“Ward Four? I wouldn’t mind—but what’s that for, Barstowe?” Spellman pointedly indicated the stick which the older man had almost managed to hide in the clinical white folds of his smock. “I mean, it’s not as though they were about to break out!”
“No,” Barstowe answered, turning his eyes down and away, “it’s just that I feel more…more comfortable down there with a stick. You never know, do you?”
As Spellman climbed the stairs he retained in his mind’s eye a mental picture of that stick of Barstowe’s. If one of the officers got to know of the weapon, Barstowe would be in serious trouble. Not that the squat nurse could do the inmates any harm with the thing—if threatened through the bars of a spy-hole, an occupant would. only have to move to the back of his cell to be out of harms’s way—no, obviously it was as Barstowe had explained; his stick was simply a comforter.
Nonetheless, Spellman could not help but remember those screams he listened to deep into the night whenever Barstowe was on duty in the basement ward. The funny thing was that later that night—even on the second floor, in the open rooms of the more trusted patients and in the corridors between those comparatively homely billets—the trainee nurse could still hear those muted, tortured echoes from Hell….
• • •
Towards the end of October Martin Spellman’s reading and studying for his book had taken a turn toward rather more specialized cases: in particular aberrations apparently influenced by imaginary or hallucinatory “outside” forces. He had seen definite connections in a fair number of reasonably well authenticated cases—connections which were especially interesting inso far as they depicted almost carbon-copy fancies, dreams, and delusions in the afflicted parties.
There was for instance the very well documented case of Joe Slater, the Catskill Mountains trapper, whose lunatic actions in 1900-01 had seemed governed not by the moon but rather by the influence of a point or object in the heavens much farther out than the orbit of Earth’s satellite. The authenticity of this case, however, seemed to Spellman spoiled by its chronicler’s insistence that Slater was in fact inhabited by the mind of an alien being. Then there was the German Baron, Ernst Kant, who, before his hideous and inexplicable death in a Westphalian Bedlam, had believed his every insane action controlled by a creature he called Yibb-Tstll; described as being “huge and black with writhing breasts and an anus within its forehead, a black-blooded thing whose brains feed upon its own wastes….”
More recently there was Dr. David Stephenson’s recorded observations of one J. M. Freeth, a female zoophagous maniac whose declared intention was to absorb as many lives as she could. This she set about, like Bram Stoker’s Renfield, by feeding flies to spiders, spiders to sparrows, and finally by devouring the sparrows herself! She, too, as with the maniac in Stoker’s story, had been refused a cat once her intentions were quite clear! Her odd fancies had been part and parcel of her belief that she had watching over her a supernatural “God-creature” who would eventually come to release her. Miss Freeth’s obsessions and her “life-devouring” mania were far from unique, and the student collected and recorded a number of similar cases.
Again, this time from the records of a certain Canton madhouse in America, Spellman culled the horrible story of an innate who had been, before his escape and subsequent disappearance some seven years previously in 1928, completely sure of his immortality and of the fact that he would “dwell in Y’hanthlei amidst wonder and glory forever….” His destiny (he was righteous in his self-assurance) was governed by “the Deep Ones, Dagon, and Lord Cthulhu”—with the former of which he would serve in the worship and glorification of the latter—whoever or whatever these names were supposed. to signify! There was, though, a clue to this last poor unfortunate’s aberrations. He was pronouncedly ichthyic in appearance, with protuberant eyes and scaly skin, and it was believed that these physical abnormalities had led him to dwell too often and too long over certain obscure myths and legends involving oceanic deities. In this connection it seemed likely that his “Dagon” was that same fish-god of the Philistines and Phoenicians, sometimes known as Oannes.
So Spellman’s studies grew more specific as the weeks passed, but he little dreamed that in a certain cell in Hell there resided a man whose case was as odd as any he had so far collected for his book….
• • •
In mid-November, knowing something of the new direction his pupil’s studies were taking, Dr. Welford invited Spellman to read the case-file of Wilfred Larner, usually one of the quieter residents of Hell but a man who could swiftly turn from a reasonably controlled individual to a raging, savage animal. Larner’s case, too, seemed to have had its genesis in those “outside” regions which so fascinated the student nurse.
Thus it happened that in his room above the basement ward Martin Spellman first came into close contact with Larner’s file, and from the first he became absorbed with the thing; particularly with those mentions of a certain “Black Book”—a thing called the Cthaat Aquadingen—purported to relate to the raising of water- and ocean-elementals and other “demons” of more obscure origins. Apparently this book was one of the main causes of Larner’s rapid mental decline some ten years previously; and, according to the file, its hints, suggestions, and the occasional blatantly blasphemous “revelation” could scarcely be considered safe reading for any man with a delicately balanced mind.
Spellman could hardly be blamed for not recognizing the title: Cthaat Aquadingen, for the book was known only to a scattered handful of men, most of them erudite antiquarians or students of rare and ancient works, some of them students of darker things: the occult sciences! Indeed, only five copies of the work in various forms existed in the whole world at that time; one in the private library of a London collector; one under lack and key—along with the Necronomicon, the G’harne Fragments, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Liber Ivonis, the dread Cultes des Goules, and the Revelations of Glaaki—in the British Museum, and two of the others in even more obscure and inaccessible places. The fifth copy: that one was soon to fall into Spellman’s unwitting hands.
But this book aside, during his decline and before his sister committed him to the institute’s care, Larner had also assembled something of a Fortean collection of cuttings from newspapers all over the world; cuttings which, especially if considered as from the often narrow viewpoint of a disordered psyche, might take on all sorts of disturbing aspects.
Spellman wondered just where the institute had gained its often detailed information regarding the events leading to Larner’s confinement; and in this he was lucky, for enquiries with Dr. Welford the next morning led him to discover that Larner’s sister had placed all documents relevant to her brother’s derangement in the hands of the institute’s alienists. Both Larner’s cuttings-file and his “Cthaat Aguadingen” (a great sheaf of stapled foolscap pages in Larner’s own handwriting; presumably copied from some other work) were still safely stored in a cupboard in Oakdeene’s spacious administrative offices—and Dr. Welford was not adverse to the idea of placing them, for a few days at least, at Spellman’s disposal.