It's difficult to write about that time. I have to take a lot of breaks.

Sometimes I have to pull three hairs, sometimes five before I can continue. I have to lay them on the top of the page, sticking them to the paper by the root until I feel like I can keep going. It's only then that I can feel safely insulated from all those emotions I thought I'd suppressed, but that threaten to come bubbling up to the surface.

I feel them when the Seroquel starts to wear off, just like I'm back in that tiny apartment, in bed with West. Horror at what we'd done and what it might mean, terror that we would be caught and our careers ruined, blissful happiness, relief at having escape that first incident unscathed. I feel them all, and they congeal together into a paste that lodges between my lungs and my stomach. I feel it there now. It keeps me from eating. Food bounces off it and comes back up.

The doctors don't believe me when I try to tell them. They say "eating disorder not otherwise specified." They speculate that West imposed it on me as a form of control - or based on what I said about him in therapy, that he had one himself and that I just copied him, like I'd done with everything else.

It's nonsense of course. West simply had more interesting things to do than eat. As for me, I admit that I emulated all his habits - except the smoking (though even secondhand it'll probably give me just as much cancer, ha ha).

Now he's gone, though. And I still can't eat. It's that paste.


West and I caused a bit of stir at school when we finally emerged from my apartment after our brush with that thing. For one, we'd skipped a day of classes - a thing unheard of for West especially, as he treated each lecture as a personal debating forum. For another, our appearance after two days of hardly any sleep and nothing to eat except the caustic mixture of aspirin and cheap brandy was ghastly - and that wasn't taking into account the bruises I'd sustained getting knocked to the ground, and West's bandaged hand.

I'd attempted to cover up the worst of my face with a scarf and heavy makeup, but my efforts fooled no one. The girl who previously had encouraged me gave me one horrified look and turned away. I had a moment's panic that we'd been connected with the "meth lab" after all before I realized that she'd put my bruised face and West's bandaged hand together and come up with an obvious conclusion. West, thank God, did his part by not causing any arguments in class for the next week or so, seeming content with letting me take the notes for both of us, muttering if I missed something.

Rumors about our relationship flew for a short time, then died down as everyone buckled down for the Boards. I stopped trying to make friends with the other students. West moved into my apartment.

Once Boards were taken and the school year complete, I spent the summer shadowing in a family practice's office in Boston, driving to and from Arkham on the weekends. My parents asked if they could meet West. When I asked him to visit, he asked "what for?" and I dropped the subject.

West divided his time between an intensive course to become a certified mortuary technician, and at a shooting range, practicing. Once, while I was spending the weekend at the Arkham apartment, we woke to a scratching sound under the window, and I had to practically restrain West from rushing out with his pistol. "It could be a cat!" I wailed.

He settled for sitting by the window until first light, when we discovered that the siding underneath had been scratched at, and partly torn away by claws that were too big for a cat. This caused me some insomnia in the following weeks, but it never happened again.


In our third year we began clinical rotations, which took us out of the lecture halls and into Miskatonic's tiny hospital. To my surprise, West's contentious debates with Doctor Halsey - who had made Dean of the medical school following the sudden heart attack of his predecessor - did not end with our departure from the classroom. Instead of throwing a faculty party once his most rancorous student had left his lectures, Dean Halsey actively sought West out to continue their debates one-on-one. They began to meet weekly for coffee, and made themselves a nuisance at both of Arkham's all-night diners.

On the few occasions I joined them, Dean Halsey left energized and excited, but West usually was enraged. He'd rant into the night about Dean Halsey's pedantry, and his obstinance in adhering to obsolete ethics. The Dean would also berate West's chain smoking, which sent West practically frothing at the mouth.

Despite West's temper, Dean Halsey adored him, and although he'd never stoop to puffing West's grades, he did agree to put West and me on the same rotation at the hospital. It was just as well - West was too snappish at the other students, and I was best at tempering his utter lack of bedside manner. I certainly didn't complain, as our clinic hours were such that if we hadn't been on rotations together, I would only have seen him for a few hours a day. As it was, we were constantly in each others' company, and still I found myself wanting more.


Our rotation work continued uneventfully until November, when the news media began its yearly warning about this or that strain of influenza. All of us at the school rolled our eyes at the increasingly hysterical news releases, which we considered an annual portent of clickbait fearmongering. We were quickly proven wrong.

