To the Wednesday Night Guys for all the years of horror, and to Dan Abnett, for the right word in the right ear.

© 2011 by Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved. 

Ebook edition published in 2011.

Cover illustration by Anders Finér.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-61661-250-4

Arkham Horror, Ghouls of the Miskatonic, all associated characters, character names, and distinctive likenesses thereof, Fantasy Flight Games, and the FFG logo are trademarks owned by Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

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Part One

Strange Tides, 1926

CHAPTER ONE

It starts with the sea. Always the sea. She loved the water, remembering weekends at her grandfather’s Vermont home on Lake Champlain, where she and her brother would swim out from the shore and dive down to try and see the coral reefs below the cold water. No amount of creepy tales her dad told her of Champ, the monster said to live in the lake, could dissuade her from swimming out as far as she could go. She loved the silky feel of water over her skin, the refreshing sharpness of jumping into its cold embrace, and the sense that she was almost flying.

So why did this dream of water scare her so much?

Perhaps because it was so vast, so enormous as to defy comprehension. She was floating in the middle of an uncharted ocean, so far away from land that it might not even exist. In this trackless ocean, land was a memory, a myth of ancient times forgotten by the denizens of this watery expanse. Without knowing how, she knew she was as far from land as it was possible to be on this spinning globe.

The ocean was peaceful, still and undisturbed, like a vast black mirror reflecting the stars wheeling above in their ceaseless dance. But some primal part of her felt a nascent terror that something was somehow out of place, disjointed, or otherwise out of alignment. She was adrift in the middle of the sea, lost and without hope of rescue, yet her fear was not of drowning, but rather of the isolation and the sense that she was an insignificant speck in the face of something unutterably vast, something too large and cosmic to be understood by a human mind.

No sooner had she formed the thought than she was dragged beneath the surface, and she felt the aching cold of the deep ocean envelop her as the water closed over her head. She gasped for breath, feeling the water pour into her lungs, filling them with bitter cold, yet leaving her able to breathe. She struggled against the invisible fetters pulling her down into the darkness, thrashing the water to bubbles as she plunged deeper and deeper into the abyssal void below.

Down into the depths she went, past the point where her struggles should have ceased, and past the point where the pressure should have crushed her body and left her as little more than food for the hunters of this lightless palace. It seemed like she descended into the deeps for a lifetime, the dim glow of starlight long since forgotten and the impenetrable darkness surrounding her completely.

She stopped struggling, knowing it was useless, and let the current—or whatever it was that had hold of her—take her down. Down, down she plunged, past any hope of return to the surface and the fleeting world above. At last her descent slowed and the darkness was leavened by a faint suggestion of light below, a lambent greenish glow carpeting the irregular surface of the ocean bed.

The floor of this deep abyss was not flat; it was a rugged mountain of titanic blocks, like the remains of some ancient city of giants left to fall into ruin over millions of years. Vast stones and gigantic statues, taller than the greatest skyscrapers taking shape on the New York skyline, towered over this dead city. Mute sentinels were garlanded with shimmering seaweed and encrusted with barnacles. This was an alien place of the unknown and the mysterious.

She floated above this vast island, now seeing its far-flung boundaries and knowing that this place had once basked in the sunlight of the world above. In ages past, this sunken enclave had known the touch of the wind and the lash of salty breakers. The thought of this place rearing up like a mountain range above the ocean’s surface filled her with dread, and her gaze was drawn toward an arrangement of blocks vaguely reminiscent of a great archway, miles high and surely too enormous in scale to be required for anything living to pass through.

A dread moaning drifted from somewhere far beyond the archway, the mumbled moans of some vast sleeper who dreams fitfully in an eons-long slumber. The meaningless garble of syllables and animal noises were unintelligible to her, but filled her with such dread that she could not bring herself to look into the blackness of the arch for another second. The sound of pipes and echoing chants from distant lands seemed to swirl around the island, as though in answer to the dreamer’s wordless call.

This was the source of her nameless fear, this city of something dead yet still enduring and sunk beneath the sea to keep it from the world above. Though surely she was too deep for starlight to penetrate to the ocean floor, she saw the reflected light of ancient suns glistening on the glassy surface of polished blocks of unimaginable scale, tracing their patterns across the island tomb until they reached their appointed positions in the heavens. As she watched, the ocean floor shook with the tectonic heaves of a great undersea earthquake. Billowing clouds of sand geysered up from the bottom of the ocean as the monstrous island shifted and the siren song of meaningless chants intensified.

The fear she had felt previously peaked into a terrifying crescendo of horror as she felt something move deep beneath the accursed island, something of infinite alien malice and uncaring destructiveness. She looked up, seeing something hanging in the ocean above her, a glittering orb of bronze. Yet even as she caught a glimpse of this new strangeness, the clouds of sand obscured it as the island broke free of the ocean floor.

Swirling water-borne sandstorms engulfed her, but not before she saw something gigantic and monstrous moving in the shadow of the great archway. Too vast to be anything living, too hideous to be anything of this earth, it moved with great lumbering steps, gelatinous and fashioned from matter beyond human conception.

And finally Amanda screamed.

* * *

She awoke with the undersea scream on her lips, her heart beating a furious tattoo on her ribs, and her bed sheets soaked in sweat. The covers were bunched in her fists and as her gaze swept the dorm room, she felt a momentary dislocation as the angles of the room she shared with Rita seemed to warp and twist like she was drunk. 

“Deep breaths, Mandy, deep breaths…”

Amanda glanced over at Rita’s bed, seeing it was unoccupied. Rita’s nightclothes were folded on the pillow, and there was a glass of half-drunk water on the bedside cabinet. The first rays of sunlight poked through the blinds, illuminating a picture of some foreign long-distance runner tacked to the wall above Rita’s bed. Amanda took a deep breath as she tried to slow her breathing.

She closed her eyes, but that only made the fleeting vision of that dreadful…thing flicker on the inside of her eyelids like the jittery images at the beginning of a movie reel. Her stomach lurched and she felt a swimming nausea uncoiling in her gut, reaching up toward her throat. Amanda threw off her bed sheets and bolted for the door, pulling it open and running down the corridors of Dorothy Upman Hall to the communal washroom facilities she shared with sixty other female Miskatonic University students.

No one else was up yet, and she was grateful for that as she lurched along the corridor and through the door to the washroom. Amanda launched herself at the nearest basin in the line, just in time, and emptied her stomach of last night’s meal in one explosive expulsion. She coughed and spat acidic bile from her mouth, holding tight to the cold porcelain and letting herself sink slowly to the green-and-white tiled floor.

With her forehead pressed tight to the edge of the sink, Amanda felt a measure of equilibrium return. The coolness of the porcelain and the hardness of the tiled floor were reassuring in their normality, the solidity of the waking world enfolding her in its comforting safety.

“Jeez, Mandy, you okay?” said a voice with more than a hint of the Bayou to it.

Amanda turned her head and saw Rita standing farther along the line of sinks, clad in her knee-length running skirt and a cotton top with “M.U. Athletics” printed on the front. Rita spat toothpaste into the basin and was at Amanda’s side a second later, helping her to her feet. Satisfied Amanda wasn’t about to keel over, she filled a cloudy glass from the tap and handed it to her.

“Here, get this down you,” said Rita.

“Thanks,” said Amanda, swilling the water around her mouth and spitting the last of the acrid remnants of last night’s beans and chicken into the basin.

“You been having that damn dream again?” asked Rita. “How many nights is it now?”

Amanda shrugged. “Six? Maybe seven.”

“The hell you say,” said Rita. “More like you been waking up screaming for two weeks now. Trust me, I know.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be foolish,” said Rita. “I ain’t looking for no apology. I’m worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” said Amanda, taking another mouthful of water. “Honestly.”

She saw Rita wasn’t convinced. Rita was a smart cookie, born and raised in New Orleans before winning an athletics scholarship and coming north to Miskatonic. Her skin was smooth Creole dark, with deep brown eyes and full lips. She was pretty in a way the boys hadn’t caught onto yet.

“Fine my ass,” said Rita. “You need to sort this thing out. You gotta speak to Doc Waldron. Get him to give you something to help you sleep.”

“No!” said Amanda, more sharply than she intended.

“Hey, I’m just trying to help here.”

“I know,” said Amanda. “I’m sorry. I’m just…just a little out of sorts.”

“Was it that underwater city again?”

“I don’t remember much about this one,” said Amanda, unwilling to speak of the blasphemous undersea vision just yet. “I don’t always remember the dreams. I just know that they’re bad.”

Amanda turned on the cold tap and splashed water onto her face, feeling the deep cold of the dark ocean once more. Despite that, the water helped and she ran her wet hands through her hair. She tried looking in the mirror to see how she looked, but without her glasses all she saw was a pale pink blob topped by a damp mop of blond hair.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Coming up on seven.”

“Are you going for a run?”

“Yeah, you think I get up this early like this for fun?” said Rita. “You want to come?”

“No thanks,” said Amanda. “I don’t think I’m up for a run just yet. I need to get on with that paper for Professor Grayson. It’s late and he’s already given me one extension. I don’t think he’ll give me another.”

“Grayson? Why you bothering with that? It ain’t like it’s your major. It’s anthropology and history for heaven’s sake.”

“It’s extra credit,” said Amanda. “And I like his classes. Just because I’m an engineering student doesn’t mean I’m all numbers and calculations.”

“Yeah, don’t I know it,” said Rita with a smile. “I’ve seen you writing poetry when you think I ain’t looking. Crescent City girls are plenty things, but stupid ain’t one of ‘em.”

Amanda tried to hide her embarrassment, but Rita didn’t care. That was what Amanda loved about her roommate. Rita had been through so much in her own life that she would never dream of giving anyone else a hard time about having secret ambitions of their own.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” said Amanda, feeling more like herself.

“Done, I got five miles to go before first class.”

“What do you have?”

“Fluid dynamics. You?”

Amanda rolled her eyes. “Materials at eleven, then I’ve got a shift at the bank in the afternoon.”

“How many is that this week?”

“Four,” said Amanda, “and I know what you’re going to say. No wonder I’m late with Professor Grayson’s paper if I’m working all the time.”

“I didn’t say nothing,” said Rita. Amanda could see she was itching to get outside into the fresh air and stretch her long limbs on a punishing run. She turned Rita around and pushed her toward the stairs.

“Go. Run,” she said. “At least one of us should be getting some exercise today.”

“You going to be okay?” said Rita, already down the first two steps.

“I’ll be fine. Go!”

“I’m going!” cried Rita, out of sight now beyond the balustrade. As Amanda turned back toward her room, Rita’s voice drifted up from the hall below.

“Don’t think this gets you out of coming to the Commercial with me over the weekend. Marie Lambeau and Jim Culver are coming to town, and that joint’s gonna be swingin’ girl. We gonna dance till the sun come up, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” said Amanda, running over to the banister. “Me and the rest of the dorm.”

Rita waved up at her laughing and ran outside.

* * *

The building loomed above him as only structures built to house the mentally afflicted could, the central tower with its steepled roof seeming to look down upon him as a stern father might a truculent child. Whenever Oliver Grayson came to Arkham Asylum, he always felt as though the barred windows and iron fencing sought to enclose him so completely that he might never be able to leave.

He smiled for the attendant at the gatehouse and drove his battered Ford Model A up the gravel roadway toward the main entrance. The engine coughed and lurched, reminding him that he needed to have Abel Sykes take a look at it. Oliver turned the car around and parked his vehicle by the foot of the steps leading up to the asylum’s entrance.

The central block of the asylum was built of red brick and was double roofed, with a Venetian-styled tower at its center. A wing extended from each side of the central block, housing the asylum’s lunatic inmates and its many treatment rooms. All the windows were secured with stout iron bars bolted to the brickwork, and the walls were thick with cyanotic vines.

Stepping out of the car, he buttoned his coat tight. September was coming to an end, and a stiff Massachusetts wind was blowing down from the hills to the west. Oliver pulled his trilby down tight onto his head so that only the merest suggestion of his neatly trimmed brown hair emerged from beneath the rim. He lifted a leather briefcase from the backseat of his car and walked across the gravel toward the heavy oak and steel reinforced door that led within.

With one hand thrust deep into his coat pocket, his head down and a purposeful walk, he imagined himself looking like Dr. Thorndyke from The Blue Scarab, but knew that was his imagination getting the better of him. Thorndyke was tall, athletic, and handsome, whereas Oliver knew he was no more than average height, bookish, and gangling, with thin features that more than one student had described as bird-like.

He climbed the steps to the main door and rang the electric bell, hearing it clanging within like the bells of St. Michael’s calling the faithful to worship. As always, he felt the first stirrings of unease, for there was often the feeling that the orderlies and doctors who worked here were looking at him as though measuring him for a straitjacket. That was, of course, ludicrous. Such barbaric restraints were almost never utilized any more, a more pharmaceutical route being the preferred method of ensuring patient compliance.

The door opened and a thickset orderly Oliver hadn’t seen before looked him up and down. The man stood in the doorway and waited for him to speak.

“Ah, yes, Oliver Grayson for Henry Cartwright. I telephoned Dr. Hardstrom to tell him I was coming. I’m a bit early, obviously, but you know how it is: classes to teach at the university, eager young minds to fill with knowledge…”

The words trailed off as he saw the orderly wasn’t the slightest bit interested. Why would he be? Oliver had a tendency to gabble when nervous, and the asylum made him more nervous than almost any other place in Arkham, and that was saying something. The orderly waved him in and Oliver removed his hat and stepped into the dimly lit atrium. The floor was a staggered herringbone pattern of black and white tiles that formed a serrated arrow pointing toward an iron gate barring access to the inner sanctum of the institution. Even the architecture of this place drew him in, letting him know that it had a padded room ready and waiting for the day his mind collapsed.

A small reception desk was set to one side and the orderly went behind this and checked his name against the day’s expected visitors.

“Grayson?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re here to see who?”

“Professor Henry Cartwright,” said Oliver. “I believe I said that already.”

The orderly gave him an odd look and shook his head. “Nobody by that name works here.”

“No,” said Oliver with a forced smile. “He doesn’t work here. He is a patient here.”

“Right,” said the orderly. “Then he’s not a professor. You shouldn’t confuse things by saying things that aren’t true.”

Oliver wanted to say that Professor Henry Cartwright deserved the title of professor more than most men who bore it, lunatic or not, but sensed that getting into an argument with this orderly would see him shown the door in short order.

A heavy visitor’s book was turned around to face Oliver.

“You need to sign in,” said the orderly, as though Oliver had never been here before.

Oliver took out his fountain pen and dipped it into the desk’s recessed inkwell, signing his name and taking his pocket watch out to write down the time. It was a quarter past seven, early by any academic’s standards, but Henry always seemed more cogent in the early hours of the day. Medicated he was barely coherent, and by evening virtually catatonic.

The rattle of iron keys and the clatter of a lock announced the arrival of another orderly. Oliver looked up from the book to see a thin-faced man coming through the barred gateway. His name was Monroe, and he was smoking a cheap roll-up cigarette that reeked unpleasantly of damp moss.

The thickset orderly jabbed a callused thumb toward Oliver.

“Take him upstairs,” said the orderly. “He’s here to see the firebug.”

* * *

“Henry?” he said. “Henry? It’s Oliver Grayson. Thought I’d stop by and see how you were getting on. Been awhile, I know, but you know how it is at the university. Always classes to take, papers to grade and so on.”

Henry Cartwright didn’t respond, sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands clasped in his lap and staring vacantly at the blank wall opposite him. Oliver removed his coat and put it on the back of the chair Monroe had provided. He set down his briefcase and sat beside Henry, looking at the man’s pale, ravaged features. He’d lost weight since coming to the asylum, almost three years ago, but that was only to be expected. The burn scarring on his hands and face had healed well, and only the barest hint of it could be seen at the side of his neck and upon his palms.

Some of the other patients had access to sketch pads, paints, and colored crayons, with which they decorated their rooms with drawings and symbols analyzed by the institute’s physicians. Not that much came of such analysis, for though Arkham Asylum practiced modern psychiatric treatments, the emphasis was very much on palliative care and not curing its patients. Henry had no such adornments to his room. Since he had been incarcerated at the asylum after a series of arson attacks in late 1923, it had been deemed ill-advised to give Henry anything flammable in his room.

“Are they treating you well?” he asked. “Is the food tolerable?”

Again there was no answer, though Henry turned his head slightly.

“I expect you’ll be glad of the coming winter,” continued Oliver. “Less light to wake you in the mornings.”

As well as no paper, Henry’s room had no curtains either, and in summer the light streamed in criminally early. Oliver himself was a light sleeper, and hung blackout curtains on the windows of his bedroom at the first hint of spring. He unsnapped his briefcase and lifted out a book, The Great Gatsby, and opened it to where he’d reached the last time he’d come to see Henry. After catching the movie at the Amherst Theatre, Oliver had picked up the book from the university library and found it far superior to the celluloid adaptation.

“Now where were we?” said Oliver. “Ah, yes. Nick had just learned that his neighbor is the millionaire Jay Gatsby, and has received an invitation to one of his lavish parties.”

Oliver had no idea whether Henry understood anything he had read, but the soothing cadences of his reading voice seemed to give his old friend pleasure. Henry had been a dear friend to Oliver, and if this small act leavened the long emptiness of his days then it was the least he could do.

He read a couple of chapters, regaling Henry with the tale of Nick’s experience at the party and the comical realization that almost none of the partygoers actually knew their host. As Oliver finished the section where Nick and Jordan Baker finally meet the reclusive rich man, he closed the book and placed it back in his briefcase. Sunlight was stretching across the wall behind him, and Henry’s eyes were following its growing intensity. His hands unclasped and his mouth opened as he looked out through the barred window.

“The sun,” said Henry. “It’s alive you know. The fire inside it. I’ve seen the fireflies that burn when they come down from the sun and the stars beyond. They come down and they burn everything they touch. Ash and cinders, that’s all they leave behind.”

Oliver cleared his throat and took Henry’s hand. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve written to a friend of mine about you, Henry. His name is Dr. William Hillshore, and he is an eminent psychologist from England who teaches at the Jesuit College of San Francisco. If you don’t have any objections, I’d like to have him take a look at your case notes. He’s rather brilliant, you know, and the academic grapevine has it that he’s dealt with some rather challenging and…unusual cases. I’ve known and corresponded with him for many years now, and his work with British veterans of the Great War is quite groundbreaking.”

“Hillshore?”

“Yes, that’s his name. Do you mind at all?”

Henry shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t. But he won’t be able to see the fireflies.”

“I expect he won’t,” said Oliver. “But he might be able to help you.”

“No one can help me,” said Henry, and the finality of the words almost broke Oliver’s heart. “142, 142, 142…”

Oliver had heard this mantra of numbers before, but now, as then, he had no idea what they represented. Henry’s pathology was such that whenever those numbers were recited it was an indication he was becoming agitated. Oliver switched tack, changing the subject to something less likely to upset his friend.

“I had another letter from the Journal of Anthropology, you know?” said Oliver. “They were going to be publishing my research on the Yopasi tribe in the fall edition, but with all that’s happened they’ve pushed it back to the spring. To ‘give me the opportunity to revise my findings.’ It’s all politics, of course. They think I’m a fraud, Henry. Trying to hoodwink them and make them all look foolish. As if I don’t already look foolish enough.”

Henry ceased his repetition of the number 142, and his face took on a more serene look, like the pictures of soldiers Oliver had seen upon their return to the United States after the war. They looked right through the camera lens, as though not seeing it, as though they had seen things their minds could not process. Oliver thought they looked desperately sad, and hoped Hillshore could make some headway with Henry’s file.

“Three years of work up in smoke,” Oliver continued. “Three years living in primitive huts and researching the Yopasi, and for what? For them to up and damn well disappear on me, that’s what. I ask you, where does a whole tribe of Pacific Islanders go? It looked like a hurricane had hit their island, but I checked the meteorological data for the entire six months I was back in the States, and there wasn’t a single thing out of the ordinary. If I didn’t know better, I would think I was trying to mount an elaborate hoax.”

The words came out in a rush, years of frustration undimmed by this fresh telling. He knew Henry probably didn’t understand what he was saying, but it felt good to say the words out loud, to vent to a sympathetic ear. Even if that ear couldn’t really hear him.

A key clattered in the lock, and Monroe appeared in the doorway. The mossy stink of his cigarette quickly filled the room as he blew a series of smoke rings.

“You have to go now,” said Monroe. “It’s time for his meds.”

“Of course,” said Oliver, gathering his coat and briefcase.

Monroe stepped inside the room and took a drag on his cigarette. The tip burned brightly, and Oliver nearly jumped out of his skin as Henry let out a terrified scream and scrambled to the corner of his bed, pulling the sheets up over his head.

“Fire! Fire…oh God in heaven, no! Not the fire, please no!” yelled Henry, beating his sheet-covered head with his fists. “It’s coming down again. Fires falling from the sky to burn them all. It’s burning them all! Iä Cthugha, na, Fnagt…”

The words died off, but before the last nonsensical syllable was out of Henry’s mouth, Monroe’s cigarette sparked with fire, the entire length of the crooked roll-up bursting into flame that crackled for the briefest moment like a spiteful laugh. Monroe flapped like a flightless bird, and though the sight was comical, the words Henry had spoken left a bitter taste in Oliver’s mouth, like the acrid aftermath of a particularly bilious belch.

“Get out,” ordered Monroe, his words muffled by the hand pressed to his burned lips.

Oliver backed out of the room as Monroe slammed the door. He stood forlornly in the antiseptic corridor of the asylum, listening to Henry’s pitiful sobs and Monroe’s angry words. He wished there was something he could do for his friend, but there was little enough he could do for himself.

Oliver checked the time on his pocket watch.

He had a call to make.

* * *

Rita ran with her arms pumping at her sides, her long economical strides eating up the distance with ease. She left Dorothy Upman Hall and ran along the tree-lined thoroughfare of Church Street, giving a wave to the bronze statue of Dean Halsey as she passed. Behind the statue of the good doctor, the tall tower erected to memorialize the sons of Arkham who’d died in the Civil War reared up taller than the surrounding buildings, and Rita never failed to be impressed by its scale. It was the tallest thing in Arkham, and dominated the skyline south of the river.

She turned north alongside the old graveyard and onto the Aylesbury pike, heading west out of town toward the athletics field. The day was clear and the cold wind kept her nice and cool as the Georgian homes, cobbled streets, and clustered buildings of the town receded from sight. 

Rita ran every day, and needed to keep her fitness level high. The last thing she wanted was to get kicked out of Miskatonic for failing to achieve sporting glory for the university. She wasn’t smart like Amanda, and knew that if she didn’t justify the faith her scholarship trustees had placed in her, then she’d be back in the tenements of New Orleans within the month.

She kept a picture of Paavo Nurmi above her bed, a Finnish runner who had won five gold medals in five events at the Paris Olympics in 1924. He was part of the Flying Finn, a group of runners who excelled at all levels of distance running, and a man whose achievements Rita hoped one day to emulate. He was her hero, a proper sportsman, not like that thug Jack Dempsey the boys at Miskatonic all seemed to idolize. He was simply a brawler who’d begun his sporting career by picking fights in bars and walking away with the winnings of the bets made against him. Sure, he’d won a bunch of proper fights since then, but hadn’t he just lost his title in Philadelphia to an ex-Marine?

There was a purity in running that couldn’t be found in any other sport, a battle with the self to find those last reserves to keep going when your body was telling you to stop. When it was so easy to give up, the challenge was to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep pushing on. And Rita never gave up. She’d been a fighter ever since she’d decided to get the hell out of New Orleans. She’d had to: after a group of Klansmen had bought her older brother out of jail only to force him into virtual slavery on their sugar plantations east of the city, she’d had no other choice.

Rita’s daddy had gone out one night with a shotgun and Mama Josette, the mambo of Rampart Street, to get her brother back. Her father and brother had come back just after dawn, but would never speak of what had happened out on the plantation. Rita saw her daddy’s shotgun still had both shells in the barrel, but when she’d asked how they’d gotten the plantation owner to give her brother back, her momma had told her to hush up and never speak of it again. She never did find out how her brother had been freed, but a month later, she heard a number of plantations along the east bank of the Mississippi had burned down.

