"Not To Force the Rhymes"

by Benjamin Adams

originally published Singers of Strange Songs, Chaosium, 1997

Poor Davey Bremner.  He's got a crappy job working at Oakdeene Sanatorium, a snake pit full of loonies.  Plus it's 1976, and his damn neighbor keeps cranking Abba (Davey's tastes run to the Sex Pistols, Stranglers, Eater and The Damned - that makes him cool, right?).  And his boss is an asshole and he's stuck with this jerkoff buddy who calls himself (or is called?) Potato-Man, and Irish drunk and rowdy who Davey clings to in his further attempts to make himself cool.

One day, Davey's asshole boss Dr. Jones summons him.  It seems that a catatonic patient, Baker, has suddenly come to.  And he's talking.  About strange dreams and such.  Jones demands Davey's assurance that he will not speak of Baker's sudden revivification to anyone.  So naturally, Davey and Potato-Man go out and have a few pints and Davey spills his guts.  P-Man suggests that Davey, rather than quit, should figure out what it is that Jones doesn't want getting out, and use it against him.

Back at Oakdeene, Davey goes poking around in Jones' office, and discovers that, decades ago, Jones deliberately gave patient Martin Spellman an overdose of psychoactive drugs in order to render him permanently catatonic.  Blackmail material!

That night back at the pub, Potato-Man gets on the wrong side of some teddy boys and gets badly beaten up.  Now he's in big trouble.  Davey decides to help him get out of Scotland and wash his hands of him.  But first, back to Oakdeene to pick up some medical supplies.

Oops!  Caught by Dr. Jones.  Having little choice, Davey tells him what he knows.  This causes Jones to tell what he knows:  Baker is Jack the Ripper - yes, that Jack the Ripper.  It seems he's the gestalt of all human evil, a being that comes into existence every few millenia (yes, there's a gestalt of all human good, too).  Having Said Too Much, Jones attacks Davey with a scalpel, wounding him.  But Potato-Man leaps in and kills Jones.  Then some black thing leaps out of Baker's body and into Potato-Man's mouth before Davey passes out.

Twenty years later.  Davey is now the head of Oakdeene.  He's given up on punk rock (one assumes he's now an Abba fan?) He's made the place more humane.  But he wonders what that "gestalt of evil" is up to .... all those serial killers over the years.

This is a minor, pulpy tale, brought down by Adams' mistake of phoneticizing Davey and Potato-Man's accents all through the story - Davey's spoken dialog is littered with "ye" and "hae" and all such.  Bad move, Ben.  It looks amateurish.  I don't see the point in name-dropping British punk bands unless its for the author to let everyone know he has cool taste in music.