The first severe cases of the H1N2 subtype were reported in December out of a hospital in Portland Maine, beginning a rush of vaccine-seekers who surged into Miskatonic's teaching hospital en masse. As we later learned, however, the vaccine provided in that particular year was ineffective against the strain of flu tearing its way through the population. On December 12th, there was one reported death - an elderly woman in Ipswich. Two days later, there were five deaths scattered across New England. In another week, there were one hundred and thirty-five deaths across the United States. By the new year, the number of nationwide fatalities had ballooned to two thousand, six hundred and fourteen, a fraction of the deaths that ensued in Central America and Southeast Asia. In the first week of January, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic at a level unheard of since the beginning of the twentieth century.

The disease hit Arkham especially hard. As is usual with influenza, it chiefly victimized infants and the elderly, the latter of which were especially plentiful in that mouldering mill town. The teaching hospital was transformed into a clinic for those who had no one else to care for them, or who were too far gone to stay at home. The students worked double shifts, and slept in makeshift cots in disused laboratories - the only places where equipment made it unsafe to keep patients.

West, of course, worked triple shifts, and assisted in the morgue, as he'd received his mortuary tech certification by the end of the summer. Arkham was suddenly inundated with corpses that had to be disposed of quickly and without ceremony, and I could sense West's impatience at not being able to conduct mortuary services without supervision - as a technician, he had to be under supervision by the mortician at all times. I breathed a surreptitious sigh of relief whenever West would stalk back to our side-by-side cots in a supply closet, deploring that he hadn't had a chance to try out the reformulation of his solution. Lying there in the dark, West groused about finally having enough material to work with, but no opportunity to take any action. Any time I'd fall asleep, he'd raise his voice until I responded, then berate me for getting bored with him.

West's desire to try his experiment again increased with both the time elapsed since our last try, and with the number of bodies that passed through the hospital morgue. I was not so eager. We had barely escaped the last attempt with our lives, not to mention our medical reputations, and that was due to sheer luck. I was also uneasy about the thing we'd created - where it was, what it might do to us or someone else. But seeing so much destruction and death around us that winter softened my resolve - if so many could be cut out of life so arbitrarily, why shouldn't West try to bring them back again? I pondered this in the dark after West had wound himself down with his speeches, his postulates, his rants. But if I want to admit the truth to myself, the deciding factor for me wasn't any noble desire to save lives. No, I wanted to see West succeed. Not for the obvious professional adulation and public fame that would ensue, but to see West happy - finally happy - in his achievement.

Once, on one of our infrequent breaks in the supply closet, I asked him "why do you want to do it?"

I braced myself for a caustic reply, but West only sighed and turned over on his cot. "To show I'm right," he said.

"To show whom?"

"Myself."


The pandemic went into its second month in February, and our endurance began to break down. Two students collapsed from exhaustion, fifteen contracted the flu and were added to the patient lists. Lectures for first and second year students were suspended, and every professor who was also a doctor was conscripted to assist at the hospital. There was still no word on when an effective vaccine would be distributed - any day now, the pharmaceutical companies said, and my fellow students and doctors alike gave little skeptical sighs with every day that passed. Most of the elderly patients caught pneumonia atop the flu virus, creating a hospital-wide bacterial epidemic.

Even West began to show signs of strain, though this was mostly restricted to his dropping to sleep immediately upon going on break, as oppose to his usual habit of working out his excess energy by chewing on pens and lecturing me about corpses. During rounds, he showed no signs of fatigue, and seemed to be running on sheer willpower. In addition, his prickly and blunt manner made him a favorite of the tough, grizzled former mill workers who were dragged in for treatment by frantic children and grandchildren. Students in other rounds were infuriated when those hoary relics demanded to see "Doctor West," despite the fact (which they took pains to emphasize) that West was a student, not a doctor. The other students took to bursting into our supply closet and fetching West on his break whenever a patient asked for him, and he irritated them still more by keeping his temper, thanking them, and rising immediately to treat the patient who had requested him.

All of this only raised Dean Halsey's esteem for West. The Dean had joined the ranks of doctors conscripted to serve the influx of patients, and he was put in charge of West's and my rotation group for the second week of February. The week would turn out to be the worst of the pandemic, as the influenza and pneumonia cases were at their most numerous and severe.

