The Archive

The Archive was scary.

It was like a bunker. They had it under the university library. It was where all the files and collectables were. People died and donated their papers here. Scholars . . . like him . . . then came down here to find out what dead people had said and written.

It was, he thought, sort of like robbing a grave. Except instead of dealing with rotting flesh, you dug through rotting ideas.

The graduate student—his name was Lester—shrugged. Well, maybe he was just being a little bitter. Not that he didn’t have a lot to be bitter about.

He sat at one of the tables with its little light. Around him, other researchers were working on their projects. All of them were under the inquiring eyes of the archivists who sat behind the desk at the front of the room. He glanced at the wall above their heads. A grim, yellowish painting of a scowling man glowered down at him. It was, he knew, one of the founders of the University. The man looked a little fish-like around the edges.

Well… he said again, best to get busy.

On the table in front of him was a document box, specifically Box Number 175 (*Section b) of the collected papers of Dr. Samuel Westticon Decuir (1879-1935), an obscure but apparently influential citizen of the little city of Crayhaven. He’d been, it seemed, a physician, a friend of the mayor, a supporter of the governor, a pillar of the Crayhaven Reformed Church, and, as a sort of hobby, a murderer. According to newspaper accounts at the time, he’d slaughtered his wife, a subsequent mistress, a neighbor, and an unknown number of vagrants whom he lured into his office with a promise of food.

He was never caught. Rather, he slit his own throat with a scalpel. A nurse found him, and a note confessing to his crimes, in the leather chair behind his (blood soaked) desk. There was also a will, leaving his money to the church, and his papers to the university.

The police found three more bodies, never identified but expertly dissected, decaying in the basement.