The explosion went off at exactly 7:06 AM, taking with it a large portion of the north wall of Arkham Asylum, a myriad of office desks and filing cabinets (among a massive collection of other objects), and young Katie Featherton. It had been her third day since beginning her internship with the hospital; she had hoped it might assist her in her pursuit of a psychology degree at Miskatonic University by putting her ahead of her peers in the already clogged artery that was the psychology career field. That morning, she had carefully planned her makeup in what she had conceptualized in her rabid, late-night sessions of thinking about him, as an attempt to impress the rather handsome resident, Dr. Mathers. Looking her best, she had set out early, in order to arrive 15 minutes before her actual shift began, once again in hopes that she might see Dr. Mathers pass by on his morning rounds to distribute medications. At 6:58, she was at her desk, and by 7:00 had signed on and clocked in. Six minutes later, half her face was vaporized by a sudden combustion of a makeshift ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb placed under a desk only 20 feet from her location. Dr. Mathers would have been coming by at 7:10.

With the heat of the flames warming his lab-jacket covered back, Mystica walked along the passage, meandering along at a calm pace with a little whistle on his lips as assorted Arkham staff members dodged around him left and right, fleeing the scene of the explosion. It was astonishing – how human beings can only think of themselves in times of peril. It’s implanted in the mind; an instinct that screams, “save yourself,” with no thought to the condition of others. It occurred to the Sleeping God that this was the basis of human nature. Every man is a selfish coward at heart. It must take a truly resilient soul to overcome the instinct to put one’s self over everyone else.

George Steen had been in the building since 4 AM, working his usual early-morning security shift. For the most part, he slacked in his job’s duties, often passing idle time with Craig in the security room, glancing over the CCTV monitors and making Mystery Science Theater 3000-like jokes as the two watched the mundane, mind-bogglingly boring goings-on in the mental hospital. For a large-scale psychiatric facility, there were not many physical altercations between the mentally deranged and the hospital staff. George’s lackluster approach to his job was, he himself could only assume, his way of dealing with the boredom of work that only served to augment his already bland life. He was rapidly approaching retirement age, and was just happy to have a reason to leave the house – and his cripplingly bothersome wife – behind when he started up the truck’s engine at 3:30 each morning. Sometimes he would sit there in the garage and hope that the cracks in the wood wouldn’t let the carbon monoxide from the exhaust escape into the cold morning air, and that it would just let him rest for once; a final, endless rest from the tenure of living.

But now, three hours after he had given up on the hope of falling into that good night and shifted into reverse, George Steen found himself running along the corridor, dodging incoming staff left and right as they ran in blind fear from the flames at the end of the hall. His keys clinking against his belt, he gave no second thought to it. This was his job. Sure, he was no police officer, but he had been hired for his sheer muscular girth, which was hidden beneath a small layer of fat. He moved as quickly as his partially arthritic legs could take him. He was the fine line where humans differed – those who run away from fire, and those who run into it. George Steen was one of those fools who ran blindly into fire.

As he finally made it to the reception area about halfway down the hall, he passed a ghastly pale man in a doctor’s jacket. By sheer coincidence, George looked to the man, and was met with the most horrifically gripping pair of blue eyes he had ever seen. Something in him shivered, seeing those bits of ice lying in the sockets where eyes should have been. The depth threw him off – triggered something in him, and as soon as he had set course for the flames, he suddenly found himself questioning why he was one of the people who would run toward the danger. His movements slowed, and he realized he had quite suddenly come to a stop, his eyes locked on the flames waiting like Charon at the River Styx, hand aloft, beckoning him to walk into the inferno. With breath caught in his throat, George placed a hand atop the marble countertop next to him and leaned like an old man – something he was destined to become, but didn’t dare admit. His stomach heaved with the weight of a half-century of memories, all blocked up and molded into a brick that pressed the inner walls of his every intestine.

