Miskatonic Nightmares Page 10
This room in the basement of Miskatonic University had once been his sanctuary. His favorite students used to litter the benches of the lab, filling petri dishes with cultures, pipetting off organic layers from experiments they had spent months extracting, mixing chemicals deemed too unsafe to be used in the upstairs labs where new students congregated with their fancier equipment. It was the place where he had spent countless nights slaving over his research long after all of the other professors had since abandoned their work for relief at home. While his coworkers were at home with their wives and families, the Doctor was studying his experiments for potential errors or future directions.
The Doctor, however, still preferred his old techniques to the techniques being used upstairs and was not jealous of the new instruments that came about years after the Doctor had passed. He did not need those instruments—he had managed to write his entire manuscript without them. He had been able to accomplish everything he wanted with not much more than his own hands. That was, however, before he received the response from the editors about his research.
Insane. Mad. Pseudo-science.
The words echoed in the undead Doctor's mind every day since his manuscript had been returned to him. He would not be receiving funding from the college any more to do his research and the police had been called to haul away all his experiments and equipment. The editors and the administration did not understand the practicality and beauty of his experiments. They did not understand what it was he had been trying to achieve. They had not taken time to hear him out. When the police had arrived they were almost all too happy to just allow them into the lab to take away everything from the Doctor.
The Doctor went back to work on his project once again and snipped the surgical thread with a rusty pair of scissors. It was his best work to date. All of those years had been leading up to this moment. He had spent nearly a century perfecting his work. He worked tirelessly to make his cuts perfect, making his stitches lay impeccably flat against the flesh. If he could have accomplished this all those years ago he would have been heralded instead of laughed at…instead of feared.
When the news had arrived from the editors that they would not be publishing his research, he had gone insane. He had picked up a rabbit he had captured rustling through a bush on campus and ripped off the third set of legs he had worked tirelessly to attach. He nabbed a squirrel he had climbed a tree to rescue from its boring life and destroyed the work he had done giving the squirrel an extra head so it could store more nuts. The dog he had stolen from one of the other professor’s yards was neutered three times. The animals had all let out terrible moans heard in every lab in the science wing of the building as the administration were on the phone with the police. By the time the police would have arrived, however, it was already far too late. All of the Doctor’s creatures had already bled out and were sprawled around the lab in pools of their own blood as well as the blood of the animals who had once been attached to the limbs before them.
This experiment, though, was better. His stitches were perfect this time. His cuts were beautiful. He had not only matched the blood types this time, but even the colors of the flesh were seamless. It had taken him so long, but he finally had done it. His beautiful art professor wife would have been proud of his Vitruvian man if she had still been around to see it. She had long since passed on, buried in the same graveyard beyond campus that was the final resting ground of her colleagues. He needed a new heart though now to get his experiment up and moving around. As it sat it was only a sculpture. The undead Doctor wanted a walking, talking piece of scientific artwork his late wife would have been proud of. He wanted a work that would have silenced the editors and stopped them from sending the police after him as they had. It would be a scientific breakthrough that would not have led the Doctor to drink an entire bottle of strychnine. He would not have been found on the floor of his lab with foam coming from his mouth and staining his lab coat—a stain that still remained on his lab coat so many years later. He wouldn’t have the strange color to his skin from the asphyxiation that had eventually overcome him and led to his demise.
As he admired his work on the extra left leg, his Teaching Assistant passed through a lab bench and approached his side. She looked longingly at the delicate stitches in black thread the Doctor had recently finished and rested her hand on his shoulder as if to say she understood what needed to be done. She would have done anything for the Doctor in life, and in death she had proved this time and time again. This was to be her biggest undertaking, however.
*
The Teaching Assistant stood in the doorway of a dark dormitory room—a room that had been her own when she had attended Miskatonic University all those years ago. It was the room where she had pored over textbooks, read countless journals into all hours of the night, dreamed about the Doctor when she did sleep. A twenty-something graduate student snored softly on a twin-sized bed in the corner. Posters from classic movies lined the wall behind her head and a stack of books sat atop her nightstand; biology textbooks, books about anatomy, microbiology, infectious diseases, and biochemistry. The student reflexively pulled the covers tighter around her as the chill that accompanied the Teaching Assistant reached her bare skin.
The Teaching Assistant stood at the side of the bed belonging to the graduate student. She allowed her fingers to trace the spines of the textbooks she had read many times through herself. She had given it all up after she found the Doctor lying on the ground, his eyes staring up at her, emotionless and dead. She had given it all up to be with him. She was the only one who believed in his research—more than even his own wife had. She longed for the life this graduate student had.
Had.
The Teaching Assistant reached her arm out towards the graduate student and tore through the covers with ease. Her hand hit flesh and pierced through it like she was running her hand through her once-soft hair. She could feel the girl’s heart race as the graduate student awoke from the pain. She screamed as the ghostly fingers wrapped around the still beating heart. The girl’s eyes tried to take in what she was looking at, but failed to understand the ghastly image in front of her. The Teaching Assistant’s face was a mess of rotting flesh, stretched taught against yellowed bone that peeked out in patches around her eye sockets. Her eyes were glazed over and protruded from their holes. Her hair hung in patches around her body, coated in the blood she could not get rid of after the self-inflicted gunshot wound that had left a canal from her throat to behind her left ear.
