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Any institution has its fair share of ghost stories – spirits walk the hallways of museums, schools, hospitals, prisons. Few, however, have as much of a storied history as Arkham State Hospital. Nor do they often have their own cemeteries, headstones beaten down from decades of hard rain. Jeremiah walks between the overgrown rows of paupers’ graves, a wreath of rue and forget-me-nots held to his chest. The pathway beneath him is grass sprouting in hard-packed dirt. It’s his hour for lunch.
The hospital rises to his back, ivy-covered brick and new additions to the Arkhams’ ancestral home sprawling out. The cemetery hasn’t expanded in any considerable way in recent years. More medication, more successes; less funding, less patients. The unfortunate few who have no one to claim them are buried with their names, now, instead of a number that often doesn’t correspond to anything at all. But Jeremiah is in the older part of the cemetery, dug before Thorazine. The numbers are weathered away to faded imprints. He counts by memory, by steps, and finds himself standing atop his great-uncle’s grave. Six feet below rests the bones of Amadeus Arkham, the founder of all that Arkham was and is.
He died decades ago in a scrawl-scratched room with the attending orderlies not even knowing his name. That room has been tiled over now, made shiny and new and clean. Jeremiah kneels to place the wreath.
It had taken him months of lunch breaks to piece together Amadeus’ final resting place, an hour a day spent in the dark dusty cellars that worm beneath the hospital. His predecessors had thought proper disposal of patient files too much effort and had locked them below for “archival” instead. Jeremiah had opened a rusted file cabinet only to discover a warren of dead rats. He’d wondered if Amadeus’ records would share the same fate. But he’d found them eventually, stuffed into a leather folio stuffed into a rotten bookshelf. They’re safe in his office now.
Jeremiah runs a finger along the headstone, along the numbers so faded that he only knows them from the mildewed paper they’d been written on. If it weren’t an act of gross favoritism, he would have another headstone made. He considered claiming the body and reinterring it, once. The historical Arkham family cemetery is only a short walk away. That too would have been favoritism, would have been unexplainable, would have rattled loose things that Jeremiah prefers under lock-and-key.
He gets to his feet, dusting at the green tinge to his knee. He says nothing, because he knows how much the staff talk of him already. He is an Arkham, madness and its cure run in his blood. It wouldn’t do for him to be seen talking to himself, even if such things are natural when any other man or woman does them at their family member’s grave.
In a few days, Jeremiah will return to take away the wilted wreath just like he has every year. He will bury it over the hill, where the cemetery will eventually stretch in future decades, and he will return to work as though it were any other lunch.
Today, Jeremiah stares down at the obliterated slab that marks a man’s grave. Then he returns to work as though it were any other lunch.