Did you know that the average human body contains about 206 to 213 bones? Except for the body I just did an autopsy on, on behalf of the city. That deceased woman had about 345 pieces of human bone in her body, most of the excess bones being found in her stomach. 

These are the recordings of Doctor Cornelius Plink.

A town worker has been going around, checking the electrical connections from the street poles to the individual houses, ostensibly to make sure that they are safe. I do find it somewhat disconcerting though that he brought Bishop Tantrum along, and has the Bishop perform a miniature exorcism at each connection before they move on.

A wealthy couple brought in their son today, insisting that he has some kind of ailment that is making him bloat. This is not the first time I’ve seen the child. At the parents’ insistence, I’ve run just about every kind of non-invasive test known to medical science. The stark truth is that the child has been allowed to develop horrendous eating habits, and is severely overweight. Nobody can eat that many snakes and not put on a few extra pounds.

Some nights back, I was unable to sleep. I am sometimes plagued by nightmares born of my time in the war. Once they set in, I know that I won’t be able to sleep again that night. I tried reading, then catching up on paperwork, but I found myself completely restless. Fidgety, if you will, filled with an aggravating itchy kind of energy that finally drove me to get dressed and head out into the night.

It was quite cold, and snow was coming down. I was the only one stirring, and I found the snow-born silence comforting in a way. I let my mind drift to all that had happened in the past few months; they probably tended towards my recent interactions with Miss Weetamoo, my housekeeper, and Miss Hooty Commonprance, dancer and would-be nursing assistant. I was mired in those thoughts when I looked up and realized that I was at the park at Armitage and Federal. I’m sure you’re quite familiar with it.

A new unbroken blanket of snow laid across the playground equipment, the rolling grass lawns, the benches... everywhere except that dead patch of earth. Stepping closer, I saw that the patch had multiple footprints in the surrounding snow, and the snow itself had been shovelled clean. But it was not merely the snow that had been shovelled away, oh no. From the look of things, the frozen earth had recently been broken up with spades and picks. Someone had been digging here.

What was more, there was a hump of earth set to one side. Displaced earth.  It led me to the conclusion that something had recently been buried here. Perhaps even earlier that very night. Judging from the size of the mound of excess dirt, whatever was buried there, it is roughly the size of a full-grown man.

I am exhausted today. I am one of the few medical professionals in the town. Most leave town after a year or two. It’s good for my practice, since I’m the only G.P. in town. But of course, it’s an overwhelming amount of work. I would take a vacation, but that would practically be leaving Arkham without a general practitioner. And of course, things aren’t made any easier by the fact that I cannot find a suitable nursing assistant.

Take the latest applicant, a Miss Berkshire out of Boston. She travelled down by train from Boston for an interview. That, apparently, was a mistake. Because when her train pulled into the station, it was parked next to that odd black train that seems to always be filled with screaming passengers. Whatever Miss Berkshire saw through that train’s windows, it was enough to send her right back up to Boston.

If I ever do manage to get a proper assistant, I am going to have to pay them so much money.

People got rid of their Christmas trees, generally back in January. Apparently the Christmas trees didn’t care for it, and they’re letting us know about it.

How are you doing these days, my friends? Are you keeping to your New Years’ resolutions? Are you looking forward to the breaking of spring? Do any of you know anything about nursing? I’ll pay you amounts you wouldn’t believe.

I think my exhaustion is catching up with me. Last night as I was trying to get to sleep, without much success, I heard a tapping at my house’s back door. It took me some moments to realize that it actually was tapping, it was so quiet. Quiet, but persistent.

I gathered my robe and went down, grabbing my favourite heavy candlestick for protection. It’s not likely that a typical patient emergency would bring someone to my back door. Considering that I had been threatened by bootlegger violence in the past, I think you’ll understand my caution.

I peeked out from my dining room, but saw nobody at my back door. Yet the tapping continued. I went to the kitchen and opened the door a crack. I saw nobody. Then I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard something squeak down by my feet.

It was the library guinea pig, the one with the enlarged brain. He was wearing a knitted hat and a sweater, I suppose taken from toys. They would certainly be necessary for such a tropical creature to be out in cold weather.

He was holding something up at me between his two front paws. I reached down and took it. The guinea pig gave me another squeak and a jaunty wave with a paw, then sped off into the night.

I looked at the thing in my hand. It was a vial filled with a slightly milky liquid. Opening it up, I took a sniff. I don’t think I’d ever smelled stronger moonshine in my life. Not that I was an expert on the subject, mind you.

I analyzed the liquid the next day. It was indeed a potato-based alcohol mixed with narcotic powder. In other words, an ad-hoc sleeping potion. You know your exhaustion has breached respectable limits when a drug-peddling rodent brings you something to help you sleep.

You are perhaps wondering why I am called on by the city to do so many autopsies. I am, after all, a general practitioner, not a medical examiner. Arkham, while not the biggest town in Massachusetts, has more than its fair share of suspicious deaths. Honestly, it has more than half a continent’s fair share of suspicious deaths, but I digress. The point is, our town has enough work for a full-time medical examiner or three. So why doesn’t Arkham have one?

It did. It has had many medical examiners on the books, going back decades. In fact, Arkham was one of the first locations in the world to have a job dedicated to examining dead bodies for unusual causes of death. There’s just one problem – they keep going insane.