No way she was going back to that life.

With that thought, she picked up the pace, knowing she would need to dig deep to finish her run if she peaked too early. 

West of Arkham, the trees crowded in on the pike, forming shadowed leafy archways and drooping bowers. The road was asphalt, and though there weren’t any sidewalks, the sides were still grassy, so Rita ran there. The forests grew thickly around Arkham, surrounding the town as though seeking to keep it away from prying eyes. She’d mentioned that impression to Amanda once, but her friend had looked at her strangely and muttered something about the witch-hunts of hundreds of years ago.

Through gaps in the forest canopy, Rita saw the hills rising above the trees. Though they were many miles ahead, it seemed as though they too pressed in on the city, their rounded flanks and stone-capped summits bare of any vegetation whatsoever. Rita eased up, slowing to a more measured pace as she came up on the rutted turnoff to the athletics field. It was a mile and a half to the field. By the time she’d gone around the baseball diamond and the bleachers, it’d be time to head back to take a shower before heading to class.

She took the turn and came in sight of the athletics grounds: a football field and a crumbling stand, which backed onto a baseball diamond and tiered wooden bleachers stacked high behind home plate. A few jocks were out hitting a ball around, mostly freshmen from Hell East, and Rita didn’t blame them for wanting to get out of that crummy dorm, with its busted heating, crappy plumbing, and lousy rooms. She headed past the thwack of ash on leather and made her way along the cinder track at the edge of the grounds.

Running wasn’t as popular as baseball and football, and much of the track was overgrown with weeds. Rita was sweating freely now, her entire concentration fixed on continuing forward. She heard whooping yells and more cracks of bat on ball, but paid them no mind. She was in the runner’s “corridor” where all she could see was the ground immediately in front of her, the yard or so of track she would cross in the next second.

Too late, Rita saw the bundle of clothes on the track and tried to avoid it. Her right foot came down on the bundle and she felt her ankle twist as she tried to extend her stride to avoid it. The world spun around her and she tumbled to the ground, grazing her knee and slamming her cheek into the cinders. She rolled and spat dirt, grabbing her ankle with a howl of frustration. She could already feel the joint begin to swell and the pain throbbing up her shin told her that, at the very least, she’d sprained it badly.

Gritting her teeth against the pain, she looked to see what had tripped her.

“What the hell…?” she said, not sure she was seeing it right.

It looked like a tattered dress, black and sequined, with corn-colored butterflies stitched around the hems. The cloth was torn, as if it had been cut up with long pinking scissors, and Rita saw it was wet with a sticky liquid. Pink and red lumps laced with wriggling insects protruded from the arms and bottom of the dress.

A moment later Rita saw the bloody remains of the girl wrapped in the dress.

And this time it was her turn to scream.

CHAPTER TWO

Rivet guns and the sound of hammers echoed over New York’s East River Shipyard, reverberating off the cavernous assembly sheds as waterfalls of sparks fell from acetylene torches welding heavy sheets of steel together. The shipyard employed nearly ten thousand men: fitters, welders, riveters, steelworkers, panel beaters, riggers, glassblowers, surveyors, engineers, electricians, and skilled machine operators.

The vessel currently berthed in dry dock 23F was the DCV Matilda Rose, a deepwater construction vessel that was nearing completion. The vessel belonged to the Warren Mining Company, a business that had prospered under the ineffectual presidency of Warren Harding and the benevolence of the corrupt Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall.

In 1922, the Wall Street Journal had uncovered evidence that Fall had leased government petroleum fields at Elk Hills and Teapot Dome to oilmen in return for huge bribes and numerous gifts. One of the benefactors of this had been the oilman Charles Warren, and though the fields at Elk Hills had since been returned to the government, his drilling rigs’ brief tenure on the land had made him millions of dollars. Though the ensuing scandal had hit Warren and the other oilmen hard, America’s voracious consumption ensured that their businesses weathered the storm without noticeable ill-effect. 

Work on the DCV Matilda Rose had begun at the East River Shipyard the year before, and her launch date was set for early November. The foreman of the shipyard was optimistic that he and his work gangs would hit that deadline. Designed to build offshore drilling platforms, the vessel was ungainly and ugly, but would allow Charles Warren’s drillers to reach oil fields that had, until now, been inaccessible via conventional means.

Her decks swarmed with workers, mainly steel fabricators and welders fitting the last portions of her deck and winch gear. A giant A-frame crane rose in the middle of the ship, and it was here that Patrick Doyle and his workmate, Martin Quinn, watched the quayside cranes lifting a tarpaulin-covered object onto the forked fantail at the rear of the ship. Patrick and Martin had, together with a veritable army of welders, recently finished attaching a complex series of winches and cable drums to the Matilda Rose and were enjoying a well-deserved break.

“So what d’ye reckon that’ll be then, Patrick?” asked Martin, carving a slice of his apple with a small pocket-knife and nodding toward the object being maneuvered into position by a gang of foreigners. They were mulattos and oriental-looking types mostly, but among them were a sprinkling of strange looking men of uncommon bulk with skin burnished bronze in distant lands. 

“Damned if I know, laddie,” shrugged Patrick. He took a drink from an unmarked glass bottle and handed it to Martin. “Here, a drop o’ the real stuff. By God, we’ve earned it.”

“Aye, that we have, Patrick,” agreed Martin, taking a slug of the Irish whiskey. “Saints alive, Patrick, where did ye get that from? That’s whiskey right enough, none of your bathtub shite.”

“Sure, didn’t I run into a lad from Killarney the other night in Shaughnessy’s? Lad’s come in from Ellis Island not three nights previous. Come to New York looking for his mother, he says. She came here six months ago, says he. Tells me her name, and I say, as God is my witness, that I knows her. Sends him up to Bowery Mission with a tear in me eye, and isn’t he so overcome with gratitude that he gives me this bottle?”

“Away with ye!” laughed Martin. “That’s ten Hail Marys at least.”

“Ah, but it’s worth it, eh?”

“Sure is, Paddy-boy,” said Martin, taking another drink.

The crane lowered its cargo to the deck, and the strange workers began fixing it to the deck plates with rivet guns and long lengths of chain. Whatever it was, they were keen to keep it covered, but the winds whipping in off the East River had other ideas. A gust caught the edge of the tarpaulin as it was lifted aside to enable one of the big men to reach something underneath, and it blew up and over the object.

“Well would ye look at that, Martin?” said Patrick.

Amid shouting voices in a language neither he nor Martin understood, the workers tried to cover the object up again. Patrick saw a flash of bronze metal, curved enough to suggest that what lay beneath was roughly spherical in shape and adorned with gleaming metal protuberances that didn’t look like any piece of drilling equipment Patrick had ever seen.

Martin handed the bottle back to him.

“Looks like some kind of diving bell,” he said.

“Aye, that it did,” said Martin, the matter already slipping from his thoughts. Patrick saw him glance surreptitiously at the bottle and knew he was angling for another drink. Patrick obliged him as the foreman shooed curious riggers away from the freshly covered object.

“It looks like a diving bell, right enough,” said Patrick. “But you and I both fitted those bloody big cable drums for that frame, and as sure as me father was the best pub fighter in Cork, I know for a fact there’s thousands of meters of cable stored below decks.”

“So?”

“So I ask you, Martin Quinn, what sort of diving bell goes down that deep?”

“I dunno, Patrick,” replied Martin. “What kind?”

“No kind,” said Patrick. “I can’t be sure what that thing is, but it ain’t no diving bell.”

* * *

The athletics field was now a crime scene. The area around the body had been roped off and two police Model Ts were parked on either side of the running track. Crowds of rubberneckers had already begun to gather on the bleachers, ghouls hoping for a better look at the body. Dr. Vincent Lee climbed out of his car and nodded to one of the young cops, a rookie he hadn’t seen before, and made his way toward the roped off area of the track. Luther Harden was already there, kneeling beside the body and lifting strips of black material to get a better look.

“Please don’t do that, Detective Harden,” said Vincent. “No one should touch the remains until I have had a chance to examine them.”

Harden looked up, the brim of his trilby pulled down over his forehead and his ever-present cigar rolling at the corner of his mouth. His complexion was ruddy, and his eyes regarded Vincent as though he were a potential suspect. In his mid-forties, Harden was—as far as Vincent could tell—an honest cop, but one who didn’t suffer fools and always looked for the simplest explanation. Blue smoke coiled from the stogie and Harden wiped his hands on his trousers before holding one out to Vincent. As his jacket shifted, Vincent saw the butt of a department-issue revolver.

“Whatever you say, Doc,” said Harden.

Vincent declined to shake Harden’s hand, finding the man’s lack of respect for the dead distasteful. He nodded toward the stained patch of ground behind the man and said, “The same as the others?”

“Sure seems like it,” agreed Harden. 

“Who found her?”

“A student from Miskatonic,” said Harden, consulting a black notepad. “A Bayou girl out running.”

“Does she have a name, this student?”

Once again Harden consulted his pad, though Vincent found it hard to believe he could have forgotten the girl’s name after such a short time. Harden was nothing if not formal.

“Rita Young, athletics scholarship from New Orleans,” said Harden. “She’s down at the station now. Harrigan’s taking her statement.”

“New Orleans? She’s a long way from home,” observed Vincent absently, moving past Harden and kneeling beside the bloodied remains wrapped in the torn black dress.

“Looks like wild animals got her,” said Harden, the words a statement, not a question.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” replied Vincent. 

“Sure, Doc,” said Harden. “Just get this wrapped up pronto, huh? I got a dozen other things I could be doing today, and believe me, this is another mess I don’t need.”

“I’m sure this poor girl felt the same way,” mused Vincent, letting his eyes roam the body.

The girl was in her early twenties and dressed in a fashionably short dress that exposed her knees and left her arms bare. Was she one of the flappers who danced and smoked and drank at the speakeasies and dance halls that were springing up all over America? The sober, God-fearing people of Arkham had resisted the incursion of jazz, and the grasping celebrity-obsessed culture of the times as best they could, but youngsters seized onto these new crazes like a drowning man holding onto a kisby ring. The dress was lightweight and barely decent, typical of what the youth of today were wearing in search of excitement. This girl had certainly found excitement of a darker sort than she’d been expecting.

She had been pretty in life, with a slender face and high cheekbones. Her hair was cut in a short bob, like Colleen Moore in The Perfect Flapper, and though glassy in death, her eyes were a vivid shade of green. The girl’s skin had been drained of color, and she was quite probably from a good family, though she bore none of the hallmarks of Arkham breeding.

Her left leg was bent underneath her pelvis, and a gleaming heeled shoe lay next to her ravaged body. The lower portion of her right leg was missing below the knee, and her right arm was likewise absent. Her left had been stripped of flesh from the shoulder down, and only the last remnants of connective tissue and sinew held it to the body.

“Yeah,” said Harden, spitting a brown stream of tobacco saliva. “Wild animals.”

“If you’re so sure about that, why did you call me?” asked Vincent, growing tired of Harden’s observations.

“I need you to write up cause of death on the death certificate.”

“I’ll do that once I’ve actually determined cause of death.”

“Just make it quick, okay?”

“Is Asa here?” asked Vincent, hoping Arkham’s Chief of Police could rein in his more aggressive underling. Asa at least understood the value of professional courtesy. 

“You’re kidding, right?” said Harden. “He’ll still be in his pajamas eating toast and drinking coffee. The chief doesn’t like to hear about crime beyond bootleggers, gamblers, and drunks.”

That much was true. Asa Nichols was an honest cop, but he hadn’t quite grasped the way the world had changed in the wake of the Great War. Despite the number of strange deaths and mysterious occurrences that plagued Arkham, the Chief of Police hadn’t yet woken up to the new reality of the world. A time of innocence had ended in the wake of that globe-spanning conflict, and the world was still in a state of shock. The youth of the nation were reacting to the psychic scars the Great War had left with a desperate zest for life that laughed in the face of the horrors wreaked on the European battlefields.

 “So what do you think, Doc?” said Harden, leaning over his shoulder and blowing a cloud of toxic smoke into his face. “Wild animals, right?”

Vincent coughed and lifted the skeletal arm. He peered at a number of deep striations in the bone.

“It certainly looks like something ate the flesh directly from the bones, but the bite marks don’t look like any animal I know that would devour a human being.”

“So don’t keep me in suspense, Doc. What do they look like?”

Vincent hesitated. Though he was no stranger to the darker underside of Arkham, he knew better than to draw unnecessary attention to it. Yet this was the sixth body to be discovered like this in the last few years.

“They look like bite marks from a human jaw,” he said.

“Human? You mean a person did this? No way, Doc. I don’t buy it.”

“It’s not about whether you buy it, Detective Harden,” pointed out Vincent. “The evidence is right here in front of us. The facts speak for themselves, no matter how impossible they might seem.”

“What are you, Sherlock Holmes?” snapped Harden. “I don’t need this. Have you any idea what will happen if it gets out that there’s a maniac killing and eating young girls? There’ll be a panic. Lynch mobs. Street justice. The townsfolk won’t stand for it.”

“They’ve stood for much more, believe me,” said Vincent before he could stop himself. Immediately, Harden was in his face.

“You trying to be smart with me, Doc?” he said, jabbing his smoldering cigar at Vincent’s face. “You might have come up from Boston with your fancy Yale degree, but this is my town, and I don’t like it when outsiders try and mess with me. You understand?”

“I’m not sure I do, to be honest,” said Vincent. “I am just telling you what I find.”

“Yeah, well get her bagged up and taken down to Eleazar’s.”

Vincent nodded, having expected as much. Jaspar Eleazar ran a low rent funeral home in the lower Southside and wasn’t too picky when it came to how a person had met their end. The other dead girls had been taken there, and no autopsies had been performed as far as Vincent knew. Like many other things in Arkham, this would be quietly buried, and a highly evolved desire not to face the facts would allow the townsfolk to pretend they lived somewhere normal.

Harden turned and beckoned a patrolman, the rookie Vincent had nodded to as he arrived. 

“Muldoon, right? Lend a hand to the Doc here,” ordered Harden. “Make sure he gets the body to Eleazar’s, you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said Muldoon, saluting crisply.

Harden shook his head and said, “You Boston types,” before walking away.

The rookie held a hand out to Vincent. “Tommy Muldoon,” he said. “I’m kinda new here.”

“Vincent Lee, and aren’t we all?”

“Sir?”

“Don’t mind me, Tommy,” said Vincent. “Death has a habit of making me surly.”

“Heck, I don’t blame you, sir. I ain’t never seen nothing like this, neither,” said Muldoon, his face as blanched of color as the dead girl’s. “The instructors at the Police Academy told us we might see some hinky stuff, but this…this is just about as nasty as I could imagine.”

“Trust me,” said Vincent. “This is Arkham. You’ll see nastier and stranger before long.”

* * *

Oliver Grayson’s office at Miskatonic University was located on the third story of the Liberal Arts building in the Department of Anthropology. Situated on the southeastern corner, it had a pleasant view over the Copley memorial bell tower and its surrounding parkland. The red brick form of the west dormitory could be seen through the trees, and beyond that was the three-story gothic structure of the university library. Constructed from locally quarried granite in 1888, the Miskatonic library was the kingdom of Dr. Henry Armitage, keeper of all the secrets held within its echoing hallways and close-packed stacks of papers, books, and pamphlets.

The office was stuffy and as Oliver waited for the telephone operator to connect him with the Jesuit College of San Francisco, he levered the window open a fraction, keeping the earpiece pressed to his ear with his shoulder. Cold air sighed into the room, but it was welcome, and helped diminish the smell of ashes and burnt offerings that had clung to his senses ever since leaving Henry at the asylum.

Looking out over the campus, Oliver watched students walking in groups toward their classes. Gray strips of cloud clawed the sky like gouges and the threat of heavy rain and snow was very real. A brooding melancholy hung over the streets and parks of the campus, which Oliver attributed to the approach of winter, though he knew, on some fundamental level, that there was more to it than that. He was out of sorts, but then he was always out of sorts after he came back from seeing Henry. That such a brilliant scholar could be so debilitated by the horrors of the Great War was galling enough, but that Oliver hadn’t seen the damage Henry’s service had wrought was a guilty thorn in his side.

Oliver idly flicked through some test papers he had yet to grade and lesson plans for the day’s lectures. He saw the words, but they didn’t penetrate his consciousness. He reclined on his creaking leather chair, listening to the hums, clicks, ghostly burbles, and whispers of distant conversations on the line.

Bookshelves lined opposite walls of his office, anthropological texts including all twelve volumes of Frazer’s Golden Bough, Kroeber’s On the Super-Organic, photostats of Margaret Meade’s preliminary findings after her fieldwork in Samoa, together with numerous texts by the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas: Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, Mythology and Folk-Tales of North American Indians, The Mind of Primitive Man. Mixed in with the required reading of any serious student of anthropology was Margaret Murray’s fanciful The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.

The latter volume was a curio, as Murray’s findings were largely discounted by the anthropological community as being selective and over-stretching the limits of her accumulated data. It had amused Oliver to read it, before he realized that the various denunciations of her work were appearing in obscure academic journals unlikely to be read by the public. Such nonsense was gaining credence in the wider world, and he and his fellow professors of anthropology would need to fight against such sensationalist nonsense.

A measure of how he viewed Murray’s work could be read in their placement alongside Oliver’s treasured volumes of Jules Verne. Dozens of the fantasist’s books lined the lower shelves, including precious first editions of From the Earth to the Moon, The Mysterious Island, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. As a child, Oliver had loved the work of Verne, and though the expense of acquiring these texts had been ruinous, he had not heeded the cost when the Baltimore auction house had telegrammed him with news of the books’ appearance under the hammer.

His own published works, detailing the cultural practices of the indigenous tribes of America, Alaska, and the Pacific Islands were modestly gathered above these books, alongside his copious research findings from the Yopasi expeditions. An entire shelf of books and papers was dedicated to the three years he’d spent with the Pacific Island tribe: drawings and monographs on language, belief systems, and physiological data. Given the disappearance of the Yopasi, none of that work would see the light of day in any academic publication of note, and Oliver felt the familiar bitterness at the sight of the shelf of wasted work.

On the wall behind his desk were his diplomas from Brown University, one in Cultural Anthropology, the other in Ancient Languages, with specializations in Latin and Arabic. Framed in dark walnut, the gold leaf of the lettering caught the reflected light from the window. His qualifications were hard-earned and the result of many years of study and fieldwork. It seemed they were looking down at him like some kind of joke now, colorful titles that weren’t worth the embossed paper they were printed on.

A tired-sounding female voice crackled from the earpiece of his telephone.

“Professor Grayson,” she said. “I have your other party on the line.”

“Ah yes, excellent,” said Oliver, turning his attention back to the telephone. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said the operator, her voice disappearing with an electric click.

“Hello?” said a cultured, English voice. “Oliver, are you there?”

“William,” said Oliver. “Lovely to speak to you again.”

“Indeed, old chap,” said Professor William Hillshore, resident psychologist, lecturer, and acting rehabilitation physician of the Jesuit College of San Francisco. Oliver had met William Hillshore in 1920 at Cambridge University while he had been a visiting professor, delivering lectures on linguistic relativity. Oliver and Hillshore had sparred good-naturedly in the staff common rooms in regards to his findings, and their friendship had firmly established itself in the pubs and smoking houses of that ancient city. Many years of friendship and correspondence had followed.

“It’s an absolute pleasure to hear from you,” said Hillshore, “It’s been far too long. How the devil are you?”

“Well,” said Oliver. “Still at Miskatonic and still underpaid, but ‘he is richest who is content with the least.’”

“The life of a scholar, dear chap,” agreed Hillshore. “But Socrates? Really? How unoriginal of you, Oliver. I would have chosen Epictetus: ‘the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant’ or perhaps something by Plutarch.”

“You always did have the edge over me on the old philosophers.”

“The benefits of a classical education, dear boy,” said Hillshore, and Oliver heard the scratch and hiss of a striking match. He could picture the Englishman in his office, smoking on his pipe and enjoying a pot of Earl Grey amid his books and wax cylinders, upon which he insisted on recording his patient interview sessions, despite the availability of more modern equipment.

“Yes, I suppose I’ll have to muddle through with my poor colonial education.”

“We must all make sacrifices, Oliver,” said Hillshore. “That is why I now find myself on your side of the Atlantic, trying to educate the good people of this nation on the intricacies of the mind and its attendant foibles. The theories of Herr Freud have barely reached these shores, and there is a great deal of work to be done.”

“You’re still working at the Letterman?” asked Oliver, remembering that Hillshore had been volunteering his expertise at the Letterman General Hospital in the Presidio for a time. Originally built to care for wounded veterans of the Spanish-American War, it now catered to servicemen suffering mental trauma inflicted during the Great War.

“Sadly, yes,” said Hillshore. “Such suffering as you would hope never to believe existed in this world. War may break the bodies of soldiers, but we are only now beginning to understand how much it scars the mind. Though, of course, you will be only too well aware of this.”

“Regrettably so, William,” said Oliver. “You received the photostats I sent you?”

“I did indeed,” confirmed Hillshore. “Marvelous thing this transcontinental airmail, I must say. A courier delivered them from Crissy Field just yesterday, so you understand I have only had the chance for a cursory examination of your colleague’s pathology.”

“Of course.”

“I must say, it makes for fascinating reading, though. A decorated veteran of the United States Marines, and a hero of 1918 whose unit was instrumental in helping stem the German Spring Offensive. Quite a remarkable man.”

“He is that,” agreed Oliver.

“And yet five years after returning from Europe, he was convicted of multiple counts of arson and incarcerated at Arkham Asylum. Of course, I shall have to peruse Dr. Hardstrom’s notes more fully before I can offer a professional diagnosis, though my first thought is that I see no correlation between his diagnosis and the presented symptoms.”

“Do you think you can help him?”

“I’m almost certain of it,” said Hillshore, and Oliver smiled at the confidence and certainty in Hillshore’s voice. It had been the right decision to contact the Englishman, and Oliver felt his lingering sense of melancholy begin to lift.

They spoke briefly about trivial matters for a few minutes longer, before the clicks and buzzes on the line told them they were reaching their allotted time limit. 

“It’s been swell to speak to you again, William,” said Oliver.

“A pleasure as always, Oliver,” agreed Hillshore. “I shall be in touch directly when I have had a chance to fully digest Henry’s case notes. Perhaps I might even come out to you in Massachusetts; I’ve a hankering to plunder that Miskatonic library of yours. I’m told you have some quite juicy texts there.”

“That would be very kind of you, William.”

“Nonsense. As a wise man said, ‘men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.’”

“Heraclitus?”

“Very good, Oliver,” laughed Hillshore. “I’ll make an Englishman out of you yet.”

* * *

The light was fading as Rex Murphy scribbled his impressions of the athletics field into his battered notepad. 

It was a creepy place, surrounded by dark forest that seemed too thick to be healthy. Like it was closing in. 

That was dumb. Of course it wasn’t closing in, but with the sun fading behind the hills to the west and the shadows lengthening, it sure was hard to shake the idea from his head. He took down a few more impressions, really trying to capture the feel of the place for his story.

Spooky.

Threatening.

Overgrown. Like the world wants this part back again.

Like it’s being reclaimed by something older.

He looked at that last bit again, wondering where it had come from. He often had flashes of insight he couldn’t explain, and didn’t question, but this seemed like it came from somewhere outside, as though the impression had been placed in his head. Rex smiled and shook off such a crazy notion, tipping his hat back and pulling out a pack of Chesterfields from his rumpled coat. 

When things went his way, which wasn’t often these days, Rex was a good reporter, with a nose for a story and an eye for detail that really sold it to Joe Average. A contact in the Arkham telephone exchange had tipped him off to this one, a call coming into the police station that a dead girl had been found at the university athletics ground off the Aylesbury pike. Rex had called Minnie and they’d burned rubber to get here, arriving just as they took the body away. By now she would be riding a slab at Whitechapel Mortuary or Eleazar’s, though Rex’s money was on the latter.

