Ten

Crowe Pecks at the Past

     Dr. Crowe looked at his notes. It had been almost a week since Nancy Bishop's appointment and subsequent panic attack. He had dealt with literally dozens of other patients since then, but his mind kept drifting back to that image of Nancy screaming, scrambling backward to escape from some imaginary terror.
     It was not his first experience with a patient who suffered from hallucinatory horrors, of course. Nowadays it seemed such things were as common as twelve-step bumper stickers. He had seen worse, much worse. He flashed on that bible-obsessed woman who had tried to gouge her eyes out... "if thine eye offend thee..." He had been lucky enough to get the thorazine into her before it was too late. But what a day! Brrr.
     Nancy was different. The others had obvious, textbook, delusions and classic symptoms of various manias; unnerving, and frightening to them, but they responded promptly to the standard regimen of treatment. Drugs and t
    herapy and, if necessary, confinement. Plus more drugs. But Nancy's case was different. She had many of the symptoms of schizophrenia, right down to the mood-swings and classic paranoia; still, something about her case nagged at him. There was something not quite right, something not quite schizophrenic about her.
     She seemed almost sane.
     That was not a diagnosis, of course. "Schizotypal personality disorder" was his diagnosis. Quite within the parameter of society's definition of "insane", as a matter of fact. But there was that something...
     It had struck late one night, when a cold wind was singing under the eaves of his fifteen-room house in the suburban wilds of West Chesterberg. "Insanity is a sane mind's reaction to insane circumstances". The though had appeared in his brain unbidden, as he was drifting off to sleep, or to wakefulness...
     It was a simple thought, an obvious one even. But it was something he had not considered.
     What if her story were true?
     Not true in the sense that monsters from the ozone were coming for her, of course. That was a delusion, plain and simple. But her symptoms could be explained as a dissociative reaction to a traumatic event.
     And the murder of a close friend by a respected teacher could be just such a traumatic event.
     Especially if LSD was involved.
     Doctor Crowe had asked Nancy about past drug use in one of their preliminary sessions. She had initially said 'no', then amended that with a 'well, once or twice, in college'. This skittishness about that particular drug led Doctor Crowe to believe that she was concealing something. At the time he had thought it could have been a negative sexual experience; but in light of this new evidence, he had to consider the possibility that she had been under the influence of the drug at the time of the murder.
     If indeed there had been a murder.
     That was the trouble with delusional patients. Where did fact end and fancy begin? Was this hypothetical murder the root cause of Nancy's unbalanced state or another symptom of it, an invented, romantic event to liven up an undistinguished history. And even if the murder had actually occurred, whether or not Nancy had any direct connection to the people involved was equally undeterminable.
     He had had a discussion recently with a colleague who worked with "alien abduction" victims; that is to say, people whose minds had constructed science-fiction scenarios to replace genuine traumatic memories. The colleague had mentioned that Whitley Streiber, perhaps the most well-known "abductee", claimed early in his career to have been present at the infamous Texas Tower Sniper incident in the early 60's, though he was never mentioned in the press reports of the time; he later recanted, then recanted the recantation, the implication being that he may have concocted the story to liven up his press bio, but now is no longer able to tell fact from fiction...
     But, on the other hand, it could be considered that Streiber's "abduction" fantasies were themselves dissociative reactions to the Texas Tower trauma.
     Doctor Crowe had a mystery on his hands. And he intended to unravel it.
     And the prescription for a mystery was investigation.
     Which was how Doctor Crowe came to be in the morgue.
     The newspaper morgue, that is.
     The Arkham Daily Ledger had a cavernous basement lined with century-old bricks, and in that basement the Ledger had set up a table-lined room where the curious could research its archives. There weren't that many curious souls down here at this hour of the morning, but Doctor Crowe was certainly curious enough for a room full of 'em.
     He had hoped that the times being what they were, the information he was looking for would be on microfiche. No such luck; the Ledger had only recently begun transferring its back issues to film, and it had started at the bottom, back at the end of the previous century. The curator (or, more properly, "morgue attendant") had informed him that they were only up to the fifties at that point, and then handed him a stack of paper.
