The Visions of Sister Mary--An 'Arkham Horror' story
In light of recent events I though it
best to leave a record of my previous notes on my evaluation of
Sister Mary and what happened just after my evaluation. I shall be
leaving my post here at Arkham Asylum and whichever member of the
staff is assigned my duties ought to be fully informed. Though
exactly what I am informing that person of, even I cannot say, and I
was here.
Even though the days leading up to my
actual involvement with Sister Mary were rather sensational with wild
rumors, police-enforced curfews and a sudden surge in patients both
here at the sanatorium and at the general hospital, it was on the
morning of April 28th, 1922, that I interviewed my first
witness to the insanity that seemed to hold Arkham in it's grip.
Sister Mary was admitted early on the
morning of the 27th, though I cannot say by whom. I have
thoroughly questioned the orderlies on staff and none of them can
recall seeing her brought in, even though such an occurrence should
be impossible as we keep the door between the general waiting area
and the consultation room locked. Yet, it cannot be denied that she
was first discovered in the consultation room, in a state of
disheveled disarray, asleep on the couch.
Dr. Haskins was on duty at the time and
had a impromptu consultation with Sister Mary—which I suspect was
as much to learn how she gained entry to the Asylum as much as to
calm her out of her agitated state. I only have his comments made to
me in private to record here as Dr. Haskins destroyed his notes a few
days later, but what he told me was that Sister Mary claimed to have
been overwhelmed by a confrontation with some creature that had
descended from the skies above Arkham and attacked her in the
Rivertown Streets after having left the graveyard near there. Dr.
Haskins checked her for signs of alcohol abuse but indicated to me
that Sister Mary seemed of sound body, despite her obvious
hallucinations. Finding nothing that he could use as evidence to
commit her, he scheduled an emergency consultation for the next day
with Sister Mary and let her go on her own recognizance.
I was called at home as my colleague
was absent from her post—a matter that I shall revisit before
concluding this narrative, and asked if I could come in on the
morning of the 28th to consult with Sister Mary. Dr.
Haskins had a busy schedule and would be administering electro-shock
therapy to another patient, who coincidentally enough also claimed to
have seen a monster in the skies above Arkham.
When I arrived, I found Sister Mary
eager to talk about her recent experiences, particularly what had
happened in the graveyard and the Rivertown Streets. Not
surprisingly, she claimed to have exorcised a ghost who had returned
from the afterlife and was haunting the area. I will spare anyone
reading this the details of the encounter she described, but it was
about what one would expect such a tale to be.
The real interest in Sister Mary's case
begins with what she described in the Rivertown Streets. There she
said she came upon some kind of beast and what she called 'a
cultist'. I had serious doubts about Dr. Haskins decision to release
Sister Mary the previous day, as what she described to me might have
been a hallucination-induced murder. Further questioning lead me to
conclude that the entire incident was a hallucinatory episode brought
on by... I don't know what. No person, cultist or not, could have
done what Sister Mary described and every test that I could
administer indicated that she was of sound mind and in full control
of her faculties. There was simply no possibility that she was
recalling an encounter with an actual person.
Her other hallucinations were, though
described in vivid detail, clearly things that –like the cultist--
had never existed outside of Sister Mary's own mind. But what had
caused these particular
subjects? What would cause an otherwise sane woman to thing that a
twelve-foot tall monster, with a human-like body and a head like a
squid would be wandering the streets of Rivertown? I think I
understand why she would think that holy water would defeat such a
monster—being that she served in the only Catholic Church in all of
Arkham, but what she described was hardly the typical descriptions of
demons that we hear. I've only heard of a creature such as she
described from our more severely disturbed patients after certain
nights of the year.
And
what would cause her to think that a winged creature that was
part-insect and part-crustacean would dive down from the Arkham night
and confront her? She explained that she had no holy water left, and
had to rely on the revolver that a friend had loaned her—an item
that I sincerely hope was not loaded. But she insisted that she had
shot the nightmare dead in the streets where it landed, though I can
say that later investigations but the authorities failed to find any
evidence. I suppose it is worth mentioning that the authorities only
checked on May 3rd,
which was a couple of days after the events of May 1st,
but I am getting ahead of myself.
The
final hallucination, and the one that she claims was too much for
her, was that of a gigantic floating nightmare that Sister Mary
described as a writhing and hovering mass of bubbling gelatin, like
enormous cow intestines that where alternatively convulsing and
expanding and with terrible mouth's set unevenly along the elongated
body of the beast. She said that she fainted just as the creature
seemed to move towards her with open mouths—though with no eyes,
she commented that she couldn't see how it knew she was even there.