We all worked doggedly, barely speaking to each other, taking allergy histories and dispensing antivirals and antibiotics. Dean Halsey began to suppress a cough. He and I were both trying to keep up with West's sleepless energy - I was more successful at it, having been accustomed to West's schedule, but the effort hit Dean Halsey very hard. His cough got louder, and his breathing came in gasps. But West continued to plow through breaks in our shifts, and Doctor Halsey was determined to keep up with him. I finally succumbed and took my break in the supply closet alone. When I woke up, West and Dean Halsey were coming down the hall. The Dean was gasping and coughing. West looked the same as ever, save for the inky circles under his eyes.

"Go ahead with Doctor Steiner's shift," West said when they reached me. "We're on break."

"Sure - go ahead and use my cot, Dean Halsey," I said. The Dean gave me a wan smile, and lay down. I stopped West outside and closed the door.

"He needs to get examined," I hissed. "That cough sounds like an infection - he can't be treating patients with that!"

"I know," said West. He pushed a matted tangle of hair off his forehead. "I'll see if I can talk him into it after we get some sleep - okay?"

West was so unusually obedient, that I granted him an indulgent smile. "And a shower," I said.

West smirked. "Wake us up in four hours, okay?" He kissed me on the mouth once, then went into the closet.

I worked an eight hour shift with Doctor Steiner's group, deciding to incur West's likely wrath in exchange for allowing him four additional hours of rest, and giving Doctor Halsey some time to recover. None of the students in my rotation had the nerve to wake West for the patients who requested him so long as I was around to stop them, and by the end of the shift, I was rather pleased with myself for having engineered what amounted to a full night's sleep for the two.

Before embarking on my second shift, I broke off from the group and headed for the supply closet to wake the two up, thinking of what best to say to calm West down about oversleeping, and how to get Dean Halsey into an examination room as a patient rather than a doctor as soon as possible.

I opened the closet door quietly, so as not to shock them as they lay still on their cots, and put my hand on Dean Halsey's shoulder.

"Dean Halsey?" I said softly, shaking him a little. He didn't move. I shook harder. "Dean Halsey?"

The slice of light coming in through the closet door was just enough that I could see a faint glitter where his face must be. I gave up trying not to shock the two sleepers awake, and flipped on the overhead light.

Dean Halsey's eyes were open, and bulging slightly out of his head. His mouth was open, his tongue protruding.

I choked, then nearly screamed as a hand close around my wrist - West's. He sat up on his cot and blinked as I tried to breathe more quietly. "What?" West said.

"He's dead - Dean Halsey," I gasped. "Look." I pointed, unnecessarily, to the Dean's bulging eyes.

West stood up, felt for Dean Halsey's wrist, his neck, his chest, as I watched.

"We have to get Doctor Steiner," I whispered.

West said nothing but straightened, eyes narrowed. Then slowly he dipped a hand into his coat pocket and produce a large capped syringe.

"No," I hissed. West met my eyes, but he began to unscrew the cap.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Last time," I breathed, "that thing… we can't turn Dean Halsey into a thing."

"It might be different," West mused. "I told you that I've made a lot of improvements." He tapped the syringe with a thumbnail, pressed until a single drop of clear fluid appeared at the tip of the needle. "And Dean Halsey was the most intelligent man I knew."

I boggled at West. After all the time he'd spent railing and raving about Dean Halsey's ignorance and close mindedness, West's statement struck me dumb. West looked at me, puzzled. "What?" he said. "He was my favorite professor."

"You just want him to admit that you're right," I whispered, too quiet for West to hear as he emptied the contents of his syringe into Dean Halsey's neck. I circled, squeezing between the side of Dean Halsey's cot and the shelving behind, so as to get a better look at his face. For several moments, nothing happened.

I looked up at West. "How long-" was all I could get out before the corpse on the bed began to scream. I joined in.

There was nowhere to run this time. I backed into the shelves behind me, knocking myself on the head and back. The corpse on the cot began to convulse, bouncing higher and higher on the flimsy mattress, eyes rolling back, red-flecked foam frothing out of its mouth.

