That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1)

by Emily C. Skaftun

  I recoiled, and stumbled backward right into Mike and Clara's room. In here, too, the light was off, but what spilled in from the hall was more than enough to reveal the unutterable horror that lay within. It was a monster. The very monster I'd feared through childhood, the very monster from my Father's fevered dreams. It writhed like a mass of snakes, shifting like a mirage of hot pavement. Its skin looked similar to Belle's, but with more maggoty limbs and more of the ... tentacles ... that sprouted from its head and torso and other parts I could not name.

  Worse still, this creature that writhed and moaned and seemed unable to right itself--it had two heads.

  "Doctor," Belle said, now quite near to my side, and her voice sounded rough and low, as though she were coming down with strep throat. "What's wrong with Mom and Dad?"

  "Where are they?" I started to ask, but then I looked to Belle, festering and slimy-looking. I looked back at the two-headed thing in the room. As I watched, the heads grew closer together, like mitosis running in reverse. Ripples spread through the palsied, tentacular body, as mass shifted. And just then, one appendage flailed toward me, and as it did a glint of gold caught the light.

  Against all sense I stepped toward the hideous limb and grabbed it, feeling my way toward what passed for fingers, where I'd spotted the gold. I had an icy weight in my stomach, already sure I knew what it was.

  It was a wedding ring.

  I threw the limb away from me, shrieking incoherently. If poor Belle was looking to me for help, she would be severely disappointed, for I could think of nothing but escape. The heads of the figure in the room shifted even closer to each other, blobbing into one. And for a moment, before the terrible heads resolved into one, I saw in the figure a shape so burned into my brain that I could never stop seeing it. But it was really there this time, big as life: two-headed Cthulhu, the Lovegood family crest.

  But the horror didn't stop there. When I finally found my quivering legs under me and turned to run, for the first time I clearly saw the doll that Belle was holding. It wasn't a doll at all; it was baby Billy, his skin as leprous as the rest of theirs, but his head bashed in on one side. And she wasn't holding him by the hand either; their hands had grown together into one deformed appendage, linking them like paper dolls.

  #

  I drove without knowing where. But I wasn't surprised to end up at the hospital, rapping on the window of Gina's lab. I was surprised to find her there, it being late evening, and the crisis, as far as anyone knew, solved.

  "I need to see it," I said by way of greeting. When her only response was a puzzled look, I continued, gesturing to her microscope. "The vaccine. Show it to me."

  She nodded. "We've had some very ... weird ... reports of side effects. Rashes and such. Psychological effects. It's like nothing I've seen before."

  I couldn't respond. On the one hand, to call what I'd witnessed side effects was the most enormous understatement ever. But on the other hand, I'd expected her to disbelieve me. I'd wanted her to disbelieve me, because I wanted to be wrong. Here in the hospital, under the harsh fluorescent lights, none of it seemed possible.

  It took Gina a few minutes to prepare a slide, and in that time I doubted myself. Surely I'd imagined the whole thing. After all, madness ran in my family. I had seen a thing because I was looking for it, was always looking for it, thankyousomuch Father. I scratched absently at an itch on the inside of my leg.

  When the slide was ready I leaned toward the microscope, prepared to laugh at my foolishness. I closed my left eye and squinted into the eyepiece with the right.

  And there it was.

  It wasn't exactly the same as the family crest, or the monster I'd seen at the Maguerrins' house. Not at first. But watch these wee beasties long enough and they'll show their fanciest trick. One of the cells in the slide stretched, parted, and slowly cleaved in two, replicating. And as it did, for a two-headed moment, it was the symbol from my crest, the missing puzzle piece in my descent into madness.

  I stared long enough to watch it happen again and again. And more. The monstrous cells divided, but then they converged, and just as Mike and Clara had, they merged into one. The resulting cell was the same as the others, only larger and growing larger still the more of its neighbors it consumed.

