Дженнифер Брожек - To Fight the Black Wind

It is the height of the roaring twenties. Flappers and young fellas dance the Charleston at raucous jazz clubs gleaming bright with electric lights. Beneath this gilded glamour, bloody turf wars rage, funded by gangsters and crooked cops who frequent rival speakeasies and gambling dens.

Amid these changing times, old New England towns hold their secrets close. Off the Aylesbury pike, in reclusive Dunwich, rolling hills hide decrepit farms and witch-haunted hollows. Past Cape Ann, the remote fishing village of Innsmouth rots from within. At the mouth of the Miskatonic River, mist-shrouded Kingsport lies dreaming. All the while, historic Arkham broods on the upper banks of the Miskatonic, its famed university delving into the world’s darkest, most ancient mysteries.

Arkham’s citizens insist everything is normal in their sleepy town, but horrific and bizarre events occur with increasing frequency. Strange lights flicker and people disappear in the forest beyond Hangman’s Brook. Misshapen silhouettes prowl graveyards and shorelines, leaving savaged corpses in their wake. Nightmarish artifacts and disturbing tomes have surfaced, chronicling gods and incantations the world has tried to forget. Cavalier scientists have glimpsed far-flung worlds beyond our own that shatter the known laws of reality. Are these events somehow connected? If so, what calamity do they portend?

Those who dare investigate these incidents witness the inexplicable. Having seen such phenomena, they can never regain their old view of the world. Now that they know the hideous truth, they cannot run or hide from it. Just beneath the reassuring veneer of reality—a veneer that was never meant to be worn away—are forces that can drive the average person to despair. Yet, a rare few try to avert the end of the world, knowing it may well cost them their lives or sanity.

These investigators must rely on their wits and skills to learn as much as they can before it’s too late. Some may find courage in the grace of a rosary, while others may burn away their fears with a swig of bootleg whiskey. They must try their hand at unpredictable spells that could doom them, or take up rifles and revolvers to combat foul creatures plaguing the night. Will it be enough?

There are events and people that change your life forevermore. It is rare, though, that we acknowledge these occurrences. My perspective, my worldview, my life has been so altered I feel I must record what happened. I will always remember this week as a turning point. I will always remember Josephine as the catalyst for that change.

It began as all such things begin—on an ordinary day. I had seen all of my regular patients. Then I met my newest patient, Miss Josephine Ruggles. Our first meeting was a study in power dynamics between patients and doctors.

Josephine, heiress to the Ruggles Publishing fortune, sat on the edge of an overstuffed chair, her back straight and chin raised. She had not yet become one of the anonymous unfortunates of the asylum, shuffling to and fro with slumped shoulders and vacant eyes. She still wore a fine linen dress of pale yellow that enhanced her warm, tawny-beige skin. Her ebon hair still held organized curls gathered in a bow. A small gold cross adorned her neck.

At first glance, Josephine was a lovely young woman of good manners and quality breeding. That is, if you ignored the pale blue dressing gown she wore over her linen dress. Ignored the darkness under hollow brown eyes and did not see the slight tremble to hands that clutched at the heavy silken fabric of a robe not usually worn out of the bedroom.

Her malady—nightmares that left her bloody—seemed, at first, to be a common self-harm complex. Then I looked at the wounds. The mind is powerful, but I have never seen the mind create wounds like these.

Little did I know her wounds were just the first of many mysteries I would face while caring for Josephine.

“You do not believe me, Dr. Fern.” Josephine’s voice was a smooth contralto, roughened by fatigue.

It was a challenge designed to bring about a black and white reaction—disbelief brought distrust while belief allowed the patient to manipulate the doctor. I did neither. “We have yet to begin our first session, Miss Ruggles.” As Josephine pondered this, I noted which drugs my new patient was taking. All were designed to give blissful, dreamless sleep.

Josephine gestured to the notes in my hands. “You began when you read those, Doctor . You do not believe me.”

What would I not believe? My patient had nightmares, despite the medication she took to prevent such things, and she harmed herself at night. Something in the way she said “Doctor” made me wonder what kind of encounters she had had with Dr. Mintz. Perhaps that was where her aggressive stance stemmed from.

There was nothing specific in her records. Then again, many of his more esoteric experiments were never written about in public files. I kept the distaste from my face as I took a seat in the chair next to Josephine’s. “I am listening. Please, tell me what you think I do not believe.”

Josephine sighed. “The wounds—the words on my back. You do not believe they were caused by things in my dreams. Even when they are in places I cannot reach. Even when they are fresh and lined as if made by a printing press.”

None of what Josephine was suggesting was possible, of course. However, in the beginning, I always allow my patients a way out of their fantasies. A way to prove or disprove their statements. “I have not seen your wounds. I cannot judge them.”

Josephine stood as if jerked by marionette strings. She turned her back to me and opened her robe. With the almost soundless crumpling of fabric to the floor, the reason for the robe became clear: The back of the linen dress was stained red-brown. The rows of weeping wounds pressed their image into the cloth. It was even and regular. While it was unusual for patients to be so careful with their self-inflicted wounds, it was possible.

“Malachi. He told me once that you might understand. That you had tried to help him.”

I twitched from my examination of Josephine’s back and the hieroglyphic bloodstains in linen.

“Malachi?” How could she possibly know the name of my murdered patient from Providence Sanatorium? There was no earthly way she could know of him, an itinerant man in another part of the state.

“Yes, Malachi. I used to see him in my dreams. He is gone now. I have not seen him in a long time.” The beautiful woman turned in one controlled, smooth motion—another testament to her inner strength and spirit, yet unbroken by the asylum. “Do you understand? Do you believe me?”

I did not. She spoke to Malachi in her dreams? How was that possible? It was not, of course. Josephine could not be speaking of my murdered patient. That would be ludicrous. She had to be speaking of another Malachi. After all, she was speaking of conversations in dreams.

I covered my confusion by taking Josephine’s robe and standing. I offered it to her with a gentle smile that the hid the turmoil within. “Perhaps we should begin at the beginning. Pretend I know nothing. We will go from there.”

Josephine stared at me for a long, timeless moment before she accepted her robe and slid it on. She nodded once. “The beginning then. Such as it is.”

The pounding of my heart was loud in my ears as I took my seat once more. I tried to put the very idea of Malachi out of my mind. My patient was before me. She needed my help. If I listened close enough, I would understand her true trauma. I focused the whole of my being upon her.