The Patient Report of the Nurse
Specialist Nurse has seen everything of you, hasn’t she Dove? Yet she couldn’t keep you alive. Mud-gened reject! Specialist Coroner would be a far more apt title! Look at how she speaks of you. Each note casts my heart in iron and puts a twist in my torso. I won’t be reading this one any further.
Miskatonic Occult Literature Library & Unusually Special Collections
(MOLLUSC Dept.)
“Whatever may happen, let it be only for the very best.”
Ice-clotted veins and an inconsolable shake. Red stripes skip across my knuckles and dot my lips. All said, it’s nothing short of a healthy response to the air of Bethes Clinic.
A coffin of the ill, sick and depraved, nestled in the bowels of Eldra’s grandiose library. Not a space for the public eye, the decor is rather minimalist. The stone floors are cool on the feet, dyed with whatever fluids the patients can’t hold to themselves. The barred doors of the operating rooms are chafed with rust, though less so as of recent. I’ve found the chips useful in the creation of wards, and also quite delicious.
Ah, and the bulbs are lazy! Never able to keep light long enough to complete a round. Yet in spite of any misgivings, the fact remains that the clinic is my home, it’s patients my kin ‘n I will see to it that they fly the nest with mended wings, hopefully without return. I’m no Seward, but what possible to do is done, all wrapped in the preserving blanket of frost.
Alas, my name is not mine alone. The title of Specialist Nurse belongs also to the bitter chrysalis that carts me both sick and dead from sun’s glow to the far dark.
Creaking along oil slicked rails that trace the far corners of the back end halls is my other me, the one that holds my birth name and my once-then title of ‘Bookkeeper’ who now also shares my title of Nurse be it only by way of a tool. It is the once-me, my leatherskinned self, which makes itself most prominent across the halls. It is ‘The Body.’ The unsleeping, ironnecked ascetic with sunken, tired eyes that have seen every figure inside and out. Toe to torso wrapped and layered in pelts ripped and torn and sewn together into a spacious carryall. Yes, even his own skin had been recycled into a tool of medical practice. And it is every day that he is strung along and led to the meek and the ill that cry out for Specialist Nurse.
I hear stories from the new-bloods on high. The whispers meant to stay among themselves and the rumors which warn of the bagged reaper, called playfully ‘The Coffin Nurse,’ spiriting away those which wander where a human figure would not fit. Those voices are loose, cycling such tales frequently. Yet it is the hushed and hurried voices of the left behind that are privy to the particulars not openly writ. They warn the new-bloods of a great exchange found in the MOLLUSC depths. A pact which in itself holds the price and promise within. It is spoken of as the inexorable for those that fall and the blood which grows stale within the library. Yes, Specialist Nurse is not two beings, but three.
Specialist Nurse, the Feared Nurse, is also the Nurse of Promise, the Cradle Nurse, and the Ringed Nurse. Her wires trace all corners of Bethes Clinic, I’d trip over them far more often if it weren’t for the droning hum of electric life pouring through each tightly wound cable. They are pathways to the end of oneself. Curling downward to the place where not even light dares to reach, sequestered in the bottom of the Library mounted in darkness and swirling in steam is my final self. The last me, the last (to be of) you, the last of those who wished to be but never were. It is a cavern as dark as pitch and as wide as to where not a single step has ever been echoed. It is the only point within Bethes Clinic that still carries warmth, with scalding steam bursting from the great heart entrenched in its metal shell. The scent of boiled meat leaking from within. It is only when I lay my hands upon Specialist Nurse that I can hear the throes of the newly promised which stir within. Those who’ve lost cause stew amongst themselves in the beating womb. Some of the still-lives beat the walls. Delicate human fists thumping feeble murmurs that echo inside. Each knock growing dimmer as flesh is stripped from bone and soul is stripped from body. Young or old, Eldra’s sacred offerings, the Dumah, will rise from their dormancy this one time, when all the misguided are one, and they will sing and squirm and writhe until they too become one with the mix. And finally, once the heart beats its last and the steam is settled, when the icy winds blow through into the deepest halls and the extant hum of my cables is all that rolls, when the lives of one hundred unfortunates and one hundred gifts are gathered as one, a promise is born.
