Today's entry is the first part of my longest story yet. In the spirit of the DLC which is sweeping the gaming world, I'm going to release the bulk of it now and incrementally more later, but at a fraction of the price of this original offering!
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An Excess of Radium [
Part II,
Part III (end)]
It was two weeks ago today that the drifter first wandered onto my porch out back of Webb Road. It was still and hot, and the silence seemed to say that even the birds and bees had decided to sleep the day through. I had a clear view up the road for a half mile, and I had watched him wading through the heat shimmer to my house. I knew this was his destination. Nothing else around here.
“Benjamin Wilson,” says he, “I’m Lionel Pardee. Pleased to meet you, sir!” His smile was brighter than a cop’s lamp at midnight. He proffered a hand –decorated with a fine gold ring– which I chose to ignore.
“Uh-huh,” I replied. Close up he was tall and young, with a touch of baby fat still in his cheeks. He was dressed nice enough. His shoes had a polish too, quite a trick where there’s no paved road. The final clue was the combination of tanned face and soft hands. A drifter will always be a drifter, however you dress him up. His name wasn’t really ‘Pardee’ either, I’ll give you that one for free.
The hand rejoined its brother, currently engaged in holding a slim, new-looking leather valise. I didn’t bother asking how he came to know my name.
“Mr. Wilson, I’ve come a long way to meet you, and I have a proposition I think you’ll want to hear. Just to show I value your time, I’m going to give you a little something for it, right up front.” From his jacket pocket, Pardee produced a five dollar bill, so new it crackled in his fingers, like it wanted to escape him and come to me. It was the first interesting thing I’d heard that day.
I would have liked to feign disinterest in the fiver, but the stake I’d brought to Dunwich was about spent, and I hadn’t worked in some time. Truth is, the lack of work suited me, but poverty didn’t. If Sadie’s family hadn’t left her this place, we’d be sleeping in the woods. Without shifting my backside, I folded up the bill with two fingers and put it someplace safe.
“I’ve been staying in Dunwich a while already, but you wouldn’t have noticed me in town–“
I interrupted: “Don’t get into town much.”
“Well, if you had been in town, you wouldn’t have seen me. I have a special talent for going unnoticed. Even in a small” –he wrinkled his nose a bit– “village such as this. You probably want to know why I’m here.”
The pause was pregnant, as they say. We both waited to see what it would deliver.
“I came to Dunwich to follow up some research I’ve been doing on a story about a Ghost Miner.”
In case this narrative hasn’t spelled it out yet, I pride myself on my poker face, and this statement was a serious challenge to that composure, perhaps my greatest to date, but I persevered. From the fancy leather case, Pardee produced a typed document. The paper was heavy bond, the stuff lawyers use, and unmarred by strike-outs or smudges. Fancy.
“It’s a private account by the Director, now retired, of St. Mary’s Hospital in Arkham.”
I could see this from the heading. I scanned the first page and grunted to let him know just how important it was to me.
“You
can read, can’t you?” I guess he realized since he had to take it, he might as well dish a bit out.
I let it pass and read the thing he gave me.
Since Pardee left it with me, I include it here.
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An Account of the Patient John Jukes, by Alfred Temple, MDMedical Programme Director, St. Mary’s Hospital
Secrets are a strange sort of life. They grow and multiply in the dark, and I have long observed there is a shadow over Western Massachusetts that makes it fertile ground for such fungi.
The particular secret I am going to relate starts with the kind of puerile nonsense common to the
Penny Dreadfuls of my youth in Britain. A man stumbles into Dunwich Town on the less reputable side of midnight. He is soaked through and has apparently walked barefoot, wearing not much more than rags, from the infamous ravines to the northeast. He claims to have survived a collapsed shaft at the Rusty Wheel silver mine which has left many of his colleagues dead and a score more trapped.
Like any tall tale worth telling, his sprouted from a kernel of truth: there had indeed been a disaster at the Rusty Wheel, a collapse of the main shaft which left dead or buried alive an even thirty miners. However, the event in question was now fifty years past and forgotten except for one or two backwoods crones who laid their widowhood to the disaster.