  An itch on the back of my hand brought me back to the present. I scratched it with my other hand and felt skin peeling off in thin strips under my nails. My eyes snapped down and, to my horror, I saw three perfect strips of scaly reptilian skin beneath what remained of my own flesh.

  #

  I knew immediately how the story would play out. Mike and Clara Maguerrin had already become one, and Belle and Billy were well on their way. I had no doubt that it was happening in all the houses of town, in each one where people had been inoculated against Father's disease.

  The cure was much, much worse than the disease.

  They'd rise from their various homes and wander out, and when they met one another, they'd merge like mercury beads coming together. They'd merge and merge until--Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn--until Father's vision, his--my--destiny was fulfilled, and Cthulhu rose.

  Logic told me that Father would want to be a part of it, so there was only one sensible thing to do. It wasn't easy with my skin flaking away, but I enlisted Mother and the surviving members of the cult, and they helped me dig. I injected his body with the vaccine, hoping it would take hold despite the formaldehyde in his dead veins. The cult members took it from there. They chanted and held each other as their flesh putrified and they became one.

  But I had other plans. Oh sure, I knew we'd all be together in the end, serving the Great One. But before that happened I figured I had one last human choice to make, the most human of all choices, really: I could pick who to be nearest to.

  I chose Gina. I ran to the hospital, and this time I was not surprised to find her in her lab, her skin like a puddle of quavering jelly. It was hard to tell, with her face transformed into a blasphemous, throbbing mass framing eyes like infinite malevolence, but I swear she opened her tentacles to me.

  * * *

  Dr. Riley Lovegood, daughter of esteemed astrophysicist Corina Elderbaum and marine researcher Thomas Lovegood, earned her M.D. from Miskatonic University and went into private practice. She's run several marathons and charity races, including a few zombie runs. These days, Riley spends most of her time with partner Gina as part of the ineffable evil overtaking New England.

  * * *

  Emily C. Skaftun is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing. If she could zap things out of this dimension there'd be a lot less traffic, chewing gum, and rain. Despite the inability (yet!) to vanquish rain, Emily lives in Seattle with her husband the mad scientist and a cat who thinks he's a tiger. She dabbles in roller derby and other absurd opportunities as they come along, while writing about fate, flying tigers, and strange fish. Emily is the Managing Editor of the Norwegian American Weekly. Hun lærer norsk, men sakte.

  * * *

  Goat

  An account by Mike Le Clair, as provided by Nathan Crowder

  * * *

  In Archer Hills, the dusty little town in Texas where I grew up, football is king. Hell, it's damn near our God. Everyone remembers Troy Waubach, who went on to play wide receiver for the Denver Broncos fifteen years ago. Boys like me wanted to grow up to be lords of the gridiron. It gives us power, control, a way out. Then my dad got kicked to death by a horse, and Mom had to take a job in Danvers, Massachusetts, my junior year just to put food on the table. I begged for her to let me stay with Billy's family to finish out high school, but she wouldn't hear none of it.

  I hated Massachusetts. It was cold. The locals were pale and quiet. And the Danvers High School football team sucked. And I mean sucked. I made varsity quarterback for the Danvers Falcons without hardly trying. The only other decent players on the team were Steve Lewis, who transferred in from Pittsburgh three years ago, and our star runnin
g back, Jimmy Dales. First game of the season we got beat 42-3. Second we lost 28-7.

  We weren't kings. We were losers. Game coverage in the school paper got buried on page three. We needed a win, and we weren't going to get it against Arkham, who had won the state championship the year before. Our Homecoming game was coming the week after the Arkham game. Longtime rivals, the Dunwich High Black Goats, I hated them without knowing anything about them. Because that's how football rivalries worked. And if you couldn't win the Homecoming game, why bother?

  So we got together behind the big, abandoned hospital outside of town, me, Steve, Jimmy, and a sixer of cold Sam Adams Jimmy lifted from his daddy's fridge. I had a plan. "We need to go send a message to Dunwich High. Something to let them know we mean business. Something to get up in their head."

