The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library

by Darrell Schweitzer

  William Luck raised an eyebrow at the word, which he thought he misunderstood.

  “Formication,” explained Dr. Carter, “is the sensation of having ants crawling on or burrowing under your skin. People who suffer from eczema or scabies often exhibit such symptoms.”

  “I see.”

  “You may dismiss those complaints as examples of so-called Morgellons disease. We are more concerned about the pathological blindness.”

  “Wait a minute,” interjected the younger doctor. “There is also the fact that upon autopsy both victims were found to have lungs that were filled with an unusual fluid, which is why we are considering the possibility of a hitherto unknown virus.”

  Luck nodded soberly. “We seem to be in a rash of viruses.”

  “Both electronic and biological, according to the newspapers,” Dr. Blackfeather said grimly.

  “Coincidence,” snorted Dr. Luck.

  And with the confidence of seasoned authoritarians, the three medical man shifted the topic away from its true center of gravity.

  “From the sound of it, you suspect the woman who died first was a vector for some kind of pathogen,” suggested Dr. Luck.

  Dr. Blackfeather lifted helpless hands. “Pathogen or virus or what have you, it is an unknown. Our concern is understanding what has happened here. We have a call in to the Centers for Disease Control, but with only two fatalities, I doubt they’ll give us much priority. They have their hands full, as you know, with so many viral outbreaks occurring at the same time.”

  “Given that the woman carrier came from Asia, it’s safe to exclude an arthropod zoonotic origin of the presumed pathogen,” said Dr. Luck. “If she was infected by a mosquito, or animal, she could not have infected the second party.”

  “On that we all agree,” said Dr. Blackfeather.

  “That is why we thought of you, Bill,” interjected Dr. Carter. “It’s probably a virus.”

  “In my opinion,” Luck offered, “it is premature to conclude that your original patient was a carrier of the Vanderhoof virus.”

  “It’s raging through Asia, and this woman only arrived in the U.S. from Singapore two days ago,” Blackfeather said crisply.

  “Sudden onset blindness is not a reported symptom of Vanderhoofs,” Luck returned stubbornly. “Rapid respiratory deterioration, yes. But not blindness.”

  “But you can’t rule it out, can you?”

  “I won’t rule it out, no,” Luck allowed. “Viruses mutate. But I would like to see the autopsy reports.”

  “I will see that you do,” promised Blackfeather.

  Luck looked thoughtful. “Odd that both victims complained of itchy skin. What do you make of that?”

  “Coincidence,” insisted Blackfeather. “About ten years ago the first cluster of Morgellons complaints surfaced in this very city. Patients complained about weirdly colored fibers growing out of open sores. These fibers were found to be artificial, not biological. Household fabrics that had become attached to the raw and sticky wound sites. Case closed.”

  “While I don’t like to foreclose on possibilities, we live in interesting times,” Luck pointed out.

  Turning to Dr. Blackfeather, Norbert Carter offered, “I tend to agree with Dr. Luck.”

  Reining in his testy tone, Blackfeather advised, “You both can go through the medical records of this very hospital and find numerous cases of patients, nearly all the middle-aged white women, suffering from fatigue, bringing in Ziploc bags filled with colored fibers, which tested out as fabric, not insect hairs. Someone searching for answers outside of medical science dug up a medical report from the 17th century attesting to pinworms growing out of the bodies of children, borrowed the name Morgellons from the man who originally coined the term, and posted it online. After that, the complaints skyrocketed.”

  “Sounds as if the symptoms hit a nerve among the general population,” suggested Dr. Luck.

  “It’s all psychosomatic hypochondria!” thundered Blackfeather.

  There was a strained silence.

  At length, Dr. Luck broke it. “Where do you propose we begin?”

  “Have you ever heard of a virus victim going blind concurrent with their lungs becoming congested?”

  “I have not. CMV retinitis, of course, progresses to complete vision loss. But there’s no correlation to lung issues.”

