The Parkland Experiments

"The Parkland Experiments" is a short Cthulhu Mythos story by British-born author William Meikle. It was first published in the Brian M. Sammons-edited anthology Shadows of an Inner Darkness by Golden Goblin Press in 2019 Title: "The Parkland Experiments" at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
==Synopsis==
During the 1920s, inmates at the Parkland Correctional Facility become unwilling test subjects of the crazed Dr. John Barnard, a man obsessed with his research into the field of eugenics. As the procedures progress, the subjects find themselves increasingly obsessed with a very specific rhythm, and this becomes the focal point of the doctor's efforts.
The inmates come to realise that the rhythm denotes a set of potential coordinates, one of which lies in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; with this realisation come dreams of "an island that shouldn't have been there, an island topped by a gargantuan city of tumbled ruins, strange angles and black stone" and "a giant doorway open[ing] revealing a colossal, shadowy, figure coming up from some distant watery depth."
Hearing this, the doctor becomes increasingly demented and, determined to experience these visions himself, undertakes the same procedures on himself. Gathering the men together, they involuntarily enact a ritual involving the beats but something goes wrong, and Barnard is transformed into something grotesque and inhuman before his former charges kill him.
==Mythos Connections==
The coordinates which insinuate themselves into the test subjects' minds, 47°9'S 126°43'W, are those given by H. P. Lovecraft as the location of sunken R'lyeh; this is further reinforced by the visions experienced by the men, which offer a clear description of the city and the coming of its dark master Cthulhu: "something that might stand like a man, fly like a bat and swim like an octopus."
==Publication History ==
*Shadows of an Inner Darkness (2019, Golden Goblin Press)
*Up from the Deep (2023)
==References==
Category:William Meikle works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works