He lit up and the tip glowed as Rex inhaled, casting an orange glow over his notebook.

“Those things’ll kill you, honey,” said Minnie, collapsing the trellis struts of her Autographic Kodak camera. “And they stink.”

“These?” said Rex, taking another drag. “Nah, haven’t you heard the advertisements? Smoking these babies is going to make me like Douglas Fairbanks.”

He coughed and Minnie cocked an eyebrow. Petite and curvy, Minnie Klein was a firecracker of a gal, with a butter-wouldn’t-melt face and a skewed sense of humor that Rex liked enormously. Dressed in a cornflower-colored dress and with a short haircut like Clara Bow, she was attractive in a fashionably prim way. Sometimes Rex thought she was as pretty as a picture, but other times she looked like a dowdy housewife. Minnie was wise to all the latest crazes, but didn’t seem to have any interest in jazz, or smoking, or dancing, which made her an almost polar opposite of Rex.

The Arkham Advertiser’s go-to gal for creepy photos of the city’s underbelly or a particularly gruesome crime scene, Minnie had impressed the paper’s owner, Harvey Gedney, enough to get her put on the payroll, much to the chagrin of the stringers that carried a camera around and called themselves photographers. Arkham born and raised, Minnie had an eye for a photograph that had impressed Rex the moment he’d seen her work. Surprisingly, Minnie had read his stories and offered to work with him. They made a hot pairing, bagging some juicy stories and getting some amazing pictures.

“Anyway,” continued Rex. “It won’t be these that kill me, it’ll be Harvey if we don’t get some good copy to him by the end of the day.”

“You get anything sweet from Harden and the Doc?” asked Minnie, packing the camera away into its padded case.

“Not a bean,” said Rex. “All Harden gave me was a glare that would buckle a railway spike, and the Doc wasn’t any more helpful. All he said was a young woman got killed.”

“Killed? He mean murdered?”

“Wasn’t specific,” said Rex, spotting one of the young cops coming around a police car, looking like he’d just tossed his cookies in the bushes. Rex didn’t know this kid, and bet that would cut both ways. Rookies were always the least guarded of the cops. You could get some real juice from them because they didn’t know to watch their mouths. He stuck his pad into the satchel he wore over his shoulder and ran his hand through his unruly hair.

“Come on, Minnie,” said Rex, crushing his cigarette beneath his heel. “Let’s bag us a rookie.”

“Play nice,” warned Minnie, hauling the camera case into the back of their car, a battered Ford that looked like it had belonged to a careless drunk. It belonged to Rex, and that impression wasn’t far off the mark.

“Hey, don’t I always?” said Rex, walking over to the cop with his most winning smile plastered across his genial face. Slim and dressed in a suit two sizes too big for him, Rex cut a disarming figure, and the glasses he wore only reinforced that impression. His tousled brown hair blew in the wind, and a scrap of fuzz on his chin completed his slightly shambolic appearance.

The cop saw him coming and gave him a look Rex had been used to all his life. It was a look that said, Take a look at yourself and get your act together.

“Patrolman,” said Rex, sticking his hand out toward the cop. “I don’t think we’ve met, have we? I’m Rex, Rex Murphy from the Advertiser. And this little bundle of fun is Minnie Klein. Ain’t no one with a better eye for a good picture, no sir. She can make Fatty Arkbukle look like Valentino or make your grandmother look like Mary Pickford. No word of a lie.”

The rookie took a step back in the face of Rex’s verbal barrage, but recovered quickly.

“Patrolman Tommy Muldoon, and I know who you are, sir,” said the cop. Rex caught the unmistakable tones of a Bostonian accent. This kid was straight out of Charleston or West Roxbury. And with a name like Muldoon, it didn’t get any more obvious where his ancestry lay. Second or third generation Irish at the most.

“Glad to know you, Tommy Muldoon,” said Rex, revving up for his machine gun delivery. “So what’s going on here, son? A nasty one and no mistake, young girl murdered, cops on the hunt for a killer. Terrible stuff, isn’t it? You think things like this only happen in the big city, but they don’t, do they? They happen right here, in nice towns with nice people. Horrible, just horrible. So what happened?”

“I don’t think I should say, sir.”

Okay, so this one might have a bit of savvy to him.

Rex briefly entertained the idea of fishing out a few bucks to grease Muldoon’s palm, but suspected that would be a bad play. Best to play on the compassion angle.

“Come on, Tommy,” said Rex. “I got a nose for a story, and right now the old conk is telling me that this girl met a sticky end. Am I right? I’m right, aren’t I? Come on, I’ve lived in Arkham long enough to know that this ain’t exactly the first time something like this has happened, you know? I’ve seen the files. I’ve done the digging. I know what’s going on here, so you might as well gimme the juice to make sure I get it right. I mean, that young girl’s parents are gonna be broken hearted as it is, without a sap like me getting things all turned around. They deserve to know the truth about their little girl don’t they?”

It was a bluff, but one Rex calculated Tommy Muldoon’s big Irish heart wouldn’t see through. Keep ‘em on the back foot, keep ‘em thinking you know more than you do, and that they’re only confirming what you already know. That’s the way to get things out of folk who don’t want to tell you anything.

“I suppose you’re right sir, but you have to keep my name out of it,” said Muldoon. “And no pictures, Miss Klein.”

“Of course,” said Minnie as Rex fished out his pad and pencil.

“So what’s the deal here?” he asked.

Muldoon looked around as though nervous and whispered, “A student from Miskatonic was out for a morning run when she found the remains.”

“Remains?” interrupted Rex. “She wasn’t just, you know, dead?”

“No, sir. Looked like she’d been set on by wild animals.”

“Good Christ!” said Rex. “If that don’t beat all.”

“Quite, sir,” said Muldoon. Rex caught the younger man’s irritation at his casual blasphemy. “It ain’t the first, neither.”

“It’s not?”

“No, Doctor Lee said it’s the sixth. Seems like there have been five others over the last three years.”

Rex wrote quickly on his pad, fighting to conceal his excitement. There had been stories, rumors really, that young girls had been going missing, but no one had ever been able to confirm the truth of them. All over America young girls were leaving their podunk towns for the big cities in search of fame, excitement, and to be part of the burgeoning jazz scene, making it hard to be certain how many of them were disappearing for perfectly innocuous reasons and how many for something darker. To hear this from the mouth of a cop had set Rex’s newshound instincts off like a shot of bathtub gin to the gut. He found it hard to breathe.

“That’s terrible,” said Minnie, seeing his struggle. “Do they know who she was?”

Muldoon shook his head. “Not yet. We’re going to canvas the campus to see if anyone’s reported a missing person. She was dressed like one of them city girls you see in the movies, like she was from New York or something.”

“A flapper?”

“Yes, Miss Klein, just like that,” agreed Muldoon. “And though I won’t speak ill of the dead, I wish I could say I was surprised to see where such a lifestyle leads. If you drink, smoke, and look for trouble, it’s going to find you soon enough.”

“I think you’re absolutely right,” said Minnie with a neutral expression. Rex saw Muldoon glance at her flapper-like haircut.

“Well, thank you very much, Tommy,” said Rex, tucking his pencil behind his ear. “I think we got all we need here. You’ve been a great help, and that poor girl, whoever she was, thanks you for being there for her.”

Muldoon nodded, but didn’t reply. He turned back to the roped off crime scene, signaling that his patience with Rex had come to an end. Rex and Minnie made their way back to his rusty Ford and tried to contain the excitement of what Muldoon’s words potentially meant for their careers.

“Wow,” said Rex at last.

“Yeah,” agreed Minnie.

Rex looked around the athletics ground and sparked up another cigarette.

“We got to get this written up right now,” said Rex. “You got all you need, picture-wise?”

“A few doozies, Rex,” said Minnie. “The light’s going anyway, and I got some good shots of where they found the body, cops looking clueless, and the sun setting behind the hills. And that creepy guy over by the bleachers.”

“Good girl,” said Rex. “Wait, what creepy guy?”

“Over there, standing by the Crossley parked up at the bleachers.”

Rex couldn’t see who she was looking at until he realized a Crossley was a car, a big ugly car like the army used to drive in the war. Sure enough, there was a guy in a long brown duster and fedora watching what was going on, like some frontier lawman awaiting a gunfight.

“So who do you reckon he is?” asked Rex.

“Beats me, Rex,” said Minnie. “That Crossley’s ex-military, so I’d say soldier or private dick. Or maybe he’s some sicko that likes to get his ha-has from this kind of thing.”

“Or maybe he was just driving past and wondered what all the fuss was about.”

“Then why’s he taking notes?”

Rex peered through his glasses, seeing that Minnie was right; the man was writing something down in a pocket notebook.

“You want to go speak to him, too?” asked Minnie. “Could be something.”

Rex was about to answer her, but seeing that he was being observed, the man climbed into his car and drove away.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Rex.

“Don’t worry,” said Minnie. “I got the plates.”

“Clever girl,” said Rex, giving her a playful punch to the arm. “My clever, clever girl.”

CHAPTER THREE

The battered truck bounced along the rutted road, though to call it a road was a stretch. More like barely visible dirt track, thought Finn Edwards as he steered the heavy Model T through the darkened forest. Billington Woods was a few miles northwest of Arkham, seldom visited and isolated, which made it perfect for tonight’s meeting. Only the faintest glimmer of moonlight penetrated the thick forest canopy, and after a few hits of Jimmy’s whiskey, keeping the truck straight was an even greater challenge than normal.

“Jaysus, Finn, are you tryin’ to hit every bloody pothole in this damn road?” snapped Sean as a lit match fell from his hands. He cursed and stamped it out before lighting another and applying the flame to the tip of his cigarette.

“You think you can do better, do ye?” demanded Finn, tired of Sean’s constant bitching. West Roxbury born and bred, his whining accent annoyed the hell out of Finn, but he was a favorite of the Boston gangs, so he bit his tongue.

“Ah, sure now, Finn’s doing a grand job see,” said Jimmy from behind him, already three sheets to the wind, having finished his whiskey by the time they’d hit the Aylesbury pike. Jimmy turned around to look at the growling truck following them through the woods. “Better than Fergal anyhow, that boy’s all over the road like a drunken nun.”

Fergal was the youngest of the four of them, and nobody liked him. Too earnest in his desire to please, he was irritating in the way only someone who tried too hard to be liked can be irritating. Which was why Jimmy and Sean rode with Finn.

It had been a risk coming out this way, what with that poor dead girl found down at the athletics field, but the boys from Newburyport were coming tonight with the booze from Canada, so what choice did they have?

“Cheers for the support, Jimmy,” said Finn. “But in your state, I’m not sure you’re the best judge of my driving skills.”

“Yeah, shut your mouth, Jimmy,” added Sean, peering ahead as though he could penetrate the gloom. His cigarette filled the cab with smoke, but he didn’t think to offer Finn or Jimmy a puff. That was typical of Sean Cafferty, though: a man who didn’t give a rat’s ass for anyone but himself. If he weren’t so connected, Finn would have taken out his knife and gutted him right there and then.

“If ye’d let me turn on the lights I could see better,” suggested Finn.

“Don’t be an eejit, man,” said Sean, taking out his heavy .45 automatic and making sure the magazine was fully loaded. “You want to tell the world we’re here?”

“There’s no one out here but us,” said Finn. “Ain’t that the point?”

“No lights,” said Sean, and Finn shrugged, returning his attention to the road. They’d driven for nearly a mile, best he could tell, and the trees showed no sign of thinning. It looked like nary an axe nor saw had ever been taken to these trees, like they had always existed and always would. They reminded Finn of the fairy tales his mam would tell him of the Fey and the green men with thistledown hair who lived beneath the hills and stole children away in the dead of night. This was an ancient forest, one that could easily give rise to the darker kinds of fairy tales. Finn shivered, his Celtic soul alive with the possibilities of strange beings and malicious sprites making their homes within this place.

“The house should be just ahead, Finn,” said Sean, holding his cigarette close to a crumpled map he had pulled out of his long coat.

Finn nodded, already seeing the trees thinning out ahead. The road became less rutted and moonlight illuminated a wide expanse of flat ground, overgrown with tall grasses and bushes that hadn’t been trimmed back since God knows when. In the center of the clearing stood what had once been an elaborate three-story mansion, built in the Colonial style, but which had now fallen into disrepair. Vines clung to its walls, and the white paint on its wooden boards was peeling and stained with decades of neglect.

Four giant pilasters framed the entrance to the house, and the splintered wooden doors hung on sagging hinges. Starlight reflected on shards of broken glass in window frames, and a curious air of sadness hung over the place, as though the house itself mourned its faded grandeur.

Two trucks in the livery of a Newburyport bakery sat in front of the dilapidated mansion, loaded to the gunwales with wooden barrels. Half a dozen men in short jackets and flat-caps stood around the trucks. They carried a mix of rifles and pistols and were smoking and pacing, looking like prowling tigers Finn had seen at the movies. No sooner had Finn’s vehicle come into sight, than they lined up in front of the fully laden trucks.

“Careful now,” said Sean, tucking his pistol into his coat pocket. “Everyone got their iron?”

“Aye,” said Finn, snapping off the safety on his pistol, a matte black .38 revolver.

“Got me piece right here,” said Jimmy, waving his own gun.

“Put that away, you bloody idiot,” snapped Sean. “You want them to start shooting already?”

Finn pulled the truck around and hauled on the handbrake as he killed the engine.

“Nice and slow, eh boys?” said Sean, stepping down from the truck. Finn and Jimmy did likewise and Fergal joined them a second later, looking as excited to be here as he was afraid.

Sean and the leader of the Newburyport gang made a great show of friendship, but it sounded about as false as Finn’s last confession at St. Michael’s. He let Sean do the talking, and as money was exchanged, he swept his gaze over the Newburyport boys. They were a tough bunch, on edge and ready for trouble. Finn didn’t blame them. They had made the twelve mile journey from the north with a hell of a lot of whiskey imported illegally from Canada, and if they’d been caught with that much booze, it would be ten years minimum in jail. The Arkham police were notoriously strict in punishing those who broke the Volstead Act and flouted the rules on prohibition.

Finn turned his attention to the mansion, finding it sad that such a fine building had been allowed to fall into such a state of decrepitude. He’d heard it still belonged to the Billington family, but if that were true, they clearly didn’t want to have anything to do with the place. Moonlight gleamed colorfully from a window around the side of the building, and the sagging roof looked ready to collapse.

The empty windows on the attic floor gaped like screaming mouths, and moonlight picked out the few remaining shards of fang-like glass. Black gunk drooled from the broken sills, and Finn blinked as he saw something pale floating in the midst of the darkness of the easternmost window. He peered at the window and the blob withdrew, but for the briefest moment, it had looked like a head.

“Jimmy,” he whispered. “Did you see that?”

“See what?” slurred Jimmy.

“Up there in the top floor window. I swore I saw something.”

“Nah, just your imagination, Finn lad.”

Finn shook his head. “No, I definitely saw something.”

Fergal nudged him in the ribs. “I saw it, Finn.”

“You sure, Fergal? Don’t be shitting me or I’ll put me fist down your throat and tear out your lungs.”

“Aye, Finn. I swear on me mother’s life.”

That was enough for Finn, and he went over to where Sean was dealing with the Newburyport lads. Sean gave him a withering look as he approached.

“What is it ye’ll be wanting, Finn?” asked Sean.

“Thought I saw something,” he said, nodding toward the house. “Someone inside.”

Sean looked up at the windows. “Don’t be daft, man. There’s been nobody here in years.”

“Could be cops,” said Finn.

“I thought you said this place was safe,” said the bootlegger from Newburyport.

“And so it is, Harry,” said Sean, raising his hands before him in a calming gesture. “Finn’s just got an overactive imagination is all. Too many tales of leprechauns at his mam’s knee. Ain’t that right, Finn?”

“I should check, though, eh? Best to be sure.”

Sean sighed, and Finn knew the Boston lads would hear of this. Finn didn’t care. He’d rather be a foot soldier than a leader anyway.

“Fine,” said Sean at last. “If you’re so sure, take Jimmy and go look in the house, but be quick about it.”

“Like a thirsty man on Paddy’s Day,” promised Finn.

“Aye, well see that you are. These barrels aren’t gonna load themselves, y’see.”

* * *

By the time the cops got Rita back to Dorothy Upman Hall it was late and the moon glared down like a bright cat’s eye in the dark. The uniformed patrolman asked her if she wanted an escort to her room, but Rita shook her head. She saw Amanda at the door to the dorm and knew she had all the escort she needed.

Amanda came running over to her and threw her arms around Rita.

“Goodness, are you okay? I’ve been so worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” said Rita. “Can we get inside?”

“Sure, of course, sorry,” said Amanda, leading her inside the building. Rita was still wearing her running clothes, though the cops had given her a coarse woolen blanket to keep warm. They climbed the stairs to their room, and heads appeared at opened doors as word spread that Rita had returned. She saw expressions of concern, interest, and fear, like she’d brought something dark with her.

Amanda took no notice and bundled her into their room, turning to shut the door firmly behind them. Rita smiled at Amanda.

“Thanks, Mandy,” said Rita, sitting cross-legged on her bed. Mandy climbed up beside her and they sat facing one another, the enormity of what Rita had unwittingly stumbled across filling the space between them.

“You’re quite welcome, Rita. Honestly, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to find that girl out there. You poor dear. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay, really,” said Rita. “I promise.”

“You sure?” said Amanda, taking her hands.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” said Rita, trying to convince herself with repetition. “It was horrible, but I’ve seen some pretty bad things in my time. I mean, this was one of the worst, but growing up in New Orleans, you see some messed up stuff.”

“Coming from Muncie, Indiana, you don’t get to see much of anything,” replied Amanda. “And for once, I’m pretty darn glad of that. I wouldn’t want to see anything as horrible as a dead girl. Even one I didn’t know. Oh! You didn’t know her did you?”

Rita shook her head. “No, never seen her before.”

“It’s just horrible,” said Amanda. “Ever since I came to Arkham I’ve had this strange feeling that, I don’t know, that something was just…off. I know that probably sounds stupid.”

“Don’t sound stupid at all,” said Rita. “I feel it, too. I felt it as soon as I stepped off the train from Boston. It’s like this place is sick and nobody knows it. Or they know it, but they don’t want to admit it. If Mama Josette was here, she’d say this town has got itself some bad mojo.”

“Who’s Mama Josette?”

“A mambo from New Orleans,” said Rita. Seeing Amanda’s confusion, she added, “It’s like a voodoo queen, but a good one. The mambo only use good magic; it’s the bokor who turn it to evil.”

“Magic?”

“Yeah, I know what you’re going to say, but back in Louisiana it’s as real as you and me. This whole town’s got bad mojo right down to its bones. It’s sick to its heart.”

“So why do you stay here?”

Rita snorted with grim amusement. “Where the hell else I got to go? I either make it here or I go back to being dirt poor on the banks of the Mississippi. Anyways, don’t be giving me no hard time about this. You just told me you know this place is bad, too. Those dreams prove it.”

“I don’t want to talk about that just now,” said Amanda, swinging her legs off the bed.

Rita grabbed her arm and said, “Your dreams. You never had them till you came to Arkham. We both know this town stinks worse than a Mississippi slaughterhouse at low tide.”

“I don’t know…” 

But Rita wasn’t convinced.

“Don’t try and back out on me, Mandy,” she warned, smiling to mask her seriousness. “I’m your friend, but I will knock you upside the head if you lie to me.”

“You’re right,” said Amanda at last. “Ever since I got lost on the way to Professor Grayson’s class and I saw…something. A painting, I think. I don’t remember, like I tried to blot it out or something. It’s weird.”

“Uh-huh,” said Rita, nodding. “Bad mojo.”

* * *

Finn pushed the mansion’s door with the barrel of his gun. It creaked open on rusted hinges, just as he knew it would, and silver light illuminated a dusty hall of warped floorboards and cloth-draped furniture. The whole house creaked and a puff of powdered plaster dust fell from the ceiling as Finn stepped inside, his pistol sweeping left to right in case anyone was lying in wait for them.

“Kind of creepy, huh?” said Jimmy.

“Yeah, creepy is what it is,” agreed Finn. He could hear a faint background hum, an electrical buzz like what could be heard from the ground when a trolley car was coming around the corner. He tried to pinpoint the source, but gave up when it seemed to be coming from all around him. It felt strongest when he tilted his head to the ceiling, but it was hard to be sure.

It was just a noise, but it raised the hackles on Finn’s neck with its strangeness. He’d never heard anything quite like it, and wasn’t sure he was keen to learn what was producing such a quietly menacing noise.

“So d’you want to tell me what we’re looking for?” asked Jimmy.

Finn shushed him, and looked toward the grand staircase in the center of the wide hallway they now stood in. Wide doors led off to either side, but Finn ignored them, climbing to the second floor and a landing carpeted in a thick layer of dust. The humming was stronger here, and he wondered if there was some kind of machinery stored in one of these upper rooms.

“Do you hear that?” he whispered to Jimmy.

“Hear what?”

“That buzzing noise. Or a hum, I’m not sure.”

“I don’t hear nothing, but I ain’t got the sharpest lugs.”

“Among other things,” muttered Finn, moving on.

The ceiling creaked, like there was something moving in the attic above. That made sense. That was where Finn had seen the pale pink blob in the window, and whoever he’d seen was still there.

“Find a way up,” said Finn. “Stairs, attic ladders, something.”

Jimmy nodded and took the left portion of the landing. Finn moved down the shadowy hallway on the right, keeping his gun out before him and checking each doorknob as he passed. One was locked, the other led into a small bedroom that clearly hadn’t been used in decades. Sheet-draped furniture was scattered throughout the room like oblong ghosts, but one look at the undisturbed dust told Finn that nobody was hiding underneath.

He moved on. The last room was a small bathroom, and he was about to close the door and catch up with Jimmy when he noticed the door in the corner of the room was open a fraction. He’d thought it an airing cupboard, but the hideous droning noise seemed louder here, like there was some kind of generator or transformer up there.

Finn backed out of the bathroom and looked across the landing. Jimmy was puking his whiskey in the corner, and Finn waited until he looked over before beckoning him with a curt wave of his gun. He looked back into the room and he smelled Jimmy before he saw him.

“Christ, you stink,” he said. “Come on.”

Without waiting for a reply, Finn eased open the door in the corner of the room, smelling a stink worse than Jimmy’s vomit-spattered shoes. The buzzing sound was louder now, like a hive of angry bees poised to drop on him from a great height. It took an effort of will to peer around the doorframe. A narrow set of stairs led toward the attic, and with his gun stretched out before him, Finn took a hesitant step upward. 

He turned back to Jimmy and whispered, “Keep to the edges, Jimmy. It’ll make the steps creak less.”

Slowly Finn climbed the steps, his heart in his mouth, thudding like a great kettle drum and sounding unfeasibly loud. His breath echoed in his skull and a suffocating fear arose in him, as though his entire body were fighting against his ascent. Behind him, Jimmy stumbled and let loose a loud curse. Finn bit back an angry retort. Any hope of surprising the attic observer was now gone.

If he couldn’t have surprise, he’d have ferocity. Though fear attempted to keep him rooted to the spot, he charged the rest of the way with a battle cry worthy of Cúchulain himself. He burst into the attic, a vast space enclosed by exposed rafters and the underside of the roof. Moonlight painted bright strips on the floor, and in the center of the arched space, suspended above a slender pedestal of brass was an irregular silver sphere that spun like a whirring globe. Finn took in all this sensory input as soon as he entered the attic, but the strange, hybrid…things hovering above the pedestal and working on the sphere with clicking, chitinous, multi-jointed limbs, those took him a moment longer.

His raised gun lowered as he struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. Grotesque, with bulbous insectoid bodies and crab-like pincers, the monsters flew on ragged, bat-like wings that seemed not to flap, but simultaneously coexist at each stage required for flight. Where Finn might have expected a head or some form of sensory apparatus, there was nothing more than a gelatinous blob of glistening meat, like a brain shorn of its enclosing skull.