After an examination of the miner in question uncovered no obvious infirmity, the local physician committed him to the care of Sefton Asylum here in Arkham for mental evaluation. Through a bureaucratic mix-up, he ended up at St. Mary’s instead. I was a senior staff member at the time and during my regular rounds, I noticed the absence of an admission sheet on his clipboard and stopped to get his details.
He repeated to me his confused, and confusing, story of the catastrophe: there was a great rumbling shift of earth, the screams of the wounded, what one would expect. He said that they hadn’t been blasting that day and he had no idea what caused the cave-in.
Despite the harrowing nature of the tale and its grisly outcome, he related it in a lifeless sort of drone. Rarely did he look me in the eye, instead seeking out the horizon, which on the paupers’ ward was hidden behind alternating stripes of wallpaper.
The next order of business was a careful physical examination of Mr. Jukes, both to confirm his physical fitness, and to test whether his tale had any degree of veracity. I estimated him to be approximately twenty-five years of age (he was unable to confirm either the date or year of his birth). He had the broad shoulders and thick arms of a manual labourer, but his hands were soft and hadn’t lately touched the handle of a pick or shovel. The black grit which commonly dirties the seams of a miner’s face and hands was also absent. He clearly hadn’t engaged in any mining recently.
The following day, I found time to talk to Mr. Jukes at length. I queried him about the operations of the mine, how he had ended up at the job, and what his salary was. His responses were vague and disjointed; they started out promisingly, but always wandered about the specifics. He said he and his fellows worked in gangs of four, three hacking away at the seam, while the fourth gathered, but he couldn’t elaborate on how the ore was extracted from the mine, how the elevators operated &c. He asserted he was happy with his pay, but could not relate the amount.
I tried a different tack and asked him why
he had escaped the mine but no one else. Jukes became briefly animated, and related that after quite a long time in the darkness there had been a second shifting of earth, and a single shaft of sunlight had guided him to the surface. He had been so excited to escape, he hadn’t stopped to help the other survivors.
At the end of our interview, I took my time about finishing my written notes, hoping the patient would volunteer something further. When nothing was forthcoming, I reviewed again my notes from the authorities in Dunwich, who had tried to locate his next of kin. I plainly refuted his claim regarding a sister and cousin. There weren’t any residences at the address he had given, only a long defunct textile mill. The phantom relations were absent from the church register and town tax records as well.
I had had some experience examining mental deficients during the earlier part of my career in Britain. When confronted with a falsehood, the mentally infirm will choose one of two paths:
In the first case, they will hotly demand you spell out your accusation, as if it were a question of personal honour. They will insist on their version of events and the presentation of further evidence against them will provoke anger and possibly violence.
In the second case, the subject will quietly revise his story. If he had spoken of a house on Pine Street, and you show by a map there clearly is no such street, he will insist it was Fir Street, or that he had meant it was another Pine Street, in Partridgeville for example instead of Dunwich. Further argument will result in further prevarication.
But as he did in so many other ways, Jukes refused to act predictably. When I told him I could neither specifically nor generally accept his account as true, he merely nodded his head and was silent.
Still, his story and circumstances intrigued me, and I decided to make my own analysis of Mr. John Jukes at St. Mary’s. In order to spare the hospital the possible taint of having an idiot on the premises, I recorded that he had suffered a head injury, from which I expected him to make a full recovery. I would keep a set of personal notes on his case, figuring I could update his official record at a later date if I deemed it prudent.
But no such update was ever made. The reader holds in his hands the sole record of the patient at St. Mary’s.
I woke the next morning with a severe rash on the palms of my hands, which on closer examination I decided was a second-degree burn, as if I’d tried to lift a pot of scalding water barehanded. I at first assumed it was an allergic reaction, but that night I happened to be doing rounds on the paupers’ ward long after sunset. We had had a gas stoppage and as I was about to exit, the only light source, a lamp near the door, was snuffed out by a stray breeze. I turned and while trying to reignite the lamp in near total darkness, noticed a phosphorescence some distance to my right, with three faint but distinct sources. One of the patients was faintly radiating light, enough so that I could see by the relative position of his face and hands that he was propped up half-sitting on his pillows. I made a spectacle of myself lighting and extinguishing the lamp, and a few of the patients grew quite annoyed, before I satisfied myself it was no optical illusion: my mystery patient Jukes, however faintly, glowed in the dark!
