The Howling Terror and Other Lovecraftian Horror Stories by Tony Richards

Author:Tony Richards [Richards, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Weird House Press
Published: 2022-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

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For my first six years as a practitioner of medicine, I worked out of a surgery down near the docks in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Liverpool. Such work was rewarding and yet stressful too – there was not only sickness caused by poverty and malnutrition, there was injury through brute force as an added detriment. Families lived in very cramped conditions, deprivation wore at people’s self-esteem, many of the local men were too fond of their drink and so domestic violence was a common thing. I did what I could to help, but the constant stream of poor wretched women – even children sometimes – with blackened eyes and cracked skulls and broken bones drove me into quite a depressed state after the first half decade. Add to that the grimy air of Liverpool, the soot-blackened buildings all around me, the ceaseless cacophony of traffic on the streets, the bustling crowds on almost every sidewalk, and by the time that stretch of years had elapsed I was having waking dreams of living in a cleaner and a calmer and even a kinder neighbourhood, one far removed from any great metropolis.

I had always taken in the medical journals, the Lancet and the like, and read the articles which interested me. Now I started looking at the Employment Pages too. A surgery in Birmingham needed a new resident, but Birmingham was even larger than this place. A mission in Rhodesia required some expert help, but I had not been planning to travel quite that far. I had almost given up by the time I opened a new magazine.

Trellaree, Ireland. New General Practitioner needed for long-standing and well-respected Community Practice.

My gaze stopped there for quite a while. I had never once considered Ireland, but did it not seem to offer all the pleasant qualities that I had long been yearning for? There was a phone number at the bottom of the page. I called it, was summoned for an interview with three representatives of the relevant medical board, and was immediately offered the post, with a decent wage and with a place to live thrown in. At the age of thirty-one I had no wife, my work had left me with too little time for many friends, the flat I lived in was a rented one, and so the move abroad was simplicity itself.

Now here I was … only to be almost instantly confronted with this deeply puzzling piece of information.

“Disappeared? But how?” I asked.

“Everyone’s still trying to figure that one out.”

But Mrs Flannery could see that that was hardly a sufficient explanation, so she went on to fashion me with her own theories.

“Doctor Stokes, the sweet soul that he was, was getting on in years the way that the less lucky of us do, if you get my meaning there. And the past year or so, his mood was getting darker too. Troubled and depressed is what I’m trying to say. He’d sit at the window of his study gazing out to sea for hour after hour, even long after the sun had set.

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