Finn tried to rationalize what he was seeing with what he knew of the world, trying to shoehorn these creatures into a neat box where things made sense. It wasn’t working, and the sheer alien horror of these beings threatened to unhinge his mind.

Then Jimmy blundered into the attic, tripping over his own clumsiness to fall flat on his face. He landed hard and his pistol went off with a deafening bang, blowing out the remains of a window. Finn jumped at the noise, his descent into madness momentarily stalled. The creatures swung around in the air, the meaty lumps of their heads spinning through a kaleidoscope of color. The buzzing increased in intensity, and Finn raised his pistol as one of them swooped toward him.

His pistol boomed and his bullets slapped into the pulpy mass of the creature’s body, but didn’t appear to harm it in the slightest. Finn dropped to the ground as its slashing pincers clawed at him. The sleeve of his coat tore, but his skin was untouched. He rolled and fired again, emptying his pistol in a flurry of shots, until the hammer clicked down on an empty chamber.

“In the name of Christ!” shouted Jimmy, looking up from the floor and finally laying eyes on the hideous flying things. “What the bloody hell is going on here, Finn?”

Finn didn’t answer him, throwing his gun away and scrambling over to where Jimmy’s weapon had landed. His own bullets had done nothing to the creature, but he felt better being armed. Even before he reached the gun, he heard fresh gunfire coming from outside the house. Had Sean and Fergal seen what was happening somehow and come to their aid? He doubted it, but it was a pleasant notion.

He grabbed Jimmy’s fallen pistol and rolled onto his backside in time to see the two creatures tear into his hapless comrade. There was nothing frenzied or animalistic about their attack. Razor sharp pincers sliced at Jimmy’s chest and belly, and blood sprayed the flying monsters as they expertly sliced him open, like a butcher dressing a carcass for the shop window.

Finn backed away on his rear, bumping into something behind him. He heard a screech that sounded like tearing metal or a busted axle grinding a gear shaft, and looked up in time to see the silver sphere on the pedestal wobble out of alignment and fall to the dusty floorboards. It hit with a heavy crunch that was surely out of proportion to its weight, and no sooner had it landed than the two creatures dropped Jimmy’s dissected remains and spun around to face him.

Without quite knowing why, Finn scooped up the silver sphere and ran to the shattered windows. He had no plan save getting out of this room, and the flying things were between him and the stairs. The fall would kill him, he was sure, but it was preferable to being cut open like a frog in a grade schooler’s biology lesson.

The buzzing creatures zipped toward him, but Finn was already moving. He hurled himself through the broken window. He missed most of the glass, but a spiteful shard caught the hem of his trousers and probably saved his life. Instead of sailing out into the air and falling three stories to the ground, he swung back toward the mansion like a pendulum on the fulcrum of his caught trouser leg.

He slammed into the wall and dropped straight down as the cloth gave way, landing hard on the angled pediment of the building’s columned portico. The sound of gunfire punctuated the night, though Finn had no time to wonder what the hell had gone wrong with the deal. The wall next to him erupted in dry explosions of plasterwork and lath as a burst of automatic weapons’ fire arced upward.

“Jesus jumping Christ!” yelled Finn, rolling out of the line of fire. Still clutching Jimmy’s gun and the silver sphere, Finn slid down the roof and off the end of the pediment. Something below him blew up in a mushrooming pillar of fire, but before he could wonder what it was, he landed with a thump in the bushes to the side of the main entrance. Though it hadn’t killed him, the fall had winded him badly. Finn fought for breath as he waited for the pain of broken limbs to flare up his spine.

The pain never arrived, but his breath came in terrified hikes. The darkness was banished in the light of burning trucks. Both vehicles belonging to the Newburyport lads were gone, and in their place were burned out wrecks, ablaze from end to end. Burning whiskey filled the air with a sour mash reek, casting leaping shadows as dozens of figures struggled in life-or-death fights.

“What the hell…?” said Finn. “What in the name of the wee man is going on here?”

He saw Sean and Fergal, firing wildly into the trees, as the Newburyport lads picked themselves up from the explosion of their trucks. Blackened bodies lay strewn around, and wiry figures darted from the trees with squealing shrieks. Finn couldn’t see them clearly, but that was a mercy, as one form fell upon a fire-blackened corpse and tore a lump of seared meat from its haunches. This was too much. Flying bloody insect monsters, and now a cannibal horde… Christ, he had to get away!

Finn scooped up the silver sphere and edged around the corner of the building, keeping low to the ground as the battle raged in the glare of the burning liquor. He ducked around the corner and ran for the trees, not daring to look behind him, not daring to stop for fear of what he might see at his shoulder if he did. At last he reached the shadows of the forest, and pressed his back to the thick bole of a tree. Horrified tears welled in his eyes, but he blinked them away as anger took over from fear.

He risked a glance around the tree, catching a last snapshot of the horror unfolding behind him. Finn saw Sean borne to the ground by three pallid-skinned savages who bit and tore at the skin of his face. Fergal ran into the forest with a pair in pursuit. Mobsters’ guns blazed to little effect. The fires were dying as the liquor burned up. He heard a crash of glass and a resurgent buzzing noise of unnatural wings that couldn’t possibly allow flight.

“Christ, who the hell are these guys?” gasped Finn.

Scampering forms, like men but hunched and degenerate, loped through the clearing before the house, and in their midst walked a hooded man swathed from head to foot in crimson robes like some ancient pagan priest. The creatures did not touch him, but gathered around him like supplicants. Finn couldn’t see the man’s face, the hood wreathing his features in shadow.

Though this was simply a man, not some blood-hungry cannibal or hideous monster from beyond the realms of understanding, Finn felt his terror mount at the sight of him. Terrible evil, palpable and without mercy, flowed from this dreadful figure, as though all the malice and horror in the world were bound to his mortal form.

“Oh Jesus Christ and all his saints, save me now,” hissed Finn.

Unable to bear the sight a moment longer, Finn turned and ran blindly into the forest.

He didn’t know where he was going; all he knew was that he had to get away from that damnable crimson priest.

CHAPTER FOUR

Oliver paced the length of the classroom, tapping a piece of chalk against his palm with every step he took. His students watched him attentively, and he waited as they copied his words in their books before continuing. Polynesian Anthropology was his favorite class to teach, and his passion for the field hopefully passed to his class. Certainly there were several students who didn’t need to take the class, but had chosen it as an elective credit.

“So you can see that the study of anthropology in Polynesia owes a debt to the sensationalist journals of Bougainville and his crew, but also to the writings of explorers such as James Cook and Dumont D’Urville. But who can tell me what else might have driven the anthropological study of these islands?”

A number of hands went up, always a good sign. Oliver scanned the faces, gesturing toward a red-headed boy from Ipswich named James Malloy.

“Mr. Malloy, what do you say?”

“From the missionaries, sir.”

“And do these missionaries have any names, Mr. Malloy?”

“Of course, sir. Laval, Turner, and Bingham are the ones that spring to mind first.”

“Very good,” said Oliver. “But, of course, Polynesia was always a land that had fascinated the Occidental nations. Partly thanks to the mythologizing of the landscape by the artist Paul Gauguin. You might know this fellow from some of Dr. Goddard’s classes. He lived in Tahiti for a time before moving to the Marquesas Islands. The works Gauguin produced there are laden with religious symbols and present a somewhat over-exotic view of the island’s inhabitants. There is undoubtedly a degree of romantic primitivism in his work, which fueled others to come after him and discover this far off land for themselves.”

“Was that what sent you out there, Professor?” asked Malloy. “After all, you spent three years out that way.”

A ripple of hushed laughter spread through the classroom, and Oliver nodded, placing the chalk down on his desk. It had only been a matter of time until word reached the student body of the ultimate fate of the Yopasi expeditions.

“That played its part, yes,” said Oliver. “But we’ll come back to that later. As far as Polynesian exploration is concerned, believe it or not, the first people to extensively study this region with a serious eye to anthropological research were the Russians.”

“The Reds?” asked a student named Jackson. “Surely not?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Jackson,” said Oliver as a rising hubbub of voices swelled from the students. “Yes, I know it’s unfashionable to credit the Russians with anything these days, but a fact’s a fact.”

“A damned Russian shot President McKinley,” pointed out Jackson.

“Actually, Leon Czolgosz wasn’t Russian, he was born in Michigan and just happened to have a Polish surname. And far from being a Red, he saw himself as an anarchist,” said Oliver. “Indeed, one writer of the time even compared him to Marcus Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar.”

“Are you saying this Czologsz was right to shoot the president?”

“Not at all,” said Oliver, not liking where this was going. “I am merely pointing out that not everything labeled as Russian should be immediately discarded as valueless. You are here as scientists, and as such you must bow only to the facts, not the mob of hysteria that distorts the truth and renders information subjective. Now, if I may continue?”

Jackson shrugged, and Oliver saw he now harbored seeds of misgivings about this class and its teacher.

“Now, if I may continue? The Russian Geographical Society was formed in Saint Petersburg in 1845, with a division that published material on ethnography, religion, mythology, and languages in Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East. Of special interest to us, as anthropological students of Polynesia, are their findings on the shamans.”

Oliver wrote the unfamiliar word on the blackboard as he spoke. “Shamanism is an understanding of the universe and the interrelation of man and nature. To the shaman, the universe is driven by ancient dualistic ideas that divides existence into the ordinary and the sacral. At shamanism’s heart lies an animistic perception, a belief in the existence of spirits and deities of nature and beyond. Indeed, the word shaman comes from the Tungus-Manchurian language itself.”

“Are they like wizards?”

“In a manner of speaking,” answered Oliver. “A shaman plays a vital role in the life of his tribe. They act as…intermediaries between men and spirits and are their tribe’s protectors.”

“What are they protecting their tribes from?” asked a nervous-looking young girl. Oliver remembered her name was Amanda Sharpe. She was one of his elective students. She took some form of engineering as her major, which made this class an odd choice for her, but Oliver certainly wasn’t going to turn her away for that.

“That is a very good question, Miss Sharpe,” said Oliver, sitting behind his desk and opening his books. “Predominantly, the shaman is a man, though in some rare cases, a woman, who interprets the seasons and tides of the world so his tribe will never go hungry or be ousted by a rival. For example, the shamans of the Nenets people would go into the tundra in spring and autumn to learn of the soil, birds, and animal anatomy. Using that information, they would decide on the productivity of various pastures and hunting grounds, and would guide their tribe accordingly. But there were other, more tangible, threats to societies the shamans helped fight. The Evenks and Buryats shamans wore headdresses of bone and feathers, topped with iron horns, and these weren’t just for show. Indeed not. They were fighting headdresses, for the shaman was believed to be butting the evil spirits, most notably a monster that lived in a long lost city and threatened to cause the end of the world.”

The girl’s face went deathly pale and Oliver feared he had frightened her with tales of shamans and monsters.

“And this is where things become rather interesting, as we can see similar, if not virtually identical, practices, chants, and imprecations to mysterious deities within the tribal groups of the Polynesian and Micronesian tribes, and others much further afield.”

“How is that possible?” asked Malloy. “Surely these groups are too far apart to share any common ancestry.”

“Well spotted, Mr. Malloy,” said Oliver. “They are indeed too far apart to share any links of civilization, but what if their connection goes deeper than that? What if their connection is on some primal level, from when mankind was little more than a barely upright hominid, a creature that had yet to evolve into the sentient race that now rules the globe?”

Oliver knew he was taking a risk in mentioning evolution, for the ruckus of the Scopes trial still reverberated in academic circles. Miskatonic University had largely ignored Judge Raulston’s verdict, and continued to teach such principles to its students. For reasons unknown to Oliver, no state prosecution had ever been mounted against the professors of Miskatonic for their continual violation of the Butler Act.

Hearing no dissenting voices, Oliver continued.

“What if these ancient men knew of some great and terrible evil, a force that linked all men though a worldwide understanding of its nature? Might not that be enough to bring the consciousness of wildly disparate shamans together? A collective understanding that predates our own, civilized way of thinking?”

Oliver saw skeptical faces and wrote a series of phonetic words on the blackboard. To the untrained eye, these were gibberish, random collections of syllables and consonants in a mishmash of colliding, unpronounceable letter groupings.

“Now if you will turn to page ninety-seven, you can read a summation of the findings recorded by a Professor William Channing Webb. Professor Webb teaches anthropology at Princeton, and his travels around Greenland’s western coast brought a tribe of depraved Esquimaux to light, whose cult practices included a strange form of devil worship. Webb described it as including bloodthirsty and repulsive rituals, which I believe to be in direct opposition of those found in Polynesia and the coastal regions of Siberia. It’s almost as though some shamans are attempting to call forth this sea devil, while others are acting against it.”

“So which were the Yopasi?” asked Amanda Sharpe.

“Very much the latter,” said Oliver. “Their shamans were reluctant to speak of the deity their tribe so feared. Even when I was able to elicit some form of explanation, their language seemed to have no correlating words to adequately describe the horror they sought to keep at bay.”

“Did the shamans ever say where this devil lived?”

In the three seasons Oliver had spent with the Yopasi he had come to know them well. Their home was a nameless island of eastern Polynesia, a scrap of land about as close to the edge of the world as it was possible to find before the vast expanse of the Pacific stretched away into eternity.

“Indeed they did, Miss Sharpe,” said Oliver. “Would you care to hazard a guess?”

“Beneath the ocean,” she said without hesitation. “In a great sunken city.”

Oliver was surprised. Though he had published selected monographs from his expeditions, he had not thought them widely read beyond higher anthropological circles. Nor had he published any of the Yopasi myth cycles, which described their wide pantheon in gross detail.

“Very good, yes. In a sunken city in the deepest portion of the sea.”

Malloy raised his hand, and Oliver knew what would be coming next.

Sure enough, Malloy did not disappoint. “But didn’t the Yopasi disappear, Professor Grayson? Into thin air? Perhaps the underwater devil rose up and killed them all.”

Nervous laugher greeted Malloy’s words, and Oliver smiled wearily at the mocking look he saw in the young man’s eyes. It was a familiar look. He’d seen it from a number of his colleagues, men he’d worked alongside for many years.

“I see the scurrilous tongues of academic rumor-mongering have been wagging,” said Oliver. He perched on the end of his desk and laced his hands before him. “Very well, I’ll tell you what I know of what happened. Ask away.”

He took a deep breath, not wishing to further expose the demise of his most ambitious work, but knowing that it would be better to scotch any rumors now than to allow them to grow with each retelling.

Jackson opened the questioning. “How could an entire island tribe just vanish?”

“I wish I knew, Mr. Jackson,” said Oliver. “The Yopasi had boats, but only small canoes used for fishing. Certainly nothing large enough to reach another island. And from what I learned in my time with them, they were certainly in no hurry to leave. They had what one shaman called a ‘duty to the world’ to stay and continue their vigil, which was how they perceived the ritual practices of their tribe.”

“So what do you think happened to them?”

“I don’t know. When our ship arrived in the cove we used as a harbor, it looked as though the entire island had been hit by a cyclone. As if a great tsunami had risen up and smashed the island. Trees were bent double, the soil was washed away, and the rocks blackened as though burned in a great fire. I have never seen the like, and I hope never to see it again.”

Oliver felt a brooding melancholy settle on him as he remembered the sight of the island last summer. “The desolation was complete,” he said. “What had once been a green and verdant paradise was now a hellish wasteland, more like one of the shell-cratered battlefields of western Europe than a Pacific Island. We searched the island for days, but found not a single trace of the Yopasi. Nothing lived there anymore: no birds, no lizards, no insects, no snakes. Nothing. The island had been scoured bare of life, though by what means I can scarcely imagine.”

“What do you think happened?” asked Amanda Sharpe. “Could it have been a volcano or an underwater earthquake?”

Oliver shook his head. “No force of man or nature I know of could inflict so thorough an extermination without leaving some trace of its substance. We found no pyroclastic residue and no mud patterns one might expect to find after such a natural occurrence.”

“Does that mean you think what happened to the Yopasi was an unnatural occurrence?” asked Malloy.

“Absolutely, but as to its nature I have not the slightest inkling,” said Oliver. “Believe me, I wish I did. I spent three years researching the Yopasi, and to know that none of my findings will see the light of day is a frightful prospect. The university spent thousands of dollars to send me and dozens of others across the world, and such a failure hangs around a man’s neck for a long time.”

The faces of Oliver’s students had changed, moving from eager anticipation of his academic misfortune to sympathetic regret. They had wanted to hear his tale, but having listened to it, now felt ashamed of their fascination.

Oliver looked up at the clock at the back of the classroom, checking the time against his pocket watch. 

“I think that will do for today,” he said. “Remember, for next week’s class I’d like you to be familiar with part three of Folk-Tales of Salishan Tribes. That’s the Okanagon tales by Marian Gould. I will be asking you to posit theories as to how these tales relate to the ethnographic spread of the tribal groupings.”

The class broke up and the students filed out of the room, some gratefully, some already looking forward to next week’s class. Oliver returned to the blackboard and wiped away his writing with a tatty duster. A nervous cough sounded behind him and he turned to see Amanda Sharpe standing at his desk. Her eyes were downcast and she looked as nervous as a freshman during hell week.

“Miss Sharpe, can I help you with something?” asked Oliver when she didn’t say anything.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” she said. “I feel a bit foolish, but…”

Oliver gathered his books and papers, stuffing them into his briefcase as he waited for her to continue.

“I’m sure you can’t possibly feel more foolish than I for admitting to losing an entire Polynesian tribe,” said Oliver with a crooked smile.

She returned his smile, and Oliver saw the shadows under her eyes, which he had taken to be makeup, were in fact the hollows of disturbed sleep.

“I suppose not, but I don’t really know where to begin.”

“The beginning is, I find, the best place, Miss Sharpe.”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s just that it’s so unbelievable that I don’t know if I should. You’ll laugh and think I’m nothing but a silly girl.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what is on your mind and I promise I’ll think nothing less of you, my dear. So tell me, what is it that’s bothering you?”

Oliver saw her screw up her courage, suddenly understanding how difficult this confession was for her. What could be so bad that she felt so nervous speaking of it?

“The sunken city you talked about? The one the Yopasi believed the sea devil lived in?”

“Yes,” said Oliver. “They called it the ‘crypt of the star-fallen.’ What of it?”

“I think I’ve seen it,” said Amanda.

* * *

The East River Shipyard was bathed in light from strings of electric lights hung like Christmas decorations. Arc lights on tall steel towers illuminated the rear quarter of the DCV Matilda Rose as sheets of rain fell, blown in from the Atlantic by a squalling western wind. Under the shelter of a corrugated iron awning, Charles Warren stood with his fists bunched and a thick vein pulsing at his temple.

The news he had received from Arkham was not good. With the theft of the Travelers’ device, the Matilda Rose was simply millions of tons of scrap metal. He looked at the workers hammering, welding, and painting on the deck of his ship, and imagined them all burning alive, like the Germans they’d killed at Belleau Wood. He watched a gang of painters working on the hull from a suspended plank, hundreds of feet above the quayside, and willed the rope to break.

To watch these men plunge to their deaths might quell his rising fury, but he doubted it.

Dressed in an expensive suit from Brooks Brothers, Charles Warren looked, at first glance, like any number of Wall Street brokers, but one look at his pugnacious face, thunderous brow, and fist-fighter’s hands made it clear that he was not a man to be taken lightly. He turned away from the gleaming ship and made his way back into his office. The walls were covered with plans and blueprints, pinned invoices, and letters. A pair of drawing boards heaped with T-squares, protractors, and slide-rules sat unused at the back of the office, and his heavy pinewood desk was similarly chaotic.

A pretty young woman sat in the corner, behind a smaller desk and a dented typewriter. He didn’t know her name, but it didn’t pay to learn their names. She looked nervous, some innate womanly instinct warning her that he was a dangerous man. She hadn’t been working for him long, barely a week, and had yet to feel the full force of his anger. She would, though. That was inevitable. The last girl’s body had been dumped quietly in the Hudson, and the scabs were still visible on Charles’s knuckles.

“Any news?” he demanded, his gruff tone precisely conveying how bad it would be if her answer were not to his liking.

“No, sir,” she said, swallowing hard. “No one’s called. I’m sorry.”

He laughed at her pathetic attempt to apologize for something totally beyond her control, as though that might one day save her from his monstrous rage. This time it had. It wouldn’t a second time.

Charles sat behind his desk, wondering if he should call the unlisted Arkham number he’d been given. He immediately decided that would be foolish. The caller had been very clear about how bad things would have to be to justify such a call. As self-absorbed as Charles Warren was, he knew enough to understand how much he would suffer if he displeased his master.

The words of the earlier call still rang in his ears. A clipped New England voice had simply said that the final piece of the device had been lost, but that it would be retrieved forthwith. There had been no hint of contrition in the voice, though Charles knew the speaker would never demean himself with anything so prosaic as an apology.

“Can I get you anything, Mr. Warren? Coffee maybe?” ventured the girl, seeking to defuse his simmering anger with pathetic blandishments.

“No,” he said. “Go away. I’ll hurt you if you stay.”

She gathered her coat and all but fled the office. He knew she would consider not coming in tomorrow, but the money was too good for a young thing like her to refuse. Booze, dresses, dancing, and cigarettes needed to be paid for. She would come in to work tomorrow as if nothing had happened. And one day soon he would beat her.

The thought gave him a delicious thrill of excitement, like the last days of the war, when the urges that had beset him since childhood had been given free reign.

 When he had become a monster and been embraced for the fact.

* * *

Oliver studied Amanda as she settled into the chair opposite him and turned her attention to his bookshelf. They had left the classroom and climbed the steps to his office, where she had politely declined a glass of water and sat with the awkwardness of students throughout the world when in a professor’s inner sanctum.

She was pretty, in a bookish sort of way, with straight blond hair and a heart-shaped face framed by half-moon glasses. Like most girls in higher education, her clothes were demure and sensible, not like the girls you saw in the movies dancing on tables and smoking like they were characters in The Beautiful and the Damned. After all, women were a new feature at American universities, and such bastions could never have been stormed by those dangerously exciting types.

She smiled nervously, and Oliver saw she was at the point of regretting her decision to speak to him. Before her nerve failed her completely, he sat forward and steepled his hands before him on the desk.

“So, Amanda, that was a rather remarkable thing you said in class.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” she said with a nervous laugh. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’d be very interested in what you have to say.”

“I feel stupid telling you this…”

“Not at all. Imagine how I felt when I had to inform the university bursary that three years’ worth of research was wasted.”

“I suppose,” said Amanda, “that must have been difficult.”

“It wasn’t pleasant,” agreed Oliver, not wishing to relive that particular horror again. “But I don’t want to bore you with such stuffy matters.”

“I should tell you what I saw, I guess.”

Oliver nodded and took out a yellow legal pad and pencil, scribbling the date and Amanda’s name at the top of the page. “That would be most useful, Miss Sharpe. You don’t mind if I take notes?”

She shook her head, keeping her arms folded tightly across her chest. She was nervous, scared even, and Oliver waited for her to begin. When she spoke it was with a soft voice, as though she were afraid of being overheard. Or was afraid of being ridiculed.

“When I say I’ve seen the sunken city, I don’t mean literally, you understand? What I mean to say is that I’ve dreamed it. Almost every night for the last two weeks.”

“You’ve dreamed it?” asked Oliver, almost disappointed.

“Yes.”

“And what happens in this dream?”

“I’m floating on the surface of the sea, in the middle of a huge ocean. I can’t see any land, and it’s night I think. I can see stars overhead, turning like the intricate mechanisms of a clock as they slot into position. I don’t feel scared, but I know there’s something wrong, something just, I don’t know, not right.”

“I see,” said Oliver, writing what Amanda said in his spidery handwriting. “Not right in what way?”

“I’m not sure,” replied Amanda, her fingers knotting and unknotting in her lap. “It’s just a feeling, like intuition, that something’s out of place. Like when you look at a movie screen. It looks real, but you know it’s not. It’s like someone has twisted the world just a little and it doesn’t fit anymore. I know that’s not a very good description, but that’s how it feels.”