In as much time as it took the graduate student to scream, the heart was already pulled from her chest with ease. The graduate student collapsed limply again onto her bed, the blood from the wound slowly dyeing the fabric of her comforter. She would not be found until Monday after class when she did not show up to her weekly lunch date with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend would have to convince the janitor to let him into the room and he would let out a scream, choked by tears as he found his girlfriend in a pool of her own blood, a giant gaping hole torn through her chest with the fabric of her sheets stuck to her by a glue created from the dried blood.
*
The Teaching Assistant returned to the laboratory where she had found her dear professor’s body so many years ago and handed the heart to him with the first smile she had managed since she had died. Her teeth had been knocked out by the barrel of the gun and she was left with a blackened, gummy grin the undead Doctor did not return. He simply took the heart from the Teaching Assistant and placed it on the lab bench beside him. With a scalpel and the utmost precision, he slowly sliced into the chest of his creation. Small beads of blood slowly crept to the surface of the body’s chest as he cut—it couldn’t compare to the blood that had been just shed by the Teaching Assistant, however.
The Doctor carefully pushed aside the organs in the chest cavity to make room for the bloodied, fresh heart. He carefully set the plump heart into its new home and got to work attaching the many arteries and veins integral to the workings
of his experiment. He had extra veins and arteries running to the limbs for his extra appendages and he carefully threaded them through the body cavity and spliced them together with the other limbs’ veins and arteries. He threaded the vessels into the flesh of the new heart, blood from the heart still sloshing around as he worked, filling the body cavity with a fresh layer of moisture. After what seemed like a lifetime, the Doctor finally stitched together the flesh of his experiment, closing its chest.
The Doctor slowly stepped away from his Vitruvian man and towards the massive Tesla coil that took up nearly half of the lab space on either ends. The Teaching Assistant stepped to the other side of the lab where the other Tesla coil was positioned. The two ghostly figures flipped the switches on the coils and watched as purple lightning bolts streaked across the lab, concentrating itself at the chest of the experiment.
When the Doctor had read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, he had marveled at the idea of creating his own man but he knew he could not just wait for the perfect lightning storm. The use of the Tesla coil had actually been the Teaching Assistant’s idea. When he had been practicing before his death he had simply knocked out his experiments, but he could not simply nab a living person for his latest experiment. He needed to use someone who was already dead and this meant he needed a method to bring it back to life. He had worked hard getting a new set of organs to replace the decaying and dead organs that his cadaver had when he brought it into the lab. He had to harvest the extra sets of limbs from the graveyard and undo the work the morticians had deemed necessary to prevent decay of the bodies.
The glow from the surge of electricity lit up the entire science wing. The other ghosts and monsters roaming the halls of Miskatonic University directed their attention for the first time to another ghost’s activities. The ghosts, used to studying by the dim light of the green light bulbs of the library, looked towards the bright electrical glow of the science wing. The thespians who practiced fight scenes with open wounds from where they were stabbed by real swords looked away from the fading spotlight and towards the Doctor’s lab. In the floors above the lab, rats, pigs, and fish reacted wildly to the hum coming from the basement. Erlenmeyer flasks, test tubes, and graduated cylinders came crashing to the ground, shattering into hundreds of sharp pieces.
A groan came from the lab bench where the experiment was set up and the undead Doctor turned off his Tesla coil. The Teaching Assistant turned off the other. They waited silently in anticipation. After several minutes another groan escaped the throat of the body on the table. The Doctor stepped closer to his experiment, sucking in breath to his flaccid lungs.
As he approached, he could see the eyeballs frantically moving under the eyelids that held them back. The nostrils flared as the creature took in a sharp breath. The skin around the lips of the Vitruvian Man stretched as he tried to make a noise but was stopped by surgical floss that had been put in place to keep his mouth shut.
A deep guttural scream came from within the Vitruvian Man and the Teaching Assistant jumped, but the undead Doctor was not fazed. The Vitruvian Man’s eyes fluttered open and he quickly sat up, breaking the leather straps around his wrists. The loud snap of the leather breaking gave the Doctor a start, but he edged closer nonetheless. He tentatively reached out towards his experiment.
The Vitruvian Man reached towards his face with its top set of hands and ripped out the stitches around his mouth, tearing the flesh into ribbons. The Teacher’s Assistant gasped and the Vitruvian Man directed his attention towards her. He tried to get up, but was restrained by the leather straps around his four ankles. He looked back angrily towards the restraints. He grabbed the scalpel from the bench beside him and threw it with precision towards the Teaching Assistant. It quickly passed through her forehead, her form dissolving into nothingness upon contact. The Doctor was not even upset by the passing of his only friend.
