by Aaron French
Then he gave a polite nod, as if he had received us as guests in his drawing room.
“Good afternoon, Doctor Paget-Lowe,” he said in the calmest and most delightful of tones; we could hear him quite well through the perforations in the glass. “Have you brought me a visitor? I must say, that is most kind of you.”
Doctor Paget-Lowe looked at me with an air of quiet triumph. “Haven’t seen anyone like him in your classes at the university, I’ll warrant,” he whispered, beaming at me as if he had just given me a priceless gift.
“No, indeed,” I agreed. “Schizophrenic, with manic stages?” I continued, feeling rather proud of my snap diagnosis. “An on-going case, I imagine, lasting for some considerable time?”
Doctor Paget-Lowe said nothing for a moment as he gazed at the man, who seemed totally oblivious to his nude state and continued to offer a delighted smile.
“Actually, he was one of our most adept psychiatrists, up until about six months ago. This is Doctor Augustus Van Buren Mainwaring, who taught at Miskatonic University—your own alma mater, I believe—some years ago and helped to develop the Mainwaring-Kurtsfield Electro-Cranio—”
“Resonating Integrator,” I finished, unable to conceal my amazement. “Yes, I had the good fortune to attend one of Doctor Mainwaring’s lectures some three years ago, wherein he discussed his hopes for the uses of his device in the alleviation of certain mental afflictions.”
“Precisely,” said Dr. Paget-Lowe. Oddly, he seemed a bit put out that I had already heard of Doctor Mainwaring’s achievements. “Were you aware that we have the only completed cranio-resonator in the world?”
“I was not,” I replied, the excitement building in me. “But if that is so, doctor, then why has it not been used to treat Dr. Mainwaring?”
Dr. Paget-Lowe seemed unable to meet my eyes. “Actually,” he said at last, “he was found in this state that you see before you, in the room containing the cranio-resonator, just after he had used it for its first test.”
A cold chill passed through me. “On whom did he use it?” I asked.
“On his partner, Dr. Whipple Kurtsfield,” he replied. “They wished to ascertain that the device was perfectly safe before using it on others. If you recall, their premise was that the normal brain would not be affected by its energies, while the abnormal would be shocked into a state of sanity.”
“And what was Kurtsfield’s reaction to the machine?”
“We don’t know,” said Dr. Paget-Lowe. “He was dead when we managed to break down the door.”
***
My duties began the next day. I was to live on the premises for the first six months, on call twenty-four hours, mostly during the night for my own duties.
For some reason that I could not at first determine, I found myself visiting and revisiting Dr. Mainwaring’s cell on my rounds. In the middle of the night, he was his most coherent.
Mainwaring’s most coherent, however, was not by any means always decipherable. Often, those nonsense phrases he uttered when first I had visited him were repeated ad infinitum.
But sometimes he could carry on a conversation as well as he had when he had been in his right mind.
“Dr. Mainwaring,” I whispered late one night.
“Ah, Gilman,” came his courteous reply, somewhat odd, coming as it did from a naked man covered in self-inflicted scratches. “How good of you to call.”
“Not at all, doctor,” I replied as I stuffed my notebook in a pocket. “It’s a pleasure, I assure you.”
“I am in dire need of a favor.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes. My associate Kurtsfield—you have heard me speak of him, I think?—has communicated the most distressing news to me.”
“Has he so?” I dug out my notebook again.
“It seems, Gilman, that there have been accusations bandied about concerning the efficacy of our invention.”
“The cranio-resonator?”
“The Mainwaring-Kurtsfield Electro-Cranio Resonating Integrator, yes. If this is indeed the case, then something must be done at once.”
“What is to be done, doctor?” I asked.
Mainwaring began to stride back and forth across his cell, his voice rising. “Our integrator was designed to bring relief to those poor unfortunates suffering from mental aberrations,” he said. “Now I am told that its use has been proscribed. What is the meaning of this, sir? Can you tell me that?”