Oliver shrugged. “I don’t think dream logic has to hold true to the strictures of the real world, Miss Sharpe. It’s quite understandable that some things feel out of place or otherwise distorted.”

Amanda shook her head. “No, it’s not ‘cause it’s a dream that makes it seem out of alignment, it’s something else. Something below the water. And as soon as I realize that, I feel the current drag me under the water.”

“How dreadful!”

“I’m not scared, at least not yet. I can breathe and no matter how far down I go, I’m not cold or drowning. I don’t know how deep I go, but it feels like I’m going down forever and ever. It’s then I see the city and hear the chanting. That’s when I get scared.”

“And what does this city look like?” asked Oliver.

“It’s big, I mean really big. Like someone sank Manhattan, then dumped Chicago and Boston on top of New York. But it was ruined, like it had fallen all the way from the surface and hit the bottom with an almighty crash that toppled all the statues and buildings in a big pile.”

Oliver leaned forward. “Can you describe any of these statues?”

Amanda closed her eyes, and her eyes darted behind her lids. Frown lines appeared on her forehead and her skin went quite pale as though she were remembering something hideous. She flinched as though slapped by an invisible hand and when she opened her eyes, they were moist with tears.

“They’re horrible, like one of those stitched together monsters in Mr. Barnum’s freak shows. They’re squatting things, like a gorilla or something, but their faces are missing.”

“Missing? You mean the heads have been knocked off?”

“No,” said Amanda, clearly distressed at her recall. “It’s more like you can’t see them.”

“Why not?”

“There’s just tentacles there, as if it’s got a giant squid or octopus for a face.”

Oliver rose from behind his desk and ran his thumb along the spines of the research materials he had gathered on the island of the Yopasi. When he came to the sketchbook he was looking for, he returned to his seat and opened it in front of Amanda.

“Did it look anything like this?” he asked.

Amanda looked down at the picture, a painted representation of the abode wherein dwelled the Yopasi’s demonic nemesis. The work was crude, without the benefit of perspective and realism, though that was perhaps a blessing. It was a riot of impossible dimensions, for no two angles seemed complete or possible, as though the stubborn reality of mathematics and planar geometry were cosmic laws that no longer held dominance.

Amanda drew in a panicked breath and looked away, as though she had been shown a hideous photograph of a murder victim. She nodded and the tears that had been gathering on her eyelids now fell freely down her cheeks.

“Yes, it looked just like that,” she gasped, dabbing her eyes with the sleeve of her green cardigan. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cry, but it’s all getting a bit much for me. I’m scared to close my eyes, because I’m afraid I’ll see the city again.”

“It’s quite all right,” said Oliver, ashamed that he had caused Amanda to cry, but the similarities between her dream vision and the city drawn by the Yopasi shaman were too great to ignore. The seaweed-hung statues of that ink-rendered city were virtually identical to those described by Amanda. She could not have seen this picture, which begged a stark and unanswerable question.

How had she seen this city? 

Oliver pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and passed it to Amanda, who smiled gratefully and dabbed her eyes. She nodded toward the sketchbook, but studiously avoided looking at the image on the paper.

“What is that?”

“It’s the sunken city where the star-fallen is said to sleep,” said Oliver. “A Yopasi shaman named Kaula drew it for me, though it took months of persuasion and hard liquor to get him to put pen to paper.”

Amanda sniffed and moved some papers from Oliver’s desk to cover the image.

“How can I be dreaming of that place? I’ve never seen that drawing before.”

“I was wondering that very thing, Miss Sharpe,” said Oliver. Afternoon sunlight shone through his blinds in crisp bars, yet the office seemed dark, as though low rain clouds pressed down on the world. “You couldn’t possibly have seen that image, but perhaps something else is at work, something not unlike the primal shared consciousness that linked the earliest shamans. Perhaps you too share a latent connection to the memory of this ancient sea devil, and some recently manifested sensory awareness has made you more sensitive to these visions.”

Amanda gave him a sidelong look. “I’m sorry, professor, you’re losing me.”

“I know it sounds ridiculous, and if I were you, I’d be tempted to call me a lunatic and have me sent to the asylum, but bear with me. This is a queer town, no mistake, and some of the texts Armitage keeps in the restricted section make for even stranger reading. There have been scores of documented cases where people sensitive to such things experience visions of things they cannot possibly have seen. Now, tell me, Miss Sharpe, you say you have been experiencing these dreams for two weeks. Can you be more precise? When exactly did they start? Was there a catalyst that brought them on, a precipitating event that might have caused you to begin seeing such things?”

Amanda gave the matter some thought as Oliver took more notes in his pad, writing a complete record of their conversation. She chewed her bottom lip as she thought, until a light of clarity appeared in her eyes.

“Yes, I remember,” she said. “I was looking for your class at the beginning of the semester, but went to the wrong floor. I ended up in the Department of Fine Arts and wandered around there until I realized I had to go up another story.”

Amanda paused in her recollection, as though her mind had become fogged and uncertain. She cocked her head to one side, frowning as though trying to recall the name of a distant friend.

“Before I found my way, I went down a corridor that led to an office. The door was shut, and looked like it hadn’t been opened in a very long time. It looked closed up, and closed up for a good reason, like the person whose office it was wouldn’t be coming back for a very long time. There was a picture on the wall, I think.”

“A picture? Do you remember what the picture was?”

“That’s the thing,” said Amanda. “I remember looking at it, but for the life of me I can’t remember anything about it, just impressions really. Sea, waves, and a mass of foam. It might have looked like a giant whirlpool. I’m sorry, I’m not being much help here.”

“On the contrary, Miss Sharpe, you’re being a tremendous help. Was this corridor lit by an electric light fitting with one bulb cracked and lightless?”

“Yes,” said Amanda, absurdly happy that this aspect of her memory seemed unaffected. “I remember thinking that it was a bit dark.”

Oliver tapped his pencil on the legal pad. “That office you saw belonged to David Rosen, the university’s ‘artist-in-residence,’ and he hasn’t been in his room for some time. A couple of years ago, he started behaving rather strangely, painting all manner of disturbing canvases, many of which match your dreams and this image from the Yopasi. What do you think of that?”

“I think it’s horrible,” said Amanda. “I wish I’d never seen that terrible painting.”

“Well, yes, of course, but it’s intriguing, isn’t it?”

“I suppose,” said Amanda. “Do you know how I can stop these dreams from coming? I’m scared to sleep, and I…I think I’m being watched.”

“Watched? By whom?”

“I don’t know,” said Amanda. “Just last week I was attacked as I was on my way home from the bank. I work as a teller at the First Bank of Arkham. It was dark and I didn’t see them, but I ran before they could grab me. I got home to Dorothy Upman Hall and told Rita, but she said they were probably after her.”

Seeing Oliver’s look of puzzlement, Amanda said, “I share a dorm room with Rita Young, she’s a black girl from New Orleans. I’d borrowed her coat and she said that maybe the guys who jumped me mistook me for her. I believed her, but now I’m not so sure.”

Oliver took a breath, shocked to hear that such a thing had happened so close to the campus grounds. Frat-boy pranks and drunkenness were as rowdy as this part of town usually got...until recently it seemed. To hear of another potentially violent assault was disturbing to say the least.

“I take it you reported the matter to the police?” he asked.

“No, there didn’t seem like much point,” said Amanda. “I figured Rita was probably right, and the cops probably weren’t going to make a big deal out of a black girl getting beaten up.”

“I think you are maybe doing them a disservice, but I see your point,” said Oliver.

“So what am I going to do?” asked Amanda. “How do I get these crazy dreams to stop?”

“I don’t know, Miss Sharpe,” said Oliver. “But I promise you I will try to find out.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Minnie looked him square in the eye and said, “Just so you know, Rex, honey. You owe me big time for this.”

Rex smiled and wiped the rain from his forehead. Their stakeout of the athletics ground had lasted the better part of three hours, and despite the cold and enforced stillness, he was enjoying himself. Minnie had her camera set up on its tripod, draped in a waterproof tarp covered with leaves and branches to hide it from the casual observer.

The lens was aimed at the murder scene, the area still taped off, but looking like it had been abandoned. Rex didn’t know why the cops were bothering to keep the area marked. The light rain earlier in the evening would surely have washed any remaining evidence away.

“You can’t fool me, sweet cheeks,” said Rex. “I know you’re loving this as much as I am.”

“True, but you still owe me,” she said.

“Fair enough. This guy turns up, I’ll treat you to a steak dinner at Anton’s. Good enough?”

“Good enough,” she agreed with a triumphant grin. “And he’s gonna show.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I read a lot, you know? Police reports and scare stories from newspapers around the world. Seems like a lot of these sickos like to go back to the scene of the crime.”

“What for?”

“Beats me. Maybe to get some weird kick coming back and reliving the murder. Or maybe they just get their yuks from knowing the cops don’t have a thing on them, like Leopold and Loeb did until they got caught.”

Switching tack, she said, “You know how good it feels when you think you’ve gotten away with something? I think maybe this guy’s like that.”

Rex gave her an admiring look. “Clever girl, we’ll make a reporter out of you yet.”

“Why would I want that?” smiled Minnie. “I prefer being an artist to a hack.”

“You cut me deep, milady,” answered Rex. “But I like your thinking. In any case, this is the best chance we got until we get word back from the state bureau in Boston about those plates.”

“I’d bet the farm it’s an ex-soldier.”

Rex returned his attention to the athletics ground, feeling a tremor of unease as his gaze roamed the empty bleachers and football stand. It was funny how an absence of daylight could make even the most humble structures look threatening. What was, during the day, full of lively fans and cheering supporters, now seemed like some dismal amphitheater, an elevated box where emperors watched gladiators fight to the death.

Places that ought to be filled with life should never be visited when empty. It made them dreary and dreadful. Rex let his stream of consciousness flow though him and into his pencil, letting the tip scratch its way across the page.

Place of execution?

Dumping ground?

Body not concealed. Killer wanted it to be found.

A murder done for show as much as the act itself.

“Pretty perceptive,” said Minnie, reading over his shoulder.

“Just some thoughts,” muttered Rex.

Minnie looked set to answer when they both heard the throaty growl of a powerful engine. Twin beams of harsh light speared onto the athletics ground as a motor car bumped its way over the rough track that lead back to the Aylesbury pike.

“I like my steak rare,” said Minnie as the car turned side on to them and Rex recognized it as the same Crossley they’d seen earlier.

“I’ll be sure to tell Anton personally,” he answered, watching the heavyset man in a brown duster and fedora climb down from the driver’s seat. He smoked a cigarette and the tip was a tiny glowing bead of orange as he walked around the running track to where the sagging police tape flapped in the wind. He knelt beside the taped area and pressed his hand to the grass, like a fairground fortune teller playing at reading a mark’s aura.

“Told you,” hissed Minnie. “Coming back to the scene of the crime. It’s classic.”

Rex didn’t answer, studying the man intently as he bowed his head. The cigarette end briefly illuminated his face: hard, deeply lined features etched with rigid control, yet looking ready to crack with sadness. Or was it guilt? Rex had no idea what the face of a killer would look like, but if he were to place bets, this guy’s face wouldn’t be far off. The man had powerful hands that looked used to a life of hard work, fists that looked capable of breaking a jaw without breaking a sweat. Suddenly this stakeout didn’t seem like such a clever idea.

He turned to Minnie to tell her to keep quiet, when her camera whirred and clicked as the lens snapped and took a picture of the kneeling man. Rex looked up in alarm. Like many things, the click of Minnie’s camera seemed hideously out of place in the dark. He’d never noticed how loud it was before now.

The kneeling man looked over at them and took a last drag of his cigarette before throwing it aside. He reached beneath his duster and pulled out a long-barreled Colt, and Rex was again reminded of his first impression that this man was some kind of frontier lawman from Cheyenne or Deadwood.

“You’ve got five seconds to come out from those trees before I start shooting,” said the man in a voice that was pure Bronx. So much for the Wild West.

“Hooey,” said Minnie. “What do we do?”

“What the hell do you think we do? We come out from the trees,” said Rex, stepping from his hiding place and raising his hands in surrender. Minnie came after him, and they walked out to stand in front of the man.

He looked them up and down, and Rex saw him relax, deciding in an instant that they were no threat to him. Quickly, Rex warmed to Minnie’s idea that this guy was an ex-soldier. He had a look that suggested violence was never far from the surface, as though he stood in a constant state of aggressive readiness.

“Who are you?” he said. “And what in heaven’s name are you doing here?”

“We could ask you the same thing,” answered Minnie with typical defiance.

“You could,” said the man, “but I’m the one holding the gun.”

“Rex Murphy,” said Rex. “And this is Minnie Klein. We work for the Advertiser, so lots of people know where we are. You understand?”

“Reporters?” said the man, almost spitting the word. “I shoulda guessed.”

“Okay, your turn,” said Minnie. “What are you doing here? Coming back to get some sick thrill out of what you did?”

“Jeez, Minnie, way to go antagonizing the man with a gun aimed at us,” hissed Rex.

Minnie narrowed her eyes and stared hard at the armed man, looking deep into his haunted eyes. The moment stretched until she let out a short bark of amusement and lowered her hands, as though she’d just had an epiphany.

“He’s not going to shoot us, Rex,” said Minnie. “I’m not scared of him.”

“You’re not?” asked the man. “Why not?”

“Because you didn’t kill that girl,” said Minnie. “I saw it in your eyes as you looked at the ground, and it’s taken me till now to realize the truth. No one who looked that sad could have killed her.”

The man lowered his gun and slid it back into a worn leather holster at his side.

“You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t kill her.”

“You’re here to find out who did, aren’t you?” said Rex, catching Minnie’s drift.

“That I am,” said the man. “Just like you by the looks of things.”

“We thought the killer might come back here,” said Minnie.

The man nodded. “I thought so, too, but looks like we’re both wrong.”

“Listen, we told you who we are,” said Rex. “How about you do likewise, huh? Tell us who you are and why you care about what happened here.”

“I’m Gabriel Stone,” said the man, his voice taut with emotion. “And I care because the girl that was murdered here was Lydia. She was my daughter.”

* * *

Though a native of Baltimore, Oliver Grayson’s academic career had truly begun at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He had prospered for a time within the walls of that institution of higher education, but had quickly realized the future direction of his studies needed an atmosphere in which no branch of research was deemed too unknowable. Oliver’s interest in Jules Verne had spurred his interests toward cultures on the fringes of belief: the unknown, the feared, and mysterious. These were the forte of one particular professor at Brown who would soon become his mentor.

Professor Morley Dean was a man to whom the study of the arcane was an obsessive métier—a scholar who looked deep into the hidden meanings of everything. His studies had been extensive and the wealth of knowledge contained within his febrile brain had acted like a lodestone to Oliver. Morley had traveled widely and read wider still, his expertise in ancient languages and their relation to the cultures that had given rise to them second to none. Regarded with some trepidation by his fellow professors, Morley had nevertheless published numerous manuscripts that were now considered authoritative on the study of language and its roots.

Finding common cause together, Oliver and Morley had mounted an expedition to the farthest reaches of Alaska to study the cult practices of its coastal communities and the mysterious nomad tribes on both sides of the Bering Strait. It had been a testing time, as several among the expedition had fallen gravely ill from a wasting sickness that even a respected physician from Anchorage was at a loss to explain. Two men had died of the inexplicable contagion, as one of the worst winters Alaska had ever seen ravaged the landscape with freezing winds and blizzards that threatened to drive the expedition into the sea. Yet they had endured, and by the end of their stay in Alaska, had uncovered much that shocked them and much that had horrified the trustees of Brown upon its publication. 

The bloody histories, blasphemous pantheons, and obscene rituals of these isolated communities and tribal groups were perverse and sickening, with dread rites that Oliver might never have believed had he not seen evidence of them with his own eyes. Just penning such debaucheries for the Journal of Anthropology had shaken Oliver’s mental fortitude. As great an effect as the expedition and its aftermath had upon him, the consequences for Morley were far worse. Their discoveries and the physical privations of the journey had taken their toll on Morley’s mental health, and after months spent with an ancient book of evil reputation uncovered in the ruins of an abandoned Russian whaling station, his mind had finally strained beyond its ability to cope.

Morley had peered too deeply into mysteries he never dared communicate to Oliver, and within a month of their return, he had himself committed to the Hudson River State Hospital for a time. Within a year, Morley had recovered from his ordeal enough to leave, but the Alaskan expedition had cost both he and Oliver dearly, physically and in terms of their standing within the university. It had only been a matter of time until Morley had been compelled to quit his position as Senior Professor of Ancient Languages.

Without Morley’s sponsorship, Oliver had seen his own position become ever more untenable, as though the university was seeking to sever all ties to the unfortunate affair. More and more doors were closed to him until it had become clear he was no longer welcome within Brown’s hallowed halls. Nevertheless, he had been given a glowing letter of recommendation from the head of faculty, which, together with Morley’s endorsement, had seen him secure his current position at Miskatonic in the summer of 1919.

This Massachusetts institution had a reputation for academic freedom, a place where all manner of research was conducted and where scholars were free to teach as they saw fit. That wasn’t the only reputation the university had. Whispered tales concerning the gruesome history of Arkham were widespread, but Oliver attributed such attendant mysteries to latent memories of the famous witch trials that had blighted this region of the country in centuries past.

None of these tales had put Oliver off accepting a position at Miskatonic, and the seven years he had spent here had been—with the exception of the Yopasi debacle and poor Henry’s unfortunate incarceration—the happiest of his life. True, there was an indefinable oddness to Arkham, a lingering sense of the unknown pressing at the fragile meniscus that separated the known world from the unknown. Oliver had explored the town extensively, taking winding walking tours through its rambling streets of gambrel-roofed townhouses, past its overgrown graveyards, around the black and looming spires of its derelict churches with lancet windows that seemed to leer down at the curious observer, and over the bridges crossing the dark waters of the Miskatonic River toward the russet-faced brownstones of Uptown.

No finer example of a Massachusetts town could be found in the state, no better example of all that made its people so proud of their rich heritage. The town’s inhabitants were of fine stock, God-fearing, honest, and tenacious, with a healthy suspicion of the world beyond the state line. The people of Arkham were hard-working, steadfast, and united in their desire to see their hometown retain its unique character in the face of the ever-advancing tide of modernity. “Welcoming” wasn’t a word Oliver would have used to describe the men and women of Arkham; “guarded” would have been a better choice. It was as though the townsfolk feared some buried secret might slip out were they to allow their tongues to wag too amiably to out-of-towners.

 Oliver had found a place to live in Easttown, a modest Georgian brownstone with modern amenities and appropriately shabby character that matched his own shambolic impression of himself. With only the bare minimum of furniture required for basic existence, the rest of Oliver’s home was a riot of groaning bookshelves stuffed with textbooks, papers, and items brought back from his expeditions to document the peoples and cultures of distant lands. Numerous visitors had used words like “chaotic,” “jumbled,” or uncharitably, “junkyard,” to describe his house. He preferred “eclectic.”

Since coming to Arkham, Oliver had attempted to keep up correspondence with his former mentor, but Morley had answered his letters with ever-widening infrequency. Oliver had learned that Morley had taken a position within the Pierpont Morgan Library, transcribing the many texts coming from the numerous archaeological digs currently rushing to excavate the Egyptian deserts. As time passed and the letters coming from New York finally dried up, Oliver had been forced to conclude that his old friend no longer wished to communicate.

Which was a shame, as Oliver would have welcomed Morley’s help with what had come to light in regards to the correlation between the Yopasi’s sea devil and Amanda Sharpe’s dreams.

* * *

Oliver pushed open the heavy oak door to the Miskatonic University faculty lounge, drinking in the warm smells of tradition, security, and self-assuredness. A breath of smoke from the hearth and numerous pipes gusted from the room, a tantalizing scent of this forbidden sanctum of academia. The lounge was a place of refuge for the lecturers, professors, and doctors of the university: a large, smoky chamber presided over by the portraits of former deans, and filled with faded carpets, smoke-hued tables, and sumptuous, high-backed leather chairs.

An open fire burned in an expansive stone hearth that had once belonged in an English abbey before Henry VIII had appropriated the rich holdings of its former owners. Shipped from Liverpool sixty years ago, the fireplace radiated warmth and history into the room, as though the smell of burning hickory carried the legacy of those long-vanished centuries.

At any time of day, a dozen or more academics with esoteric titles could be found relaxing here—reading, sleeping, smoking, or bemoaning the lack of focus evinced by their students. It was a place where the mantle of teacher could be hung on a hook, and the man behind the title could emerge. Spirited debates could be had here, and Oliver relished the sense of intellectual momentum to be found within its walnut-paneled walls.

He nodded to a number of professors of his acquaintance, and set his briefcase down next to an empty chair. The professors of biology were arguing with the doctors of theology, and Oliver smiled as he heard references to Darwin and Genesis hurled back and forth.

Oliver took his seat and fished out his notes, thinking back to what he had told Amanda Sharpe. His thoughts had been unformed and she had likely left with no clearer idea of what was happening to her than she had when she came in. His theories were, he accepted, far-fetched, but Oliver had seen enough disparate peoples sharing identical beliefs and experiences to discount the idea of a form of race memory from some unfathomably ancient time.

He began collating information from his interview with Amanda, transcribing his notes as though from a field study, extrapolating what he could and establishing points of congruity between her dreams and the Yopasi belief system. There were many points of agreement and many areas where the crossover was too exact to be coincidence. The more he read, the more he felt his excitement mount, no matter how he tried to restrain it. As much as he sought to keep a dispassionate eye, Oliver knew this was a means of salvaging something from his years of research in the Pacific.

“Grayson, fancy dragging your head out of that notebook and joining our discussion?” said a voice Oliver recognized as belonging to Theodore Hutchins, a visiting professor of geology who was assisting Dr. Dyer in preparing for the long-planned expedition to the Antarctic.

Standing beside Hutchins was Professor Nathaniel Eaton, a fellow geologist who had learned his trade at Yale, then put it to use in the oil fields of California. Both were learned men, but Oliver had had little to do with them, what with his field of research being somewhat newer and less well-established than their own.

“That depends,” he said, closing his notebook. “What’s the subject at hand, and what do you feel I could bring to the discussion?”

“Ah,” said Hutchins, a florid-faced man of around fifty years and with a waistline that was rendering him more and more like the planet whose rock he studied. “We’re debating the latest discoveries in the Naica Mines of Mexico. Seems like workers there might have found some interesting crystal deposits in a previously undiscovered cave deep below the surface.”

Eaton was Hutchins’s opposite in every way, tall and gangling, with long, drooping arms that made him look like a character from The New Yorker’s cartoon pages. “The cave is too far down to reach yet, but there’s strong indications that there’s something dashed strange down there.”

“Strange in what way?” asked Oliver.

“Well, the core samples the miners have been taking indicate the crystals have been forming for perhaps millions of years. It’d be the find of the century to document such a place, and it would certainly put the wind up the theologians who think the world is only six thousand years old.”

“Indeed,” said Hutchins, taking up the mantle of storyteller. “All signs point to incredibly large and dense formations of selenite formed in mineral-rich water.”

“Wouldn’t Dr. Dyer have more useful an opinion than I on such matters?”

“Not at all, Grayson,” said Eaton. “Hutchins and I believe you might be the ideal man to speak to in regards to this mystery.”

“How so?”

“Well,” said Hutchins, sighing with exaggerated disbelief at the incompetence he was about to relate. “It seems the geological surveyors in Mexico aren’t as thorough as our home-grown ones. Apparently they’ve misplaced the maps and sample charts that correlate where each sample came from. Nobody can find the damn place anymore!”

Oliver saw the punch line a moment before Eaton delivered it.

“And seeing as you are such an expert in misplaced things, Grayson, we naturally thought to pick your brain,” said Eaton. “After all, a man who can lose an entire tribe of Pacific Islanders should have a unique take on such a matter, eh?”

Oliver felt his anger simmer below the surface. Bad enough that the Yopasi expedition had been an abject failure, but to be so brazenly mocked was almost more than he could bear. Oliver was not a violent man. He did not own a gun and had not been in a fight since his grade school days, but Eaton and Hutchins’s disrespect was a slap in the face too far.

