The Taint and Other Novellas (2 page)

My first stories were published by August Derleth in 1968, so I was still a relative beginner in the first half of 1970 when I sent him this novella. I was also still in the British Army: a recruiting sergeant, of all things, in the city of Leicester. The story was published (eventually) by Derleth’s Arkham House, but I had to wait all of seven years to see it in print in the hardcover collection of the same name, a book which is now long out of print. The Horror at Oakdeene—quite obviously the work of a beginner and very heavily influenced by Lovecraft—is one of a quite small handful of stories that has not been reprinted until now…

In the summer of 1935 Martin Spellman went to work as a trainee mental nurse at Oakdeene Sanatorium. He was twenty-four years old and already dedicated—but not to nursing. Spellman’s one ambition since his early teens had been to be an author; and since a rather odd and macabre turn of mind had dictated for his first projected work a compilation of rare or outstanding mental cases, he had decided that the best way to gain a first-hand insight on his subject—the
feel,
as it were, of asylums—would be to work in such an institute.

Of course, Spellman’s real intention in applying for training was kept well hidden, but that did not mean that he was not going to try his best in the job to which he was committing himself. The minimum contract period was one year, with a further year of full-time nursing, and Martin cheerfully agreed to these terms in the furtherance of his project.

His colleagues and superior officers alike were quite astonished at the unaccustomed zeal with which young Spellman threw himself into his work, and every night that he was not on duty saw the light in his room burning well into the early hours. Martin had allotted his time off-duty in the following manner: for three hours he would study the theory of mental nursing, for five hours he would work on his book. This would leave him at least six hours for sleeping in any given twenty-four hour period. At those times when night-duty came around—once or twice each week—he would alter his schedule so as to spend the same amount of time in these aforementioned tasks.

Often Martin’s immediate superior and tutor, Dr. Welford, caught him in the late summer and early autumn of the year working on his manuscripts; but who could complain about a student mental nurse writing a series of “theses” or correlations on the stranger, more complex cases of his calling? If anything Martin was to be congratulated on his studious attention to all details of his sanatorium routine.

In fact Spellman soon discovered that he did not like his work at the institute; his night-duties were an especial abomination, when on occasion he had of necessity to wander those lower corridors of Oakdeene wherein the worst patients were held resident. His harder, more stoic colleagues called the basement ward “Hell,” and Martin Spellman would not have contested this seemingly harsh appellation. It
was
hell down there, with the corridor lights starkly illuminating the heavy doors with their little barred spy-holes and their labels bearing brief, typed case histories of the occupants of the cells. Behind those doors, separated from Martin by only the thickness of the oak panels and battens and the rubbery warm panels within, many of Britain’s most terrible lunatics dwelt in the perpetual horror of their own madness, and Martin Spellman made sure when on night-duty that his hourly tours of Hell were undertaken with a thoroughly efficient but speedy dispatch.

One of Spellman’s so-called “colleagues” at the sanatorium, Alan Barstowe (an ugly, squat-bodied, fully-trained nurse of some thirty-five years), was able on occasion to help the trainee out with his dread of the ward known as Hell. Barstowe, it seemed, had no fear of that part of night-duty whatever; indeed, in the eerie atmosphere of the nighted asylum, he appeared to welcome the hourly visits to the lower ward. He would often exchange duties with Spellman, saying that he did not mind working nights—that in fact he preferred such duties to those of the daylight hours. Every man to his own tastes!

Spellman’s room at the institute was on the ground floor—one of four bed-living-room combinations—separated from the two mental wards on the same floor by reinforced, soundproofed walls. With the recruiting of nurses at Oakdeene going badly, two of the four “living-in” rooms were empty. The other occupied room belonged to one Harold Moody, a fully-trained, middle-aged mental nurse whose partial deafness was certainly no handicap in living directly above Hell; the flooring of the ground-floor quarters was definitely
not
soundproof! Not that the sounds from below bothered Spellman often, but he did notice that Hell’s inmates were always exceptionally vociferous whenever Alan Barstowe was on night-duty; and at those times the screams, moans, and gibberings from the basement ward seemed to penetrate the stone floor beneath his bed with an insistence that bothered him inwardly as well as keeping him physically awake often until four and five in the morning.