“Doctor Mainwaring, no one would dare to argue that you are one of the pioneers of the use of electrical devices in the psychiatric profession.”
“Quite right!” he yelled, stamping his bare foot on the padded floor.
“But a prototype can harbor unforeseen, uh, mechanical problems. Surely it would be best to—”
“There are no problems!” he shouted. “Only brainless imbeciles who do not understand the process, nothing more! Take me to it now and I will prove to you that it works!”
I looked uneasily about me, but Dr. Mainwaring and I were the only inhabitants in this entire underground wing.
An idea rose irresistibly in my mind. I was a strong young man. Dr. Mainwaring was an elderly gentleman. Though I knew of the uncanny strength of the insane, I did not doubt that I was more than a match for him.
Then why not take him at his word? Why not visit the instrument in question with the inventor in tow, and see for myself if I could ascertain why it had caused this brilliant man to lose his grasp on the world?
No doubt you think me mad myself, to harbor such an idea. Not mad, no, but inflamed with a desire to make a name for myself that would outshine all others in my field.
If you are keeping count, mark this as my second mistake.
***
Mad I was not, but neither was I so foolish as to take Dr. Mainwaring entirely at his word. We visited the room that held his device some few nights later. I saw through a filthy window nothing more than a dim and dusty room full of odd shapes draped in sheets. I did decide, however, that I would spend some time reviewing the facts of the case.
The records told me of the pride that the Arkham State Hospital had taken in the Mainwaring-Kurtsfield Resonating Integrator. As I studied the records in more depth, however, I noticed some disbelief in the claims of the two inventors.
Dr. Kurtsfield had insisted that the primary basis of all mental aberrations was something that he referred to as vibrational. He further posited that the resonance set up by his and Dr. Mainwaring’s device would assist the subject brain to lock on to the proper vibration from the first treatment.
As even the layman can see, this—if true—would do away with the need for psychiatric hospitals in a matter of years. Perhaps this was the primary reason that there were murmurs of distrust and dislike from Kurtsfield and Mainwaring’s peers. None of the doctors could wish to see their life-long professions done away with in one fell swoop.
Still, the tests were scheduled. Kurtsfield would be the first subject, strapped into the device, which would, theoretically, do nothing to a mind already so in tune with its surroundings. Mainwaring would be in the room with him to operate the controls.
A glorious achievement. A magnificent dare, offering hope to untold millions.
If only it had worked...
I visited the site of the machine often after my first visit with Mainwaring. Stale air would rush out to greet me when I opened the door, rusty hinges giving off an unearthly squeal that sounded almost like a cry of pain or terror. I would brush aside this fanciful concept—would that I had paid more attention!—as I entered the cavernous room.
Wires. Wires of all dimensions snaked and twisted and soared and tunneled about the room. Huge vacuum tubes sat like pontificating judges in a row against the far wall. A series of switches laced across a panel beside the structure.
In the center of the room sat a long narrow table covered with pale green moth-eaten fabric. Clamps at each corner gave one the unfortunate impression of an ancient torture device, a rack or Iron Maiden, instead
of more reassuring images of the examination table.
The machine took my breath away each time I saw it. I would brush my hands like a lover over the cobwebbed switches and stroke the upright rounded tubes. I could imagine the forces that could be turned loose in such a room.
At least, I imagined I could imagine them. The reality, I was to learn, was far different.
***
It took me three weeks, working a few hours each night while the rest of the hospital slept, to ready the machine for its next trial. My decision to test the machine on poor Dr. Mainwaring was a foregone conclusion by the end of that time, especially as I had learned what he believed had gone wrong during the first trial.
Dr. Mainwaring believed now that the resonating integrator should never have been used on a sane mind. The vibrations leading up to the final correct setting were damaging for a brain already at the proper frequency.
In short, the process would take a sane mind and drive it mad—just as it also should be able to turn madness to sanity.