  Carter reminded, “Acanthamoeba Keratitis has been ruled out. It’s a rare disease where amoebae invade the cornea, with visual destruction often the outcome.”

  “We are at a loss,” confessed Blackfeather.

  Noticing Dr. Blackfeather’s personal computer in the background, Dr. Luck asked, “May I?”

  “Be my guest.”

  After switching seats, Bill Luck logged on and executed a number of searches on the Centers of Disease Control main database. He came away with very little, except for a dissatisfied expression.

  “I drew a blank, but I knew I would. Whatever this is, it is new. Would it be possible to study the patient’s records?”

  “Give me your email address and I will transmit them to you.”

  Taking a memory stick from one pocket, Luck said, “I always carry one of these with me. Just copy it to the stick.”

  Dr. Blackfeather took the stick, inserted it into his machine, and copied the two files, never suspecting a third file stealthily migrated over to the memory stick of its own accord.

  “Give me another day or two,” said Dr. Luck, accepting the memory stick and rising to his feet.

  That evening, William Luck plugged the stick into his home PC, and so commenced the longest night of his entire remaining life.

  The medical files were succinct and easily understood, but utterly baffling.

  Time and again, Dr. Luck read over the notes pertaining to the patient’s complaints of subcutaneous formication. These parallels, more than the sudden onset of blindness and the rapid physical deterioration, bothered him.

  Well past midnight, he was still at it when his wife poked her head in to ask, “Going to bed anytime soon?”

  “I may be at this all night,” he said absently. Snapping out of his trance, Luck lifted his head to ask, “Have you ever heard of people complaining that there were bugs or bacteria crawling under the skin?”

  “No, I haven’t. But with all the microbes and other beasties that we now know inhabit our bodies, it wouldn’t surprise me that suggestible and susceptible people think infestation whenever they have a creepy-crawly sensation.”

  “That’s what Dr. Blackfeather believes. But I am starting to wonder.”

  “Well, try not to wake me when you turn in.” The bedroom door closed and the mellow light framing it went out.

  At 4:14 AM, the Al Azif virus jumped from the memory stick to Bill Luck’s personal computer, not triggering his anti-viral shield because the Necronomicon file was merely text. Text that was sentient. Anti-viral software was not configured for that, since it was not known to exist.

  It remained dormant. Dormant but aware.

  At 6:66, Dr. Luck for the first time noticed the Necronomicon file. He did not recognize the filename, so he immediately became suspicious.

  Activating his anti-virus software, he initiated a scan of his system, muttering to himself that the world was full of viruses these days.

  “Bane of our existence,” he murmured.

  Twenty minutes and a hot cup of black coffee latter, the anti-viral software pronounced his system clean.

  At that point, Luck opened the file.

  It was in Latin, which he could not read with fluency. He made a mental note to ask his wife if she had downloaded it, for what reason he could not imagine. Deborah did not read Latin, either.

  Scrolling down, Luck found illustrations. Pen and ink drawings, they were weird in a fascinating way. They looked like the product of an artist who lived long ago. There was something about the line work that suggested that.

  The sketches reminded him of chiggers, ticks and midges. A few sug
gested microscopic life. Bacteria, and the like. There were even some specimens that brought to mind viral bodies. But of course that was impossible. Viruses cannot be seen with the naked eye, only with powerful modern electron microscopes.

  Soon tiring of the images, Luck closed the file. He was at a loss to continue. Sleep called to him. But he was stubborn. Stubborn and filled with caffeine.

  Returning to the medical records, he was again nagged at by the virtually identical symptoms exhibited by the two deceased women. There were no surprises. A nurse had discovered a pink wormlet resembling a maggot or pinworm that had been found on the Asian woman’s dead face, near the right eye. It was not considered significant and went into the biological waste receptacle for incineration.

  Having no other avenue of investigation, Luck plugged in the name he recalled from the day’s conversation, Morgellions disease. That he had misspelled it mattered not at all. Google corrected it for him and displayed a short list of websites. He began reading.