Not like a man, not a Specialist, and lacking the capabilities to become either. A promise bears no name for no singular title would be found ample for the congregation. It has not much more than you to its form, yet holds the ability and processes of all encompassing itself. Traded souls pitter out to the floor to be lost forever among smoke as only a body one hundred strong remains. A promise or ghoul or daemon or whatever it’s to be called in your language has not what a single man once held in intellect save for cases extraordinary. As the ocean’s womb or the swirling sea of stars above, a promise’s shape is never fixed. There are those which swim in the tanks of the Sanzu Aquarium Wing and those which preside eternally beyond the outskirts of Gehenna Quarter, forever ousted from even the most private niches within the vast expanse of the Library. In rare cases, they dawn masks, if a mask would fit them, and they return to their work. Diligent and autonomous like cells or colonus insects. In truth, not a single promise has met a fortunate end. They are made to be broken and to dissuade the poison that is devotionless apotheosis which has swallowed far too many since its’ initial outbreak to date or hold in memory. The formation of a promise is the greatest mercy that we can provide any Bookkeeper lest the squandered offerings take them for itselves. And it is a simple cruelty to see a would-be off in such a crude manner. Dignity is utmost in the MOLLUSC department, at times more so than our safety…
Perhaps that was where Alexandria Dove’s umbrage began? The most prominent example of devotionless apotheosis happened to occur in the once-foreseen heritor to her department. Alexandria Dove, known then as no more than a Bookkeeper, had a very soft heart (I’d see it later in her autopsy.) It was some time in the dawning years of Eldra’s reign following her succession of the late and former Head Librarian Ea himself that a copper-locked bookkeeper fell to her side and shattered the delicate porcelain laid in her soles. Curious to all, she had no debt to pay, that in both senses.
She lay at rest for three days and three nights swaddled in the thin sheets of the clinic bed. I was set to pronounce her dead if had she not risen on that third day with feathers in her teeth. Dove the Bookkeeper was a vegan by choice, I’d learn. She'd not once partaken in a single meal since the scuff of her employment and had since fasted for what neared to be forty days. Not roe, not the clams scarfed and enjoyed heartily by voices above, not even the Head Librarian’s sacred offering had passed her lips in the time of her orientation. It was that abstinence which stayed her from assimilation. While pleased to see her among the still-lives it brought a clot of worry to the forefront. The cafeteria holds not more than seafood and none in-library alternatives are offered. With the sheer scope of each floor she’d liably fall to starvation fore finding a single crumb to eat. I began to fear she’d find herself among the earth in Gehenna Quarter… but it struck me then!
It was soon after that I found myself, my other self, at the foot of the precipitation room. A lyceum, cylindrical in shape, with deep blue walls and a glassy floor dotted with drain holes in its outer layer which sat reflecting each of the tens of thousands of raindrops that drizzled down each second, rolling off of the figure which stood unmoving at its core. A shadowed lump of clay formed into a wisened, spindly shape which had stood undershower since Miskatonic University held its days in Salem. For the decades I’d known of him and perhaps for many more, he’d chip pieces off in stillness, letting the soft tides carry them far away. Far from the city drains to the great Atlantic and back as the beaten, dusted specks were carried through the pipes and poured from the showers shelled in droplets and bursting over his back before they found themselves settled right back into his body. He’d say it made him a better man, a more worldly type for each flake of him that crossed the globe. It was a journey of stillness that lasted beyond any human lifetime. He’d been known once before as Briar Samson. Today, he is Specialist Poet.
It is only a wisened sort such as Specialist Poet that would be able to parse the flowers of Gehenna without also becoming one in turn. The nature of a Specialist is to fit where humanity would not and it is our devotion to our Head Librarian which allows us to take the shape most suited to our function. However, there is no endpoint in apotheosis. We are all in a paced, methodical evolution which will span for as long as one reigns above all else within the Library. My time then was young, my present body too, fragile. Resembling then more Human than the Arcanus, I held fear to be satisfying of neither. Thrice incomplete. Under Eldra’s rule, I am deemed for the role in body-mending and yet my appointment then came at what felt to be all too soon. Still, I persist in the iced down corridors whist my wheeled self, the Holding Nurse, is at eyes with the final remaining disciple of the late and former Head Librarian Ea.
Specialist Poet is an Arcanus one. His presence is felt at the immediate when his existence is acknowledged within any mind. It is as a heavy downpour within the brain, top to toes caked in clay and feeling with each step that one’s body is being slowly washed away. These days, is a grave sin to approach one who derives their enlightenment from faith in a former. By Head Librarian Eldra Echo’s rule, they are secluded to restricted sections with not a word to be spoken of their being. All tomes authored by Arcanus Specialist Poet and the ones who derived erudition from the former Head Librarians had as well been archived in great secret somewhere deep in isolation shortly after Head Librarian Eldra Echo took reign. It is told to be inaccessible to all but our Head Librarian and the one or ones trusted to maintain her order. Bookkeepers have dubbed that practice ‘The Silent Burning.’ And had I not been a Specialist myself, I’d have surely fallen to the Dumah for what I’d done next.
Arcanus Specialist Poet does not speak to me for I am not worthy. That is the understanding I accepted from his first silence.
