The Hungering God Read online

  The rise in those from the surrounding area committed for a host of serious conditions ranging from emotional breakdowns and sleep disorders at one extreme to catatonia and full-blown delusional mania at the other, was both extraordinary and unprecedented. It was as if an epidemic of madness were taking hold of the Miskatonic Valley, and Arkham in particular.

  Those affected came from all walks of life—they were university students, clerks, grandmothers, farmers, bank officers, there seemed no rhyme or reason save geography and a strange resistance to conventional treatments in all cases. But it was the strange consistencies in the visions, an undercurrent of the monstrous and the repeated imagery of nightmares between the subjects that they all noticed first. It had been the subject of much theorizing, just before the trouble really started and a trickle of cases became a deluge. Soon the “outbreak”—for what else was there to call it—started to show itself in members of the staff. The patients grew more disturbed and more violent, and sedation and restraint started to be used in an almost cavalier fashion just so they could cope, but it barely helped. A wave of suicides followed, and one incident that they’d branded a suicide because they had no other explanation how a man in a straightjacket tore himself to pieces in a locked room without first removing it. It was inexplicable, it was horrible, and it defied every rational explanation—so they simply ignored it and carried on. What else was there? Arkham itself and what dark malady that allied it needed them sorely.

  Soon fellow institutions across the state and beyond began to shun them, politely but unmistakably. First Danvers, then even Sefton Sanitarium, whose very close ties had cut off assistance and consultation. They “regretfully” could no longer take on overflow cases, citing their own increase in workload and diminishing resources in troubled times—but the truth was Arkham Asylum was a “troubled house” to them.

  When the Asylum’s clinical director simply resigned and disappeared a month ago, they were left a rudderless ship and an exodus of the medical staff had followed, leaving only a few remaining, her included, either unable or unwilling to terminate their contracts, or like her too bloody-minded to give in. In terms of psychiatrists left at the institution, there was only herself, a few other juniors, and the senior resident Dr. Mintz now. Between them they struggled to keep the place going despite everything, although more and more she feared they were all just going down with the ship.

  “But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

  Assailed the monarch’s high estate…”

  She muttered the lines to herself as she waited impatiently for a reinforced inner door to the ground floor infirmary to be opened. Hearing her, the orderly looked up in alarm.

  “Don’t worry, Thomas,” she said with a lopsided smile. “Just a little Poe, The Haunted Palace.”

  He nodded in agreement despite clearly having no ken of what she was speaking, and she hurried passed him with a sigh, her face a mask now of professional calm, her exhaustion dispelled by force of will. She smelled the blood immediately.

  A pair of nurses tended to a writhing man in a blood-spattered police uniform on the examination table, attempting to keep him still, but by the hesitancy of their movements clearly worried about doing more harm than good. The night porter stood vulture-watchful by the pharmaceutical cabinet, bundle of keys held in his hand like a talisman, while lurking in a corner of the room was another stranger, a young, narrow-shouldered man in what had been an expensive suit, but now looked like he’d been rolling in a ditch in it. The young man held his right hand pressed to his left upper arm, and she could see a trickle of blood between his fingers.

  Taking charge swiftly, she set about examining the man on the table first, reasoning that the walking wounded could wait till later. The man had an ugly open gash on his thigh through which she could make out bone beneath the welter of blood as she removed the improvised wadding that had been thrust into it. The wounded man was ashen-faced, his eyes rolled white in his head like marbles.

  “What is this, some kind of animal bite? He needs a qualified surgeon immediately,” she barked at the porter. “Take the van and fetch Dr. Lee at once. Tell him I need him now.”

  The man blinked slowly and drew back, “Now?”

  “Yes now!” she barked back, jamming an ampoule of morphine into the wounded man’s other thigh. “Take Thomas with you if you’re frightened to go alone!” she snapped more angrily than she meant.

  The man nodded in relief and vanished.

  She repeated her question about the wound to the man in the muddy suit, and he merely nodded and said, “Sure, dogs, big ones, we were on a raid, bootleggers, it all went to hell and the deputy got bit, so I—”

  But the facts established for treatment, she had already tuned him out. The desperate work of long minutes passed and when it was done, she leaned back and stretched her suddenly stiff back.

  “He going to live, Doc?” the other man asked casually from the shadowed corner of the room.

  She started, having forgotten for a moment that he was there, so intent had she been on her bloody work. “Yes. Yes I think so, at least if he doesn’t have another crisis in the night. He’s lost a lot of blood, but I’ve transfused him, and it wasn’t quite as bad as it first looked—no major vessels were ruptured but a good deal of tissue is missing. That and he’s young and strong means his heart will hopefully have coped with the strain. Whether or not he keeps the leg will be the surgeon’s call rather than mine when he gets here.” And if he’s sober, she added silently to herself. “We shouldn’t move him tonight, but we’ll get him an ambulance and transfer him to Boston General in the morning. He’ll get the best care there.”

  “You’re not a surgeon?” he asked quizzically, tapping out a cigarette from a pack and lighting it. As he did so, she saw the shallow wound on his upper arm had already stopped bleeding, the sleeve of his shirt and jacket were torn around it and blackened. Powder burns, she thought.