It stopped screaming as abruptly as it had started, and with a speed that shocked me, flipped itself over to crouch on the cot on all fours. It surveyed the closet for a moment, and then, with a howl, threw itself at West.

The motion of the corpse leaping pushed the cot into my stomach, and I doubled over, gasping. By the time I was able to catch my breath, the thing that had been Dean Halsey had West by the throat, and was slamming him into the shelving on the other side of the closet - once, twice, three times. The plastic boxes of equipment fell, bursting open and raining bandages, tongue depressors and instruments. The thing slammed West again, and this time, I heard a loud crack. I found my voice, and screamed again.

The thing started at the sound and dropped West, who crumpled on the ground, not moving. It stared at me with Dean Halsey's eyes, puffing foul, moist breath into my face through Dean Halsey's mouth. Then, slowly, it climbed onto West's cot, preparing for another leap - this time me.

A sudden clatter outside the closet caught the thing's attention, and it snapped its head to the slightly open door. It made a low gurgling sound, and sputum dripped from its jaws onto the cot, staining the sheet pink. Then the thing lept - not at me, but toward the door, bursting it open and scattering Doctor Steiner's students, who had come running when they had heard the screams from the closet.

Now it was the group of students who began screaming, and I heard running steps moving away. In the confusion, I had the presence of mind to jump over the cot and, grab West's empty syringe from the floor, and thrust it into my own pocket. I managed this just before the remaining students turned from watching Dean Halsey sprint down the corridor, and settled their attention on West and me.

Doctor Steiner was the first to enter the closet. Before she could say anything, I gasped "I'm fine - help him!" She looked to where I was pointing, and so did the other students. The sight was frankly gruesome. West was unconscious, face down on the floor, his right shoulder jerked back at an unlikely angle. A pool of blood was widening under his face.

"Oh my God," I started to sob, "he'll choke-"

"Take him!" Doctor Steiner snapped, jerking her head. The two closest students, faces blanched with fear, came in and started lifting West into one of the cots, hampered a bit by the lack of space.

"Come on," 'Doctor Steiner said, taking my arm in one hand, steering me out of the closet and into the hallway. From there, I could hear more screaming from some distant part of the hospital. It sounded as though it was coming from under water. Doctor Steiner heard it too, and disbelief spread across her face as she listened to chaos erupting down the ward. She turned back to me. "What the hell just happened?"

It's funny how one can be completely hysterical and completely rational - to the point of being calculating - at the same time. The sobbing, gulping part of me continued to sob and gulp, but the crafty part - the one whose first move had not been even to see if West was all right, but to hide the evidence of our culpability - told Doctor Steiner the truth. But not all of it.

It was a simple story. I'd gone to wake West and Dean Halsey up for their shift, shaken Dean Halsey, and he'd woken up unhinged, and attacked. No one would have believed it unless they'd seen the thing sprint down the hall, howling - and by now, half the hospital had seen just that. Shaken patients and crying children roamed the halls looking for someone who could tell them that everything would be all right. The thing had torn through the main lobby, out the doors, and out into the night, fortunately not doing anything more than frightening those who had seen it.

"Please," I found myself praying while I waited for West to be released from the ER, "let it wind down. Let it just keel over and die. Let it run out." But run out of what, I didn't know.

It took West so long to get out of treatment that I was forced to return to my shift with Doctor Steiner's group before I could see him. The students working with me gave me cautious looks, but didn't ask me anything. Doctor Steiner, for her part, seemed more concerned that the most efficient student the school had was not only out of commission, but also taking up valuable resources by needing treatment himself.

I resisted the urge to ask Doctor Steiner whether she was worried about Dean Halsey, not wanting to indicate any possible culpability for his current condition. Besides, I thought, Doctor Steiner was like me. She didn't want to think about the thing that had once been the dean of the medical school. She too wanted it to disappear.

But it didn't.

I came back from my double shift to find that West had been released from the ER and rolled back to the supply closet. "No other room," the attending had snapped when I'd asked. At least it was private. I curled up on my own cot to assess the damage.

West's nose - the source of the disturbingly large pool of blood I'd smeared across the floor in an unsuccessful attempt to mop up - looked battered but not broken. His right arm looked worse, and was tucked across his torso in a sling.

West opened one eye and looked at me. "Hey," he said.

