Arkham is changed. While fire and flood reshape the city’s streets, money and scandal reorder its high society. In the aging neighborhood of French Hill, where we lay our scene, the star of one family rises while another’s falls… 

Ahead of Fantasy Flight Games’ upcoming scenario pack Traces to Nowhere for Arkham Horror: The Card Game, meet the scions of the Meiger and Husserl families in Alike Indignity, a new serial from veteran Arkham Horror author Tim Pratt. This six-part series mixes family rivalry with dangerous magics.  

Read or listen to the first chapter, “Troublesome Bodies,” below, and subscribe to the Arkham Horror newsletter or the Aconyte Fiction Podcast to make sure you catch the rest of the series. 

Alike Indignity

Chapter 1: Troublesome Bodies

by Tim Pratt

Talcott Meiger seethed and plotted and hoarded his hates, but when his dark-eyed nursemaid came into the attic room with his pills and evening porridge, he faked a drooling, gap-toothed smile and said, “Hello, miss, and who are you? My daughter, eh?”

She betrayed no annoyance, despite having variations on this conversation several times a day since Talcott took up residence in the Meiger estate on Arkham’s moneyed French Hill, where he’d inflicted himself as a willful burden on his nephew and his irritating family. “No, Mr Meiger. You don’t have a daughter, as far as I know. I’m Olive Sapinska. I work for Josef, remember? We’re looking after you while you… recover.”

Talcott beamed at her from his nest of pillows, projecting empty-headed affability. Recover. There could be no recovery from the consequences of six decades of dissolution. The booze, the late nights, the carousing, the… rituals and their strange effects… even the grave robbing and inevitable risk of mummy rot had riddled his body with a thousand ills, some unknown to science. He’d persisted for this long through sheer force of will, but soon he’d leave this husk of a body behind. The pain was a distraction, but he refused laudanum because he needed his wits about him. The agonies in his chest were probably almost detrimental to his cognition, but soon that pain would be someone else’s problem.

Talcott had been on the hunt for immortality since that night in Alexandria when he vomited blood for the first time, and death suddenly seemed less theoretical. He’d spent twenty years crisscrossing continents, following rumors, exploiting every connection from his family’s connections with black market purveyors of antiquities across the Mediterranean, trying to find the key. In the process he’d unearthed countless relics that were worthless to him but valuable enough to collectors to keep him in relative comfort, at least until these recent years of dwindling health and fortunes.

But he’d finally found the secret to eternal life, receiving the final recipe in a Paris café from a strange, cold-eyed woman who’d accepted the deed to his Left Bank maison in exchange; that house had been his last and most precious possession, but what was property when compared to life? That had been a strange trip; he was sure he’d spotted Carl Sanford, the former leader of the Silver Twilight Lodge, in a Paris night club with a doe-eyed Spanish beauty on his arm… but Sanford was dead, of course, the Lodge in ruins, the Order in schismatic disarray, the remnants fought over by–

“Usurpers!” Talcott bellowed, but Olive didn’t flinch, just finished setting up his tray. She was used to his sudden shifts from happiness to rage. Playacting at dementia and emotional instability was all part of Talcott’s plan. “My little baby nephew Josef says the town is infested with usurpers!”

“Josef is no baby now, sir. Even his children are grown.” She sat by the bedside and spooned porridge into Talcott’s mouth, half of which he made sure to dribble out again. “Though you aren’t wrong. The whole family has been in shambles lately, especially with Josef’s disappearance. Mrs Meiger was raging the other night about a new family, the Husserls, remember? They’re flashing money around, buying up property, getting invites to all the best parties while the Meigers are snubbed. I don’t understand all the fuss, myself. Ah, well. Things change, don’t they?”

Something scurried in a corner, and Olive’s head snapped around, her eyes narrowing. “Damn rats. Excuse my language. I’ll put more poison down later.”

There’d always been rats in the estate. They bred in tunnels under the hills and Talcott had taught his nephews to shoot them with a slingshot once when he returned from Turkey, rich from the latest sale of Priam’s Treasure.