He pushed himself from his chair, a vein at the side of his temple pulsing in time with his choleric outrage. His mockers saw the fury in his face, were surprised by it, and backed away from him. Oliver knew he should sit back down. No one said anything constructive in anger, and words spoken in such a frame of mind would almost always be regretted.

“Professor Grayson, if I may?” said a cultured New England voice at his shoulder. A hand took his elbow and a tall, distinguished man with dark hair with just a hint of silver at the temples smoothly interposed himself between Oliver and the professors of geology.

“Templeton,” said Hutchins warily. 

Alexander Templeton was professor of ancient religions at Miskatonic, a man who had made his name by unlocking the mystery of how the pagan faiths in ancient Britain had been supplanted by Christianity. His work around Stonehenge with William Hawley had proven vital in the understanding of the monument and he had posited many fascinating and controversial theories as to the original purpose of the great megaliths.

Templeton eyed the two professors of geology critically.

“I think you’ll find that it is a great deal easier to misplace a tribe of indigenous peoples with a rich heritage of moving from island to island over the centuries than it is, say, a geological formation. After all, I am given to believe rock doesn’t move around much,” said Templeton. “Professor Eaton, I believe it took you nearly six years to find an oil deposit the size of Richmond beneath an area already identified as oil-rich. That strikes me as rather careless. And Professor Hutchins, didn’t you once incorrectly identify a series of rock formations in the Grand Canyon, the nature of which any freshman could determine?”

Hutchins started to reply, but contented himself by storming away with a snort of irritation.

“We were just having a bit of fun, eh, Templeton?” said Eaton in a querulous tone. “No need for insults.”

“No insult intended, I assure you,” said Templeton. “Simply a leveling of the playing field. I’m sure you understand. All’s fair in love and war and academia.”

Eaton grunted and retired from the conversation, joining Hutchins by the fire.

Oliver smiled, almost ashamed at the pleasure he took in seeing his antagonists so humbled. Templeton offered him his hand.

“How are you, Oliver?” he said.

“Well, Alexander, well,” said Oliver. “Do you have time to join me?”

“Of course,” said Templeton. “It would be a pleasure.”

* * *

Alexander Templeton was a comparatively new addition to the teaching staff at Miskatonic University. A Princeton graduate, his area of expertise lay in the fields of history: more specifically the study of ancient religions and the societies that created them. A decorated war hero, he had fought as a Marine captain in the Great War and returned home with numerous commendations and, it was said, a box containing a Citation Star.

Templeton rarely spoke of his years as a soldier, but Oliver had gleaned a measure of it from Henry Cartwright prior to his incarceration. Alexander Templeton had captained the Marine company in which Henry had served as a corpsman, leading his men through the nightmarish battlefields of Europe to the final defeat of the Bosch. Henry had spoken highly of Templeton’s military record, but appeared to dislike him for no reason he would adequately explain.

Likewise, when Alexander Templeton’s application for a position at Miskatonic was under review by the board, Henry had vehemently opposed his appointment. Oliver had read the man’s exemplary resume and could find no reason for Henry’s reservations. Templeton had graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, was class valedictorian, and had his pick of the universities to approach in order to pursue his post-graduate work. Instead, he had enlisted in the Marine Corps and earned numerous commendations for meritorious conduct during the last years of the war.

The deans of the university saw the opportunity to employ a man they felt would soon become a leader in his field, and Henry’s objections were overruled—much to his vitriolic indignation. Such was Henry’s apoplexy that words harsh enough to see him suspended had been yelled at the dean. In the aftermath of the shouting match in the university council chambers, Oliver had tried to talk to Henry about the matter, but his friend would not be drawn. All he would say was that during the war he and Templeton had disagreed on a matter that had seen a number of men die.

The strain of his suspension had proven too much for Henry, and the fire starting had begun soon afterward. Within the space of a month, Henry had been arrested and committed to Arkham Asylum, where he remained to this day. A sad end to an unnecessary fiasco.

Oliver had known Alexander Templeton for three years. They had become good friends, and spent many an afternoon in the faculty lounge discussing how religion in ancient societies had shaped the anthropological development of the culture. From the pyramids of Egypt to the cave dwellers of Petra and the spirit worship of the American plains, their discussions were often rambling, digressive, and impenetrable to those not versed in ancient history, but never less than fascinating.

Indeed, the insights Templeton had given him regarding the likely origins of the Yopasi belief structure had advanced his research immeasurably. True, there was not the easy rapport Oliver had shared with Morley Dean, but Templeton’s intellect was sharp and cut at the leading edge of modern thinking, which though seemingly at odds with his doctorate, was a measure of his capacity for insight.

* * *

“Intriguing,” said Templeton, after Oliver had outlined the substance of Amanda Sharpe’s dreams and their correlation with the Yopasi belief structures. “And you’re sure this young girl couldn’t have seen your notes or any of the publications in which your extracts appeared?”

“As certain as I can be,” replied Oliver. They had procured a pot of tea and as the drinks were poured, Oliver sipped his hot drink with a wistful recall of his time in Cambridge. William Hillshore had given him an education in the appreciation of a good cup of tea: a drink Oliver’s countrymen didn’t seem able to reproduce as faithfully as the English.

He put down his cup and said, “Miss Sharpe is an engineering student taking my class as an elective, so I don’t think that she would be perusing obscure anthropological journals simply to hoodwink me.”

Templeton also took a drink of his tea and nodded. “That does seem unlikely,” he agreed. “But you must be careful, Oliver. Whatever she tells you should be subjected to the same intellectual rigor as any other source.”

“Of course, yet it would be quite a find were we to prove there was a link.”

“That it would, but how one would go about verifying the authenticity of a dream, I do not know. I am aware of the new vogue for the interpretation of dreams with the Austrian neurologist’s publications, but no man can say for sure what goes on in the head of another.”

“The fields of psychology and psychoanalysis are coming on in leaps and bounds, Alexander. Don’t you think it possible we might finally unlock the human mind with such academic tools at our disposal?”

“I am not sure the human mind should be opened to such scrutiny,” said Templeton. “I saw enough in Europe to make me question the goodness of even the most kindly man. Some things are best left in the darkness of a man’s own private kingdom.”

“You think she might be lying?”

“It’s certainly a possibility,” said Templeton, lighting a cigarette and running a hand over his jaw. He cocked his head to one side. “Is she attractive, this Miss Sharpe?”

“She’s pretty enough,” said Oliver. “But what does that have to do with anything?”

“Maybe nothing,” said Alexander with a shrug. “Maybe everything. You are not an unattractive specimen yourself. A professor with a decent income. Knowledgeable and erudite. Many a pretty young thing has found herself drawn to such a figure.”

Oliver was taken aback. He hadn’t expected this interpretation of Amanda Sharpe’s dreams.

“I see you’re shocked,” said Alexander with a smile. “You shouldn’t be. I’ve seen it before. The young girls of Princeton were far more forthright in their attentions. Several times I was put in a position where I had to politely decline offers of inappropriate…companionship. I’m surprised you haven’t had the same, Oliver.”

“You flatter me, Alexander,” said Oliver, feeling his skin redden. “How did you handle such a delicate situation?”

“I told them that I was married.”

“Were you?” asked Oliver. Alexander had never mentioned a wife, and he had presumed him to be a studied bachelor, content to spend his money on his own amusement and sailing the yacht he had moored at Kingsport.

“I was,” said Templeton, and Oliver saw a tightening around his friend’s eyes that made him wish he’d never asked.

“Ever since the war there’s been an undercurrent of self-indulgence that flies in the face of all this country stands for,” said Templeton. “Just look at the youngsters crowding the speakeasies and dance halls of the cities: unrestrained and selfish things, sybaritic, and following blind instincts and perverse fancies, worshippers of tinsel gods on perfumed altars and silver screens. I think I would be outraged if it wasn’t all so half-hearted. It’s just despair turned inside out.”

Oliver didn’t know quite what to say. Their conversation had strayed into an area that contained an exposed nerve of Alexander’s. His friend had never spoken about a wife, but Oliver now wondered whether that was a means of sparing him the pain as opposed to one never having existed.

“I’m sorry, Oliver,” said Templeton. “Sooner or later I compare everything in terms of religion and its organizing principles. Once an academic…”

“Always an academic,” completed Oliver. “And there’s no need to apologize. As a matter of fact I quite agree with you.”

“In any case, I think you’ll find that Miss Sharpe, like many of her generation, is acquainted with the writings of Freud only in the most superficial way. I don’t doubt that she’ll have read that water in dreams is said to represent sexual feelings and that playing in water can denote a sudden awakening to passion. To most girls, the good doctor’s writings seem to mean that if you want to be well and happy then you must indulge your libido. I believe she is hoping that you are familiar with Dr. Freud and will reciprocate.”

“I’ll certainly bear that in mind, Alexander,” said Oliver.

“Good,” said Templeton, finishing his tea. “I’d hate to see you make a terrible mistake with this girl. Academic or otherwise.”

“Good Lord,” said Oliver. “Perish the thought!”

Templeton smiled as he stood from his seat. “Well, you did say she was pretty,” he said.

CHAPTER SIX

The noonday sun woke Finn, streaming in through the threadbare curtains of the room he’d taken at Ma’s Boarding House. He blinked sleep-gummed eyes and smacked hangover-cracked lips as he tried to moisten his mouth. Drinking a half bottle of whiskey might not have been the best idea, but it had sure felt like it at the time. 

His head hurt and he could hear folks running over the hardwood floors in hobnailed boots doing their best Irish jig. Or at least that’s what it felt like in his head. He rolled onto his side and spat into the bowl beside the bed. He lay on top of the sheets, still fully clothed. The blanket he’d been given was wrapped around the metallic sphere he’d taken from the Billington mansion, sitting atop the sagging dresser on the far side of the room.

Finn couldn’t remember climbing into bed—a torture device of iron springs and jabbing struts—but he knew he’d been lucky to get a bed at all. Most respectable Arkham boarding houses shut their doors around nine, and didn’t open them till morning. But Ma’s was the one place where anyone could get a room, no matter the hour of the day, so long as they had money.

Finn didn’t have much cash, certainly not after buying that whiskey from the drunk raging at the gates of the graveyard, but he’d had enough to convince Ma to give him a key to this flophouse room. With the door locked behind him, he’d hit the bottle hard, pacing most of the night, alternately reliving what he’d seen and drinking toxic mouthfuls of rotgut, until the horror had receded into an alcoholic stupor. The whiskey was venomous stuff, but it had done the job, blotting out the intrusive thoughts of what he’d seen the night before.

Whatever that had been…

“Christ on a cross,” moaned Finn, holding his head in his hands.

What had he seen? He still wasn’t sure.

He climbed out of bed and forced himself to stand on wobbling legs, holding onto the wall for support. The room spun crazily around him, like he was the center of a giant merry-go-round, and he closed his eyes to stop his guts from emptying onto the floor. Ma was famously tolerant of her guests, but wouldn’t take kindly to a pool of puke in the middle of her room.

“Hell, she’s seen worse, I reckon,” muttered Finn.

The image of Sean being eaten by those repulsive creatures leapt unbidden to the inner surfaces of his eyes, together with the sight of the cannibal horde eating the flesh from the seared bodies of the Newburyport gangsters. Those monsters had been hideous wasted things, scrawny and thin, like the starving men and women of the Great Famine that had driven his family across the Atlantic in the first place. Unlike those poor bastards, these flesh-eaters were fast and strong, like the hunting dogs the bailiffs used to chase people from their homes.

Sean and Fergal were dead, and that didn’t bother him at all, but Jimmy was dead, too. Poor, harmless Jimmy, who never did no one no harm at all, and who just drank himself stupid whenever he had enough money and cooked when he didn’t. The sight of him being cut up by those flying things was like something from a nightmare, and Finn could contain his sickness no longer.

He ran to the window and hauled it up in its frame before loudly throwing up down the side of the building. Thankfully, he had a room that overlooked a trash-filled alleyway, so he figured no one was going to complain too much. He lay over the windowsill, his stomach pumping itself empty, until a cold breeze revived him enough to lift himself back inside. Finn spat a last greasy mouthful out the window and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes.

“Okay, Finn lad, time to get your damn fool self together,” he said. “Think. Your mam din’t raise no eejits, now did she?”

That was debatable, he knew. His brother Connor wasn’t exactly blessed with smarts, but at least he was bringing in a wage somewhere in New York and not getting attacked by…by what exactly? Try as he might, Finn couldn’t quite frame the image of the things he’d seen in that damned attic, though he’d stared at them, clear as day in the moonlight. He recalled vaguely insect bodies, wings that were there and not at the same time, and…something strange about their heads. Try as he might he couldn’t or wouldn’t focus on their heads, because that was just too horrible, too nightmarish to contemplate.

What was worse was that he knew they weren’t just freakishly large animals. They’d been working on that silver globe like watchmakers or mechanics. And didn’t that make them intelligent? The idea that something so unnatural and alien could be intelligent was more horrifying than any repulsive detail of their form.

Finn looked over at the dresser where he’d wrapped the silver sphere he’d taken from the house. He still didn’t know why he’d done that. Taking tentative steps, he retrieved the object from the dresser, finding it heavier than he would have expected, as though made of some incredibly dense metal. Perhaps it was valuable. Finn sure hoped it was, because there was going to be hell to pay for the loss of so much booze last night. The Newburyport gangs would think they’d been double-crossed, and the Arkham hoodlums would believe they were betrayed. That was the trouble in dealing with criminals, Finn thought, there was no trust.

As the only survivor of the debacle in the woods, he knew his chances of survival were low. Both gangs would be looking for someone to blame so they could save face and keep doing business with one another. Finn would be a convenient scapegoat. But what could he do, hide? Nah, that wasn’t the Finn Edwards way. Why hide when you might have something to trade?

He unwrapped the item he’d taken. “Now, what have we here then?” he asked.

It was spherical, brilliant silver in color, but with a sheen like a thin layer of gasoline coated it. Finn rubbed his palm over the surface of the object, but it was completely dry. The surface wasn’t completely flat-ridged and angular lines cut across its surface as if it had been put together like a jigsaw. Was that what the flying things had been doing: assembling this object?

Finn turned it over in his hands, finding that some of the interlocking pieces seemed capable of moving. He pushed against one curved section and it slid upward, displacing another portion that slid into the place vacated by the other. Turning it this way and that, Finn found he could reconfigure the surfaces of the sphere like some kind of kid’s toy. The metal made no sound as it slid and shuffled across the surface. Finn became strangely fascinated by the shapes it made, shapes that shouldn’t be possible on the surface of a sphere.

Though his hands told him the object was still a sphere, his eyes beheld cubes, rectangles, and cylinders, as though these protean forms sought to replace the device’s original shape. Was it some kind of trick, a neat illusion...or was it something else entirely?

Just as he was about to replace the sphere on the dresser, it emitted a deep bass note, like the sound of a distant foghorn. At the threshold of hearing, it grew in volume and resonance until he felt it in his bones. Dust bounced on the floor, and Finn’s ears popped as the air itself began vibrating. Glass shimmied in the window. He felt an electric tingle in his teeth, like biting on a copper penny, and his eyes watered worse than when he peeled onions for one of Jimmy’s stews.

“What the hell?” he said, the vibration growing from the sphere.

He blinked through his tears as the room shifted. The far wall seemed to stretch away from him as the floor and ceiling twisted in ways they couldn’t possibly move. A nauseous sensation of vertigo seized Finn and he dropped to his knees, the sphere falling from his grip and thudding to the threadbare carpet.

It rolled toward the door, the floor seeming to tilt crazily and the walls bulging and sagging like taffy. The sphere rolled on, and Finn lunged for it, hoping that Lady Luck would take a shine to him for once. It seemed she did, for no sooner had he laid his clammy palm upon it, than the dreadful vibrations ceased and the sphere became silent once more. The room regained its normal dimensions and the crazy, electric sensation dissipated like the heat after a really good storm. Finn took a deep breath, his hangover forgotten in the wake of so horrifying a sensation. He rolled onto his back, clutching the strange silver orb to his chest.

Its impossible weight pressed down on him, its nature utterly beyond his understanding.

“Okay,” he said. “This is way outta my league. I’m gonna need some help with this thing.”

* * *

Rita and Amanda strolled through the campus grounds, books clutched close to their chests and coats draped over the books. The day was unseasonably warm, and they had bought their lunch from the university refectory to eat in the small park around the bell tower. Neither was inclined to venture too far from Dorothy Upman Hall, and with no classes until later in the afternoon, the opportunity to enjoy some time in the sun was too good to miss.

They sat beneath the spreading boughs of a tulip poplar at the southern edge of the park, the tree’s leaves a vivid yellow and a welcome spot of brightness in the fall. Rita sat cross-legged and lifted out her box of sandwiches and a slice of pecan pie. Amanda sat more demurely, tucking her skirt beneath her as she carefully lowered herself to the ground. A few other groups sat in the park, but not enough that anyone was close to them. Fellow students and the occasional lecturer made their way down College Street.

“So did you speak to Grayson?” asked Rita, taking a bite of pie.

Amanda looked at her. “You eat your pie first?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Surely sandwiches first?”

“Uh-uh,” said Rita. “Back in New Orleans, you go for the best bit first, that way ain’t nobody gonna steal it from you.”

“You’re not in New Orleans, Rita.”

“Sure, but old habits, you know?”

“I guess,” said Amanda, unwrapping her chicken salad sandwich and setting it next to the soda she’d gotten from the drug store on Garrison.

“So did you?”

“What?”

Rita rolled her eyes. “Speak to Grayson?”

Amanda nodded and waited until she’d swallowed her first bite before answering. “I did. I spoke to him a couple of days ago.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said…a lot of things,” said Amanda. “I didn’t understand a lot of it, but he thinks the dreams I’m having are of some city that sank below the sea. A temple or prison or something. For a devil creature the Yopasi worshipped.”

Rita’s mouth froze in mid-chew and her eyes widened. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and gulped. “Say what? I meant about giving you another extension on your paper. You said you were late.”

“Oh, right,” said Amanda.

“What the hell’s all this talk of devils? And who are the Yopasi?”

Amanda took a deep breath and told her what she and Professor Grayson had talked about, seeing a growing hardness enter Rita’s eyes with every sentence. By the end of the retelling, Rita had her arms folded and was shaking her head.

“What’d I tell you? Bad mojo,” said Rita.

“I don’t know that I believe all he said,” said Amanda. “I mean, it’s all a bit far-fetched, isn’t it? Why would I be dreaming of something half the world away? Something I’ve never heard of. It doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it don’t,” agreed Rita. “But there’s a whole lot of this town that don’t make much sense. So what did he say about getting rid of your dreams?”

“Nothing yet,” said Amanda. “He was talking about Siberian shamans and Eskimo rituals, and some kind of race memory. Or something. It was all a bit, you know, out there.”

Amanda waved her hand to emphasize the point, rolling her eyes like she thought Professor Grayson’s tales of psychic connection were all bunkum. Rita saw through her in a heartbeat.

“Don’t gimme that,” she said. “You believe him, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” sighed Amanda. “It sounds foolish, but what else is there?”

“You have any other dreams since?”

“No,” said Amanda, the relief plain in her voice. “Thankfully.”

“Hell, maybe all you needed to do was talk it out.”

“I hope that was all it was,” said Amanda, though she doubted it. She hadn’t had any more dreams to match the power and force of her last one, but each night’s sleep had been troubled by vague feelings of unsettledness, a restless unease that left her as tired in the morning as she had been going to bed. She could not recall any of the dreams of the last couple of nights, and knew that was a blessing. Perhaps her mind was shielding her from the nightmares that lurked around the edges of her dreaming consciousness like patient predators.

“Anyhow,” continued Amanda. “He’s going to look into it and see if he can’t find some way to make them go away for good.”

Rita, her pie now finished, tucked into her sandwiches and brushed crumbs from her cardigan. She reached over and patted Amanda’s knee.

“If half of what you say about him is true, I’ll bet he’ll sort it out lickety-split.”

Amanda smiled and looked up as she saw a group of young men approaching them. They were well-dressed, most in Oxford bags and MU sweaters and blazers. She recognized two of them—Spencer Osborne and Wilson Brewster—but the others she’d never laid eyes on before. They were seniors from Alpha Qoppa Alpha, one of the oldest fraternities of Miskatonic, and certainly its highest achievers.

Spencer was tall, with a linebacker’s build and a shock of neatly combed blond hair. With his high forehead, prominent jaw, and defined cheeks, he had the quintessential Massachusetts bone structure. Wilson was much shorter, with the build of a quarterback, and though his features were also those of the Bay State, they were slimmer and less angular.

She shared a couple of classes with Spencer and Wilson, and had exchanged a few words with both of them. They were pleasant enough and polite, but she didn’t know them much beyond that. They were both good-looking in a preppy sort of way, and most of the girls in Dorothy Upman had crushes on at least one of them. Despite that, she hadn’t heard any rumors of either boy dating or going steady.

“Amanda,” said Spencer. “How are you?”

“Just fine, Spencer,” she answered. “How are you?”

“Just dandy, Mandy,” said Spencer, getting down on one knee beside her.

She smiled and nodded to Brewster. “Are you dandy, too, Wilson?”

Wilson favored her with a winning smile and said, “As dandy as you can be after two hours of Professor Atwood, I guess.”

“I’m fine, too,” said Rita, leaning over. “Thanks for asking.”

“Good to know,” said Spencer. “I was just about to say hello to you, too.”

“Sure you was,” said Rita, unconvinced.

“Absolutely I was,” continued Spencer. “In fact, Wilson and I came over with the express intention of speaking to you both. Didn’t we, Wilson?”

“Sure did,” confirmed Wilson.

“Aren’t you going to introduce us to the rest of your friends?” asked Amanda.

Wilson put his arms around the two boys she didn’t know and said, “Amanda Sharpe, this is Arnold and Randolph Derby. They’re originally from Iowa, but don’t let that put you off—they’re actually pretty nice. Randolph’s the clever one, but Arnold has a mean fastball.”

Amanda saw the brotherly resemblance between the two boys and smiled nervously at them. Neither said anything, and though Amanda was no expert in body language, she immediately recognized the male hierarchy at work in the boys’ grouping. The Derby brothers were there as entourage to Spencer and Wilson, who were clearly the alpha males.

“So what you want?” demanded Rita. “We’re having lunch.”

If Spencer was irritated at Rita’s brusqueness, he didn’t let it show. Amanda flashed Rita a questioning glance. Smoothly Spencer stood up and brushed his baggy trousers. He ran a hand through his hair and smiled at them both.

“Don’t worry, we won’t intrude further, ladies,” he said. “I just wanted to see if you were free this Friday. The Amherst is showing The Black Pirate, and we wondered if you’d like to accompany us to see it. It’s got Douglas Fairbanks in it, and its supposed to be pretty exciting. We thought you ladies might enjoy it.”

“No can do,” said Rita. “We’re busy.”

“Oh,” said Wilson. “That’s a pity. You have other plans?”

“Yeah, we do,” said Rita. “We’re going to the Commercial. They got Marie Lambeau and Jim Culver playing, and we ain’t gonna miss that. Not for no damn army movie…”

“Marie Lambeau?” said Wilson. “We have some of her records at the frat house.”

“You like jazz?”

“You’re darn tootin’,” said Spencer. “We own a bunch of records by Louis Armstrong and Frankie Trumbauer.”

Amanda could see that Rita was impressed, though she tried to hide it beneath a mask of belligerence. “Yeah, well, just cause you own a few records don’t mean you know jazz.”

“Okay, well I see we’re fighting a lost cause here, boys,” said Spencer. He shrugged with theatrical defeat and said. “Another time maybe, ladies?”

“Sure,” said Amanda, mystified and irritated at Rita’s overt hostility. “Another time.”

“We’re having a gathering at the frat house a week from Saturday,” said Wilson. “From seven o’ clock on. You’re more than welcome. Both of you. Maybe we’ll see you there?”

“Maybe,” said Rita. “Maybe not.”