In my bed later, I stared into the nothingness of night until my first insight into Jukes’s condition stole over my mind in perfect synchronicity with the creeping approach of dawn’s light.
The year was 1898, and Mrs. Skłodowska-Curie’s discovery of Radium had awed the scientific community. From the several papers I had read on her groundbreaking research, I formulated my first diagnosis: the patient had been exposed to
an excess of Radium, probably contracted through the discovery of pitchblende at the Rusty Wheel silver mine. How else to explain the evidence: burns on my hands following my examination of Mr. Jukes, compounded with the eerie glow given off by his skin.
I was quite thrilled with myself, and the reader has probably realized already what did not occur to me until I had covered three pages in an excited and illegible scribble, to wit: Mr. Jukes was no miner, nor had the Rusty Wheel silver mine been in operation in my lifetime.
Yet the paradoxes presented by my favourite patient had stimulated me more than any event in my five year tenure at St. Mary’s, and the possibility of Radium as the cause of his malady had me trapped as surely as a rabbit in a snare.
I cautioned staff to wear gloves when bathing or physically interacting with the patient, noting on his chart that he may have been exposed to an unknown disease, possibly affecting the brain.
Distracted by other duties, I did not return to Jukes’s bedside for two weeks, when he was brought to my attention by the nurses on the ward. They claimed to have seen him wandering far from his bed, in the kitchen, the administrative offices, and the paying patients’ wards(!). Once he had been reported outside by the stables, snooping around the wagons. But whenever he was spotted, he always eluded the witness and was back in his bed before he could be properly scolded. When he was confronted about his rule-breaking, he denied ever leaving the ward. The cheek of it, they said.
It’s not hard to imagine a patient rambling away on the hospital grounds, but the claim that he was somehow able to magically return to his cot was spurious on the face of it. I’m more inclined to suspect the nurses and interns. We had recently sacked a pharmacologist’s assistant for unauthorized dispensing of laudanum, and several of his customers were on staff. Since Jukes was supposed to be haring about outside as well as in, I asked the ward nurse to bring me his cotton slippers. The soles were as white as the day they were issued, and gave no evidence of having been used in any grand adventures. This was sufficient to silence the critics.
As an unexpected boon however, their griping presented me with an excuse to move Jukes into a private room. I told the Director that in future I would see to the patient’s wellbeing myself.
Further interviews with Jukes revealed more details about the mine and his life, but the information came grudgingly, as if I had to trick his brain into releasing its secrets. In a few weeks more, I felt myself tantalizingly close to a conclusion.
Unfortunately, my special treatment of Jukes had drawn the eye of an embittered and childless old hag, who for the sake of politesse we call the Head Nurse. She kept an ever watchful eye for “freeloaders” –her term for anyone with the strength to stand, but without money to pay for care– and had correctly identified my patient as just such a freeloader. Jukes’s hijinks outside his ward, real or imagined, were also the target of her ire. She could not abide hijinks.
After a particularly heated exchange with this craggy personage, I was more determined than ever that Jukes should not end up at Sefton. Since the founder’s grandson, the last of the Sefton line, had died, the Asylum had degenerated into ignominy and ridicule. Even then, at the turn of the century, it was becoming a sort of sideshow of the medical world. The quack psychiatry which I knew for a fact was being practiced there was bad enough, but the rumours of what went on in the wing for the criminally insane were too grisly to repeat.
At the same time, it was obvious that Jukes’s days on the ward at St. Mary’s were numbered. Whispered snippets of our private discussions were making the rounds, if you’ll pardon my pun, and these were distorted and exaggerated beyond all common sense. Imagine the headlines if the Examiner caught on to my speculations about Jukes’s condition:
Hundred Year Old Miner Has Body of Twenty Year Old! Formula for Eternal Youth Discovered in Radium! He glowed in the dark for God’s sake! Add to that his “extra-corporeal” wandering, or whatever you want to call it, and the supernaturalists would descend upon St. Mary’s in flocks.