"Hey. How are you feeling?"

He sighed, closed his eye. "Codeineous," he slurred.

"Rough time?"

"Clavicle fracture and dislocated shoulder. Had to pop the socket before they set the fracture. It was…" he gave a nasty sounding snicker, and didn't finish. I didn't know what to say, so I lay silent.

"Oh," he said, "also MBT."

"A concussion?"

"That's imprecise."

"So's MBT."

"Touche."

"Do you remember what happened?"

West opened both his eyes at this, drew in a long, hissing breath. "No. Not much."

So I told him, up to the point where the creature disappeared into the night after escaping the hospital. West lay silent after I finished.

"What is it, West?"

"What d'you mean?"

"The… thing. It's not Dean Halsey anymore, but what is it? Is it a monster? A zombie?"

West gave the nasty snicker again. "Zombie? What made you think of that?"

"I don't know - it was dead. Now it isn't. But it's not human."

"Yes it is. It's just… damaged. We got there too late. It wasn't quite fresh enough."

"But-"

"No. Zombies are voudon."

"..are Voodoo?"

"No. Voudon is a religion. Hoodoo is…" he lost the word in the narcotic fog, searched, found another. "Bullshit."

"You mean magic."

"Same thing. Religion too, now that I think about it."

"Go to sleep, West."

West, obedient again, closed his eyes and was quickly asleep, judging from his even breathing. As for me, I lay awake, thinking about how the only truly modern word for life, or death, or love, of God, or religion, or magic was "chemical."


I must have dozed, because a few hours later we were both awakened by a knock on the closet door - Arkham police investigators come to take our statement about the attack, now that West was deemed to be sufficiently able to respond. I, under the guise of being worried about West's health, was able to lead the conversation, with West nodding and corroborating my story. The questioning was all rather perfunctory, and as the officers turned to leave, I asked whether there was any news about the Dean. The officers looked at each other, then at me. "I guess you haven't seen the morning paper," one said. I stared at him blankly. They took the opportunity to leave, while I turned to West, horrified.

"Don't move," I said when I could speak again. West rolled his eyes at me, but stayed still as I dashed out of the door and followed the officers down the hall.

A cluster of students had gathered in one of the halls, heads bent and whispering. They looked up as I approached, seemingly nervous. One of the girls giggled shrilly - which, based on the others' reactions, was the wrong thing to do. I held out my hand, and one of them thrust the newspaper into it. The group dispersed, leaving me there. I began to read the article, bile rising in my throat, glad that it did not include pictures.

After I finished, I strode down the hall and jerked the supply closet door open, shoving the newspaper at West. "A night watchman was beaten to death," I said.

"Don't wave that thing in my face," West said, snatching the paper with his good arm.

"At Christchurch Cemetery. His face was ripped off - there wasn't anything left! No skin, no nose, no cheeks-"

West smoothed the paper slowly over his knees, affecting indifference.

"It used its teeth to do it," I said.

"Hm. And it's definitely-"

"The watchman taking the morning shift saw it running away before he found the body," I interrupted. "He described it. Balding, dark beard, white coat. It's… it. The Dean."

"Interesting," West replied. He began to read the article.

"Wait!" I said in frustration. "Do you really - I mean, don't you feel any responsibility for-"

It was a stupid question, and we both knew it. West lifted his eyes from the newspaper and stared at me, his eyes so flat and cold that I could hear the "chick, chick" as they met mine.

I stared back, silent, conscious only of an overwhelming despair at the knowledge that not only did West feel no responsibility, but would have done it all over again, knowing the consequences. We stared at each other that way for what seemed like a long time, until the closet door opened behind me.

It was the girl who had encouraged me my first year - I'd already forgotten her name.

"Hi," she said, "Doctor Steiner said come find you. The vaccines finally came."

West and I were both staring at the girl now. She squirmed, cleared her throat.

"So," she said, "there's an announcement for everybody in town to come in and get inoculated here. We're setting up a clinic in the lobby and we need all hands."

"I-I'd better go then," I stammered, lowering my eyes and grateful for the excuse to leave the closet. I stepped out and followed the girl to the lobby, resisting all attempts to enter into conversation with her.