Spencer sketched Amanda a casual salute and led his friends away as Wilson made an oh well gesture that Rita didn’t see. The AQA boys moved off down College Street in the direction of Hotel Miskatonic, play-punching one another and miming baseball pitches. Amanda watched them go, unable to contain the delicious frisson of excitement at the idea that such popular boys might be interested in them.

She turned to Rita, who was staring at her, ready for her questions.

“What?” said Rita.

“You know fine well what, Rita Young,” said Amanda. “What was that all about?”

“You want to go to that damn movie?”

“No, I said I’d go to the Commercial with you.”

“Good,” said Rita, watching as the boys disappeared around the corner. “You know, rich kids like that, they only after you for your body.”

 “Maybe I’d like that,” said Amanda.

 Rita laughed. “Look at you,” she said between giggles. “One offer of a movie and you get all blushy.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Amanda, her cheeks reddening. “It was just a movie, it wasn’t like a date or anything.”

“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that,” snickered Rita.

* * *

Aunt Lucy’s was crowded. A varied clientele sat on the stools at the counter tucking into their midday meals. Catching the overspill from the Grafton, you could get a thirty-five cent lunch at Lucy’s that was passable and filling, if you didn’t mind the cracked crockery and cutlery that maybe wasn’t as thoroughly washed as you might like it.

“Not exactly Anton’s, is it?” said Minnie, staring at the pile of mashed potatoes, fried chicken, and green beans on her plate. “I’m still gonna collect that, you know?”

“Don’t I know it, honey. It’s all I’ve heard since last night,” said Rex, sipping his coffee and looking around the diner. The décor was trying to be homely, but just looked a bit shabby. Then again, that was part of the charm of Aunt Lucy’s. 

“Well I was right, wasn’t I?” pointed out Minnie.

“Half-right,” said Rex. “He came back, but he wasn’t no killer.”

Minnie took a mouthful of chicken, making a face that said, Hey, not bad after all. She was dressed in a knee-length skirt and severely cut coat that looked like it came straight from some femme fatale’s wardrobe. Today she was looking like the bee’s knees, and Rex wondered, not for the first time, why she didn’t have a fella.

His own clothes were rumpled and in need of a wash, but Rex liked to think that was all part of his grizzled reporter’s chic. He sketched formless doodles on his pad between sips of coffee. Unlike Minnie, he hadn’t ordered any food.

“You think he’ll show up?” he asked.

“I do,” said Minnie. “I saw his eyes, Rex. He wants answers as much as we do. Probably more so.”

“But we don’t know anything about him.”

“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Rex.

The door opened with a jingle of a bell and Rex looked up to see Gabriel Stone enter the diner. He headed straight over to them, like he’d scoped them from the outside and already knew where they’d be sitting. Rex moved over to give him room to join them. Stone removed his fedora and hung it on the hook on the side of the table as he slid into their booth.

“Mr. Stone,” said Rex. “Good to see you again.”

Stone nodded and accepted a cup of coffee from a passing waitress. He smiled in greeting to Minnie, taking a moment to savor his drink. Rex looked at Minnie, who gave a tiny shrug.

“Mr. Stone,” said Minnie. “I just want to say how sorry I am for your loss. I can’t imagine what you must be feeling right now. It must—”

“You’re right, you can’t,” said Stone, cutting off Minnie’s condolence. “So don’t try.”

Rex covered his irritation at Stone’s manner and said, “So you want to tell us what’s what? How come you knew that was your daughter up on the athletics field?”

“I know how to ask questions,” said Stone. “And I know who to ask.”

“And how do you know that?” asked Minnie.

“We never sleep,” answered Stone, reaching into his pocket and producing a silver badge engraved with the words Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

“You’re one of Allan Pinkerton’s boys,” whistled Rex, leaning back in his seat with a newfound respect for Gabriel Stone.

Allan Pinkerton, a penniless Scottish immigrant, had formed his detective agency on the mean streets of Chicago in 1850. Over the years, his agents had earned a gritty reputation as tough, effective, and brutal investigators, bounty hunters, and strike-breakers. Pinkertons tracked down train robbers, counterfeiters, and in 1861 helped foil an assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln as he traveled through Baltimore to his inauguration. After the Civil War, where Pinkerton headed up the Union intelligence service, he returned to his detective agency and its fearsome reputation went from strength to strength. Rex had never met a Pinkerton man before, but Gabriel looked just like he’d have expected one to look: tough, self-reliant, and capable of breaking him in two with one hand tied behind his back.

“Yeah,” said Gabriel. “I work for the Pinkertons, but I’m here for myself. My little girl got killed, and I’m here to find out who did it and see he gets what’s coming to him.”

“What does that mean?” asked Minnie, pushing her unfinished lunch away.

“It means whatever I want it to mean,” said Stone. “Now are you going to help me or not?”

“Sure, Gabe,” said Rex, flipping the pages of his notebook.

“It’s Gabriel.”

“Oh, sure, okay. Gabriel,” said Rex. “I think we can work together. We can share information, yeah. You find your daughter’s killer, and we make sure her story gets told straight, yeah?”

Stone nodded and Rex continued. “Okay, well, first why don’t you start by telling us how you knew it was your daughter. I don’t think the cops even know that yet.”

“They know,” said Stone. “I spoke to a bull called Harden last night. Good cop, but he don’t like to be told his job. Guess I don’t blame him.”

Minnie leaned over and said, “But how did you know she’d been…you know, killed?”

“My Lydia’s a good girl,” said Stone, as though it was important to establish that fact up front, like maybe Rex and Minnie had doubted it. “She had her mother’s spirit, God rest her soul, but she was a good girl. Always wrote me every fortnight, told me how she was getting on, what classes she liked, what professors were dull or interesting. Every two weeks, regular as clockwork I’d get a letter on Monday morning, but I didn’t get no letter this week.”

“And that was enough to bring you here?”

“Yeah,” said Stone. “I came up and did what I’d do on any missing person case. Trawl the morgues and lean on the night shift workers, maybe grease a few palms along the way. Took a couple of hours…but I found her at a place called Eleazar’s. My little girl, laid out on a damn slab with half her arms and legs missing. What kind of sick bastard could do that to a little girl…”

“Golly,” said Minnie, putting her hand on Stone’s arm. “That’s terrible, I’m so sorry.”

Stone nodded and cleared his throat.

“I got her out of that place, lickety-split,” said Stone. “Got her to a respectable place up on French Hill. She deserves that, you know, to be someplace nice.”

“Were you and your daughter close?” asked Minnie. “I know it sounds like a dumb question, but I have to ask.”

“Yeah, we were close. Ever since my wife died, we’re all each other’s got. I didn’t want her to come to Arkham. ‘What’s wrong with the New York schools?’ I said, but she wasn’t having none of it. Wanted to get out of the city, to go to school someplace where you didn’t live right on top of ten other families, I suppose. Our place ain’t big, just a walk-up apartment in the west Bronx, but it was home. She came out here two years ago, and she seemed to like it, even though she missed the New York vibe. She loved music and dancing. Liked to get out to listen to jazz and hep it up with the other girls.”

“There’s not many places you can go to dance in Arkham,” said Rex, hastily scribbling what Gabriel Stone was saying. “The good townsfolk tend to look down on youngsters that want to listen to jazz and drink and smoke.”

“Then it should be easy to track down where she was before she…met her killer.”

“Should be,” agreed Minnie. “That’s the sort of lead Rex and I can chase down.”

“We need to find this guy,” said Stone, putting down his cup and rapping the table with his knuckles. “I found out he’s done this a bunch of times before, and if we don’t find him, then a whole lot more girls are gonna die. Someone gets a taste for this shit, he’s not gonna stop.”

“Yeah, your daughter was the sixth girl in three years,” said Rex.

“Sixth?” said Stone, shaking his head. “Try twenty-fourth.”

Rex and Minnie looked at one another, unsure whether or not to entertain such an absurdly high figure. The idea that twenty-four girls had been murdered in Arkham without the vast bulk of them coming to the attention of the town was surely ridiculous.

“Look, Gabriel,” began Rex. “I don’t want to sound harsh, but don’t you think if that many girls went missing we might have heard about it? I know the cops around here don’t have the reputation of the Pinkertons, but they do a pretty good job of keeping the peace.”

“Do they?” snapped Stone. “I’ve been here four days and I probably know more about the bootlegging operations going on here than they do. Girls have been going missing here for the last three years, but no one’s done anything about it. Sure, not all of them have been turning up the way my Lydia did, but they’re going missing all the same.”

“So how come we haven’t heard of them?” asked Minnie.

“Missing ain’t the same as dead, sugar,” said Stone. “Since I left New York, I been reading up on this place. You wouldn’t believe half the shit that happens here, but no one seems to care or notice. I got friends in the department, and they got me a record of the missing persons from Arkham, and it’s a big list. Sure, some of them are drunks who fell in the river, or schmucks who figured they’d try and outrun their debts or take off with a floozy, but too many of them were girls at Miskatonic.”

“Were they investigated?” asked Rex.

“Don’t look like it,” said Stone. “Most of their parents got letters saying they were heading to Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles to make it in showbiz or to get married to some new fella they didn’t think their folks would like. Cops don’t investigate runaways.”

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” said Rex, crossing himself at the notion that so many girls had met grisly fates in Arkham. Rex was what he liked to call a “lapsed Catholic,” one who fell back on its tired rituals in times of stress and muscle memory.

“Okay,” said Minnie. “We can look into the dance clubs and jazz holes. What are you gonna do?”

“First up, I need you to get me a look at the records of the Advertiser,” said Stone. “You got a newspaper morgue in the basement, don’t you?”

“Sure,” said Rex. “But Harvey won’t let you get down there. He keeps that place locked up tighter than Lillian Gish’s corset. I can’t get you in there. Sorry, Gabriel.”

“You sure about that?” said Stone. “I mean really sure.”

“Harvey’s a real stickler for who gets to look at his files,” said Minnie, and Rex could have kissed her for the support. “We have a hell of a time getting down there and we work for him, but I think we can get you in one night, can’t we, Rex? Maybe Harvey’s bridge night?”

“I guess we might be able to,” conceded Rex. He leaned forward over his coffee. “If we get you in there, what are you gonna go looking for in those files?”

Stone took out his notebook, a leather-bound pad encased in black leather. He flipped it open and scanned down his copious amount of notes. He tapped a small pencil against a particular name and nodded to himself.

“I want to find out everything I can about this guy,” said Stone. “He knew Lydia, and she used to say he was always interested in her work.”

“What’s his name?” asked Minnie.

“Grayson,” said Stone. “Professor Oliver Grayson.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The stink down by the riverside was something powerful, but Pete had smelled far worse in his time. Living on the streets gave a man a chance to smell all kinds of awful things, not least his own body and clothes. Pete’s eyes slowly levered open, and he smacked his dry lips. The sour bile of whiskey vomit coated his chin and he reached up with a dirt-encrusted hand to wipe the worst of it away.

The sunlight hurt his eyes, and he rolled onto his side as a coughing fit wracked his body. He dry heaved, retching and hacking a gelatinous lump of phlegm onto the shoreline.

“Hell,” said Pete. “Firs’ solid food ‘n two days an’ I spit it in the damn mud.”

Pete slumped back as the waking world began to take shape around him. He lay in the mud down at the river by the edge of the railroad’s properties. The railroad ran out of Arkham from its Northside district, and all along this portion of the river’s north bank crowded sidings, warehouses, storage sheds, and locked freight cars. It was a risk coming here, as the railroad bulls that patrolled along here were fond of the cosh, and weren’t scared to put a hobnailed boot through a hobo’s face if they caught him sleeping rough. But if you could avoid them, it was at least quiet at night and you didn’t get rousted by the cops.

If you were smart, you could light a fire in the lee of the freight sheds and keep warm while you tried to sleep, but these days Pete was finding sleep harder and harder to come by. The empty bottle of rotgut whiskey beside him was proof enough of that. A drunken stupor was preferable to the horrific nightmares that had plagued him over the last few weeks. If he couldn’t panhandle enough nickels and cents to get a cheap ass bottle of what passed for liquor in this town, he’d be in for a night of feverish nightmares of the war and things worse than he’d ever seen over there.

He realized his feet were wet and looked down the length of his body. The tide had come in and his boots were lying in the water. Though he was exhausted from a troubled, uncomfortable night’s sleep, Pete scrambled back from the river’s edge, suddenly fearful of the black water lapping at the shore. The water was the color of oil, frothed with yellowish scum—sulphur seepage from the scores of coal heaps further along the shore.

Satisfied he was far enough from the water, Pete slumped back and squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to blot out the half-glimpsed memories of his dream.

Fire falling from the sky.

Water rising up to meet it and the world in-between boiling away to nothingness.

His eyes snapped open as what felt like a wet piece of sandpaper rasped across his cheek and hot, animal breath panted into his face.

Pete waved an arm as he rolled in the mud away from the source of the panting.

“Damn it, Duke,” said Pete. “Can’t a man sleep where he wan’s without gettin’ disturbed?”

The object of his rant dodged out away from Pete’s flailing hand, a scabby mongrel dog with wet fur and bright eyes. A red collar with a lank length of rope attached dangled from the dog’s neck, and it looked expectantly at Pete as he pushed himself upright.

Pete blinked in the sunlight, looking across the water to the desolate island that clung to the northern shores of the river. Low and swampy, it was covered in thick, wiry undergrowth, like a slice of land nobody wanted, but nobody could get rid of. No one visited the island, though Pete would swear he’d seen a fire burning out there over the last couple of nights, but the whiskey made it hard to be sure of anything.

Pete reached out and patted Duke’s head, smiling as the dog licked his hand, an act which most sensible folk would reckon to be a hazard to their well-being.

“You hungry, boy?” Pete asked the dog. Dumb question, he knew. Duke was always hungry, and would eat till he burst if given half the chance. “Yeah, me too, boy. Don’t reckon we’ll get much from the good people of Arkham today, but there might be some bins we can raid later. Whatever the rich folks don’t wanna eat, that’ll do Pete just fine.”

Pete picked himself up, and shook out the worst of the dirt and grime from his clothes.

Over the years of living rough, he’d picked up the nickname “Ashcan,” which wasn’t as bad as some names he’d been called in other towns. The folk of Arkham knew of him and in their own weird kind of way, tolerated him like he was a fixture of the town. Didn’t make them any more generous in their handouts, but at least he wasn’t beaten out of town like some hobos he knew. The lucky ones were hauled to the county line by the cops and kicked on their way with their bindle over their shoulders, while the unlucky ones ended up thrown in jail if they couldn’t pay the fine: which, of course, none of them could.

Pete set off toward the Garrison Street Bridge, knowing there was an easy route up to the streets there. He’d cross the river and head to the narrow streets of Lower Southside. The folks there were mostly immigrants and pretty poor as well, but Pete had found that the measure of a person’s kindness couldn’t be found in how much money they had in their wallet. Oftentimes the best handouts he’d had came from those least able to afford it. That might make him feel bad for a second, but then he’d think of the whiskey he could buy and any guilt was washed away in his needy thirst.

He glanced over at the island and couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there were things moving in the long grass, shadowing his movements in the bracken. Over the years, Pete had developed a keen sense for when he was being watched, a talent that had saved him more than once from over-zealous cops eager to keep their streets safe and clear of vagrants.

“Come on, Duke,” said Pete. “Time we was outta here.”

Duke barked and ranged ahead, loping over the broken ground of the riverbank as he ran toward the bridge. Pete picked up the pace and started climbing the slope toward the streets above. Behind him, Duke barked and barked. Pete turned and saw his dog standing in the shadows of the bridge, his tail wagging furiously like he’d found the mother lode of doggy treasures. Pete beckoned the dog to join him, but Duke wasn’t moving and just kept yapping like he was fit to burst.

“Dammit, Duke,” said Pete. “Come on, you dumb mutt!”

Seeing the dog wasn’t going to move, Pete went back down to the shoreline, where concrete piers supported the bridge’s footings. Each was a wide slab of gray, stained with tidemarks, and piled high with washed up trash and assorted detritus thrown up by the river.

 At his master’s approach, Duke bounded into the darkness beneath the bridge and stopped beside an inlet formed in the gap between two of the bridge’s footings. The water here was stagnant and foul, scummed with runoff from the railroad workings and unidentifiable froth.

“Jesus, Duke, what the hell’s the matter with you?” cried Pete, smelling something worse than even his own powerful body odor. “What the hell you got?”

Duke was tugging something at the water’s edge and Pete squinted in the low light to see what he had. It looked like a length of pale piping, but as Pete’s eyes adjusted to the low light beneath the bridge he saw exactly what it was. He’d seen enough human bodies reduced to their component parts in the war to know what one looked like when it was taken apart. Duke didn’t have no pipe, he had a human femur in his mouth.

“Duke!” yelled Pete. “Put that down!”

Startled by the authority in Pete’s voice, Duke dropped the bone and backed away from him. Pete raised his hands as if saying sorry and crept forward, scanning the rest of the inlet as he heard the sloshing of thick, sludgy water against the concrete.

“Oh, sweet Jesus Christ,” said Pete.

The water was thick with body parts: arms, ribcages, and bones of all sorts. And it wasn’t just one body’s worth. Skulls—some fleshless, some clung to by stubborn scraps of flesh—had been washed to the shoreline, grinning from the water like doll’s heads. Rendered down flesh floated just beneath the surface, like dirty fat from a skillet tossed in a cold basin.

“Christ, there’s gotta be a dozen folks here,” hissed Pete.

Pete had seen and done some terrible things in the war, horrific, mind-wrenching stuff that had left him unable to sleep or hold down a job when he got back to the States. In an instant, he was right back there, surrounded by dead bodies so torn up you couldn’t tell one man’s remains from another or what part of him you were looking at.

Duke crept to the river’s edge, but Pete snatched up his rope leash and hauled him back. The dog protested, but Pete wasn’t about to loosen his grip.

“No way, Duke,” said Pete, shaking his head. “We’re gettin’ outta here.”

Pete turned away from the river and made his way toward the streets, dragging Duke with him. The idea of telling the cops about the charnel house beneath the bridge crossed Pete’s mind. He dismissed the thought; he had learned the hard way what would happen to a man like him if he were to go to the cops with something as dreadful as this. No, sometimes it paid to be silent, to keep quiet. Sometimes it even paid to play stupid and act like nothing had happened.

The hairs on the back of Pete’s neck bristled, and his sense of being watched returned even stronger than before. He could feel baleful eyes regarding him from the swampy island, or was it just his imagination? No, he was sure there were malicious eyes on him, hungry eyes with a taste for human meat and fat in their jaws.

He shook off the image, remembering dark tales told in France of subterranean tunnels dug deep beneath no-man’s land, where packs of deserters from both sides were said to have hidden to escape the horrors of the war above. The tale had done the rounds many times, getting more gruesome with each retelling, but enough of the details were similar enough that Pete had always wondered whether there was some kernel of truth to them. In many of these trench tales, these deserters had been there since the beginning of the war and were described as little better than feral cannibals.

Though the madness of the war was long behind Pete, the after-effects would never leave him. He felt his limbs begin to tremble and he felt his mouth go dry and his bladder tighten.

“Oh God in heaven,” he said, feeling his terror mount.

Quickly, he climbed the grassy slope toward the world above and took a relieved breath when he reached the pavement. The sun shone down on Arkham, but though the normality of the sight was a blessed relief, there hung a lurking unease over its winding streets and gambrel-roofed buildings, a fear understood, but never acknowledged.

Pete remembered that fear well; it was the same feeling that settled in a man’s bones as he stood knee-deep in muddy water in the trenches before going over the top.

* * *

The Miskatonic University library was quiet, as it always was at this time of day, the yellow glow of streetlights from College Street and Garrison Street forming pale blobs on the ceiling of the third floor. Oliver flipped through Justin Geoffrey’s People of the Monolith, scanning down the page to check for any references that might aid him in his attempt to spare Amanda Sharpe’s fragile mind from further dream assaults.

There was little to be gleaned from this poem, for the poetic stanzas were uselessly outlandish in their form. Apparently Geoffrey had gone mad a year or two before, which was no surprise to Oliver given the nature of his poetry. He closed the collection and pinched the bridge of his nose, stifling a yawn as the rigors of the day began to catch up with him.

Henry Armitage, the dour master of the library, had left for the night, but his assistant had provided Oliver with all the books he had requested and more besides. Many of them were now piled like a fortress wall at the end of the desk, and Oliver had filled several pages of his notebook with half-formed thoughts and vague cultural references to myth-cycles ranging from the native tribes of America to the coastal tribes of Ceylon and Madagascar.

All he was finding was interesting, but whether it would help Amanda was another matter entirely. He needed to speak to her again, to record their conversation under laboratory conditions and perhaps even ask her to submit to hypnosis. The university had several cylinder recorders and a single gramophone Oliver could request the use of, and the thought of recording Amanda’s testimony for posterity was a thrilling prospect.

“One thing at a time,” whispered Oliver, remembering Alexander’s advice regarding intellectual rigor. Hit the books first, gather information, sort fact from fiction, and then, and only then, close in on the human aspect.

His table was piled high with books, their subject matter covering anthropology, the occult, archaeology, and mythology. He’d consulted The Golden Bough, of course, as well as lesser-known texts: Witch Cults in Western Europe, Exiles of Hyboria and Others, Malleus Maleficarum, and, of course, The Interpretation of Dreams. He found many teasing references to arcana that bore striking similarities to Amanda’s dreams, but most were found in books no serious scholar would treat as fact.

A book of this latter stripe was Dreams of Atlantis. Oliver had never consulted this book before, and with good reason. Its author was a discredited Englishman by the name of Prothero Fitzgibbon, a disgraced professor of Oxford University. In the excited preface to his book, Fitzgibbon claimed the spirits of dead Atlanteans had entered his body and used him as a vessel to tell how their land had met its end. The resulting text was filled with protean ramblings of these so-called spirits, lamenting their lost cities and describing at length the doom that had befallen them.

Fitzgibbon had been ridiculed in the press and became the laughingstock of the literary and academic worlds for his steadfast adherence to the truth of his work. The man had been forced to quit his position at Oxford, and (so tongue-wagging gossips had it) had later been committed to an insane asylum somewhere in the south of England. Oliver had smiled to see the book in the pile the student library assistant had brought him, but the more he read in its pages, the more he began to wonder if perhaps Fitzgibbon had been, if not correct, then at least honestly led by dreams of a similar nature to Amanda’s.

In one dream, Fitzgibbon, or rather the spirit possessing him, talked of a great beast arising from the deep:

“…a monstrous mountain of quivering flesh, more landmass than living thing. It marched upon the seabed as a man walks in the waves on the shore. Its every step a tidal wave, its every movement a doom-laden gesture as it laid waste to the sapphire shores and silver towers of our beloved Atlantis with no more thought than you or I might crush an ant. Gods spare us from the walker between the stars, risen now from his sunken tomb! Cursed be the day the stars aligned and freed his abhorrent form!”

Another spirit spoke of how he had sought to save their homeland from the beast:

“Lo! Yet the waves rush through the Pillars of Hercules and surge across the ocean to crash upon the pillared capitals of the Twin Halls of Gadeirus and Atlas, we may yet be saved. Though fish swim in the Great Library of Elasippus, and the spires of Ampheres vanish below the waves, there is yet hope. Our doom is at hand, and nothing now can prevent the loss of the greatest treasures of the age, but across the gulfs of time and space, others may yet heed our ending and learn from the hubris and willful arrogance that destroyed us. Yea, though the beast sinks our gilded land, know that its horror can be sent back to the ancient prison to slumber until the stars are right once again. Hear me now, scrivener yet to be born, heed my words and etch them in your damnable book. And once written, hide them away from the sight of men until the beast’s abominable bulk is heaved unto the surface to wreak its horror and the sun hides its face in shame. For I am Nereus-Kai, and I alone know the terrible fate of the world.”

There were other, equally florid descriptions, but time and again, Oliver saw phrases and concepts that resonated with Amanda’s description of the sunken city she had seen. Not only that, but many of the descriptions of the sunken god matched what Kaula, the Yopasi shaman, had divulged to Oliver when drunk. It was all too fantastical to be real, yet with each correlation, Oliver began to despair of making any real progress. He couldn’t publish anything using Fitzgibbon as a reference; he’d be laughed all the way back to Baltimore.