Oh, he’d been dashing in those days. And would be again soon. That Parisian scholar had provided the final piece of a ritual that would allow Talcott to swap his mind with another’s, moving his soul into their body and trapping the victim’s consciousness in his own wrecked physique. He’d intended to switch with his own grand-nephew, to become heir to the Meiger fortune and head of one of Arkham’s grand families – a role denied him as a younger son with no children of his own. But since the fall of the Silver Twilight, the Meiger family name was in decline, their old connections now useless. These Husserls, though…

They were rich, respected, unburdened by history, making their young scion, Elias Husserl, Jr., Talcott’s new target. He would steal the boy’s body, destroy that upstart nouveau riche family’s reputation from the inside, and loot the coffers as he went. He could always swap bodies with the Meiger heir later if he wished, despite the scholar’s warnings, and oversee the ascension of his own family again. He’d acquired sufficient supplies for multiple doses of the necessary potion, after all.

“Newspaper!” he bellowed, spraying flecks of porridge. Olive nodded, displaying irritating equanimity. She’d been a housemaid at the estate before being assigned to nursing duties, which mainly involved feeding Talcott, making sure he didn’t wander the halls naked, and tending to his hygiene needs. She was a capable hand with a straight razor, Talcott had to give her that; he’d never received a better shave.

Olive put the porridge bowl aside and rose to fetch the latest Arkham Advertiser. Ah, good, he wouldn’t have to dig around for one of the papers he’d hidden under the bed. She handed the paper over, and Talcott flipped through to the society pages, holding the print close to his failing eyes, squinting in the light streaming through the window under the eaves. There was a photo of Elias Husserl, Jr. in today’s issue, wearing a tuxedo and holding up a glass at some charity event at the Arkham Historical Society. He was handsome enough, but with a weak chin, and those round glasses were a bit prissy. Talcott had been a bruising bull of a man before his decline, and he’d used his physique to intimidate others his whole life, but it might be nice to be more lithe and limber, eh?

“Would you like me to read it to you?” Olive asked.

“I can read, woman. Says here… the Husserls ran the charity auction, what? That’s our patch, isn’t it? That wife, ah, what’s her name, she always does it.”

“I gather she wasn’t feeling up to it this year,” Olive said. “Things have been unsettled in the house. No one’s been able to replace Penny White, the previous housekeeper. I haven’t seen Mr Meiger – that is, your nephew – in some time, and Mrs Meiger is starting to fret. Miss Zelda is preoccupied lately, too.”

Josef could be rotting at the bottom of the Miskatonic River for all Talcott cared. Zelda was a grand-niece currently sponging off the family largesse, but she was also the only one to ever visit and check in on him. Talcott was as fond of her as he was anyone, which wasn’t much.

Olive leaned in, conspiratorial. “I even overheard talk about selling the estate.”

The Meiger estate? Preposterous! Talcott’s brother had purchased it as a symbol of their wealth, stature, and importance in Arkham. They couldn’t lose that! “Nonsense,” he muttered, and then remembered he was supposed to be in the grips of dementia. “We can’t have eggs and soldiers now, it’s the hour for brandy.”

Olive leaned back and stood up. “I must be starved for conversation. I’ll come back to check on you later.” She bustled out.

Ha. She’d be back, but she wouldn’t be checking on him. Talcott wasn’t quite as infirm as he pretended to be. Flinging back the covers, he carefully lowered himself to the floor. As a young man, when Talcott’s brother first purchased the mansion, he’d discovered a loose board up here, and now the hollow beneath concealed his battered grimoire, rare herbs and ingredients, along with a vial of the prepared potion. He smoothed the newspaper on the floorboards and stared at the photo of Junior, fixing it in his mind. He had to focus on the face he intended to wear.

A flash of doubt passed through him. What if the scholar had tricked him, sold him something useless, or worse, a recipe for poison? No, no, she’d proven her bona fides. She’d known secrets about old Arkham that only a true initiate of the mysteries could possess.