In all honestly, Sister Mary's description was so vivid and so
detailed that I want to go and check for myself and see if there were
any traces of what drooled from the creature's mouths, but of course,
such a venture would be foolish. After all, it could only have been a
hallucination. Besides, even if it had not been, no trace would have
remained after May 1st
, but of course, it was just the imaginings of a stressed mind.
Try as
I might, I could not uncover the real source of the stress that
brought on Sister Mary's breakdown. She spoke of portals to other
worlds—strange worlds—that had appeared all over Arkham and how
she and a few others had been working to understand them and stop the
monsters from coming through. She mentioned a drifter, and local
professor visit Arkham University and Dr. Carolyn Fern. At the
mention of Dr. Fern, I began to understand. Carolyn had always had an
interest in the stranger patients that we had received and had
detailed notes on their various hallucination, phobias and dementia.
Sister Mary must be one of her contacts who had not yet fully
succumbed to insanity. I consider it unprofessional that Dr. Fern
does not take more precautions to prevent a person's psychoses from
going too far.
With
her bill for the consultation paid in full, Sister Mary took her
leave of me, indicating that she needed to meet up with her friends
and continue the fight against what she called 'The Lord of the
Winds', Yetturiel, or as the indians called it, Ithaqua. Later, Dr.
Fern would tell me that he was known to the natives of the Americas
as a beast that roams the great northern waste, and takes lone people
from where he finds them in the wilderness to accompany him as he
rides the winds of the universe. Seldom are such people ever seen or
found, but according to the legend, they are sometimes found frozen
solid—even in the middle of summer. And always as if they had
fallen from a great height. Normally I would dismiss such a legend,
but after the events of the first of May, I'm not so sure.
I
didn't see Sister Mary for many months after she left the Asylum, but
when I did, she didn't speak of anything other than her work at the
soup kitchen with their new cook, a drifter who the called Ashcan
Pete who had decided to stay in Arkham for a while. I didn't see
Sister Mary, but I did hear more about the hallucinations that she
had described to me. Other people had also reported seeing the awful
flying nightmare she had described, and things had gotten so bad that
the general store had closed up shop while the proprietor went 'on
vacation'.
It was
on the evening of April 30th
that things seemed to culminate. I heard of people seeing strange
things everywhere and that night I decided to stay in the heavy brick
Asylum rather than venture the streets to my home. That decision may
have saved my life.
It was
at about 11PM that a sudden wind came up through the town of Arkham,
a wind that grew in strength until it reached hurricane proportions.
Sometime before midnight the power went out and the inmates seemed to
go mad. While the orderlies had their hands full I watched out the
solid barred windows of the Asylum as the winds tore through the
streets, knocking over power lines and tearing up trees. I though for
a moment I saw Dr. Fern move down the street in front of the building
looking up at the sky, but that was impossible and I knew it—no
person could have survived in those winds.
It
must have been sometime around midnight when the temperature began to
drop precipitously as the winds continued to lash the town. Later, I
would find that my house had been torn from its foundation like so
many others. Over dinner with a friend of Carolyn's I heard such a
tale and to not know whether Mr. Monterey Jack (if that even is his
real name) was putting me on, or had put away too many beers. But
either way, here is what he claimed happened in the wee hours of the
first of May:
Mr.
Jack told me that it was indeed the ancient spirit of the winds,
Ithaqua, who had come to Arkham. He said that he faced the
demon-prince with his bare hands (his tommy-gun having been torn from
those same hands but the hurricane force gales). He said that his
three friends were there also—who I have already named earlier—and
that together, in the face of the icy winds that were hurled at them
that they faced down the demon-prince (or as Carolyn calls them: the
'Great Old Ones') and that they won.
I
don't know what to believe, but I know what I know. And what I know
is that some insanity, so terror, had gripped Arkham in the days
leading up to that night. I know that without warning or explanation
and hurricane appeared over Arkham and Arkham alone. And I know that
in the morning, though terrible devastation remained, the madness was
gone.
I
don't know whether some collective hallucination had threatened to
drive the entire town mad, and if maybe that psychosis had enough
psychic energy to become real for a while and exhaust itself in a
dreadful storm. I don't know if maybe Sister Mary had been telling me
not of hallucinations, but of the God's Honest Truth and that she
stood with three others against an ancient terror that had threatened
to destroy us all—and won. I don't know.
But I
do know that we are still here. And if, from time to time, Sister
Mary asks us to pray to protect the world from evil, where's the harm
in that?
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