These were the thoughts in which I was deeply engrossed the night I mistakenly descended the staff stairway all the way to the basement. Finding myself some distance down a wrong passage, I compounded my mistake by trying to continue onward instead of retracing my steps.
What at first appeared to be a blind corridor ended in a long forgotten chamber. Narrow and unfinished, with the crumbling stonework exposed, it had evidently lain unused for decades. The only natural light came from a tiny slit of a window near the ceiling. When I paused to sneeze, for the dust was plentiful, an inspiration came to me. I would purge Mr. Jukes from our records and keep my secret project here in the basement. The problem was solved
deus ex machina. Naturally, none of the staff could know, especially the magpies in white.
My confidant in this deception would be Dr. Tully, an 82-year-old Board member who spent his days ambling up and down the wards and regaling patients with stories of the Battle of Fredericksburg, his internship as a callow twenty-year-old, or whatever else struck his fancy. The old pirate was delighted to be part of a conspiracy.
One night, whilst Tully and I procured a bed, table and oil lamp, his housekeeper gave the place a going over with mop and bucket. Tully arranged for her to clean up after Jukes and make his meals. She was a refugee from some Eastern European backwater and spoke no English.
The books with which we supplied him went unread and the meals mostly uneaten, but Jukes did not complain. He seemed content to sit and stare and often claimed he had been out touring all kinds of places. I mentioned to him during one of my visits that the nurses’ complaints of his wandering feet had ceased. He confirmed that he had grown bored of the hospital grounds and now roamed farther afield, and had recently returned to Dunwich. He said the town had changed, and that he hadn’t even been certain it was Dunwich until he spotted the sign in the railway station.
Our interviews continued in earnest through the summer, and I tried a myriad of different psychological techniques, even mesmerism, in an effort to lift the miasma of confusion that befuddled his brain. After months of effort, I had begun to despair that Jukes’s mental condition would ever improve, but at the same time tantalizing details of his life in the mid-19th century continued to surface. More and more I was forced to consider whether the man might really have worked the Rusty Wheel silver mine before its ruin in 1853.
In the autumn of that year, I reaped the benefit of my correspondence with colleagues in Europe and repaired there for further study. I met with some success in my goals, and ended up staying quite a lot longer than I had intended in Leipzig, where a Dr. Mueller had acquired a small amount of Radium for his research.
Before returning to Arkham I conducted my own investigation in Dunwich. It is a sorry, tumbledown little hamlet, more depressing to my spirit than any slum I have seen in America or on the Continent. The state of their records was therefore unsurprising. I found a license for the Rusty Wheel, indicating it had first been staked at the start of the eighteenth century. For an address only the head office was listed, a now vanished building downtown. Neither was the mine marked on any extant land registry, but I inferred from a newspaper account of the disaster that it was located in the network of ravines northeast of town.
To my enquiries about the ravines, the locals replied that they were haunted. To which I was tempted to reply, “What isn’t haunted about Dunwich?” There is nothing supernatural about the occasional inbred teen-ager getting lost in a densely forested labyrinth which no geologist or surveyor ever had the inclination, or stomach, to chart. Suffice it to say the hoi polloi had nothing of use to add.
When I returned to my duties at St. Mary’s, Nurse Hemway at once expressed her sympathy to me in as heartfelt a manner as she could muster. She said that a note had been sent me in Europe regarding my colleague –indeed, my friend– but had been returned unopened when I could not be located. As the staff had not wished to unduly stress me during my sabbatical, no second note had been sent. I waited on her with poorly concealed impatience. It had been five months since I had last looked in on Mr. Jukes and I much wished to speak to him. I hurried her along to the point: Doctor Tully had had a massive stroke and dropped stone dead, almost immediately after my departure.
Swallowing my terror, I rushed to the basement without another word.