A few feet away, the strange, pale man in the doctor’s jacket paused in his prideful stride. With a sudden jolt of movement, the wendigo cracked his back and neck simultaneously, sending a horrid echo through the smoke-stained hall. A claw of a hand reached up and removed the nametag pinned to his chest pocket before tossing it haphazardly onto the counter. The metal clanged as it bounced down the length of the countertop, finally sliding to a halt inches from George’s vein-lined hand. The ghost of a man suddenly glanced over his shoulder at the ailing security guard. In a moment that burned itself intp George Steen’s mortal memory, the man smiled. It was something horrific – more than any man could ever prepare himself for; a grin that spoke volumes from a forbidden tome, bellowing forth a prophecy of things that must remain unspoken for their madness. And then, as quickly as he had appeared to George Steen, the man was gone, trudging down the hall at a quick but at the same time rather relaxed pace, like a man on a mission, never looking back.

George paused. This was it. The moment where he’d have to choose. Dare he turn over that bit of metal on the counter just inches from his hand and set forth a series of events from which he could never return? Or rather, did he ignore it like the thoughts of self-destruction in his garage, and turn back to the flames; be a hero? No. Not the latter. Ever unfortunately for his soul, he decided that today was a good day to grasp the folly of human error in a death grip; his sausage-like fingers reached out and tipped over the nametag. It shone against the light of the flames eating at his back from down the hall. His eyes widened. That name. The name no one ever liked to say, as though it were the most profane swear word to ever curse the lips of the staff at Arkham Asylum.

Dr. Casey Jones.

Something clicked inside George’s head. No. He knew who Dr. Casey Jones was, with his frog-like face and piercing eyes that seemed to reach into one’s head and forcefully rip out the contents like a torn bag of cereal spilling all across the kitchen floor. This was wrong – a dichotomy. That man, that white creature from the snow, was not Dr. Casey Jones, and George knew this for a fact. And then, as though by instinct, George pulled back on the reigns of pain rebounding through the jail of his ribcage, and trudged after the strange man, one hand already reaching for his pistol. But what would kill him first – the fire, the cardiac episode brewing in his chest, or this ghost in the psychiatric ward?

Mystica finally came to a halt outside a frosted glass window-adorned door, his reflection bobbing to and fro in the bouncing light of the flames from down the hall. He looked so sick, with his eyes masked with days of restlessness, like a raccoon’s mask in the night. That pale, sickly flesh that hung from David Martin’s meager bones stood like quivering jelly in the jar, just waiting to be scooped out by the knife of perdition. And here it was: the single golden door handle that would finally separate Mystica’s consciousness from David’s. It had been his own mistake in combining their minds. Mystica had hoped it would drown out David’s weak human capacity for ethos, but it had done quite the contrary, and merely melded David’s humanity unto Mystica’s infinitely half-asleep consciousness, still trapped beneath the ice somewhere in Northern Saskatchewan. This was the moment that would decide his next action. To be severed, or to purposefully sever?

Once inside, Mystica had about three minutes’ worth of time for scavenging through the myriad of cabinets, filled to the brim with files upon files. Luckily, they were alphabetized, like any good psych ward would have them. In the third “J” cabinet, he began rummaging and sifting through the army of manila folders, looking for that tag that screamed, “forbidden” to him. Ah, yes. The one marked in stern, red marker, like the hand of authority locking away the most dire murderer. His hand withdrew it – the file marked “Restricted – Dr. Caey Jones, “The Art of Manipulation: a Case Study in Mind Control.”

“How quaint,” Mystica muttered to himself beneath the sound of the flames roaring Cerberus’s call. Peace came flooding into his cortex like an orgasm of hope, but it was ruined by the sudden appearance of a portly man in the doorway. His shadow crept across the wall, haunting Mystica’s moment of solitude.

“You are not Dr. Jones,” George said, his pistol aimed a bit too high, but nevertheless in the direction of the intruder.

Mystica, still rolling on the energy of pure calm, turned to face his newfound guest in the archives. He was dressed down now without the jacket. David’s usual journalist attire – a sport coat, slacks, and a pressed dress shirt – had been replaced with a wrinkled white collar shirt and a pair of dirt and oil-stained black work pants. This style was all Mystica’s own; a fashion dedicated completely to disguise and illusion, all in attempt to fool the most common of minds. Clearly, he was dealing with an enigma – some mind that had seen past his simple magic trick. Then onto the finale.