Once assembled, the students, doctors and hospital staff set the lobby and connecting halls of the hospital up into "vaccination stations," and set to work as what seemed like the whole town streamed in to receive immunization.

I worked another double shift, which passed in a blur of exposed forearms, screaming children and jostling figures who wouldn't queue properly. During the afternoon, while I manned one of the stations, a skinny middle-aged man sat to receive his injection. When he rolled up his sleeve, however, I saw that he had a fresh puncture mark already, and gummy residue from where he'd removed his bandage. I looked up at him.

"You've had your shot already," I said.

"I'm from the Arkham Advertiser, he said. "I had a hell of a time finding you - this place is a madhouse."

"You've had your shot already," I repeated. "You can't have another."

The man flipped a small voice recorder from a pocket, clicked a button. "You're the girlfriend, right?" he said, " You saw it happen?"

I stared at the recorder. "It's dangerous to get too much of this vaccine, sir. And there's a line."

"The attack," the man pressed. "You saw Doctor Halsey attack your boyfriend, Herbert West."

"There are a lot of people behind you, sir," I replied. "Please - you can't have another shot. Please get out of line." The people standing behind the man began to grumble.

"I just need one moment of your time," the man said, handing me a business card. "Perhaps we could met after your shift, and you could tell me-"

"NO!" I screamed, standing up, "GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LINE!" I threw the card in his face, and it flapped undramatically to the floor. The point had been made, though, and the shocked-looking reporter slunk away, while several of the waiting patients applauded.

I fully expected to be taken aside and lectured by Doctor Steiner, but she instead motioned to hospital security, who hustled the man out while I got back to my inoculations.

The sun set. People looked nervously at the reddening sky, and left lines in which they'd been waiting for hours, unwilling to stay out after dark. An assurance from the doctors that the hospital would be open for more vaccinations at first light caused stampede for the door, clearing the lobby in a matter of minutes. The effect was frightful, and the ashen faces of my fellow students and doctors showed that they felt it as much as I did. Doctor Steiner briskly herded those of us in her group, and we embarked on a round to check the status of patients overnighting at the hospital. By midnight, when my second shift ended, I was stumbling and felt sick myself.

I didn't know what to do or where to go - back to West? The thought of being stared at as I'd been this morning was unendurable. Pull a cot into one of the labs with the other students? They would stare too, and what would I talk to them about? Find somewhere to be alone and think? I was tired of thinking, and afraid to be alone. I began to sniffle a bit, thinking of Dean Halsey, kind Dean Halsey, who was always so funny, and happy to verbally spar with West - and now, through the theories he had scoffed at as impossible, had been turned into a monster.

When I turned into the corridor that housed the supply closet, I saw that West was leaning in the doorway, waiting. As I got closer, I could see how tired he looked, how glazed his eyes were. More codeine, probably.

I stopped a few feet away, wondering what to say. Eventually I decided on the truth.

"I don't know what to do," I said to West.

"What do you want?" he asked. Reasonable question. I pondered it for a short time.

"Nothing," I finally said.

"Then," he replied, "you might as well stay."

And it was true, and I felt suddenly peaceful And I didn't have to consider how I could go on after having known someone like him. And he put his good arm around me, and a delicious oblivion hollowed me out to my fingertips, and I kissed him, and nothing else mattered.


The shipments of vaccines continued, and within two days, the city of Arkham had been inoculated against H1N2. The influx of patients to the hospital ebbed. The patients in the hospital left on their feet, not in a hearse. After a week, our schedules calmed so that we began to work single shifts again, and got to sleep at home. The pandemic had ended just as a new, and far more frightening plague began.

On the night after the attack on the cemetery watchman, a policeman was killed, his throat ripped out and his thymus missing. The night after that, a pair of men going home from a bar were found in an alley. One man's neck was broken; the other's head had been smashed in. The thing that had done it had gnawed a chunk of flesh out of the second man's substantial belly.

The police mobilized a full force, and requested assistance from neighboring cities. They imposed a curfew for the residents of Arkham and commenced an all-out manhunt.