  “No, this is an asylum,” she said with a snap of sarcasm she couldn’t quite keep out of her voice. “As I imagine you know, St. Mary’s is closed to emergency patients at the moment,” she said, walking over to him. “Psychiatry is my chosen specialty, but before I chose that path, I cut my teeth in hospitals in New York during my residency. I’m a fully qualified M.D. and I know my way around a scalpel and suture, I can assure you. Now let’s take a look at that arm.”

  “It’s just a scratch,” he said with a smile she was sure was intended to be charming, but she had already taken a dislike to the man. “My name’s Sykes,” he continued. “I’m with the Bureau of Prohibition.”

  She merely nodded and led him over to the light to wash and disinfect the bullet graze. Afterward, she busied herself with the stricken deputy and ignored the young man as he attempted to flirt with her, until, equipped with an entirely needless sling, he departed to find the sheriff and inform him what had happened once the blurry-eyed surgeon at last arrived to pronounce his judgment that the leg was still viable, at least for now.

  She was thankful to see the back of Sykes at the finish. She had no time for liars; a bear perhaps she might have believed, but she had seen enough dog bites to know this wasn’t one of them, no matter how large the hound in question.

  As for why the prohibition agent had clearly shot himself in the arm, and been delicate enough about it so as not to do any real damage, she neither knew nor wanted to know. She had problems enough of her own.

  Chapter Five

  Arkham

  November 26, 1929

  There was no reason for the fight.

  Raker was leaning over a plate of grey meat at a diner counter. There was no one else in the diner except the soft-dough-faced girl behind the counter and an old guy taking his time over a mug of coffee and a copy of the Arkham Advertiser. Raker liked it this way: quiet and a clear view of the door and the street outside. He looked up at the sound of a shout, his hand moving to the gun in his pocket. He hadn’t heard back from Tucker yet and he was killin
g time while chasing down a few leads of his own.

  Out beyond the grime-misted glass a man in a crumpled cap and sea-faded clothes was turning to face a thick-shouldered man in a badly fitting suit. The deckhand in the cap was shouting something in another language, spit flying from his lips, flushed red spreading up his neck and face. The bigger man gestured, half in dismissal, half in insult. The street was not busy, but the few passing figures stopped at the sound, drawn to watch the argument in jittery silence as it raged on.

  The deckhand hawked and spat at the big man’s feet. The big man looked down and then stepped forward, hand rising to jab at the deckhand’s chest. The deckhand sneered, yellow teeth flashing in his weathered face. Raker realized what was going to happen a second before he saw the knife in the deckhand’s fist. One of the onlookers must have realized it too, because a shout rose in warning, but the big man stepped forward, heedless, his eyes intent on the deckhand’s face. The knife edge flashed eye-blink fast, and suddenly the big man was stumbling, falling, a dark stain spreading over his chest like a blooming rose.

  For a second the world seemed to freeze. Raker could hear the girl behind the counter gasp, and the old guy look up. The faces of the onlookers were a wall of wide eyes and open mouths. The deckhand was bouncing backward, the knife bright in his hand, face snarling. Someone bellowed with rage, and Raker saw shock and relish flash across the watching faces. Raker had seen a lot of fights in his life, from the clumsy violence of drunks, to the slow beatings handed out to bad debtors and finks that left men begging and broken. But this was different, as if in a second the flash of the knife and the wet gasp of the falling man had become a focus for something that had been floating in the nervous looks and hurried steps of the people out on the street. As if it had released something.

  The big man finally hit the ground. At least half of the onlookers surged forward. Someone lunged at the deckhand, and the knife flashed out, fast and bright, and there was more blood on the cobblestones; bodies clashed, jostled, fell and the street was screaming and roaring in a confusion of violence. Argument had become a fight involving a dozen men and the sound of fists swinging, cries of anger and pain, of feet stamping on those that were already on the ground all came through the glass, dulled as if under water.

  A man reeled out of the crowd and hit the diner’s window, and a spider web of cracks spread from the point of impact. The girl behind the counter was already making frantically for the door, hands reaching for the bolts as the man who had hit the window slumped to the ground, blood smearing down the cracked glass. The old guy at the other end of the counter was just staring, his paper forgotten on the counter beside his cooling coffee.

  Raker stood up and began to turn away from the scene of the riot, but after one step he dodged back and picked up the newspaper from under the old guy’s unresisting hand. The man’s eyes did not move from the violence rolling through the street outside. Raker nodded thanks to the man’s blank face and hurried through the doors that led to the restrooms. He did not run, running just made you a part of the chaos, part of whatever was going on; walk while the world spun and people had a habit of ignoring you, as if you were part of the backdrop rather than the action. That was another lesson he had learned to take to heart long ago.

  He had checked the stalls as soon as he had entered the diner and broken the catch of the window in the second cubicle; it always paid to be careful, particularly in Arkham, particularly now, and paranoia kept a man alive.

  He pushed the window wide and dropped clumsily into the alley behind the building.

