Madhouse Source Book wrote:2010s (the present)
The start of 2010 was met with the arrival of Dr.
Sara Lockwood, the Lakeshore Asylum’s newest
superintendent. Her younger sister had been infected
with Biting Fever a decade earlier, and after seeing the
terrible toll it took on the young girl, Lockwood had
changed her major to medicine in the hopes of finding
a cure to the horrible disease.
Bright, analytical, and driven, Dr. Lockwood was a rising
star in the medical community. When she applied for
the position of asylum superintendent, the city council
leapt at the opportunity and gave her a great deal of
latitude in running the Lakeshore Asylum, including
permission to begin researching a cure to the Biting
Fever. A generous grant from the city council and a few
donations from private citizens whose lives had been
damaged by the disease allowed her to retrofit some
of the asylum’s old offices into a personal laboratory,
which she then stocked with all manner of primates
and rodents.
Then, one morning, a wrapped parcel addressed to
Dr. Lockwood was found leaning against the asylum’s
front gates. It contained a worn tome filled with strange
diagrams and disturbing drawings, many of them occult
in nature. At first, Dr. Lockwood dismissed the tome as
a curiosity or a prank on behalf of her coworkers, but
as the days passed, she found herself reading through
its pages in her spare time, first out of mild amusement,
then curiosity, then actual interest.
Dr. Lockwood began to pay less and less attention to
the day to day operations of the hospital, allowing the
ambitious head nurse, Amelia Tanis, to run things in
her stead. Overcome by curiosity and feeling foolish
despite it, Dr. Lockwood finally decided to perform
one of the easier experiments in the tome using one of
her lab rats as a subject.
After marking the animal’s shaved body with strange
symbols and injecting it with a nonsensical
mixture of chemicals, it twitched and
collapsed to its side, apparently dead. As
Dr. Lockwood finished pronouncing the
last syllable of the strange incantation
written in the tome, the rat’s back
arched violently, and it released a
hideous screech as its back boiled
and blistered.
Startled, horrified, and excited in equal mixture, Dr.
Lockwood was unable to prevent the rapidly growing rat
from tearing open the bars of its cage and leaping to the
floor. It skittered out of the open, darted between the
legs of a nurse as she opened the door to check on the
noise, and leapt into the toilet of a nearby washroom,
squeezing its way down the pipes even as the metal
groaned and strained around its enlarging form.
That day marked Sara Lockwood’s first true steps into
the world of the occult. She first turned her attention
to the laboratory animals, alternatively infusing their
bodies with arcane power and altering their forms with
invasive surgery. With each arcane word she uttered,
Dr. Lockwood became more withdrawn and inventive.
By the time that Lockwood finally began to experiment
on her patients, a dark shroud had settled over the
Lakeshore Asylum and the surrounding city. Few
people realized just what sort of horrors were being
created and summoned behind the walls of the city’s
asylum, but the rise in violent crimes and strange
graffiti certainly made the news. Strange, mutilated
corpses were sometimes found floating in the lake,
and the police fearfully warned everyone about the
possibility of another serial killer walking the streets,
fueling further panic.
Things are getting worse every day, and for the patients
of the Lakeshore Asylum, the horrible things they see
lurking in the shadows and hear whispering to them
in the night are no longer just the products of their
damaged minds.
