Eric Barrett’s short life wasn’t a happy one. Confined to an asylum at four when he began to exhibit autistic behaviour, he spent three years scribbling weird, meaningless shapes on any scrap of paper he could reach, before finally dying of unknown causes.
Eager to study an unusual case further, the asylum’s doctors have convinced the grieving parents to allow them to perform an autopsy and craniotomy to identify the cause of death.
They cut into the boy’s skull and find...
Possibilities
1 ...a brass clockwork engine where his brain should be.
It’s still ticking over, tiny wires tugging at nerves and muscles that no longer respond. Interior convolutions of the skull suggest that the engine somehow GREW in its current position.
Eric’s uncle Phillip was an investigator into the unknown who looked too deeply into mysteries he should have avoided, and slowly went mad. In his insanity, he talked about the things he’d discovered. No-one listened, except his nephew, who didn’t understand what he was hearing. He understood one thing, though—the name ‘Hastur’. He made a game out of repeating it, and even invented a pretend playmate named Hastur.
The childish chanting, coupled with a boyish imagination that treated Hastur as real, was enough to evoke a partial manifestation of the Great Old One, with limited power. Eric and Hastur spent countless hours together, and Hastur told him things even his uncle didn’t know. The boy’s devastating transformation is the result.
His three years of drawings contain mythos secrets imparted by Hastur. Only a few, but they’re big ones, and each is repeated hundreds of times. Someone with the right knowledge could interpret them to reveal information with horrible implications for the whole human race. The Barrett’s have no idea what they have stuck on their fridge.
2. ...a hollow, filled with nothing but bloody fluid.
Three years ago, parts of Eric’s brain were extracted by mi-go while the family vacationed at a mountain lake resort. They left enough to maintain basic functions, but took everything responsible for higher thought. The mi-go used those pieces of Eric in a mi-go mining machine, burrowing for minerals under the same lake he stayed at with his parents.
Worse, a week ago, Eric’s parents received a phone call in a buzzing, metallic voice claiming to BE Eric, begging them to rescue him. They thought it was a cruel joke, but if the boy is still alive in some form, something will have to be done.
The scribbled drawings are maps of mine shafts, somehow transmitted by the remainder of his brain.
3. ...a bullet.
While she was pregnant, Eric’s mother was injured in a drive-by shooting. Because it was so close to her unborn baby, the doctors who attended her elected to leave the bullet in place and remove it after the boy was born. However, exploratory surgery failed to locate it after the birth.
The bullet penetrated Eric’s skull, and his brain formed around it. However, the lead slowly poisoned him, leading to the mental breakdown and eventual death.
The gangster responsible for the shooting was never convicted, and is now a wealthy and powerful man. A ballistic examination of the bullet could be the evidence which finally puts him behind bars.
The drawings are meaningless.
© Chris Kerr
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