Are churches and synagogues in other towns continuously melting? 

These are the recordings of Doctor Cornelius Plink.

A kerfuffle downtown today. A mysterious box appeared at the corner of Church and Garrison early this morning. It is a large box, about half the size of an automobile, and appears to be made out of tightly interwoven jungle vines, partial road signs, and orange hair. Orangutan, perhaps. 

Police have cordoned off the area. I tried talking to some officers at the scene, but it’s hard to get a good idea of what is going on when the other participant in your conversation can only grunt, nod, and pick bugs out of the hair of his partner.

Eventually I did manage to flag down the man in charge of the scene, an inspector or lieutenant, perhaps. I’m not sure of his rank. I do know that he had a rather resplendent uniform though. Lots of shiny buttons.

I asked him if they were planning on opening the box here. And if so, were they expecting trouble. And if they were expecting trouble, should I fetch my doctor’s bag.

The inspector or lieutenant or whatever he was shook his head and said the box was going to be transported to the countryside, where “volunteers”, and he chuckled slightly as he said that word, from the local prison would open the box in exchange for time off of their sentences.

I’ll leave them to it. I’m rather in the habit of opening boxes instead of having boxes open me. I do feel a bit bad for those prisoners that are going to attempt to open the box. I deem it unlikely that Clara Bow or Pauline Stark are going to pop out of it and give the box-opener a big hug.

I am left to wonder though... can anyone wear buttons as shiny as the inspector’s on their clothes? Or are they for police only? I’ll have to look into this.


You’ll perhaps recall that a strange man informed me that Arkham houses a hidden library, and that in that library I will find texts relating to strange illnesses and wounds that I might soon have to deal with.

The idea of that library has twisted and turned in my mind, a thought-worm in my brain-apple, so to speak. I have to find it.

My first idea was to hit up the old-timers in town. I tried Old Mister Connor Tormey, who is so old he’s practically ancient. He knew nothing about any secret library. Ditto for the Widow Adelia Saltinspice, who accused me of trying to quote “make a stuffed bird laugh” unquote with my questions about a hidden library. I don’t believe that was a compliment.

So far, no luck. And now I really want to look up the history of phrases about laughing stuffed birds.


There is a cloud following me. This is not metaphorical. It is a small cloud, no bigger than a skinny left-handed man. It is the purple of a watercolour pomegranate, and is wearing blue coveralls, much like you’d find on a mechanic. There is a sewn-on patch on the left breast of the coveralls, with the name “Bud” in red letters. I have seen this skulking cloud multiple times behind me as I’ve made my way through town the past couple of days.

Whenever I turn around, the cloud pretends to be checking out something in a store window. Having had quite enough of this, yesterday I spun about and approached the cloud directly, demanding to know its business in a no-nonsense tone of voice.

The cloud at least had the grace to turn a sunset red in embarrassment, and then mimed that it had no idea what I was talking about. 

I pointed out that it would be a most unlikely coincidence that I would find a cloud, one clad in coveralls, no less, walking along behind me on multiple occasions over a number of days.

In turn, the cloud mimed out that remarkable coincidences can in fact occur because of quote unquote “synchronicity,” which has been defined by leading psychiatrists as an “acausal connecting principle.”

The main thrust of this principle, the cloud went on, is that while coincidences may not be causal connections, they may still hold meaning for the observer, like when one keeps spotting the number of the house one grew up in in prices, license plates, or other addresses where we have appointments. This causality observance may in fact be the basis of multiple forms of religion, magic systems, and superstitions that flourished through the world since time immemorial.

Fine. So the cloud made some salient points.

None of that explains where it got the coveralls.


A representative of Delaware called me. He asked where have I been. I could hear snickering in the background.

Get bent, Delaware!


Enough about my woes, for the moment. How are all of you doing? What mood are you in as you listen to this phonograph? What season is this? Is it perhaps a hot summer night, and you are sitting out on your porch with your spouse, feeling the glass of lemonade in your head bead up with moisture, watching the neighbourhood settle down for the night? Perhaps it is fall, and you can smell wood burning in fireplaces from the houses nearest you. Maybe it’s winter, and you are seated inside, cozy as you watch virgin snow pile up along the street. Whatever the case, I am happy to be here with you, even if it is just this mechanical echo of my voice, reaching you through decades of time. Let’s make this a habit, shall we?


Someone has desecrated West Church. Bishop Tantrum called me, asking for a relaxant, as the whole affair has quite upset him, and is making him scream even louder than usual.

I joined him at the church, being ushered past police lines. The vandalism was apparent from even a block away, once one could see over the heads of the gathering crowd.
What was not so apparent was the modus operandi of the vandal. The damage was most unusual, to say the least. At first blush, it looked like someone had painted parts of the church’s stone exterior with sooty black paint.

But on closer inspection, one could see that parts of the stone exterior had been burned away. The church now sported blackened fist-sized pockmark cavities in a dozen different spots dotted around its exterior.

The police are at a loss. Well, they’re usually at a loss since they employee Neanderthal-like people as their rank-and-file officers. They’re very strong, but not likely to be listed amongst the world’s great thinkers.

But this time, I confess I must join them in their confusion. How does one set fire to stone?


I returned home quite late from work last night, and while on my way I saw something that can only be described as an apparition. Or, well, what I hope was an apparition, anyway.

There were people in the sky. Very large people. People that I could see through. I believe they were native people, or the memories of natives, or ghosts? Gods? Spirits? I don’t know.

What I do know is that they wore what I believe to be traditional native garb, and were carrying spears and stone axes. They seemed stern, yet also filled with a certain kind of joy, as people with purpose can often be.