This was the reason that Dr. Mainwaring was raving in the locked cell. The vibrations released by the machine had been far too intense even for one not connected to the equipment.
And it was also why Dr. Kurtsfield was dead—torn to bits by his suddenly mad colleague as he lay helpless, strapped to the table.
But this test would be different. I had gathered all the information I needed about the actual running of the device, from notes and records and from Mainwaring himself in his more rational times. I had devised a remote method of control, outside the small defined epicenter of the vibration.
But though Mainwaring was calm more often, his brief times of raving became ever more violent and aggressive—almost as if his insanity were dreading its expulsion and was working to compensate its future loss in further madness. He would shout and curse and rant and spew out nonsensical phrases for hours.
Cthulhu f’tagn! Shub-niggurath! Ia! Ia! The goat with a thousand young! Hastur the unspeakable! In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming!
Even as he raved, I became more eager to bring this man back into the land of the intellect, away from the dark dreams that possessed him.
I know now that I should have taken more notice of his nightmares, his ravings.
If I had done so, I believe mine in the years since would have been more bearable.
So I worked on. I studied the notes and visited Mainwaring night after night, gleaning from his damaged mind much useful information. I drove myself ever harder, determined to prove that the device was a success by restoring Mainwaring’s mind.
At last the night chosen for the test arrived. I was prepared for the ordeal when I arrived at Mainwaring’s cell.
“Doctor Gilman,” he greeted me as I struggled with the key to his door, “is this the night?”
“It is, doctor,” I replied as the door swung open. “Tonight we will prove that your invention works. When you are cured, the unfortunate death of Kurtsfield will be put down to the effects of the machine and not to you.”
“Kurtsfield is dead?” asked Mainwaring as he scuttled through the door. I slammed it and locked it behind him. “You are incorrect, doctor. He is not dead but taken captive by the Ancient Ones. They have eaten his brains and left his shattered hulk to roam eternally in the outer reaches of space.”
I hurried him along before me as he babbled.
“They would have taken me if I had not been able to hide, you see,” he went on, “and I have hidden since then from their minions. Their strength has weakened over the millennia and they now need many pathways to enter our realm.”
Many pathways to enter our realm.
I was to remember his words a dozen, a score, a thousand times.
***
I had no problems with Mainwaring until we reached the doorway to the room that housed his device. There it seemed as if his senses suddenly departed from his poor addled brain. I know now that they had instead returned, for one brief and final flash of clarity in the enveloping darkness of his insanity.
“Doctor Gilman?” he asked. “Doctor Gilman, is this not the gateway? Is this not the opening long sought for by the offspring of the oldest of all?”
I paid him little mind. I dragged him into the center of the room. I strapped him onto the table and snapped padded manacles around bare wrists and ankles and, of the utmost importance, the broad clamp about his forehead. But he kept up a steady whimpering, muttering about sleeping minions and demons of the wood as I worked.
“Soon, Dr. Mainwaring,” I reassured him, “soon you will be past these imaginings and returned fully aware to the real world. Soon you will feel the might of your own invention as it brushes away these dark fantasies.”
I then left the room, my patient twisting and begging from the center table as I disappeared from his sight.
But he did not disappear from mine. I had prepared the next room as an observation point and remote controlling station. I was anxious, madly anxious, to proceed with the experiment, believing that I would succeed in bringing back the mind of the poor abused man strapped to the table.
I checked that the glass panel I had situated in the doorway between the two was in place. All was in readiness—the glass panel lined with the thick wire so easily obtainable in the hospital; the thick padded helmet lined with layers of reflective metal with which I covered my head. This had not been so easy to obtain, but I had improvised with a football helmet. The door to the hallway was locked and bolted from within.
I was ready.
Then I committed my third—and final, if God is merciful—mistake.
I released the switch that started the cranio-resonator.