  Contrary to Dr. Blackfeather, Luck discovered that the medical thinking on Morgellons was slowly evolving. While most physicians had been trained to dismiss the stereotypical patient exhibiting symptoms of fatigue and hypochondria, carrying with them a matchbox or Ziplock bag filled with multi-colored fibers plucked from bodily sores, a few researchers were taking a second look. One had samples of the enigmatic fibers tested at a police forensics lab. The result was that the filaments in this case matched no known fibre, and were presumed to be biological in origin.

  A vague chill coursed along Bill Luck’s hunched spine. Absently, he scratched at his left forearm. His scalp began to itch. Remembering that addicts withdrawing from methamphetamine addiction often complained of chronic itching, he blamed the caffeine.

  Dr. Blackfeather’s mindset was struck on old training, Luck decided. Morgellons disease might be a pathology, after all.

  Bill Luck spend the next hour reading feverishly. What he learned fascinated him in a repulsive way. The first cluster of Morgellons broke out in San Francisco in 2006, and the second in London a few years later. But they were not isolated.

  Once the condition was given a name and promulgated on the web, all over the globe patients flocked in to see their family doctors complaining of subcutaneous itching, and wound sites from which brightly-hued filaments grew. Filaments whose colors ranged from coal-black to bright blue and scarlet. It was bizarre.

  All over the world, patients professed to the identical symptoms. And just as vehemently, doctors of different cultures sent them on their way, insisting that it was all in their minds.

  A small but growing body of evidence now suggested otherwise. Despite all, the medical community was stuck in what it knew—or thought it knew.

  Luck thought back to the heretic who first suggested that ulcers were the result of a viral infection of the stomach lining, not stress and diet. He was almost drummed out of the medical profession until the irrefutable science of his theory saved him. Generations of physicians had not wanted to be shown to have been treating their patents in error. It was as simple as that.

  Digging deeper, Luck researched the origin of the name. It went back to 17th century France. Morgellons was a corruption of Masquellons, which meant “little flies.” Further digging unearthed that this was synonymous with maggots. The first outbreak—or infestation—occurred in the Languedoc region of France during the mid 1600s.

  And there, skimming abstracts of ancient texts describing an endemial distemper affecting children, whose chief pathology involved so-called “harsh hairs” resembling insect parts protruding from the bare backs of the screaming and increasingly emaciated patients, William Luck came upon the drawing that froze his supercaffeinated blood in his veins.

  One image was virtually identical to the drawing in the Necronomicon file, whatever it was.

  By now, Luck was scratching himself energetically, the product of nervous excitement and caffeine, he told himself.

  He opened the Necronomicon file in a separate window, and began scrolling. Looking at the images side by side, he was struck by their similarity. Continuing along, he found others. then he came upon one that made him jump out of his chair. It tipped, waking his wife.

  She padded in sleepily. “What is it?”

  “Honey, did you download a file called Necronomicon onto this system?”

  “No, never heard of it.”

  “Come here. Look at these images.”

  Deborah came in and blinked at the illuminated screen.

  “They look almost the same. So what?”

  “One is the Vanderhoof virus, the other is a drawing from this Necronomicon. They are identical.”

  “Close, I’ll agree. But nothing to lose sleep over. Why don’t you come to bed?”

  She took his hand and noticed the scratch marks on his forearm.

  “What happened?”

  Bill Luck looked down and saw red welts. “Oh, just an itch, that’s all.”

  “You look like you’ve got scratched by a tomcat.”

  Bill looked closer in the LCD light. He noticed a clump of hairs, black as wire, but two were scarlet. He scratched at them, his mouth drying up.

  “My God, Morgellons!” Then he began laughing.

  “What?” Jennifer demanded.

  “I met with a Dr. Blackfeather today. He told me that patients reading up on Morgellons disease often manifested psychosomatic symptoms. Itchiness. Now I have them.”