Arkham Asylum currently plays host to not one, but five gentlemen who were previous official medical examiners for our city. It becomes even stranger, because all of them claim to have seen maps of a, quote, “nameless city”, lost in some desert. I don’t understand it at all – how does one see a desert in coils of glistening wet intestines?

I am, of course, concerned that taking on the occasional autopsy will eventually lead to my own madness. I haven’t seen a lost city yet, hidden in the fold of some recently deceased person’s brain. Still, the fear of madness remains... Ah well, the pay is good.

On a related note, my god morticians make a killing in this town.

You may be wondering why I keep shifting my description of Arkham between the designations of “town” and “city”. The two words do, after all, hold somewhat different meanings. I believe a town becomes recognized as a city when it reaches a population of somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand souls.

And that’s where the trouble of defining Arkham pops up. It’s a bit of a problem, defining a location’s population, when that population’s number can suffer immense explosions or implosions on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis.

Do snowfalls in your area ever happen to follow one person and one person only? Just wondering.

Well, here we go again with the holier-than-thou book-burners here in town. Yes, they’re after the Encyclopedia Terrorificus books again. It seems that this time, the volumes of the Encyclopedia were found piled up against the inside of the library door, as if to keep people out. The piling-on happened during the night, when even Mr Crick, the library’s janitor, had gone home after his shift. First of all, there’s no real evidence that the books piled themselves up. It’s possible it could have been a bizarre act of some kind of break-and-enter thief. And second, even if the books somehow did pile themselves up, how do we know for sure they weren’t doing it to keep us citizens away from something dangerous inside of the library? I just think we should get all of the perspectives before we leap to judgment, never mind banning books.

Regarding my ongoing state of fatigue, it occurs to me that I haven’t had a real vacation in years. Unless you count being dragged through a hellish-netherworld with an inevitable off-ramp to the state of Delaware as a vacation, which I do not. Of course, if I leave, that leaves Arkham without a general practitioner, not to mention bereft of anyone who can do a decent autopsy. I’m not sure which would hurt the town more.

Speaking of the library, when such government buildings have statues out front, they’re usually lions. Can anyone tell me what those creatures are out front of Arkham’s library? And why do they seem to have slightly shifted position every time I happen to pass by the library’s front door?

Bishop Tantrum and I have decided to take a psychiatric approach to his constant screaming. I’ve done every single physical test I can think of to find a bodily cause of his screams, all to no avail. So it’s time to turn to the Bishop’s mind. The Bishop is reluctant. I can understand, psychiatry is still in its infancy. I would be hesitant to allow adherents of such a pursuit to muck about in my mind. Still, the Bishop had to admit that officiating weddings has become quite troublesome. And baptisms? Screaming in an infant’s face while one is trying to welcome it into the fold of your religion? Forget about it.

I had to head into the Arkham Police Department to deliver an autopsy report. Usually they send an officer to the morgue in the hospital to collect the reports, but they’re all on patrol thanks to the increase in bootlegger violence. I was told to hand it to a civilian who handles evidence documents, and was told he was down washing out the cells. I went down, only to discover that there was a second subterranean floor of cells. These cells, which very much brought to mind the word “dungeon”, were quite spacious. The feature that really caught my attention though was that in each cell was a collar chained to the wall. Every collar was a different circumference. Some were no bigger than my wrist, while others would have fit comfortably around my waist with room to spare. Just who, or what, have they been holding down there in those cells? And what laws had they broken to deserve being chained up by the neck?

I was called in for another late-night autopsy. I suppose I didn’t mind, it was not like I was getting any sleep anyway. However, when I arrived at the hospital morgue I did not find a dead body waiting for me. Instead, I found a police officer lying dazed on the floor from a blow to the head, and a missing corpse.

I must admit, I was quite impressed that anyone was able to do an Arkham police officer harm by cracking him over the noggin. Our officers generally have incredibly thick skulls. Now there’s a body I would genuinely like to autopsy – an Arkham P.D. officer, to see what the ratio of skull to brain might be.

At any rate, I ended up staying just as long reporting to the investigating detective as I likely would have searching for a cause of death. 

Now, of course, we’re left with the following questions. Who burst into the morgue and assaulted the officer and stole the body? What purpose does the suspect have for the body? Or, did the “body” commit the crime itself? If so, was it ever truly dead? That last question is the one that haunts me the most.

Mr Baek Hyeon, he of the hot-dog stand, has decided to make the plunge and convert his business into a full-on store-front eatery. He was worried that a man from the mysterious Orient would not be able to make out well in an American town, but I am proud to say that I have heard nothing but support for his endeavour. Well done, Arkham! I for one will be one of the first in line when Mr Hyeon opens his doors for the first time... assuming of course Mr Hyeon manages to keep his sanity intact as he applies for his store-owner license at Town Hall.

As I end this phonograph, I am left to wonder at the bizarre events of the last few months. Arkham has always been a most unusual town, there is no doubt of it. But I feel as if events are growing closer together, and bigger, and even stranger than ever before. At the risk of sounding dramatic, it truly does feel as if something looms on the horizon. In Arkham, that is not necessarily a metaphor. Keep your eyes and ears open, dear listeners... just be sure you don’t let anything crawl into them. Until next time!

Overnight For Observation was created by Daniel Fox. Daniel is the author of the horror novel “Mash Your Motor!”