wild of notions concerning Keziah Mason, the ancient markings and certain things he had gleamed from the Necronomicon. What Gilman had said exactly he never did tell me, but whatever it was, it had earned him an unofficial rebuke from Upham and the department. His independent studies were suspended, all access to special holdings was revoked, and his class work was reduced. He was ordered to visit Dr. Waldron, who after a brief examination and discussion suggested rest and prescribed a light sedative.
It was then, in a disgruntled fit, that Gilman tried to distance himself from the university by moving out of the campus dormitory and into the vacant garret room of the Witch House. That the landlord Dombrowski had not wanted to rent the room to anyone, let alone a wild-eyed student, was forgotten when Gilman offered to pay double the going rate. It was thus that we two came to be sitting around the common rooms of the house and discussing Keziah Mason when we were joined by another resident, Joe Mazurewicz, who oddly enough had his own tale to tell about the old witch.
Joe’s father had been Polish, but his mother had been of the old Burke family that had lived in Arkham since it was founded. According to Joe, the Burke family had long ago split between those that still lived in Arkham, and those that had like so many others left the village about 1690. The split had come between two brothers, the older Lemuel and the younger Thaddeus. Upon the death of their father, Lemuel had inherited the family estate and documents, and amongst the papers he had found a sealed envelope addressed to him from his grandmother, Deborah Zellaby. The matron Zellaby wrote at length about observations she had made and grave concerns that she had, out of respect for her son and daughter, declined to discuss. However, in this letter, apparently written knowing her death was near, she made things plain to Lemuel, going into such detail on matters extremely strange. When Lemuel had finished reading the missive he confronted Thaddeus and under the threat of death ordered him to leave Arkham forever.
The Zellaby letter has long since been lost, but its contents were passed down amongst the Burke family and form the stuff of family legend. Lemuel Burke had been born to Eliza and Thomas Burke in 1657, and like his parents and all his relatives, he was a strapping blonde-haired, blue-eyed specimen of health. Thaddeus Burke had been born in 1660, and it was his birth that the Mason sisters had helped with that gained them such fame as midwives. Thaddeus was the opposite of his brother, with dark hair, dark violet eyes, a pale complexion and a thin wiry build. At his birth, Deborah Zellaby had suspected something, but lacking evidence she said nothing. It was through the course of years that Zellaby watched what was happening in the village; she watched the Masons and noted which children they birthed, which children died, and which children lived. Children brought into the world by the Masons flourished, while those that they did not, tended to struggle to survive. This was particularly noticeable amongst the younger siblings of those children birthed by the Masons, who seemed prone to disease and the occasional lethal accident. All this the old matron wrote about in her letter, and all of it but the most circumstantial of observations. Yet it was the other thing that Burke had noted that had so enraged Lemuel and driven him to banish his brother Thaddeus. For his brother bore no resemblance to his family, and yet bore strong resemblance to the hundreds that had been born and thrived in Arkham since 1660. A whole generation which, regardless of family, had the same dark-hair and dark-violet eyes as the women who had supposedly only helped to bring them into the world, Abigail, Hepzibah and Keziah Mason!
Despite the fact that Mazurewicz was something of a drunkard, the story he told chilled me, and with my mind filled with what Deborah Zellaby had come to believe about her own grandson, and the implications thereof, I found no comforting sleep that night. It was Mazurewicz’s tale that drove me to begin my own research into the life and legends surrounding Keziah Mason. November came and went, and December brought us to winter break. Gilman went to visit family in Haverhill, and then to visit a new mill his family had built in Maine near Gates Falls. Given my rather meager finances, I took the bus for the short journey to my home in Kingsport. There amongst my friends and in my family home, I set about initiating my own more personal study of Keziah’s dark legacy.
In February our return to the ivory-columned halls of Miskatonic University brought to us the first hint of the supernatural. The incident was so simple, and yet it is undeniably the first in a series of preternatural events that would, in their course, lead Gilman first to madness, and then to his singularly horrid death. Gilman and I had made our way to the great library, cursing the masses that were uncommonly cluttered about the University grounds. It was not merely the student body that milled about the commons, but strangers as well, some of whom wore military uniforms and bore with them firearms and similar such weaponry. Others wore charcoal suits and traveled in pairs, dominating the sidewalks, oblivious to any other pedestrians they might come across. Ostensibly, these hordes had invaded Arkham in response to some secretive government action that had sealed off the aged port town of Innsmouth. Rumor had it that nearly the entire village had been arrested, charged with the smuggling of liquor and other contraband. The streets of Arkham were wild with speculation, and every tidbit of unfounded speculation and gossip concerning Innsmouth seemed to travel across the city like wildfire.