Arcanus Specialist Poet is unbothered by the will of Head Librarian Eldra Echo. It is in recognition of that which allows me to be in the presence of his voice.
Arcanus Specialist Poet speaks to no living being, but to all the rain and all the earth with which it falls upon. It is in allowing that truth which stays his hand from weaving me undone.
Arcanus Specialist Poet allows for no recounting of his direct word. It is in promising that which allows me to make a request of him.
Arcanus Specialist Poet will venture into the outskirts of Gehenna Quarter to retrieve herbage for Bookkeeper Alexandria Dove once each week. It is in offering my first self that our pact is made.
Foliage from Gehenna Quarter is incredibly toxic to nearly all forms of life. Hate, agony, and defeat cycle through soil and through all corners of the garden lay a blanket of their airthickened gloom which coated each step. Those who have committed acts unforgivable are swallowed within, their malice reborn as blossoms. Only the Arcanus, ones who have made peace with this world and all beyond it, may trespass into that garden of sinners. In Specialist Poet’s discovery, when he knelt at the edge of the anguished and plunged his hands to their roots, he felt atonement.
‘Roots of Gehenna’ is the name I’d given to the meal I’d feed to Bookkeeper Alexandria Dove for the duration of her time as a Human. Each Sunday morning after dawn’s break I’d find a bundle of human blossoms on the operating table and I as the present Nurse would pluck the stringy, bitter roots and taste that they were safe for my patient. Dove as she were showed little complaint and would go on to advance to the ranks of the Specialists before disfiguring half of the department’s Bookkeepers. The talonfooted who remained would mourn her passing before falling to the Dumah soon thereafter. No promises could be made for them.
Alexandria Dove was the first human saved under my care. For centuries after I would become well acquainted with corpses. For the Bookkeepers that came after her, a single trip to the far below would often end in autopsy. Not for lack of expertise, I’ve got bodies tailored for medicine, and well refined they are now. But those juvenile, the unblossomed, they’ve got a fragile frame. Much so to the degree I’d once believed there to be no living soul left to walk the halls and read the tomes we take such pride in preserving.
It was only in the rise of a late generation when a sling of two boys fresh from their orientation had spilt over themselves at the foot of the clinic that I would be forever changed as to how I’d come to view our current youth. Sturdy ones, the elder of two was eager to schedule additional appointments after his first treatment and pleaded for hidden medicines and magics that did not exist. After his discharge I saw none of him until after his promotion to Assistant Producer. He visited only once after and humbly requested that I pierce every pore and allow for the blood to drain from his body entirely. When declined, he bowed and took his leave. There are rumors now from the elder-bloods of a man with the properties of an insect and an impetuous generation soon coming. I hope our Head Librarian will allot what spare funds can be parted with for some extra clinic beds. Such things are sorely needed since the younger has acclimated…
A hospital is a place of healing, not respite. Peace is found within literature and it is the novelties of human expression that is one of this world’s greatest treasures. There is not a single soul I’ve known in the MOLLUSC Department or those departments which came before it who’d prefer beds to books. It is that which wilders me greatly by the fact that my patient today has met with me now seven times. An excitable Bookkeeper who calls himself a Specialist. And I, to him, an idiot.
Bookkeeper Novelist, as self-ascribed, has a fatal allergy for scattered particles. Its symptoms, as he’s diagnosed, start with a dreadfully weak feeling in the knees coupled with mental fogginess and a crushing sense of apathy when organizing shelves. These symptoms, as he’s eager to remind me, manifest within about thirty minutes of exposure to any and all scattered particles within the Library and thus it is ‘of the highest level of importance’ that Bookkeeper Novelist indulge in frequent repose through routine wanderings of the MOLLUSC Department to ‘shake out the bad air’. Strange, it strikes me. I’ve seen centuries through my other eyes and yet Miskatonic Library never ceases its deluge of enigmas. When Bookkeeper Novelist’s initial medical report spoke nothing of any chronic illnesses, here within days of his employment he is fervently declaring to me a string of ailments completely foreign to any I’ve studied and with consistent refusal to give consent for any medical testing. The only method of effective treatment, he’s proclamated, is to escape the Library entirely and meditate for several hours per day on the University rooftop, in the heart of Gehenna Quarter.
“Are you sure the air of Gehenna will not rot your lungs?” I asked once.
“Not at all! It’s the freshest I’ve ever breathed.”
He spoke without hesitation before discharging himself early yet again. Bookkeeper Novelist never likes to wait long enough for me to finish with his sewing and bandages. . .
Last, once more, Bethes Clinic is at rest. Lullabies of my final self ring from flower-wreathed cables, and a fresh bouquet lies on the table.
