Desperate Remedies
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Author: Jon Rowe
Homepage: http://www.flar.demon.co.uk/terror/welcome.htm
System: Call of Cthulhu
Type: Hook
Category: Horror
Requirements: None

Someone close to the investigators is succumbing to a horrific disease. Symptoms include unpredictable attacks of agony; loathsome swellings, horrible alterations in skin texture and bone structure, and foul excrescences. Conventional doctors are mystified and alternative therapies are futile - because the sufferer is turning into a ghoul.

Oddly, a group of stalkers seem interested in the invalid, following him everywhere and breaking into the offices of some of his doctors to steal case-notes. If observed, they too are suffering from a disfiguring disease.

As the character becomes increasingly debilitated, his friends (the investigators) discover Dr Ladislav’s Sanatorium. Ladislav is a gaunt cadaver of a man who greets his new patient with strange excitement. The patient has a private dorm with every luxury during his stay but the doctor will not discuss his radical therapy and is very anxious for his friends to leave. These characters notice a larger wing of the Sanatorium which more closely resembles a high-security prison (yes, Ladislav explains, the Sanatorium was once a gaol last century). Orderlies leaving the Old Wing have blood on their uniforms.

And that is the last they hear of their friend. Mail isn’t answered nor are calls returned. The stalkers ransack the sick character’s old residence and will be seen lurking near the Sanatorium. If the investigators return to the Sanatorium, Dr Ladislav, looking disturbingly decayed, has no records of the patient’s admission and the luxury dorm is occupied by an elderly man with gallstones.

Possibilities

1     Ladislav heads a necrophagic ghoul-cult, and the Old Wing’s cellars access nearby ghoul warrens. Patients are treated with foul transfusions and rituals until they transform fully; others are eaten. All food served at the Sanatorium is human flesh, either that of patients (their extremities surgically removed over a period of time to grace the Doctor’s table) or from corpses from the old gaol cemetery.

The ‘stalkers’ are a group of patients who escaped through the ghouls’ tunnels: half-demented and hideous, they are desperate to rescue fellow-sufferers from the Doctor, but are in terror of ‘regular’ humans and ghouls alike. The sick character is in the last stages of transformation, but may be saved in the nick of time. A long-term cure is still needed...

2     Ladislav is a Mythos scholar dedicated to finding a ‘cure’ for ghoul-ishness. His treatment is exceptionally brutal, involving electrocution, organ transplant with hallucinogens instead of anaesthetic and physical purgings. Obviously, he would be incarcerated if his therapeutic methods were known. The ‘stalkers’ are true ghouls, looking to liberate their half-changed brethren from the good doctor’s clutches. They are hideous, but oddly sympathetic - compared to Ladislav, anyway. The ghouls would like to destroy the Sanatorium and rescue the inmates, but aren't sure how.

3     Ladislav is himself becoming a ghoul. His treatments are all attempts to stave off his own inevitable transformation: he used to transplant fully-human organs into himself, but his ghoulish body has started rejecting them. Now he needs partial-ghouls for transplant subjects, victims less far gone than himself. The ‘stalkers’ are Ladislav’s former-patients, too far gone into ghoul-ishness to be useful transplant subjects (though they bear the amputations of earlier surgeries). Instead, they now locate fresh victims for the Doctor in the (futile) hope that, once he is cured, he will in turn cure them. They’re a pitiful crew, but may be turned against the one who did this to them by a investigator sensitive to their tragedy.

Copyright (c) Jon Rowe1999