They crossed overhead, heading west to east in the night sky, stars twinkling through their celestial forms. Come to think of it, they were heading in the direction of Miss Weetamoo’s reservation, as if they had been called.

A hunt. Yes, if I had to give my overall impression of the spectacle, I would say that these heavenly people were being called to some sort of hunt, and seemed to be happy to take up the invitation. 

Oddly enough, none of this scared me. I found it... comforting. And I don’t believe I was the only one. If this was a hallucination, it was a shared one. Others saw the apparition too, and I saw nothing but appeasement on all of the upturned faces around me.

I hope that our instincts are correct, that those figures were beneficial. I certainly wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that great hunt. 


I’ve just dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts on my latest medical paper, “Is There Anything Radioactivity Can’t Cure?!” This coincides with this fresh batch of Radioactive Juices I just got in. Anemia, begone! Depression? Au revoir! Who knew that a simple change in the number or arrangement of nucleons could prove to be so helpful? And it comes in seven exciting flavours! Yum!


Arkham played host to a bit of a spectacle last week. A gentleman by the name of Chick Guerlad, sporting a leather helmet and the single most jaunty scarf I have ever seen on a man, attempted to set some sort of record by jumping his car over a row of automobiles.

His own ride was certainly a sleek little beast, a Model A Duesenberg that he had modified to increase its top speeds. The event took place on Federal, right next to Independence Square, home of the park with its notorious patch of dead earth.

Mister Guerlad hustled up quite a bit of speed and launched his car at the ramp like an arrow shot by a well-practiced archer. He obviously was a car man, with hundreds, if not thousands, of hours behind the steering wheel. He had measured road conditions, consulted weather forecasts, charted out speed requirements needed to maintain flight over five parked automobiles. Yes sir, this was a gent that had anticipated everything.

Well, almost everything. Who could have anticipated the beaver?

And not just any beaver. This beaver was a behemoth of the species. Half the size of an automobile itself, it pushed its way through the crowd of onlookers just in time to swat the speeding Mister Guerland and his swift Model A Duesenberg out of the air with one slap of its gigantic beaver tail.

Mister Guerland and his car crashed down to the street, landing on its side, scraping up sparks, forcing onlookers to lunge out of the way.

As for the enormous beaver, it waddled its way sedately south on Peabody, presumably to reunite with the river. Everybody was all atwitter with questions – Had anyone ever seen a beaver of that size before? Where had it come from? Why did it hate automobiles? Or was it not targeting automobiles but Chick Guerland instead?

Which is all beside the point. The real question is – where did Mister Guerland get a scarf that jaunty? I’ve never seen the like! Perhaps I’ll visit him in the hospital and ask. 


The man in the trench-coat, the one that told me about Arkham’s hidden library, has been seen around town again. By whom, you ask? By me, that’s who. I’ve seen him ahead of me, acting like we’ve never met. He keeps dropping crumpled up papers on the ground, the dirty litterbug! I put over a dozen of them in the garbage, but he still doesn’t seem to be getting the message.

He keeps staying ahead of me, walking speedily a block ahead, and then dropping more crumpled up papers on the ground. When I made a right turn onto Walnut St, he had to hustle back from further down High Street and get ahead of me again, to drop yet another one of his bits of garbage.

When I threw this latest offence in a garbage can, I observed him clapping a hand to his forehead. He waited until a family of five had passed by, then mimed to me un-crumpling the paper and reading it.

By this time, I was less than amused. But I retrieved the latest paper from the trash and smoothed it out on the side of a carriage horse. The horse did not seem to mind.

There was a crudely drawn map on the paper. Miskatonic University was circled in red ink, and a likewise red book was drawn next to it, with an arrow pointing from said book to the university. I took this to mean that I should try to find out more information about Arkham’s secret library at the University, but at this point I really didn’t care. 

By this point, I was more interested in finding out why the trench-coat man just hadn’t told me that. Or gone to the university himself. Or why he had felt in necessary to waste so much paper by crumpling it up into balls when he could just have sent me one letter at my office.

I’m beginning to feel that some people just aren’t cut out for clandestine work.


Yet another brouhaha with my housekeeper, Miss Weetamoo. You’ll perhaps recall that I took a wounded mouse on as a patient, keeping him in my home office as he recovered from surgery.

As expected, Miss Weetamoo was less than thrilled at the arrangement. At first she was going to dispose of the rodent. When I put a stop to that, she then insisted that I take it to my office so it was out of my house. As if the mouse could be moved in such a state!

No, I was having none of it, and I put my foot down, as any employer should. Miss Weetamoo replied that she refused to clean my office while the creature was, in her words, “lurking” there. “Lurking,” indeed! As if she couldn’t see the tiny little bed and blankets I had made the patient out of carved wood and part of an old flannel jacket.

She stormed out to clean other parts of the house, and I stormed out to get to work at my office.

Miss Commonprance was much more sympathetic, and even applauded me for extending my Hippocratic oath to an animal. She gave me a shoulder rub to soothe my anger, and said it made her sad to see how often I fought with one of my employees. She said that if she continually offended me, her employer, she’d quit out of shame. But that I probably couldn’t imagine doing without Miss Weetamoo, so never mind.

But it got me thinking... can I imagine my life- I mean, my house without Miss Weetamoo. She is a diligent worker to be sure, and her butternut-squash soup verges on the miraculous... but still... there are other house cleaners, and other flavours of soup.

I don’t know... I wish, dear listeners, that you were here with me so that you could tell me what you think.

Until next time...


Overnight For Observation was created by Daniel Fox. Daniel is the author of the historical western horror novel “Hag’s Trail”.