The Miasma

Doctor Roach has been very understanding, he’s a good man, he tries to help me and never hesitates to let me have caustic soda.   For the last thirteen years I have used it five times a day to scrub my room.  My soul longs to expunge the rancour that haunts me but however hard I scrub it’s still there.  After I have scoured the last floorboard I soothe my hands with the creams and lotions that the good doctor has so willingly supplied, nevertheless the blood still oozes from the suppurating cracks that cover my skin.  

In my cell in the Arkham Asylum there is a small writing desk.  It is at this desk that I have decided to share with you the loathsome history of the foulness that has destroyed my life.

The first time I experienced that malignant odour was in May ’26; I was tending my vegetable garden when I noticed its queer rank bitterness.  It was a bright summer’s day.  As the wind shifted I caught just a whiff of that hideous odour.  It seemed to come from a long way away. I thought that perhaps a ditch had become blocked and the water in it had putrefied.  If the problem was with a watercourse on the adjacent Miskatonic Air Force base I knew that it would be sorted out very quickly as I was familiar with the brisk military efficiency of the taciturn men that worked there.  I was employed there myself as a janitor cleaning the laboratories.  I had to have special clearance to do even this menial work because of the top-secret research that was carried on in its grey concrete buildings.  I had passed the security checks because of my service in the first world war – I had been in front line intelligence.  The war had left me damaged physically and psychologically and now I craved the solace of a lonely existence.  I had made my home in a pitiful sharecropper’s shack some distance from the base but close enough to let me work there at night.

By the next day the smell had vanished, it had been replaced by that of the wild flowers which grew in abundance right up to the double electric fence that divided the green of the countryside from the concrete and tarmac of the base.

It was a couple of months before I noticed the hateful smell again.  I was leaving the house, first thing in the morning, to tend my garden and my senses were overwhelmed by the unutterably foul stench which caused my throat to sting.  This time the grotesque thing was that the birds had stopped singing, in fact I couldn’t see any at all. This made my flesh creep more than I cared to admit. I retreated into the house but by the afternoon everything was back to normal.  This time I enquired of the sentries at the base if the smell had come from there, they looked at me as if I had lost my mind – according to them there had been no smell.  Although the odour was hideous and strange I still clung to the idea that it was the result of decay, perhaps some unfortunate beast had died in the verdant wilderness that surrounded us and the rank odour of its fly-blown flesh had been carried to my isolated dwelling by a chance ripple of wind. A more insidious thought was that it was something that had escaped from the top-secret laboratories on the base, the ones that the scientists cleaned themselves, where I imagined that they were developing biological weapons.  It could even be a new battlefield gas of a loathsomeness straight out of the pages of the dread Necronomicon.

The next winter was the worst that I have ever experienced.  Every day there was a fresh fall of snow.  To begin with I could get into the base using my snow shoes but soon the time spent digging my way through in sub-zero temperatures and driving blizzards meant that I was confined indoors.  Then one morning so much snow that had been blown up against the door that I couldn’t even push it open.  I was ok, I could hunker down, I had plenty of fuel, food and water and could wait until the cold snap was over.

I went up to the attic and gazed out over the frozen, lifeless landscape and shivered.  I thought I might scramble out of the small garret window onto the roof and from there get to my snow shovel and clear the door.  However as soon as I opened the window the stench hit me and I reeled back.  Gathering myself I threw myself at the casement and slammed it closed.  The smell, as it surged into the room, had possessed a hideous solidity as if it were alive.  The queerest thing was that before I opened the window I hadn’t smelt anything despite the drafts that were everywhere in the rickety shack.  No, that wasn’t the queerest thing, the queerest thing was that the smell immediately vanished.

I spent the rest of the day reading and working out my next moves in my games with my numerous chess playing correspondents.  I was enjoying my enforced idleness.  I haven’t enjoyed any peace since that fateful day. 

It began that night; I woke to find a loathsome moistness on my cheek and jumped up imagining that the wind had changed, the snow was thawing and that a drip from the rickety roof had fallen onto my face.  It was just light.  Perhaps though what had landed on my cheek wasn’t just water as the the skin was stinging lustily. I peered into my mirror and saw a bright red patch where my cheek was hideously burnt as if by acid.  I splashed water on it and the pain eased. 

As the light improved I could trace yellow spots on the floor that ran in a line across my room, they were like nothing that I had seen before.  I’m a keen entomologist and thought that perhaps they were the noxious product of some exotic beetle.  There are beetles that eject acid as a chemical defence.  Such insects are unknown in this part of America but perhaps the unusual Siberian winds had blown one thousands of miles and it had crept in through the cracks between the roof shingles.

I scrubbed off the spots and having time on my hands looked everywhere for my unhuman visitor but found nothing.  I slept fitfully the next night and, in the morning, awoke to find more of the yellow spots but now they were slightly larger and composed of a sort of jelly, a jelly that seemed to slowly flow and expand as if it were welling up in multiple places from a reservoir beneath the floor.  In my horror I imagined that this foulness could be migrating from an underground fissure connected to the nearby midden where, in great gashes in the ground, the experimental animals from the base were buried in lime.  I got my wrecking bar and prised up one of the loosest of the boards, beneath it was a cavity but the slime was confined to its top surface, it seemed like it must have condensed out of the air. I cleaned up and as water touched the slime the revolting substance emitted the same unmistakable odour that had first assaulted me back in May.  There was something almost evil about it, a rasping astringency that I could only bear by binding a wet cloth across my face.  Thus protected I could manage the hideous task of cleaning up.  As I went around the shack scrubbing the floors and furniture I found that the mice had crept out of the wainscoting and died in the corners of the rooms their faces twisted, their lips pulled back to expose their teeth, their staring eyes full of blood. The contorted remains of spiders were scattered over the shelves their legs also twisted and strangely deformed.

As evening returned I began to dread the monstrous things that would happen whilst I slept.  Pacing the room with limbs that felt heavier and heavier, drinking mug after mug of scalding coffee, each less effective than the one before, my eyes red and sore from the smoke of my roll ups I fought the grotesqueness of the coming nightmare. 

At last sleep and the phantoms of the night overwhelmed me.  The frightful thing flowed noiselessly from one room to another wrapping itself around my fear-rigid body like a viscous wind.  Dividing and reforming within inaudible howls of pleasure its tentacles probing into every orifice, twisting, tasting, tearing, smearing its yellow excretion over every surface.  This unutterably foul putrefaction spread like petrol running, dripping, insinuating itself into every surface reeking of the crypt and of unknowable horrors.

The men from the base said that when the sentries saw me crawling towards them in the snow that they thought I was bear that had been caught in a trap and had torn off its own foot in order to free itself and which, mad with pain and lusting for revenge, was howling its way through the screaming blizzard to rip their flesh apart.  The military doctors sedated me and as soon as they could shipped me off to the asylum. 

(Inspired by a particularly intense bout of diarrhoea suffered by our dog Jiro. I love HP Lovecraft whilst accepting that his work needs serious editing to be acceptable today.)