  "This is a bad idea, Mike," Jimmy told me. "We usually beat Dunwich. Why mess with them?"

  "I don't know," Steve said as he intently peeled the label from his beer bottle. He was a defensive tackle, a big slab of meat with a crew cut and a 3.8 GPA. "Dunwich looks tough. They beat Arkham in their first game this season. I'm with Mike. Maybe we should do something. The three of us can't win the game by ourselves."

  Jimmy drained the last of his beer, stared at us from under his mop of shaggy brown hair. He was a townie, grew up in the county, the last several years in Danvers itself. He always got skittish about driving on the back roads late at night. Full of superstitions about the outlying towns, like Innsmouth, Haverhill, Dunwich. Jimmy was one hell of a running back. But damned if he weren't jumpy about the craziest bullshit.

  I leaned in. "You told me they had a bonfire the night before the game, right? Big pep rally bonfire to get the team whipped up?"

  Jimmy nodded. "My cousin graduated from Dunwich. He told me about the bonfires."

  "So maybe we get there early. Shake them up. No one will even know it was us."

  Steve opened another bottle. His attention was off, away from us, down the covered stairs that led to the small cemetery behind the hospital. "Danvers is a small town, Mike. They might suck at football, but they're not idiots. When our team hears about it, they'll figure out it was us."

  "We tell everyone we went to Boston," I told them. "Heck. We start telling people we're going to Boston and build up an alibi now. Then day before the game, we take my mom's car, race down to Boston and take a few pictures of us there, then race back to Dunwich and hit 'em. We post up our pictures from Boston and no one will know any better."

  Jimmy took a long pull on his beer, a crooked smile around the lip of the bottle. "Shit, Mike. That could work."

  "Goddamned right that could work."

  "Ok, I'm in," Steve said.

  "Yeah," Jimmy agreed reluctantly. "You're our quarterback. You call the play."

  "Good. A week from Thursday, we hit Dunwich where they hurt."

  Steve narrowed his big brown eyes. "How we going to do that?"

  "We kill their mascot and string it up over the bonfire."

  They paled, looked at each other, back at me, made ready with their objections. Pair of pussies like that, probably didn't want to get blood on their Chuck Taylors. But I grew up on a working farm and went hunting since I could carry a rifle. This wouldn't be the first animal I killed and gutted.

  "I'll do the deed," I told them. "But you have to help with the ropes."

  "I thought you meant spray painting something, or maybe cutting the tires on the team bus," Steve said. "We can't kill a mascot, even if it's just a goat."

  "You won't have to kill anything," I said, my voice hard, like a general on the field, the quarterback. "I told you. I'll do it. That a problem for you, Jimmy?"

  Jimmy's jaw was tight, his back straight. "I told you I was in. I'm in."

  Steve didn't say anything. I tried to stare him down, but he kept his eyes turned away. To the ground, to the cemetery grounds off through the trees down the slope--anywhere but at me.

  He'd come around.

  That weekend, we lost to Arkham 37-13 and Dunwich won their game against Haverhill by an even wider margin thanks to the Haverhill star wide receiver missing the game with a broken arm. Dunwich was having a blessed season.

  I didn't see Steve anywhere except practice. He started avoiding me like he owed me money. Saw me coming and ducked out the other way. I didn't try sending him texts to talk him into it. Shit like that was how people slipped up all the time. Leave no trail. That was the trick. Jimmy said he'd talk to him, that he'd turn him. I don't know if they talked or not, but Steve didn't show up to school on Thursday.

  Fucking coward.

  Jimmy was solid, though. He was waiting next to my mom's Saturn, his blue and white letter jacket next to the red car looked like a goddamned American flag. I felt a swelling in my heart at the sight. For a second there, it felt like I was home, like everything made sense. God, football, apple pie, the way it was supposed to be.

  Me and Jimmy shot down to Boston like a goddamned Roman candle. Got a bowl of chowder, snapped a few pictures on our phones, hopped back on the road towards Dunwich. I could barely contain myself. This was what I had been missing. Not just football, but the understanding that football was more than just eleven guys fighting for every inch of the gridiron against another eleven guys. It was war. It was life. It was religion.