Eventually there came a time when the student and Barstowe were detailed for night-duty together, and frankly the younger man was not at all happy with the arrangement. For all Barstowe’s apparent amicability, and quite apart from the contours of his face and body, there was something ugly about the man. And yet the evening shift started quite normally at 9:00 P.M., with nothing in Barstowe’s manner to substantiate Spellman’s feelings or cause him any untoward concern.

The orders for night-duty included the stipulation that each ward would be visited—each cell, room, and occupant checked and, as far as possible, inspected once every hour. Martin Spellman had been detailed for duty in the lower wards and Hell, while Barstowe had the upper wards and the rooms of the quieter, less permanent inmates. At 11:00 P.M., when the student nurse was about to descend for the second time to the dreaded basement ward with its padding-muted gibberings, curses and moans, he was hailed from above as he stood at the top of the stone steps.

“Young Spellman! Hold on a minute,” the guttural voice of the froggish Barstowe came down to him. Looking up towards the first-floor landing, the trainee saw the squat man making his way quickly down the stairs. In his hand Barstowe carried what looked like a black stick, about eighteen inches long and with a silver tip.

As he descended, the nurse saw Spellman staring at his weapon and held it closer to his body, concealing it as best he could. “Come prepared, I always say,” he muttered with a strained grin as he came to a halt beside the trainee. “Look, Martin,” he quickly changed the subject, “I know you don’t care much for the lower wards and Hell—so if you fancy I’ll stay down here and you can carry on upstairs. I was just about to do Ward Four—so if you’d care to—”

“Ward Four? I wouldn’t mind—but what’s
that
for, Barstowe?” Spellman pointedly indicated the stick which the older man had almost managed to hide in the clinical white folds of his smock. “I mean, it’s not as though they were about to break out!”

“No,” Barstowe answered, turning his eyes down and away, “it’s just that I feel more…more comfortable down there with a stick. You never know, do you?”

As Spellman climbed the stairs he retained in his mind’s eye a mental picture of that stick of Barstowe’s. If one of the officers got to know of the weapon, Barstowe would be in serious trouble. Not that the squat nurse could do the inmates any harm with the thing—if threatened through the bars of a spy-hole, an occupant would. only have to move to the back of his cell to be out of harms’s way—no, obviously it was as Barstowe had explained; his stick was simply a comforter.

Nonetheless, Spellman could not help but remember those screams he listened to deep into the night whenever Barstowe was on duty in the basement ward. The funny thing was that later that night—even on the second floor, in the open rooms of the more trusted patients and in the corridors between those comparatively homely billets—the trainee nurse could
still
hear those muted, tortured echoes from Hell….

• • •

Towards the end of October Martin Spellman’s reading and studying for his book had taken a turn toward rather more specialized cases: in particular aberrations apparently influenced by imaginary or hallucinatory “outside” forces. He had seen definite connections in a fair number of reasonably well authenticated cases—connections which were especially interesting inso far as they depicted almost carbon-copy fancies, dreams, and delusions in the afflicted parties.

There was for instance the very well documented case of Joe Slater, the Catskill Mountains trapper, whose lunatic actions in 1900-01 had seemed governed not by the moon but rather by the influence of a point or object in the heavens much farther out than the orbit of Earth’s satellite. The authenticity of this case, however, seemed to Spellman spoiled by its chronicler’s insistence that Slater was in fact inhabited by the mind of an alien being. Then there was the German Baron, Ernst Kant, who, before his hideous and inexplicable death in a Westphalian Bedlam, had believed his every insane action controlled by a creature he called Yibb-Tstll; described as being “huge and black with writhing breasts and an anus within its forehead, a black-blooded
thing
whose brains feed upon its own wastes….”