“I’ll assume I’m dealing with the Sherlock Holmes of small-time security,” Mystica sneered, shooting George a look of pure disdain mixed with a hint of respect. Hatred wrapped in some sense of mutuality – like a present wrapped up with a bow made of barbed wire.

“I don’t know who you are or what you want,” George began, his voice shaking and his left arm going numb. “But I know you set that bomb off.”

“Clever boy,” Mystica snickered, scanning George as though he were simply an animal about to undergo testing in a lab. “Ah, you poor thing.”

“Sorry?” George asked, his breath fading as the agony crept closer to his heart.

“You’re dying,” Mystica replied off-handedly, without a hint of humanity in his voice. “Dying like chattel. Out in the barn, all alone, with a wolf at the door.”

File in hand, Mystica gestured to himself, holding his arms wide open. George corrected his sights, aiming the gun squarely at Mystica’ chest. With his sight going blurry, George rested his fingertip on the hair-trigger, ready to fire.

“Go on,” Mystica implored. “Fire. Haven’t I done enough for you to warrant killing another man in cold blood? I can feel it in you. The capacity for murder. So seal your soul’s demise. Fire away, coward!”

“You’re the coward!” George cried out, sending a searing pain surging across his chest. It felt as though a thousand needles were tearing into his heart. “You killed them! You killed good people! That girl at reception! What was her name…? …Katie! You killed that poor girl! She was one semester away from graduation! She had a whole life to live!”

“Tragic,” Mystica commented in monotone, seemingly bored by these attempts to grasp at straws of his humanity. But there was nothing to be found there; no soul inside this shell that had once been the man, David Martin. Now, there remained nothing of the sort; simply a mixture of minds inside a meager skeleton, walking along like a marionette as the conductor pulled the strings, putting on the grandest of shows.

Behind George, the archives’ door slammed shut, closed by an unseen hand. He jumped, momentarily taking his eyes off of Mystica. This was the worst mistake of his life. In the half-second of George turning his head to look back at the phantom-closed door, Mystica had moved at an inhuman speed, suddenly appearing inches away from George. A hand reached up, breaking the laws of physics, and crushed the bones in George’s left arm, causing his hand to open. The pistol clattered to the floor, sending an echo reverberating through the room, drowned out from the pulse of the fire creeping closer and closer.

With his free hand, Mystica pressed his palm against George’s chest. His heartbeat pulsed against his cold flesh, and for a moment, he was one with this pathetic pile of human hope. Mystica could only smile in this moment, as much as he despised this man. Hope. A folly.

“Your heart is slowing,” the Old One announced in a hoarse whisper as George whimpered in a combination of fear and pain, the purest emotions. “Beating, beating…only for a few moments longer. I know your every thought, Goerge. Your every memory. I know the ways you’ve watched the young doctors move around, their flesh keeping you up at night in cold sweats as you roll over and wish that they were your wife. You all grow old, but life seems to be standing still. Youth is a gift wrongfully given to the young, right? It’s all a joke. And the punchline is the frozen hand of the reaper. Do you feel it now? The grim palm of death, cold against your chest, feeling your heart skid to a halt?”

A smile. A smile from the Sleeping God as George made his peace with whatever runs the universe. Little did he know – there was no one listening.

“You have dreamed of death every morning in your car. Let me indulge you.”

Darkness. Except for the fire as it crept closer. A hand suddenly melted into a tentacle, wrapped up in something razor-like. Pierce.

Ba-bump. It tore through flesh and bone and muscle, and the heart that wished for rest finally received it in glorious fashion.

By the time the flames began to chew away at George Steen’s corpse, the cosmos’ great punchline had gone, his steps echoing in the dark of the night.

George Steen’s wife didn’t even recognize the charred corpse two days later in the county morgue.



What meaning was there?