  The dark, gnarled branches over the Miskatonic Valley road swallowed the sun. Shortly before we plunged into full twilight, our headlights lit the sign, "Welcome to Dunwich," on the narrow road into town. Barely dinnertime, and the place was a ghost town of old houses and scrabbly trees in rocky yards. Dunwich was a shit town. The tallest building was a pale church that scratched the night sky like a skeleton's hand. Dunwich didn't even have a McDonald's, and the only person I saw on the streets was a tall, thin figure walking a sickly dog in an under-lit park. This was the town that was kicking so much ass? It seemed hard to believe.

  Jimmy must have figured I was nervous. I hadn't said a word since we drove into town. I had even turned off the mix CD I burned for road trips. "Everyone is probably having dinner," he told me.

  "Whatever. Creepy goddamned town."

  I made my way to the high school. Town this size, it wasn't that far. The place was old, brick, a three floor center section and three, shorter wings off the sides and back. Auditorium was on the left, the gym off to the right, with the dark athletic fields behind and to the side. We got there early enough to beat the pep rally, and there were only three cars in the lot with faculty stickers in the back window. Jimmy instructed me to pull around to the right, where there was a narrow dirt road back to the school groundskeeper shed.

  Wasn't nothing but a steel garage back there--one of those pop-up buildings that you could buy at the feed lot or hardware store back home. It was big enough for a riding mower and the heavy training equipment for the football team. It was locked up tight from the outside, no lights on, no cars. We parked alongside, far enough to be out of sight should someone walk back that way.

  "Now, where's that bonfire?"

  "In the woods a bit," Jimmy said, taking a flashlight out of his pocket. "Never been there, but my cousin told me how to find it."

  "And the goat?"

  "The goat will be there." Jimmy's voice was quiet. I didn't question it. I reached under my car seat and pulled out the bundle I had tucked there first thing in the morning. A pair of knives and a cleaver, wrapped up in a sturdy apron. They had a familiar weight. It had been months since I'd gotten to kill something, and the anticipation was a knot in my chest. I tried to keep from smiling.

  "You sure take football seriously," Jimmy said from ahead of me.

  "What else is there? School sucks. The girls in Danvers are either ugly or don't care that I'm a quarterback. I used to think I might be good enough to get noticed, get a scholarship to a decent college to play ball. I figured if I can shine enough playing for the Danvers Falcons maybe I could get seen, but if we can't win games it's never going to happen. Back home, football was eve
rything. We had faith in the Hail Mary. Worshiped at the fifty-yard line. Game night was a Friday night prayer meeting and the whole town was there. Here ... it's like ... hell, I feel like a missionary among the pagans."

  Jimmy laughed. He ducked beneath the black twist of a lightning-blasted tree, turned back to smile at me. "Must be a Texas thing. This part of the country, Mike ... I don't know. We can be a little old fashioned. Up here, church is church, religion is religion, and football is just football."

  I hurried to keep up. I didn't like the woods. We didn't have woods like this back in Archer Hills. This was no sparse scattering of pines and cottonwoods. This was hardwood. Oaks and maples and hickory that might have been here for a hundred years. Their branches knit together, choked out the starlight. Their roots interwove, rippled beneath the dirt like black varicose veins. Everything was quieter here under the trees, made me want to whisper. The air didn't move.

  "We almost there?"

  Jimmy said nothing.

  I raised my voice a bit, not realizing I had whispered my question the first time. "I said ..."

  "I heard you. It's not too late to turn back, you know." Jimmy stopped walking, turned off his flashlight.

  I fought back my immediate panic over the plunge into darkness. Up ahead, I saw a slight glow through the trees. A few electric bulbs, I figured, strung up to light the area around the goat pen. I didn't need Jimmy anymore. I could finish alone from here if I had to. The bundle in my left hand had the weight of grim intent. "Why would I do that?"