The news media swarmed the town, breathlessly reporting the grisly details. Reporters from the television channels, the Boston Globe and Herald, the Arkham Advertiser, and a flashy tabloid that hitherto had featured news stories about a creature infesting the waters off the coast of Innsmouth named "Shark-Boy," sought comment from the hospital, school, West and me. The hospital and school refused to comment about the Dean, or grant reporters access to its students. As a result, so long as we were working and sleeping at the hospital, West and I were safe. Once the flu had dissipated, and our schedules cleared, however, we began to be hounded. Reporters waited in the hospital parking lot for us to enter or leave, and shouted questions, which we ignored. We unplugged our telephone and let the apartment buzzer ring unheeded, to the increasing consternation of the neighbors.

The papers and blogs howled about the hospital's stonewalling, and lack of information about the rampaging Dean. West and I, as the first victim and witness respectively, were identified as refusing to comment. This did not keep the tabloid from printing a largely invented character study of West based on his contemptuous dismissal of its reporters. West bought the issue and read it aloud, snickering at the more damning sections. Afterwards, he lay back on the floor, holding a cigarette out for me to light for him, and said "I would have given an interview to Shark-Boy."

I lit the cigarette but didn't laugh.

A little over a week after the men were killed in the alley, and the imposition of the curfew, the thing broke into a house and slaughtered a family of five. Parts of each family member had been torn off, and the smallest child had disappeared entirely. The news reporters abruptly lost all interest in West and me, and issued a gruesome series of articles and televisions reports on what they termed the "Arkham Horror." West read the first Arkham Advertiser report, pursed his lips and said, "over a week. It must have been hungry."

I locked myself in the bathroom, hyperventilating, until West managed to snap the lock, forced me to take one of his leftover codeine, and put me to bed.

The night after the break-in, and for three nights after that, the full force of the Arkham police department flooded the streets of the city. No one slept due to the strobing searchlights sweeping across stairs and into lawns and windows.

"They won't find him tonight," said West, peering out of the blinds at the searchers.

"Why not?" I asked. He turned and looked at me, silent.

"Oh," I said, realizing. "The child."

"Sort of like takeout," he agreed. It took another codeine to get me to sleep that night.


On the third night, they caught the thing. It was trying to break into the back of a house half a mile from the cemetery when a group of police searches came upon the scene with their searchlights, and ambushed it. It seemed oblivious to their presence as they screamed at it to freeze, one of the police said in an interview. Instead of shooting it, they physically subdued it with nightsticks until it could be handcuffed. The thing shrieked and struggled, but it didn't attack them. When they got it to a prison cell, however, it began throwing himself at the concrete walls, still shrieking. As a consequence, it was removed from the cell and taken to Sefton Asylum, a large, castle-like structure on the outskirts of town with a nasty reputation for patient neglect and general disorder and decay.

West and I followed the news reports about the thing closely. It was positively identified as Dean Halsey, but a grotesque change had taken over the Dean's features. The skin on its face and body appeared to be rotting away, and the flesh on its fingers had been scraped nearly to the bone. It did not appear to feel pain, and it took massive amounts of anesthesia to sedate the thing. When in a cell, it threw himself against the walls - though they, unlike those in the jail cell, were padded.

A psychological evaluation was immediately begun, and almost instantly concluded that the thing was unfit to stand trial for its crimes by reason of insanity, though none of the attending doctors could agree on a diagnosis. A medical examination was abandoned after the thing woke suddenly from heavy sedation, attacking and injuring one of the doctors. After one brief visit, Dean Halsey's family voluntarily committed the thing to the asylum indefinitely, and moved out of Arkham as fast as they could. Thus, the once-revered Dean of Miskatonic University School of Medicine became the ravening creature known as the "Arkham Horror."

After reading me the news of the thing's commitment, West folded the newspaper and stared at the ceiling for a full minute without speaking.

"Do you know what the worst part about this is?" West finally asked.

"Tell me," I said.

"He wrote my main letter of recommendation for residency applications. I'll need another one now, and it won't be as good."

I thought about this, staring at the ceiling myself, my thigh pressed against West's in the narrow bed.

"You can find another," I said. "Doctor Steiner likes you, now that you've joined our group.

"She's not exactly effluvient in her praise," West muttered.

I rolled over, took his face in my hands and kissed him on one eyebrow. "Don't worry about it right now. Come on, we have an early shift tomorrow."

We settled, switched off the lights.

"I can finally sleep now that that thing's locked up," I murmured.

I did not.