AUGUST 1895 SAINT DENIS, LEMOYNE
Galen unfurled a crumpled paper found stuffed inside a stack of medical notes. The writing was so shaky as to be almost illegible in places, but still he recognized it as his own. It was dated to a few months prior.
June 30th, 1895
There is a saying – “Be careful what you wish for” – that I find treacherously ironic at present. I will recount here, to the best of my ability, the events of the past few weeks.
Dr. Yamino was his name. He claimed to be a writer and professor. Perhaps this was true, perhaps not, but I will never know because despite my personal interest in the matter, I did not have the privilege of meeting the man on any academic terms.
It began as a simple wound dressing, but would soon descend into a nightmare better suited for publication in a penny dreadful. Dr. Yamino – then only an unknown male – came into my office wearing a mask complaining of an injury. I know it seems foolish to allow a masked individual into my midst with such reckless abandon; however, I stand by my principle to accept any patient under the conditions that they make it worth my while, and those rare patients who feel the need to wear a mask are frequently those who do, in fact, make it worth my while – monetarily speaking, of course. I have no shame in this. My discretion is already guaranteed by law, so I cannot be bribed; nonetheless, I will naturally accept any offered payment to secure their… peace of mind.
The man was dubious from the start, but I treated him as I would any other possible threat – to perform my duties with minimal query or conversation and send him on his way. Yamino, however, queried me instead. He asked me about my faith and my education. Despite the red-lensed black mask he wore, I could plainly discern the color and texture of his hair, and judged him likely to be of Oriental descent. In my treatment of him, I also noted the particular color of his skin, the hue and texture of which supported my notion that he may be from the East. While I worked, I answered his inquiries to the fullest of my ability, little suspecting that they were no exercise in academic curiosity, but rather a snare designed to take the measure of his quarry.
He waited until I turned my back to spring upon me. I reached for my pistol, but could not reach it. I was a whole head taller than him, so I was caught off guard at the strength with which he held me. I fought back and briefly broke free long enough to shove him and pull one pistol from my waist, but he was swift and knocked it to the floor. As I dove for it, he tackled me to the ground, gagged me, and placed a bag over my head. I cried out, but to no avail.
He picked me up and hauled me atop a horse, and I could tell by the sound of its hooves on cobblestone that we must have been headed Northward out of the city. The noise underfoot shifted to the sound of sand, then mud, then hollow wood as we passed over the bayou boardwalk. I heard the rustle of trees and knew we had to be approaching Roanoke, but with my vision obscured, I had no means of divining our precise location. After removing me from the horse, he laid me upon the grass and stripped away my clothing and personal effects, until I was left in only my undergarments.
Then everything was quiet. When I decided he had left me, I managed to wrest my hands from my bindings and pull the bag from my head. Before me was a dilapidated shack strung with human skulls and a letter that made my blood run cold.
The letter, which was expertly penned in elegant calligraphy, impressed upon me the rules of this terrible game. I was to be hunted, and my sole hope lay in discovering the location of my belongings hidden somewhere close at hand. Should I succeed, I would secure not only my possessions, but my very life.
I dearly wish I could forget the long minutes that followed, but they are inexorably burned into my memory. The sun sank low behind the Valley’s rolling hills, and there I glimpsed the light of a house in the distance. I raced towards it, hoping to find help within, and as I did, I was besieged by the retort of arrows impacting trees and earth around me. About 40 meters from the front door that held my salvation, one of the arrows I had thus-far managed to evade finally flew true into its target. The impact alone made my knees buckle, and I think I fell forward into the grass, but I cannot be entirely sure.
What I remember distinctly, though, was the outline of his silhouette against the evening sky and those bright red lenses looming over me as he took his knife to my chest. Thirteen times he cut me, each time hearkening to an invisible Devil. At some point, I no longer felt the pain, but a dull throbbing and the cold pressure of his blade.
I remember fading in and out of consciousness until I reached the hospital where I am told that I verbally instructed Ranger Boone how to stabilize me. I do not recall this. Dr. Fox was dispatched soon after and arrived here two days later wherein she removed the arrow from my chest and tended to my wounds.
Her optimism is a welcome salve, I daresay, misplaced though it may be. I know I have contracted an infection, and I understand how unlikely it is that I will survive it. Still, I am eternally grateful for Dr. Fox’s help.
The doctor smoothed the page into his notebook. The writing was not eloquent nor orderly, but a fitful rush of thought that he had scrawled into the paper as if the sooner it was relayed the sooner it would cease to haunt him, or perhaps some final effort to tell the story before he met his end.
Thoughtfully, he gazed out the window into the streets for some time, listening to the bustle of the city in summer. Out there were thousands of people who lived in ignorance to the kind of horror he’d seen. At times he thought he envied them until he remembered that their lives were largely insignificant, small, and would amount to nothing of note.
To achieve greatness is to suffer, he thought. And what great suffering I have endured. I should be thanking you, professor, just as I thanked young Blackwood.
He touched his chest where the bandages had recently been removed. He had healed, but the scars were unfortunate. Yamino had cut him so deep as to sever muscle tissue, leaving him incredibly weak, so weak from fever and injury that he had not been able to return to work. Instead, he had spent the weeks since his release from the hospital holed up in his apartment, deep in a drug-induced haze.
Languidly, he picked up his pen and turned the page under a strange compulsion to close out the rest of the saga.
August 15, 1895
Either I did not know it at the time or I was too ill to record it, but Dr. Yamino was arrested the very same day Diana Fox operated on me and saved my life - the 16th of June. They told me he confessed to his crimes, but there was already no doubt in my mind who he was. The Mythology Murderer we had been calling him – a killer who marked his crimes with a perverted recounting of local folklore or legend. A hackneyed attempt at theatre if you ask me.
At the time of my attack, I had not plainly seen it, but now I can recall the exact clues that would have pieced together the legend he had chosen to paint my death. If it hadn’t been so harrowing, I might have even found it humorous! The creature in question was none other than the The Devil of Leeds, for it is plain to see now that Yamino had been the one to leave the number thirteen inscribed in my office, and he who had decorated the shack with twelve human skulls – my own, surely, to be the intended final installment, and he who chittered incessantly about the Devil in New England. I am, however, an actual Englishman, so I daresay it is very nearly insulting.
But perhaps I have become a snob about my would-be killers. How singular, indeed, that I have survived not just one mass murderer, so many that I could, with some amount of absurdity, rank them in order of preference. Either I am protected by some inscrutable Providence – unlikely – or the machinations of these killers are nothing short of puerile. As I am a skeptical man, I tend towards the latter.
His hand trembled as he finished writing the last word. Six months of hard-earned sobriety had been rendered for naught during his long recuperation. His decades of chemical vice had resulted in a high tolerance to traditional draughts, so Dr. Fox struggled profusely to procure a combination of medicines that would ease the pain enough to help him sleep and not risk death from acute toxicity. Now, weeks into his healing, he had promised to take only as much as he needed to cope, but that promise was broken before it had even left his lips.
From the wooden box on his bedside table he retrieved a silver syringe. He drew up that damnable elixir that would calm his mind and steady his hands. He cursed himself as he pushed the needle into his arm, squeezed the plunger, and sank down onto the bed in resignation. He’d stared at the ceiling. If he’d been sober before, he could do it again. Just… not today.