The Vitruvian Man let out a grunt of satisfaction and turned his attention to the Doctor. He seemed to recognize his creator and study him for a minute before grabbing the rusty scissors the Doctor had used to cut the surgical thread and lobbed them towards the Doctor’s chest. Unlike the Teaching Assistant, the Doctor took his time dissolving into nothingness, wanting to understand as much as he could about his experiment before he left his scientific purgatory. Black blood poured from the wound where the scissors had been buried and dripped from the handles. As the Doctor stood stunned watching his creature, the Vitruvian Man broke the remaining four straps around his legs and hopped down from the lab bench with ease.
The Doctor finally dissolved as the four-legged man ambled towards where the Teaching Assistant had once stood. He knelt down and picked up the scalpel with is lower set of arms before walking awkwardly out of the lab and down the hall.
Screams. Howls. Strangled moans. Strange noises came from behind the various doors as the Vitruvian Man walked. He finally stopped in front of a door where a strange bubbling noise was coming from. He reached out with his lower set of arms and turned the knob before swinging the door open on rusty, noisy hinges.
Inside the room was a large tank and three ghosts with clipboards studying the creature inside the tank. Inside the tank floated a fish-like man. After a moment, the fish-like man noticed the Vitruvian Man standing in the doorway and made eye contact. It seemed to communicate all of its pain and desires in that moment and after some time the three ghosts turned to see the Vitruvian Man. The Vitruvian Man wasted no time grabbing the first ghost by the throat with one hand and dug the scalpel into its chest. The ghost quickly dissolved as the other two ghosts moved towards the Vitruvian Man. He spun on them and shoved one towards the old brick wall on the opposite side of the lab where the ghost evaporated. The third ghost he quickly snapped the neck of and it faded away as well.
Once all of the ghosts in the room had dissipated the Vitruvian Man turned his attention back towards the creature in the tank. The Vitruvian Man reached out towards the glass confines holding the creature in and felt the cold beneath the surface. The creature looked desperately at the Vitruvian Man as if both thanking him and asking him to set him free. The Vitruvian Man raised all four of his fists and smashed them hard against the glass tank where it quickly spider-webbed out. The water gushed from the cracks before the tank imploded under the pressure. Before the fish-like creature could step out of the tank, the Vitruvian Man had already left the lab and was headed down the hall to let the next creature out of its cage.
When You Wish Upon a Star
Christopher Peruzzi
There is no way to know what goes through the mind of a cricket.
They are amazing creatures capable of jumping incredible distances through the combination of their powerful legs and almost weightless body. When a bunch is found together under a rock or log, they’ll start springing about in random directions like popping corn. Their motivation to move might be to escape a predator or to get to a stable blade of grass. On a soft summer night, a cricket will jump through a meadow and then stop to rub its hind legs, chirping its song to the heavens or to whatever gods are benevolent to the small insects that make the night’s music within and without the gates of Miskatonic University.
These carnivorous bugs happily feed on nature’s decay and eat their own dead. They breed and thrive in the warmth of the spring and summer seasons, laying their eggs in the early fall. They are fragile creatures, commonly killed under the careless feet of the academia, but have been known to survive in the oddest of places. Sometimes a cricket will settle into a damp dark place and stay still, hibernating for long periods, only moving when the whimsy or light hits it.
Only the cricket knows why it does what it does.
An orchestra of crickets found its way into a dark alley behind a local funeral home, one used by the medical students of Miskatonic. The warm September rains of an Indian summer left a few generous puddles which simmered slowly in the unseasonable heat and humidity, bringing the street’s natural oils to an earthy concoction with the
temperature of living human blood.
A few crickets, apparently not satisfied with being at the pond-sized puddle, leapt into an open stairway that led to the embalming room. On this sultry night, the doors were wide open. Typically, the building’s stone walls insulated it with the heavy cold air, keeping all occupants, both living and dead, cool. This night, however, was too warm and the undertaker needed to release the combination of stale air, chemical fumes, and accumulation of natural gases that came from both the living and the dead into the night’s sky like spectral prisoners looking to escape a sealed crypt.
Dr. Joseph Petteau, the funeral director, emerged from his embalming room/laboratory with his companion. Their long-standing debate since their days at the university on human reanimation grew to a heated argument which, ironically, was fought on logistical rather than moral grounds. Petteau knew he could do it, given the right subject, time, and materials. It was all a matter of science and lab conditions.
“I require a clean fresh corpse,” he complained. He ran his fingers through his thick hair in exasperation. “My treated blood formula would work under the proper conditions. Then we’d hold the keys to immortality.”
“If it were that easy, you would have succeeded by now,” his companion, a small nervous man with a pale face, shot back. “Surely, as a mortician, you have more than your fair share of subjects.”
“A fair share of corpses that are completely unusable and easily identifiable,” Petteau lamented. “There are grieving families to deal with who want to bury their loved ones for closure. Most of the dead vagrants brought to me by the police usually have been dead for days. I’m up to my neck in useless dead meat.”