     He had decided to focus his search on the late sixties, that being the most likely time frame for Nancy Bishop's college days. He was looking for a murder, and a professor as the suspect.
     That was a lot of ground to cover.
     About 1500 issues, to be precise.
     Doctor Crowe had always had a mental image of a Newspaper Morgue as a dusty cavern redolent of old paper, a shadowy underworld of cobwebs and clippings, its Hades a bespectacled old mnemnonist in whose grizzled mind resided a photojournal of every Arkham event since the Crucifixion, from bake sales to bank robberies. He had imagined that he would walk in, say "Murder AND Professor," and be instantly handed the proper edition of the Ledger as well as an earload of recollection and gossip.
     Well, that would have been nice. He suspected that the close-cropped youth that was this particular morgue's real-life Archivist in residence might have trouble pinpointing an event as far back as oh, say, last week, unless it was an event of great import such as a World War or a new Pearl Jam single.
     On second thought, scratch the war.
     On the plus side, Arkham in the 60's was still the sort of place where a murder always made the front page. So he only had to skim page one, then discard. Resisting the urge to become distracted by interesting stories had been a challenge at first, but as pile of discarded papers grew without any clues the task began to seem so endless and the day so finite that he buckled down pretty quickly and developed a method for his search which he began to follow with almost robotic precision: pick up paper, scan headlines, discard. The only break in the routine came when he would stand and walk to the "mortician's bench" to return one pile of yellowing journalism and pick up a fresh batch.
     As the morning wore into the afternoon, Doctor Crowe's patience was starting to fray. It looked as if he had jumped full-lanced into a quixotic windmill tilt. He was beginning to believe that the "murder" had a lot in common with the Common Nesting Snipe and the Easter Bunny. It would have been prudent to to just cut his losses and consider the day wasted.There were worse things that could happen.
     Doctor Crowe didn't know it at the time, but finding what he was looking for was one of those things.
     And, at that moment, he found just that.
     His eyes were growing so tired that they had almost missed it. Page one, indeed, but it was only a small bold headline near the bottom of the page, grouped with pointers to several other stories contained within - "Killer of Student Still at Large -Pg. 5". With a sense of excitement (tempered with the knowledge that the student in question might simply be a different, unrelated homicide; college kids were always departing the earth in colorful ways, even back in the sixties) he laid the paper out on the large desk and turned the musty pages.
     Jackpot.
     "Miskatonic Killer Still at Large -Police seek Professor in death of student.
     Arkham - Local police have been unable to locate the chief suspect in the murder of a Miskatonic University student at a rock 'n' roll concert last Saturday night.
     "We are looking for Prof. Colin A. Firth," Chief Marion Arboghast confirmed yesterday. "He has apparently gone into hiding, perhaps with the assistance of underground radicals. We are examining every avenue of investigation"
     The Chief confirmed that the FBI had been contacted for assistance.
     William Smythe, a sophomore at Miskatonic University, was murdered at an off-campus concert, which had been held in the old Weisenstein Dance Hall building.
     The murder apparently occurred in front of several eyewitnesses; however, reports of the incident are confused and contradictory.
     "We believe that most or all of the witnesses were under the influence of the dangerous narcotic LSD, known in the criminal underground as 'acid' for its brain-destroying properties," Chief Arboghast explained.
     Police are releasing no other details of the killing, other than to say that it was "particularly savage," in Chief Arboghast's words.
     The suspect, Professor Firth, 41, has been a professor of Philosophy at Miskatonic University for the past decade. He is well-liked by both faculty and students, despite some off-beat ideas.
     "I can't believe it," said a student, Melissa Van Buren, 19. "Colin - Professor Firth - was just the most wonderful professor. Billy looked up to him totally, like a mentor."
     Other students remarked on the professor's offbeat yet effective teaching methods and "hip" demeanor.
     "No one can believe he killed anyone," said another student, Steve, 21. "He was so into peace. It just doesn't add up."
     Witnesses that the Ledger was able to contact gave bizarre and confusing accounts of what occurred, lending credence to Chief Arboghast's assertion that most if not all attendees of the concert, an event dubbed "The Miskatonic Acid Test" and featuring music by local band The Plasma Miasma, were under the influence of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, a powerful mind-rending "psychedelic" drug.