  “I don’t like the look of those fibers,” said Deb. She tried plucking them. They would not budge.

  “Don’t worry about them. They’re psychosomatic.”

  “Bill, listen to yourself! These are hairs. And they won’t pull out. Hairs that I can feel and tug at are not psychosomatic. Look at you—you’re pale as a ghost.”

  Woodenly, Bill Luck reached down and righted his chair. He sat down heavily.

  “Honey, please come to bed.”

  “I need to think this through…”

  “You need sleep!”

  She dragged him off to bed, but sleep would not come. Dawn broke, filling his strained face with light. He stared at the fibrous things sprouting from his right wrist and was reminded how much like carpet fibers they seemed. But there were no carpets in his home, nor his office, which matched these colors…

  Dr. Ronald Blackfeather had been up all night. No sleep. Just coffee. He had not left his office at Mission Hospital since word reached him that the chief pathologist at the City Morgue had gone blind shortly after completing his autopsy reports on the first two victims of what Blackfeather was calling Pathogen X.

  The hospital was on alert. All personnel who had attended to the deceased patients were called into work and isolated as a precaution.

  Blackfeather and the chief administrator had been monitoring them, prepared to place a call to the proper authorities that would initiate a lockdown under CDC quarantine guidelines.

  So far, no untoward symptoms had been reported. So Blackfeather had retreated to his office and was surfing the internet, seeking clues, leads, anything.

  He had been tempted to call Dr. Luck at his home, but without the certainty of an outbreak, it seemed rude if not foolhardy to wake a man from sleep.

  During his post-midnight search, the Al Azif virus had executed. Blackfeather had been oblivious to it. Oblivious, that is, until the Centers of Disease Control website dropped off his screen, only to be replaced by what appeared to be an electron microscope image of something odd.

  It was cylindrical, and stood on two pipestem legs resembling the feet of the common house fly. Otherwise it was blank-featured.

  When it moved like an animated gif, Blackfeather frowned darkly.

  “What is this nonsense?” he muttered, hitting the escape key. But he could not escape. No one could. It was too late for that.

  From the system speaker, an exceedingly thin vibration was emitted. It seemed to struggle to articulate words.

  “Ego Sum Verminus,” it seemed
to say.

  Blackfeather made a rude noise in his throat.

  “Ego Sum Verminus,” the razor-thin vibration apparently repeated.

  Blackfeather remembered enough Latin to wonder if the thin vibration was actually saying, “I am vermin.”

  Of course, that was ridiculous. And being a learned man of medicine, Dr. Blackfeather did not question his own impeccable judgement.

  The escape key finally got him out of the funny screen, but up popped a file he did not immediately recognize. It was in Latin.

  It appeared to be a treatise titled Necronomicon. His eyes automatically scanned the preface or preamble, and dimly the speaker vibration seemed to articulate again, high and reedy.

  “Ia! Ia! Shub-Niggurath!”

  Since the “words” he thought his brain was decoding from mindless electric buzz were nonsensical, Blackfeather dismissed them.

  Not so the next buzzing emission.

  “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!” it seemed to shrill.

  “Strange,” he said, blinking rapidly. That was quite a long example of pareidolia—the acoustical hallucination whereby the brain interprets random noises as coherent language. It should have trailed off into nonsense. But it did not.

  The Necronomicon file began scrolling and scrolling of its own accord. The words blurred past, but periodically, the scrolling stopped to briefly display pen and ink images. Bizarre in the extreme, some looked vaguely familiar.

  One appeared to be a specimen of Demodex brevis, a common eyelash mite, a parasite which inhabited the eyebrows and lashes of humans around the globe, but which also infests nasal passages and other facial features, silently subsisting on skin oil.

  It reminded Blackfeather of his residency at Johns Hopkins, and the lectures on the mite and its cousin, Demodex folliculorum, which dwells in hair follicles, both of which have nocturnal sex on human hair and burrow back under the skin before the host awakens.