  The alley was quiet and smelt of blocked drains and autumn rain. Raker glanced down it and began to jog to its far end. He could hear the distant cries from the other side of the row of buildings, and the bell of a police wagon drawing closer. From somewhere he heard the sharp crack of a gunshot. It was not the first of these types of incidents he had seen since he’d come back to Arkham. Two days before he had seen an elderly man pull a gun on another who jostled him in the labor line down by the rail works, but that at least had not ended in bloodshed. The night before he had heard painful cries from the yard beside a boarded-up store and found a young man in a good suit beaten so badly he could not open his eyes. The boot marks of at least five people had churned the muddy ground around the man. He’d dropped a dime in a phone booth and watched from a distance as the ambulance picked up the victim without ceremony, and stayed in the shadows for nearly twenty minutes more waiting for the police to show up, but they hadn’t. It was as if Arkham was teetering on the edge of hysteria, that it felt but could not see or understand, and nobody was doing anything about it.

  Raker kept moving at a fast walk once he reached the main streets. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the paper he had taken from the man in the diner. He had been going to ask the man for it before the fight had started outside, ever since he had caught the headline on the front page.

  DERANGED MANIACS DRIVEN MAD BY POISONOUS LIQUOR

  His eyes flicked down the story, taking in the details between the overly sensational language. There had been a still raid gone bad out near Dunwich, but within the purple prose and wild assertions, there were surprisingly few solid facts—just how many had been killed or injured for a start, including the lawmen involved. What was plain was the claim that the still was supposed to be producing raw liquor cut with all manner of poisons that polluted the booze, from mercury to weed killer. The reporter on the story said that the tainted moonshine was linked to instances of civil unrest, sickness, and hysterical delusions across the county. Raker discounted the inference, sneering a smile to himself; Arkham and its sibling towns were choking under a growing malaise, but it was nothing so simple as a bad case of the demon drink. Such a rational cause would have been reassuring.

  Most of the story was irrelevant, just the line put out by the local law offices repeated with some suggestive trappings to make it seem like a revelation. But folded amongst the banalities a few lines stood out like bright coins in churned mud. The writer made a passing reference to the bootleggers being drawn from “the destitute and the desperate” and having “seemed possessed of an irrational fury.” The writer inferred that this ferocity was because they had been poisoned by their own work and driven mad, but Raker remembered the grey-robed members of the Hand of Solace, their sleeves red with blood to the shoulder, their eyes hard with conviction.

  For a second he stopped and took a slow breath of chill air. The distant sounds of the riot and police bells had faded, and around him Arkham moved in furtive, hurried steps.

  It might not be them, he thought. It might be nothing to do with the reborn Hand of Solace…it might be nothing. But it might be them.

  He glanced back down at the paper. In the final paragraph it said that some of the survivors had been taken to Arkham Asylum for treatment and their own protection. Raker felt coldness lick his spine; he thought of the chained gates of the asylum grounds, and the clang of metal doors closing on small rooms.

  He had almost never left the last time he had gone asking questions at the asylum, and Vivian had died there because of the secrets she had uncovered.

  After a second he pulled out a pouch of tobacco and rolled a cigarette. He realized that his hand was trembling when he put it in his mouth. He lit it and took a deep draw before breathing smoke into the mist-touched air.

  There was no choice, of course. He had to do this; its end was all that was left to him, and he would see it through. The bootleggers might be members of the Hand of Solace, or they might know something of them, and what they planned next. That or the lawmen involved might have seen something important to him if not to them. Either way, they were a place to start. The light was fading and he could smell the charge of a storm building in the air; it would be dark by the time he got across town. He began to walk, his feet hurrying but his head filled with memories of pain and screams hidden behind sealed doors.

  * * *

  His dead daughter’
s face came to Dr. Fields in a dream. Her blond hair fell around her face, and her eyes glittered with the possibility of tears. She was neither as old as she had been when she met her end nor as young as she had been when he last remembered her being happy. Her mouth was a blurred smile, and behind her the dream was a smeared fog, rolling with impressions of places and people that had been part of her when she lived. There were glimpses of the small, serious child, of the laughing girl in bridal white, of the widow crying in a room that stank of spoiled food and rot.

  “Amelia,” he said, and heard his voice echo in the fog of memory. His daughter’s face grew, filling his sight, its lines solidifying out of the grey. She had been crying, he saw. Wet runnels lined her cheeks. She was always crying in his dreams, as if his mind could only draw on memories of her pain. “Amelia, I am sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry.” His voice sounded flat, but he knew somehow that on the narrow bed where he lay there would be tears forming in his eyes. “I will put it right, all of it. This will never have happened; it will not even be a dream.”

  His daughter’s mouth moved, as if she was about to smile or speak. In the dream he tried to smile back.

  Her mouth opened, and darkness poured from it. Two pits opened where her eyes had been. Cracks spread across her face as if it was shattering porcelain. Her hair rose, blond burning to ashen grey and cinder black. He felt the scream rolling over him like an endless peal of thunder.

  He tried to speak, to say that he was sorry, that he would set it all right, that they were close, so close to what they needed, but her face was vanishing, sinking into a boiling night.