At first, aside from a dimming of the single overhead bulb, I detected few signs of the device beginning to work. Then a hum began, as of billions of insects chirping and cheeping in hideous cadences. I could see Mainwaring as he squirmed against the manacles, his skin tearing, blood flowing in lazy drops to pool onto the dusty floor.
The hellish humming rose in intensity as I watched the drama being played out in the next room.
The cables and wires that circled throughout the room coursed with the power of electricity. I began to see them twitch and spasm as the current increased, rising, ever rising. Swirls of inky smoke rose from one as it exploded, but there were thousands of others to take its flow.
“Ia! Ia!” screamed Mainwaring, his body bent like a bow in an arc of pain. “The gateway opens! The demons come!”
Then it happened.
As I watched my patient, I began to notice about him flickering images of other, less canny creatures. There in the far corner, where the wires hung thickest, a body like some stupendous sea-creature began to obtain a faint, errant form. Closer, a figure with the horned head and winged shoulders of some horrible denizen out of myth was outlined in sparkling energy. All about the room, dancing some hideous pavane of death, outré creatures formed of purest electrical energy swarmed and caroused, their forms tethered by the wires... though they promised at any instant to be freed.
“The gateway!” shouted Mainwaring as his mad eyes gazed on the creatures capering about his trapped form. “The power in the wires; that is the gateway to the ancient places! They killed Kurtsfield! Great Cthulhu! Hastur! Shub-niggurath, they are here—and they hunger! Do not let them escape, Gilman, for the love of God!”
With a last despairing moan of anguish, Mainwaring expired, his body ripped and torn to fragments by the hideous demon figures that I had raised up from their horrible realm, that realm lost to mankind for innumerable years.
A realm whose denizens awaited only some convenient pathway to renew their attack against humanity. A pathway that Kurtsfield, Mainwaring—and I—had given them.
I flung down the switch and collapsed on the floor even as the demonic forms were battering on the glass panel, trying to escape to the outside world.
***
I spent the next twenty-seven years of my life in
the hospital—as a patient—several in Dr. Mainwaring’s old cell. I felt safe there, secure underground, with but a single wire bringing the light to me. Later, as I grew calmer, as the images in my mind grew dimmer—by day, at least, for by night they were as vivid as ever—the authorities moved me to roomier quarters. But I was not as comfortable there. The wires grew in number, as more and more electrical devices were deemed important, and then necessary.
Two years ago I was released to the outside world, released to find even more proliferation of the dreaded pathways. I do my best to fight it, to deny the wires their insidious grasp of everything around them. But the power grows. Soon it will be enough for Great Cthulhu to begin his attack anew. Hastur will fly again through our dark skies. Shub-niggurath, the goat with a thousand young, will dance once more over the battered, dying bodies of humankind.
***
Wires. They snake everywhere. Over you. Around you. Above you. Even in the walls of your houses where you feel most secure, they insert their malicious fingers.
Pathways; pathways for the eldritch horrors that seek to reclaim their dominion over humanity.
Beware! Beware!
About the author: K.G. McAbee writes science fiction, pulp, mystery, horror, gothic, steampunk, and fantasy. She’s had several books and over seventy short stories published. With Cynthia Witherspoon—they write as Cynthia Gael—K.G. is co-author of THE BALEFIRE CHRONICLES; the first two books are Balefire and Moonstone and Balefire and Lodestone. She and her co-writer are also working on a series of steampunk novels set in the same Balefire ’verse; book one, Brass and Bone, has been contracted by Carina Press, an e-division of Harlequin.
The Laramie Tunnel
R.B. Payne
Wyoming Territory
Winter, 1868
“Are you that newspaper man from Saint Louie?”
I opened my eyes and regarded two trail-weary cowpokes from the comfort of deep, hot water. It was the first bath I’d had in over a month and, as far as I knew, I was in the only cast iron tub in Cheyenne. I wasn’t at all pleased being disturbed, having been half-asleep and quite content.