In the library Gilman and I marched defiantly through the marble halls on a mission to persuade Dr. Armitage to restore Gilman’s access to the rare book room in general, and the Necronomicon in specific. Unfortunately, both Armitage and the Necronomicon were already occupied. For the better part of an hour the old librarian stood watching as the most curious of characters sat hunched over the ancient grimoire, all the time making seemingly endless notations in an old leather journal. Gilman fumed over what he viewed as an invasion of his personal area of research, and when the stranger finally made to leave, speaking to Armitage in a rough and uncouth manner, Gilman rose to intercept the aged librarian.
It was at this moment that Gilman had his first and cascading preternatural encounter, for as the stranger rose it was to reveal a countenance and stature that brought to mind the ogres and trolls of legend. The man easily stood over seven feet tall, and his bulk was barely contained by his thread-worn suit and broken shoes. That a thin black tie and aged hat framed his face served only to draw attention to the man’s huge and goatish head which was covered by a thick beard and eyebrows that created the illusion of fur. That fine black hair was apparently endemic throughout the entirety of his body, for it peeked out at the cuffs of his sleeves, and several clumps were visible between the buttons of his shirt.
As Gilman crossed his path, the lumbering giant paused and stared down at the diminutive man blocking his way. His gaze wandered in my direction and then back to Gilman. A massive hand reached out and came to rest on Gilman’s shoulder. With little effort, the monstrous man gently moved Gilman to the side and grunted in a deep and curious way that reminded me more of the bellows made by frogs or whales, rather than a true voice. What was more curious was what he actually said: “Yew should know better than to stand in my way, sir,” and then he turned to look at me, “and yew should know better too, little cousin.” In those huge violet eyes I saw no empathy, no humanity, and if there was any evidence of emotion, all I could see was pure unadulterated hate. Who the monstrous figure in the library was, and if it was his casual touch that brought on the ensuing events, I cannot say for certain, but it was on that very night that Gilman’s bout of brain-fever and s
trange dreams were to first manifest.
Of the events that followed, of Gilman’s dreams, of his ghostly encounters with Keziah Mason and Brown Jenkin, of his involvement in the death of Ladislas Wolejko, and his own tragic death, I have little to add. Some have questioned my whereabouts on certain evenings, and in response to these inquiries I must admit that I was pursuing the course of research that I had begun so many months before in Kingsport. Though my investigation had yielded nothing more than rumor, innuendo and circumstantial evidence, I had, much like Deborah Zellaby, grown to suspect certain things about those early days of Arkham. It was not until that chance encounter in the library that my suspicions began to coalesce and provide a more concrete direction for my delving into history.
It was in April that I borrowed a car and drove madly back to Kingsport. At my request, my brother had dug through the family holdings and there hidden amongst things long forgotten he had found a portrait of the patriarch of the Elwood family, a man who had come to the village in 1691 as a pauper. That I and most of my family bore a resemblance to Thaddeus Elwood was never in doubt. This was not the revelation that my months of research had unveiled. For it was the second painting, the one that made little sense to be amongst our family possessions, that confirmed my worst fears. The painting was more than two hundred and fifty years old, and still bore a note stating that it had been commissioned by Roger Mason to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his business venture.
For in this painting of the Mason family, I could see the fine dark hair and dark violet eyes, the turn of the nose and chin and the high ridged cheeks that were the most notable features of the young Keziah Mason, features that were reflected in the painting of Thaddeus Elwood, who had once been named Thaddeus Burke. Features I knew well, for I could see them in the face of the monstrous thing we had seen in the library as it played at being human, and in the face of Brown Jenkin as it burrowed out of Walter Gilman’s chest and madly chattered at me. Features I madly see in every face around me. For there is I fear no choice but to accept the mathematical certainty that from those dozens of children that Keziah and her sisters brought into the world, those children that fled Arkham like rats in the night, who have had more than two centuries to establish themselves, to marry, and to raise children of their own. Children, with fine black hair and violet eyes, of which, madly I myself may be only one of thousands. “For the Black Goat Mother doth favor her servants with such fruitfulness that would shame even the most fertile of pestilent flies, breeding in the secret wounds of man’s misery and pain, like maggots in a slaughter yard.”
Chapter 25.
MONSTERS OF MISKATONIC
The last few hours of that dark morning still haunt my immediate memory. That it has been just days since my arrest on charges of murder seems incredulous, for the pages piled in front of me would seem to have been begun years ago. That my jailers periodically enter my cell to provide me with blank sheets, food and drink seems overly kind. On occasion there have been notes, signed by Dr. Dexter, asking for details concerning certain aspects of my research and formulae. I think perhaps they are trying to re-create my work. Given what has happened, I should try to stop them, but it all seems so pointless, they will find what they need one way or the other. The things that I have done will slow them down a bit, but it will not stop them from trying. Not even the horrors I left behind in St. Mary’s will defer them.