More recently there was Dr. David Stephenson’s recorded observations of one J. M. Freeth, a female zoophagous maniac whose declared intention was to
absorb
as many lives as she could. This she set about, like Bram Stoker’s Renfield, by feeding flies to spiders, spiders to sparrows, and finally by devouring the sparrows herself! She, too, as with the maniac in Stoker’s story, had been refused a cat once her intentions were quite clear! Her odd fancies had been part and parcel of her belief that she had watching over her a supernatural “God-creature” who would eventually come to release her. Miss Freeth’s obsessions and her “life-devouring” mania were far from unique, and the student collected and recorded a number of similar cases.

Again, this time from the records of a certain Canton madhouse in America, Spellman culled the horrible story of an innate who had been, before his escape and subsequent disappearance some seven years previously in 1928, completely sure of his immortality and of the fact that he would “dwell in Y’hanthlei amidst wonder and glory forever….” His destiny (he was righteous in his self-assurance) was governed by “the Deep Ones, Dagon, and Lord Cthulhu”—with the former of which he would serve in the worship and glorification of the latter—whoever or whatever these names were supposed. to signify! There was, though, a clue to this last poor unfortunate’s aberrations. He was pronouncedly ichthyic in appearance, with protuberant eyes and scaly skin, and it was believed that these physical abnormalities had led him to dwell too often and too long over certain obscure myths and legends involving oceanic deities. In this connection it seemed likely that his “Dagon” was that same fish-god of the Philistines and Phoenicians, sometimes known as Oannes.

So Spellman’s studies grew more specific as the weeks passed, but he little dreamed that in a certain cell in Hell there resided a man whose case was as odd as any he had so far collected for his book….

• • •

In mid-November, knowing something of the new direction his pupil’s studies were taking, Dr. Welford invited Spellman to read the case-file of Wilfred Larner, usually one of the quieter residents of Hell but a man who could swiftly turn from a reasonably controlled individual to a raging, savage animal. Larner’s case, too, seemed to have had its genesis in those “outside” regions which so fascinated the student nurse.

Thus it happened that in his room above the basement ward Martin Spellman first came into close contact with Larner’s file, and from the first he became absorbed with the thing; particularly with those mentions of a certain “Black Book”—a thing called the
Cthaat Aquadingen
—purported to relate to the raising of water- and ocean-elementals and other “demons” of more obscure origins. Apparently this book was one of the main causes of Larner’s rapid mental decline some ten years previously; and, according to the file, its hints, suggestions, and the occasional blatantly blasphemous “revelation” could scarcely be considered safe reading for any man with a delicately balanced mind.

Spellman could hardly be blamed for not recognizing the title:
Cthaat Aquadingen,
for the book was known only to a scattered handful of men, most of them erudite antiquarians or students of rare and ancient works, some of them students of darker things: the occult sciences! Indeed, only five copies of the work in various forms existed in the whole world at that time; one in the private library of a London collector; one under lack and key—along with the
Necronomicon,
the
G’harne Fragments,
the
Pnakotic Manuscripts,
the
Liber Ivonis,
the dread
Cultes des Goules,
and the
Revelations of Glaaki
—in the British Museum, and two of the others in even more obscure and inaccessible places. The fifth copy: that one was soon to fall into Spellman’s unwitting hands.

But this book aside, during his decline and before his sister committed him to the institute’s care, Larner had also assembled something of a Fortean collection of cuttings from newspapers all over the world; cuttings which, especially if considered as from the often narrow viewpoint of a disordered psyche, might take on all sorts of disturbing aspects.

Spellman wondered just where the institute had gained its often detailed information regarding the events leading to Larner’s confinement; and in this he was lucky, for enquiries with Dr. Welford the next morning led him to discover that Larner’s sister had placed
all
documents relevant to her brother’s derangement in the hands of the institute’s alienists. Both Larner’s cuttings-file and his “
Cthaat Aguadingen”
(a great sheaf of stapled foolscap pages in Larner’s own handwriting; presumably copied from some other work) were still safely stored in a cupboard in Oakdeene’s spacious administrative offices—and Dr. Welford was not adverse to the idea of placing them, for a few days at least, at Spellman’s disposal.