     "It was crazy," said one attendee, who would only identify himself as "Bilbo". "It was the powerfullest acid I ever took; the hallucinations were intense. Frightening. It'll be a long time before I take it (LSD) again."
     The event was sponsored by The Volition Coalition, a student group unaffiliated with Miskatonic University. None of the group were available for comment.
     Well, Doctor Crowe thought to himself. Very interesting. We now have names for these characters in Nancy Bishop's psychodrama.
     But there was more, he was sure of it. He turned back to the front page.
     Doctor Crowe looked at the date on the masthead. November 5, 1968. He flipped back two days in the pile. Neither of the previous two days' issues were here... the last previous issue was dated November 2, and the front page was primarily concerned with local and national elections. Nixon vs. Humphrey. What a contest.
     If the murder had occurred the previous Saturday night, then it probably didn't make the Sunday morning papers; it would have been front page news on Monday, the third.
     But he didn't have the third. Or the fourth.
     He flipped through the pile, but the all-important issues weren't there. Blast! Some conspiracy to keep him from the awful truth? No, judging by the manner of critter they hired to run things around here, human incompetence was a far more likely culprit. He had noticed one or two other out-of-sequence papers en route to this point. It was endemic; no wonder it was taking so long to transfer the morgue to microfiche. They had to locate lost papers before they could move forward.
     Well, he'd have to get up and see if the throwback behind the desk could make an expedition into the racks, a quest for the missing issues, a mission Crowe was sure his would-be Parsifal would fail. But he had to make the effort. This was growing beyond the bounds of research into the nether realms of quasi-obsession.
     Before he undertook that futile task, however, he would stay where he was and skim forward; perhaps there would be some follow-up stories, though he suspected not. Journalism in those days meant something different; a story was a story, and all the armchair analysis that so often became the meat of modern newspapering was then seen as superfluous. You thought for yourself, and the world was a better place for it. Look in the mirror, o counter-boy, and see what monsters the other way has wrought.
     He scanned the cover of November 6th... some six year old kid dropped an ice cream cone. Awww. The story might have faded from the front page by this time; Crowe flipped through the inside pages, but there was nothing beyond a notice that the Weisenstein Dance Hall would be closed until further notice, and that all currently scheduled events were to be either rescheduled or canceled.
     He became momentarily distracted by the comics page, and its oh-so-dated "current events" storylines. Dick Tracy was battling Dr. Leery Gooroo, who seemed to be trying to ensnare Junior with some sort of mind control; Mary Worth was counseling a teenaged girl about her participation in a rally of some kind; Mafioso were executing student radicals in a typically cynical "Li'l Abner" episode. A glimpse of The Asp in the Little Orphan Annie strip sent a chill up his spine, reminding him of the nightmares that ghoulish character had inspired when Crowe was a child. For solace he shifted his gaze to the more cartoony strips, "Mutt and Jeff", "Andy Capp" and their ilk.
     "Peanuts" seemed especially apropos; Lucy was sitting behind her "Psychiatric Advice" booth, listening to Charlie Brown with a bored expression, her head on her arm. Charlie Brown said, "I'm troubled by the nature of evil. Is it an unseen force that surrounds us, watching, waiting, seeking the chink in the armor of our psyche that it can swoop in and lead us to woe? Or is Evil a part of the human condition, a force that emanates from within us all?"
     Lucy's response: "Lighten up, you blockhead. Five cents, please."
     Charlie Brown's punchline: "Maybe I should try the religion booth over on the next block."
     Doctor Crowe smiled. He was a psychiatrist, but he had found here a sort of religion, or at least a calling: To discover the root truth of Nancy Bishop's murder mystery. There was evil afoot, though safely tucked in the past, and he would get to the bottom of it. Perhaps there would be a novel in it. "Doctor Crowe: Psychiatric Detective". He smiled.
     There were many more papers to go through, but he had a feeling he'd found everything useful that he would find here. But there were other places to look.
     He turned another, thinking about who they might get to play him in the movie.