Someone had decided to re-open an ancient coal chute onto my unused corridor for basement deliveries, and the architect had ordered the roof reinforced. Since that section appeared to be a dead end, the workmen had thought nothing of blocking the passage floor to ceiling with several unused pallets of brick. Judging by the trackless dust, these bricks had remained undisturbed for months.
I went straight to Magnuson, the Director, who asked at once if I was quite well. I can’t imagine how wild-eyed I looked to him. “I hope you’re not upset about the renovation,” he said. “Having our deliveries switched downstairs has made all the difference at reception. Everyone’s delighted.”
“No, no. The renovations are fine,” I said, clutching the edge of his desk as if fearing a tornado might pluck me into the sky. “I’m glad you went ahead. But listen: there was a patient of mine and I was wondering how he’s getting on, a Mr. Jukes. Have you seen him?”
“Jukes? Can’t say that I have. Special case of yours, is he?”
“That he is,” I said quietly. “All this travel has me addled. I remember now. He was transferred to Sefton while I was away.” A damned lie if there ever was one. I would later learn that the housekeeper had said not a word about her charge. She had vanished the day after Tully’s death along with a large sum in cash which her master imprudently kept about the house.
Unconscionable I know, but there it is. In my defense, Jukes was in perfectly fine health, physically. Why hadn’t he put up a racket? He would have been heard.
The next night, I returned to the basement with a helper. He was a Chinese lad named Ming, very strong, and as a deaf-mute the soul of discretion. My hands were shaking so awfully, I could not have done the job without him. Once enough of the black space yawned open for me to pass, I signaled Ming to wait, covered my mouth with a handkerchief soaked in cologne, and entered.
By the light of my lonely candle, I witnessed Mr. Jukes’s final repose. He sat propped up on his cot as ever, his eyes were closed, his expression serene. The dust here too was undisturbed. The poor mad fool had not even stood from his bed to save himself. I returned the handkerchief to my pocket and tentatively sniffed the air. The room smelled of damp, but that was all. I bowed my head a moment in prayer.
“Hello, Doctor.” Mr. Jukes opened his eyes, and though he did not turn from contemplating the bare brick wall opposite, a slight grin creased his visage, as much emotion as I’d ever seen from him. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
I felt the blood drain from my face, and it seemed from my body as well, pouring out my feet and into the earth. If there had been some way of bricking up that corridor again in an instant, I would have done just that. But I could not have borne another moment so close to the thing in that room. Clutching Ming by one arm, I fled.
Three days later, my courage reinforced with a generous measure of scotch, I delivered my patient to Sefton Asylum along with a heavily edited dossier, including a diagnosis that covered his confused memories and feeble appetite, and a birth date that reflected his appearance.
That is all twenty-five years gone.
Yesterday, I was summoned to Sefton, a place I have always avoided, but especially after parting ways with Mr. Jukes. He had asked for me by name, and as the horrors of our past association had faded over the decades, I acceded. I found exactly what I expected: a quarter-century years later, Mr. Jukes looks the same as he did the day of his arrival at St. Mary’s. Not a wrinkle, nor a gray hair, nor any indication of the advent of time which all mortal men must face.
He told me he had found the mine. I asked him in a whisper what he meant. The Rusty Wheel, he said. He had finally found it and would be returning there. It was where his friends were, the only friends he had now. My brain reeled as he spoke of men whose very bones must be dust, and buried beneath a thousand tons of granite besides. But for the sake of expediency, I agreed that this was for the best, silently promising myself I would never again set foot within the Asylum’s stained gray walls.
The next morning I arrived at my office and saw that despite the locked door I was preceded by a young man who seemed to be idly looking through the papers on my bookshelf. As I was about to protest, he turned to me, smiled, and offered an ironic two-fingered salute. It was John Jukes. He then walked to a corner of the room by the window, where an open closet door hid him momentarily hidden from view.
All my years pressed down on me like so many blocks of masonry. I wished with every fibre to close the door behind me and never return, but I advanced those few steps to confirm what I must by then have known. John Jukes had vanished, as if into the air itself.
Once I had caught my breath, I went to the secretary’s desk and telephoned Sefton to inquire on Jukes’s status. When my call was returned that afternoon, there was much prevarication and grumbling before it was finally admitted that he was nowhere to be found. He must have escaped, they said. I did not press them for details and for that I assume they were glad.