As I have previously written, the population of Miskatonic University, its students and teachers, had for the most part volunteered to aid in the recovery of Dunwich following the horror that had devastated that area. Only a scant few remained on campus, and those were mostly concentrated at the University teaching hospital. St. Mary’s had been cleared of most patients and only a skeleton crew of medical professionals and a few others remained behind. That night, the night of October thirtieth, only I, my young charge Frank Elwood, and three nurses were on staff, and the early evening had been uneventful, which given the torrential rains that were buffeting the area was somewhat surprising.
After midnight, in the small hours all that changed, and a deputy brought in three victims of a tragic car accident. Their injuries were all severe, and under normal circumstances they would have been fatal, but the Fisher triplets had been patients of mine, and had been subjected to my experiments in immunization against death using a reagent developed in part by Dr. Herbert West, but significantly modified by myself. The exposure of the triplets to the reagent was apparently keeping them from expiring, but there was also something else. All three showed the presence of an unusual cell in their blood, a cell that I had only ever seen in samples from Innsmouth, a cell that appeared to be responsible for generating a natural version of the life-sustaining reagent.
At first I thought that perhaps the Fishers, who had some family history in Innsmouth, had always possessed such a cellular component, but I quickly discounted such a possibility. I would have noticed such a foreign component during my initial examination. The source of the reanimating cell perplexed me, but I had had little time to ponder an alternative explanation. Young Elwood had burst into the room and announced the sudden death of Helena Armitage and then shoved a packet of his own writings into my hands.
The handwritten statement detailed certain facts that had been left out of previous accounts of the death of Elwood’s friend Walter Gilman. Elwood’s tale, which was the product of his own research, seemed to suggest through the linking of a variety of seemingly unrelated events and facts that something untoward had been occurring in Arkham during colonial times. Though to be honest, I found the idea that over the course of many years, a trio of midwives had systematically replaced the newborn infants of Arkham with their own spawn incredulous. It did however provide me with a possible explanation to my own conundrum.
The strange cells that had appeared in the blood of the Fishers may not have been present when I had examined them initially, but rather may have been triggered to develop as a response to my reagent. That the immune system could respond to a variety of foreign bodies was a well-established fact, and it seemed not unreasonable that my treatments may have perhaps activated some pre-existing component; a cell that naturally produced a version of the reanimating agent, but for some reason had been suppressed by millennia of evolution.
It was a radical theory, but one for which some evidence might well exist within the walls of the hospital itself. I drew my own blood, but as I had expected, there was no trace of the strange spindle-shaped cells to be found. Then, covertly, I took the light microscope up to where the body of Helena Armitage still lay. She was, as Elwood had said, dead, but her blood had yet to coagulate and under examination I confirmed what I had expected. The blood of Helena Armitage did indeed contain a number of the strange cells, though they were not in the numbers that had presented in the blood of the Fishers. Immediately my mind began to develop hypotheses concerning family ancestry as well as reagent dosage and periodic re-administration.
I had no opportunity to document my thoughts, for it was then that the screaming began. It was high-pitched and clearly that of the charge nurse who had helped me wheel in the Fishers. I dashed down the stairs and through a pair of double doors to find Nurse Clemens trapped behind the reception desk, desperately trying to fend off the menacing advances of a large man, half dressed and still dripping from the storm. He was grunting at her and flailing his arms wildly, trying to capture her in a kind of pathetic manner that had little chance of working save for if she were to suddenly panic. With each move Nurse Clemens made, her attacker mirrored it, and it was only when I reached down to pick up a chair to use as a weapon and cried out for him to stop, that he turned to acknowledge my presence. I gasped audibly, for I knew this man, had seen his visage more than I had wished to that evening, and he had no right to be stalking through the hospital after an innocent nurse. He had no right to do such a thing, save for the fact that I had allowed it, or at least made it possible. For the man was none other than Edward F
isher brought back from the dead by my own experiments in death and reanimation.
He charged me, and it was as if a great ape was leaping across the room to attack, and I instinctively thought of the thing that Allan Halsey had become so many years previously. I swung the chair and smashed it across his temple as he dove the last few feet toward me. Blood and teeth flew through the air leaving arcs of crimson on the walls and floor. Edward stumbled back to his feet and roared at me, blood and spittle dripping down his chin. His eyes had gone pale, and I knew then that there was no reason left at all in this creature that was once a man. I lifted up the chair and readied myself for the next attack. Edward crouched down and prepared to strike.
Both of us turned as Nurse Clemens began screaming once more. She was backing away, pointing toward the swinging doors that led to the procedure rooms, doors that had suddenly swung open and remained so. Each door presented a kind of doppelganger to the creature I was fighting, and I swear Edward grinned as the two things that bore his face came through the doors. Those doors swung back and forth, casting wild shadows across the room as Edward’s brothers Frederick and Godrick moved to join him. There was a noise from behind me. The doors I had come through had again swung open, and without thinking I swung the chair and smashed the figure that was behind me, sending him to the ground.