BRUMEPHITIS preview
9.
Laid between ropes where dogs are crated. Leash ceilings in a hall of drapes. Water cups over a box of ears. This is not what boys listen to.
Regarding Claudine and Hortence’s train car stalker, I didn’t put two and two together until I did a re-read of some findings.
After we had settled on Brumephitis, I did a deep dive into the history of the name (mostly to check that it hadn’t already been claimed by another band). One rabbit hole led me to an urban legend spun off from the Inlore Hospice Sanitarium; a facility that had been shut down in the 1970s when it had been bought by WGBM Amalgamate LTD. WGBM took the name Inlore for their new chain of therapeutic boarding schools, and sold off the Sanitarium grounds to Dr. Clarence Thacher.
Now called The Iris Thacher Memorial Hospital (after his late wife) Dr. Thacher reopened the facility with a bold vision for treatment of the mentally ill. In between Inlore closing and Thacher Memorial opening, however, a number of patients had been left behind. Now solely reliant to their own broken devices, unrestrained from shackles both literal and medicinal, their frayed grip on agreed realities unraveled violently into the decadent wiles of coordinated obscenity, discharges of the body congealing into a load-bearing sweat-reek that, were it to be scrubbed out, threatened to collapse the brutalist structure to its secretion-webbed foundation.
Rather than go through the rigmarole of having them escorted off the premises, Thacher decided to “transfer” the abandoned patients (down to thirteen in total) to his facility, herding them into the sub-basement of the building while remodeling commenced.
When he went down to the basement to assign the patients their own rooms and medication schedules, Dr. Thacher had discovered a grisly sight. All but one of the patients had been throat-slashed to death. The one, the young man Bohak (according to the name tag on his scrubs), was found sucking his thumb (“a climatic collapse into performative infantilism after having succumbed to the actualization of revenge for likely having endured the excessive traumas of repeated molestations by the lingering delinquents of the premises”[Dr. Thacher’s diagnosis]), long fingernails filed down into razor-claws, blood caked into red gloves worn tight over his hands.
Once again relenting to a pattern of shady avoidance, Dr. Thacher simply cordoned off the sub-basement, turning the improvised abattoir into a cell for Bohak, where he presumably fed upon the decaying cadavers of his fellow patients, becoming both Thacher Memorial’s first inmate and first phantom.
Years later, there was the fabled “inmate uprising” at Thacher Memorial, which claimed a still unknown number of lives (including the Doctor himself). The facilities remained cordoned off for years until, once again, WGBM Amalgamate stepped into to purchase the property, turning it into a sanctuary compound for those who are newly arrived into the country.
Several children began to tell of a figure they claimed to have spotted lurching the grounds of the facility in the middle of the night; a stowaway run-off from the prior occupants of the building, now three-generations deep into the lore of the grounds.
One morning, a man had complained that several items of clothing had gone missing; white overalls, a long sleeve Hawaiian shirt, and a pair of round-frame sunglasses. When questioning the residents about the theft, only a little girl provided an answer;
“I saw Bohak take them”.
The little girl described this “Bohak” to the officers; a tall man, skin marked near to black with sigils crowded into thickets of filth, a mustache that fountained from his nostrils, curving over his mouth and around his chin to tickle and scratch across his throat, and fingernails that could pass for swords in miniature, which he likely used to trim the split-ends of his icy black hair.
The officers ask the little girl;
“Did this ‘Bohak’ say anything to you?”
The little girl responds;
“He said ‘I have to go to Brumephitis’, then he pointed to a face on his belly that was filled with stars.”
That’s the last time anyone ever heard about Bohak.
I think we have our mascot.
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