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And that was the doctor’s story.
“What do you think of it?” Pardee asked.
“What do I think of it?” I parroted. “I think it’s rubbish. Oh, you maybe could get it published in some serial for young boys. Seems you can get anything printed these days.”
“You don’t believe a word of it, eh? That suits me fine, Mr. Wilson. It suits me down to the ground. But I believe the miner Jukes uncovered something deep underground, something that changed his makeup. At this late date, we know whatever he found wasn’t Radium, or at least not just Radium, but whatever it was gave him longevity beyond any normal man. It might even have given him
eternal life. ”
This last bit of earnest prattle was too much for me. I let loose a belly laugh that all but shook the house down. I laughed until I wheezed like a sixty-year-old man with Black Lung. The fact I didn’t roll right off the porch and into the ditch was purely good manners, which I thank the Lord my mother had raised me up to employ at all times.
Mr. Pardee waited. And waited. Whatever else you could say about him, he was a patient man. When the last giggle and snort had trickled to an end, I sat back to finish catching my wind.
“Mister, do you travel around like this all the time, telling jokes? ‘Cause I think that was the single best laugh I’ve had since I saw the preacher’s pants catch fire when I was eight years old.”
“Mr. Wilson,” he said, pausing until he had my attention, “your country bumpkin act might help you blend in here in this nowhere town, but it doesn’t fool me. Listen. I want a guide to accompany me to the Rusty Wheel silver mine, someone who knows how a mine is laid out, how to navigate underground without the benefit of a map and powered elevators. There‘s also gas, rotten shoring and other dangers, with which I know you are familiar. I’ve got fifty dollars for the man who will take me out there and spend a few days sussing things out.”
“Why me?” I didn’t ask how Pardee knew I had once been a miner. My flush of good humour was fading as something at the pit of my stomach told me I didn't want to know.
“I have good reasons, to wit: I don’t want to mount an expedition. I want one man I can rely on. Besides the cost, I can’t have a lot of gossipy small town types involved. You can imagine if– when I find what I aim to find, the discovery has to remain secret for a long time. I’ll have to get the substance, whatever it is, to a lab, then I’ll need to get funding to buy the land, set up a guard at the site, etcetera. The whole project may take months.”
“If this secret of yours is so precious, what makes you think it will be safe inside the head of a broken down old miner?”
“Ah. A very good question, Mr. Wilson. Very astute. Tell me, what do you know about West Virginia?”
“To the west, ain’t it?” I quipped. Truth is, this lollygagger really did have my attention now. I knew about West Virginia all right. I knew a piece more than I’d like to.
“Ha ha,” he replied. “My family is in mining, sir. I’ve never actually worked in a mine, but being around folks in the business, one occasionally hears stories, like the story of this ghost miner John Jukes. Like the story of a union organizer named Bernard Wolczak.”
Like a startled snake, my spine spasmed out of its accustomed slouch. The heat was rising up in my face, and no doubt Pardee saw it too.
“In the course of my research into the Rusty Wheel, I did a little asking around and discovered that you hail from West Virginia yourself, from the same town as this other miner in fact, place called Beury. Maybe you’ve heard of this Pole, name of Bernard Wolczak? Any man high up in the union makes a lot of enemies in a mining town, but Wolczak is a special case. A union man who steals from his own hall…” He shook his head, baffled. “I do believe some folks would travel right ‘round the world to talk to that man, if they only knew where he’d got to.”
I lifted a hand to shade my eyes from Pardee’s brilliant smile.
“There’s one more reason I chose you for this job, Mr. Wilson: I like to hire cheap. Problem with men you get on the cheap is they’re slow, unmotivated, and often not too bright. Now I know you’re motivated to work for me; you must be smart to have so many enemies; and I have a feeling you’ll come cheap.”
I am not a man who will fight when he knows he’s licked. Battered pride recovers faster than a cracked skull. I speak from experience.
“Fifty dollars you say?”
----
to be continued....
nuh nuh NUUNNNH!
RPG