Anyway, what choice did he have? If he didn’t escape this body soon, he’d die anyway. He could practically feel the growth in his lungs multiplying, and he coughed wetly at the thought.

Talcott uncorked the glass bottle with shaking hands and poured a measure of the shimmering dark liquid into a small leather cup. This was the potion that would loosen his mind from its moorings, allowing his soul to take flight. When he displaced the mind of young Junior, and flung the young fool’s soul aside, it would flow into the body Talcott left behind like water into a hole in the ground. Souls could flow, you see. They naturally wanted to be in their proper body, but they could be directed into another with focus and magic.

Junior would be confused and terrified to awaken in Talcott’s form, and everyone would think the old man’s sanity had finally snapped. Talcott had made a point of acting fixated on the Husserl family, muttering about Junior in particular, so when he started ranting that he was Junior, it would seem a sad and natural progression.

The time had come. Talcott opened the grimoire to the proper page and looked over the words again, then replaced it beneath the board, hiding his supplies and the vial. He spilled some potion as he lifted it to his lips, but that was fine; it would still be efficacious. He swallowed, a taste like stinging nettles felt, and winced. He rolled the cup under the bed and began to speak the words of the ritual in as clear and strong a voice as he could manage, staring down at the newsprint picture of Junior. His knees ached, his lungs burned, and he grew hoarse as he reached the end of the litany, but he recited it all, note perfect.

Talcott’s head swam as black motes swarmed in his vision, so many he believed there were flies in the room, before he realized it was a trick of perception. His inner ear rebelled, no longer agreeing with him that down was down and up was up, and he fell onto his side as vertigo swept over him. He blinked, and then looked down at himself from the ceiling, marveling at the sudden absence of pain. Talcott was astonished by his terrible appearance: his gray hair lank, eyes red, cheeks sunken, torso shrunken, and withered legs sticking out of a stained dressing gown.

Then, his vision spun as he shot up through the ceiling, into the sky, until he stared down at the Meiger estate – my, the roof needed some work – surrounded by the finest homes at the top of French Hill. There was the burned ruin of the Silver Twilight Lodge house, collapsed into those rat-filled tunnels below.

Talcott drifted higher, overcome with a sudden terror of flying into outer space where his research told him strange horrors lurked. Talcott focused, envisioning the face of his target, Junior’s weak chin and tiny glasses…

His mind soared across rooftops, passing above the old graveyard and the crumbling spires of the university, and then whipping northward across the river and that strange isle and its ancient stones into the business district, over the newspaper office, and toward the Excelsior Hotel. Odd. Talcott expected to find Junior at the Husserl’s refurbished mansion bought from a grand old family whose fortunes had fallen. Why was the boy in a hotel?

With no voice, he could not scream, but Talcott felt fear when he hurtled toward the hotel’s stone wall, although he passed through harmlessly into a hallway, through a closed door and into a room where a young man and woman sat side-by-side in bed, sharing a cigarette. Talcott barely recognized Junior’s face before his vision swarmed with those black flies again, and then he was in a body without pain, full of pleasant languor. He turned his head to look at the young woman beside him who wore only a slip, his lips curling into a lascivious smile at his good fortune–

Which vanished when he recognized her pert nose, dark curls, and sparkling eyes. Talcott had transgressed many a taboo in his time, but this wasn’t one of them. This was Zelda Meiger, his grand-niece, clearly having an affair with the heir to the Husserl family, hated rivals of her own clan. The betrayal! The cheek! The audacity–

She put her hand over his – or, rather, her lover’s, which Talcott now possessed. “Oh, Junior,” she said. “What are you going to do about those boys from the Sheldon gang? You can’t hide in the hotel forever, and anyway, they’ve got eyes everywhere. If they catch you…” Tears welled up in her eyes.

A cold gust of fear blew through Talcott’s healthy new body. What sort of trouble had he jumped himself into?