A shadow fell across him and he jumped, startled by this new arrival. Hastily Oliver closed Fitzgibbon’s book, lest he be taken for giving it scholarly weight, and looked up to see Alexander Templeton standing beside his table with a book under his arm.

Templeton smiled. “Fitzgibbon? Really, Oliver?”

Oliver let out a breath and nervously tapped the book’s vulgar cover. “Yes, well, I need to explore all avenues, eh? No matter how fanciful. It’s nonsense, of course, but it makes for interesting reading if nothing else.”

“I’m glad you think that,” said Alexander, placing his curious volume of lore upon the desk. “May I?” he said, indicating the empty chair opposite Oliver.

“By all means,” said Oliver, dismantling his wall of books so he could see Alexander. His friend wore a dark suit, as though preparing for an evening’s excursion, and though he was indoors, still wore his hat.

“Passing through?” asked Oliver.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Alexander. “I have a dinner engagement with an old army colleague at six.”

“How nice for you,” said Oliver, looking to the clock on the far wall. “It’s a quarter to six now; won’t you be late?”

“I’ll be fine. I have a taxi waiting to take me to Anton’s.”

“Anton’s,” said Oliver. “Very nice.”

“So I am led to believe,” agreed Alexander. “Anyway, I have a book that might help with your research concerning Miss Sharpe’s dreams.” He tapped the book he’d brought and Oliver detected more than a hint of nervousness to Alexander’s demeanor, as though he were the bearer of bad news. “I called by your office, but they said you’d already left for the library.”

“Very kind of you to bring it to me, Alexander. You could have just left it in my cubby hole you know.”

Alexander shook his head. “Not this one, I’m afraid. It’s rather…specialized, old fellow. Not really for mass consumption, if you take my meaning. Some of its contents might be taken the wrong way.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Alexander pulled his chair around until he was positioned adjacent to Oliver. With one hand resting on the cover of the book, Alexander said, “In my researches, I have in the past consulted some very ancient books, tomes containing lurid tales that are quite beyond the pale. They tell of quite fantastic things, horrible things, concerning the far distant past of this world and the…beings that lived before the time of man. This book is not for the faint-hearted, Oliver, so I warn you that you’ll need a stiff shot of whatever liquor you have stashed away beside you as you read it.”

“Come on, man,” said Oliver. “You’re exaggerating,” but one look at Alexander’s face told him that his fellow professor was deadly serious. Alexander gripped his forearm, squeezed, and Oliver frowned at the earnestness he saw in his friend’s eyes.

“I’m giving you this book because I think you have already seen a measure of what lies beyond the fragile veil of ignorance that shields mankind from utter oblivion.”

Was it just Oliver’s imagination or did the glow of the streetlights outside dim slightly?

“Alexander, I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about. And what’s all this talk of ignorance? We’re professors, damn it. It’s our job to fight ignorance. Isn’t that why we pursued this career?”

Alexander gripped harder, desperate to impart the seriousness of what he was saying.

“Would you teach a child of war or murder, Oliver? Would you let a babe in arms play with a razor?”

“Of course not, don’t be foolish.”

“Mankind is that child,” said Alexander. “And the full horror of this knowledge is that razor. Some things even the wisest of men are not meant to know, yet some things a poor unfortunate few must know.”

“You’ve lost me,” said Oliver. “I don’t like this one bit, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” said Alexander. “When you and Professor Dean went to Alaska, you touched the very edges of a wider world. I read the paper you published at Brown. It came so very close to exposing that which should never be exposed. Truths mankind is not yet ready to face. Dean tried to shield you from all that you’d uncovered, but his mind couldn’t withstand the horrors of what he learned.”

“Morley? I haven’t spoken to him in years.”

“Of course you haven’t. He would have distanced himself from you,” said Alexander. “To spare you from the things he had learned. To protect you. Regrettably, I cannot do the same.”

Alexander pushed the book toward Oliver, only reluctantly taking his hands off the faded leather of its cover. “I read this book upon its publication in 1915, and consulted it again after our conversation in the faculty lounge. God help me, but I wish I had not.”

“Why?” demanded Oliver. “In heaven’s name why?”

“Because you need to know what lies at the heart of this matter,” said Alexander. “Something terrible is coming, and only with the knowledge contained in this book can we face it.”

Oliver tore his eyes from Alexander’s gaze and looked at the book before him. Bound in softest kid leather, with a spine edged in faded gold, it had the look of a Bible to it. It had the smell of dusty antiquity and the papery reek of incalculably old knowledge. Though it was unremarkable in almost every aspect, Oliver felt a great revulsion at the sight of it. Every sense he possessed was screaming at him to decline Alexander’s offer of the book. On some instinctual, animal level, Oliver knew it was a source of great evil, a tome that should be burned without ever being opened.

The idea that a book could be evil was ridiculous, but the notion had taken hold in Oliver’s mind. Despite the warnings from some deeper parts of his psyche, Oliver reached down and opened the book. The inner page listed the author as Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, and the name was not unknown to Oliver. Dr. Shrewsbury had been an anthropologist and a noted professor of philosophy, one who had taught at Miskatonic University, but had mysteriously vanished over a decade ago. No one knew what had become of the professor, and few of his later works had survived him.

 The book’s title was unfamiliar to Oliver, and he traced his finger over the inked words until coming to the loathsome one near the end: An Investigation into the Myth Patterns of Latter-Day Primitives with Especial Reference to the R’lyeh Text.

* * *

Moonlight shone in through his curtainless window, and Henry Cartwright closed his eyes, willing the silver orb in the sky to turn its face from the world. He sat on his bed, knees drawn up to his chest and rocked back and forth. His arms were wrapped around his shins and the barest hints of faint whispers escaped his pressed lips.

“Mustn’t let them in,” he murmured. “Mustn’t let them in.”

Henry’s eyes cracked open a fraction, and the moon’s face was hideous and banal at the same time. Shadows danced on the walls of his cell, black lines of phantom tree branches that waved like undersea fronds in a frozen current deep beneath the waves. Henry pushed himself back against the wall, unreasoning terror clamping an icy hand in his guts.

The black shapes on the wall drifted and slithered like snakes, coiling across the walls and over the ceiling. Henry saw they weren’t snakes at all, but tentacles, like the obscene gropings of some gelatinous octopus or squid.

No, it could be none of them, for the black tentacles oozing over his walls were legion, not limited by some quirk of evolution to eight or ten. Henry waved the air, flapping his arms in a sudden burst of motion. He leapt from the bed, taking hold of its iron frame and flipping it onto its side with lunatic strength to put it between him and the far wall.

“You won’t take me!” he screamed. “Not again!”

The wall across the cell from him was entirely black now, an inky void of abyssal darkness that stretched out to infinite gulfs of immensity between galaxies. Within that darkness, entities older than this fleeting world still lingered, forgotten in name, but not in malevolence. Within that howling emptiness lurked the things that gave all men nightmares and haunted the long watches of their imaginings when fear took hold of their hearts.

This was the darkness at the beginning and end of the world.

And Henry had seen it before.

He’d heard the whisper of the abyss in the dusty catacombs of the ruined chateau and learned what it was in the writings of its long-dead master. Even then, he’d known it would be better for the advancing Germans to wipe this cursed place from the face of the Earth. Yet he had conspired to bring the writings of the despicable count back to the United States, had worked to translate the numerous texts they’d found behind the cracked tomb wall amid a host of rotting skeletons.

The black shadows, blindly questing over the walls toward him wavered in their approach. As though scenting the air, they hesitated, unsure of themselves. Henry’s fractured mind danced in a constantly spinning whirl of half-remembered memories and knowledge. Yet amid the ruin of his sanity, one thing still held true.

He remembered the one thing that was anathema to them.

Henry stood, and though terror threatened to overwhelm him, he wrenched open his shirt to reveal the horrific scarring burned into his chest. Years old and faded to the color of pale white, the ridges of scar tissue cut Henry’s chest in an angular pattern with the suggestion of five branching points. In the center of the strange design sat what, in a certain light, could have looked like a flaming eye.

“You will not take me!” screamed Henry, feeling the blackness recoil at the image burned into his flesh. “I know you…I know you…,” he sobbed, dropping to his knees as the door to his cell crashed open and Monroe entered. The man threw his rollup away before entering the cell, lifting a hickory cosh from his belt.

“You gotta shut up,” said Monroe, brandishing his cosh. “You’re disturbing the other patients.”

“No!” screamed Henry, waving his arms at the walls. “Don’t you see it! The darkness at the end of all things! It’s coming. It’s coming here!”

Monroe came at him, oblivious to the gelid darkness pressing in all around, or the ghostly silver light of the moon that bleached the world of life. The orderly dragged the weeping Henry from behind his bed and cracked the cosh against the side of his knee, driving him to the floor. Two more orderlies bundled into the room, one bearing a straitjacket, another a thick syringe filled with clear liquid. 

Henry thrashed on the ground as strong hands held his arms and legs.

“No! Please! You can’t!” he shrieked in terror as he was flipped onto his front.

A foot cracked against his jaw and he tasted blood. A sharp pain stabbed into the meat of his rump as the sedative was administered. He fought the orderlies as best he could, but his struggles only increased the speed at which the drug raced around his system.

“Please…,” he whispered. A thin rope of red drool leaked from the corner of his mouth as his head lolled to the side.

Henry found himself staring out his window as the hungry moon grinned down at him. His eyes widened in horror as he saw its chiseled canyons and cratered surface loom close to the Earth. Its tidal power drew the oceans to it with one breath and forced them back with another, devouring and revealing their secrets with uncaring impartiality.

“Too late,” hissed Henry as chemical oblivion closed in on him. “It’s already here…”

Part Two

Ripples on the Surface, 1926

CHAPTER EIGHT

Amanda’s heart raced as they descended the worn steps down from the heavy door on Armitage Street toward the interior of the Commercial. She could hear the loud buzz of conversations and music deeper in the building, and felt her skin flush with a delicious frisson of excitement. She linked arms with Rita and squeezed tightly.

“Easy, hon,” said Rita with mock seriousness. She was as excited as Amanda.

“I can’t help it,” said Amanda. “I’ve never been to a speakeasy before. I feel so bad.”

“Oh yeah, you a real criminal now,” laughed Rita.

Behind them, Spencer Osborne and Wilson Brewster followed like gentlemen, snappily dressed in short coats and their ubiquitous Oxford bags. Their trilbies were cocked at rakish angles and their shirts were undone at the neck like Chicago gangsters. Rita had balked at the idea of asking them along, but without male companions, they wouldn’t be allowed into the club. The Commercial had a strict policy of allowing no singles inside, and rather than chancing that they’d meet someone outside, as folks often did, they’d made a date of it. Though both girls had been careful to avoid that word in particular. This most certainly was not a date.

They reached the bottom of the stairs and found themselves in a long corridor lit by a single naked bulb. The walls were bare brick, with faded paint peeling between posters advertising Harlem jazz clubs, Detroit record labels, and New York swing clubs. The paper curled from the walls, plastered haphazardly like a patchwork quilt so that it was hard to make any sense of what was on them. The artists had showbiz names like Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Pigmeat Markham, or Nick LaRocca, and the clubs sounded like exotic wonderlands: The Blue Heaven Ballroom, Dreamland Café, Club el Rado, The “It” Club.

A heavyset man in a long coat sat on a stool at the end of the corridor, smoking a thick cigarette beneath the brim of a black fedora. His skin was coal dark and he wore a thick pair of shaded glasses. Amanda wondered how he was able to see in the dim lighting.

Rita marched confidently toward the man, who held up a meaty hand as they approached.

“You want in, you gotta pay the piper,” he said.

“Yeah, how much he want?” asked Rita.

The man laughed. “For a voodoo child like you, a dollar fifty.”

“What about a Maryland girl?” asked Amanda. “How much do I pay?”

The man turned his head, not quite looking at her. Amanda realized the man was blind, noticing faint scar lines at the edges of his glasses. He took a deep draw of his cigarette and blew a series of perfect smoke rings toward the ceiling. The smell was deeply scented, and Amanda smelled herbs and strange spices from far off lands.

“I figure ‘bout the same, pretty girl,” he said. “But I don’t reckon neither of you dames oughta be dippin’ into you purses. Not when you got such handsome beaus to pay this old man.”

“How did you know we had two boys with us?” asked Amanda.

“Man got eyes don’t he?” said Rita, giving her a look that said shut up.

“Maryland here’s right to ask,” said the man, removing his glasses to reveal two puckered cavities where his eyes had once sat. The skin around them was like gristly burnt tissue, gnarled and pale against the black of his smallpox-scarred cheeks. “Blind Rufus may not have the sight the good Lord gave him, but he got his ways, oh yes he do. Eyes ain’t the only way to see, pretty girl—not in this town.”

Before Rita or Amanda could say any more, Spencer came forward and pressed a ten dollar bill into Rufus’s hand. “Here you go, old-timer,” he said.

 Rufus pocketed the bill, but made no attempt to reach for change. To his credit, Spencer didn’t demand it, and simply nodded as Rufus laughed and pushed open the door to the club.

A wall of noise hit them: music, talking, stamping feet, and clinking glasses.

“Go on in, folks,” said Rufus. “This is jazz, baby!”

* * *

The assault on the senses was total. Everyone in the club was smoking, and a fog of their exhalations clung to the low ceiling. Set out in a wide horseshoe around a central stage and dance floor, the Commercial was filled with men and women of all descriptions—young and old, black and white, American and immigrant. 

A band played on the stage: five black men in matching suits who filled the club with furious jazz licks, the sound bouncing from the walls like a living thing, and lifting hearts with its vital vibe. Dancers spun each other in tight spirals, twisting back and forth and leaning into one another like lovers.

Amanda had listened to Rita’s jazz records, but this was something else entirely. The sheer dynamism of the music filled the room with its passion and energy, feeding the hunger of the audience and reflecting back to the players. There was no separation between the musicians and the dancers; each thrived on the others’ energy, driving each other to fresh heights of enjoyment.

Amanda tore her gaze from the band and followed Rita through the press of bodies toward the bar where a vested man with a towel over one shoulder poured drinks from unmarked bottles and ceramic jugs painted with various kinds of fruit. As they moved through the club, Amanda tried to take in every detail. Perhaps forty tables were packed into the basement, so close that revelers jostled elbows as they drank and shouted good-natured jibes at one another.

The lighting was deliberately dim, like no one needed or wanted too much illumination shed on their dealings. Amanda saw women laughing at jokes, smoking, and drinking cocktails with men who lounged with their ties undone while sipping from squat glasses of whiskey. The women wore short dresses of black and purple, red and green, with low cuts and high hems that exposed swathes of bare flesh. Their glitzy shoes had heels that looked positively dangerous, and how they danced in such precarious footwear was a mystery. Amanda had done her best with her sewing kit, but her own dress looked woefully Middle America in comparison to these urban sophisticates.

But despite the conservative nature of her attire, she felt like some kind of rebel, an outsider daring to enjoy forbidden pleasures and venturing where angels feared to tread. This was the new face of America: wild, reckless, and seeking all that life had to offer. Amanda had lived a pretty sheltered life until now: studying hard, imagining her future husband, and going to church on Sunday, but this new world both thrilled and scared her. This was hedonism and indulgence, everything her father had warned her against in his parting words before she’d set off for Arkham.

These people cared nothing for the dictates of society. For them, this was society.

They reached the bar and Spencer leaned over to order their drinks. When they came, Amanda regarded hers with a mixture of anticipation and wariness. A pale pink, it looked more ice than drink. A long-stemmed cherry bobbed near the surface.

“What’s this?” asked Amanda.

“It’s a Mary Pickford,” replied Wilson, leaning close to be heard over the music.

“What’s in it?” asked Rita.

“Rum mostly, mixed with whatever they’re using for grenadine. And a lot of pineapple juice to cover the taste of the liquor.”

Amanda took a sip of her drink, and decided it could have used a whole lot more pineapple juice. The venomous bite of the illegal alcohol kicked the back of her throat and she coughed, her eyes widening as it slid down her throat like burning gasoline.

“Takes a bit of getting used to,” laughed Wilson.

“I’ll bet,” said Amanda, taking a more genteel sip and rolling the ice around in her mouth.

“So you think you’ll come to our rub next week?”

Amanda smiled and looked over at Rita. She took another drink before answering with a coquettish grin. “Maybe.”

“That’s not a no,” crowed Spencer.

“It’s not a yes, neither,” pointed out Rita.

“We’ll think about it,” said Amanda.

Wilson waved a hand, as if to dismiss the subject. “Don’t worry your pretty heads about it. I’m sure we’ll see you both at one of the AQA gatherings sometime. We have lots of them throughout the year.”

“What do the initials of your fraternity mean?” asked Amanda. “I never took Latin.”

“It’s an abbreviation for Age Quod Agis, which means, ‘Do well whatever you do,’” explained Wilson. “It’s kind of cheesy, I know, but it’s worked out well for anyone who’s been lucky enough to pledge. We have the highest percentage of graduates who go on to earn twice the national average, and lots of the most successful businessmen in America are AQA men.”

Amanda felt like Wilson was repeating these words from rote. If he thought it would impress her, he was sadly mistaken. She caught Rita’s eye and her friend rolled her eyes.

“That sure sounds good,” said Amanda, “but it’s like some kind of sales pitch from a slick adman trying to sell me a new vacuum cleaner.”

Rita’s comic expression was that of a vaudeville clown, and Amanda stifled a grin. She took another drink, the alcohol already hitting her system. Feeling suddenly bold, Amanda took Rita’s arm and together they walked away from the two frat boys. She blew a kiss over her shoulder and said, “See you around, boys!”

Rita laughed and said, “Hell, I been wanting to do that since we got here.”

“They knew what this was,” said Amanda, the thrill of being in a speakeasy and drinking illegal hooch sending a swirling recklessness surging through her body. “We told them we were only meeting them to get inside, right?”

“Yeah, we did,” said Rita, angling their course toward a table with two empty seats. They pushed through the crowd of revelers and sat down, grinning at the folk already gathered around the table like conspirators sharing a juicy piece of society gossip. A man in a black suit tipped his drink toward Amanda with a sly wink, and a woman in a green dress gave her a warm smile she returned with a nervous laugh.

The music stopped and the jazzmen on stage bowed to rapturous applause. The dancers laughed and clapped as the musicians left the stage, their faces flushed with the joy of their exertions. Most of the dancers returned to their tables or headed to the bar, but more than a few retired to secluded shadows of the club to indulge their other physical passions.

The lights dimmed around the stage and Amanda took another drink as the room fell suddenly silent. Breathless excitement spread through the club, and she heard footsteps move to the front of the stage. A light came up and Blind Rufus was haloed by a shimmering electric light, wreathed in clouds of smoke like a cheap magician.

His hat was pulled low over his face as he approached the microphone stand. His breath rasped around the club as he cleared his throat, grinning like the Cheshire Cat as he sightlessly surveyed the crowd and sensed their fevered anticipation.

“Yeah…,” he began. “Now the doors are closed, it’s just us, baby. We got something special for y’all tonight. Hoo, yeah. They say a man with no eyes gets sharper senses, you know? Now I don’t know if that’s true, but tonight I’m a-hoping it is, cause the grooves these cats lay down are like nothin’ you ever heard. It’s gonna be sweeter than a trainload of molasses and smoother than Velma’s coffee.”

Rufus paused, letting the moment stretch as he took a drag on his aromatic cigarette. He tipped his hat toward Amanda and smiled. “And if this is your first time here, you picked a good night to come, cause you gotta dance. Ain’t no spectators when it comes to jazz, folks.”

Rufus smiled and leaned in close to the microphone, his voice lower than a whisper, yet carrying to every corner of the club.

“You like velvet voices? We got the Crescent City’s smokiest velvet,” sighed Rufus. “And we got a Harlem trumpeter who plays a mean Dead Man’s Stomp. Straight from Connie’s Inn of New York City, give it up for Marie Lambeau and Jim Culver!”

A single note of a trumpet split the darkness as Rufus retreated to the shadows—a plaintive note that resonated deep within Amanda’s heart. It spoke of longing, of hope, and a deep heartache that made her eyes tear up within a moment of hearing it. The note echoed around the club, sustained far longer than any note should linger, before sweeping down into a syncopated beat supported by a trembling bass line from an unseen player in the darkness.

The stage was still dark, no hint of the musicians visible.

And then a light.

Softly, like a breaking dawn in summer, a gauzy illumination ghosted over the stage. Amanda saw a dusky-skinned woman standing at the microphone in a sparkling silver-gray dress, with a face that spoke of too much heartbreak. Marie Lambeau’s eyes were closed, and her body moved in time with the music, like the beat flowed through her in a wave. Amanda had never seen anyone more beautiful.

To the singer’s right was a man sitting askew on a wooden stool, dressed in a muted red velvet suit and wearing a battered fedora with an emerald feather tucked into the brim. The soulful music of the trumpet came from the golden instrument in his hands, his fingers working like a virtuoso. Though she had never seen a picture of Jim Culver, there could be no doubt as to the trumpeter’s identity. The music soared as soft drums joined the double bass and a piano struck up a dissonant beat.

And then Marie Lambeau sang.

Her voice was pure Bayou, sultry and smoky as a Louisiana bordello, raw as a Deep South Honky Tonk. She sang from the heart, baring her soul and reaching out to the audience with her words and music. As she suffered, the audience suffered. As she soared, so did they. Amanda felt the music deep inside her, Culver’s teasing, steadily building melody combining with Marie Lambeau’s quickening voice to awaken parts of her she hadn’t known were asleep. Her senses swelled to take it all in, and she felt her entire body aching with the need to get up and dance. Others were quicker to succumb to the music, drawn from their seats like marionettes pulled to their feet by a puppeteer.

Amanda looked over at Rita, and they made their way to the dance floor, moving in time to the music and the hauntingly beautiful voice of Marie Lambeau. Amanda didn’t hear the words; she didn’t need to. Everything she needed to know was in the flavor of the singer’s voice and the trumpeter’s staccato playing. Bodies surrounded them, men and women driven by the urge to dance and move to the music. When the dance floor proved too small, they pushed the tables aside and danced where, moments before, they had been drinking and smoking, content to let the music wash over them.

The song finished, and a crushing sense of emptiness filled Amanda. But before it could take hold, a new song began, and Amanda felt as though it was being sung for her and her alone. Marie Lambeau’s eyes were upon her, dark pools of soulful sorrow, eyes that had stared into the blackest New Orleans night and seen what lay at its heart. The moment stretched, their silent communion in defiance of the raucous beats filling the club and driving the dancers to ever greater heights of ecstasy… 

Then it broke and the song swelled, swirling jazz beats thumping and stomping around the club, dancing over the walls and sliding in the gaps between the dancers to jerk their limbs in strange ways and jangle like an electric charge through their blood.

This jazz was an exuberant overflow of natural talent and creativity, a complete surrender to the music that was inside the musicians, a fluid and instinctive inventiveness that no formal training could ever match. 

Song after song kept the audience moving: a pied piper rhythm that wouldn’t let go and seemed like it would dance them all beyond the limits of exhaustion. Amanda and Rita danced with men and women they had never met, all barriers of propriety lowered in the shared flux of the jazz. The crowd became one gestalt entity, a willing slave to the music and a grateful prisoner of its beats.

Then it was over, gradually slowing until it reached a natural conclusion. The last note faded and though there was the same feeling of emptiness, this was a more triumphant ending, a climax that left the dancers drained but elated. 

Amanda hugged Rita, the shared experience of this wonderful music bringing them closer than either could ever have expected. Tears welled in Amanda’s eyes and she saw the music had had the same effect on Rita.

“Oh my Lord,” said Amanda.

“I know,” answered Rita.

“Have you ever…?”

“No,” said Rita. “Never.”

Their nonsensical conversation was meaningless, but both girls understood the heart of it without the need for coherent sentences. They hugged each other tight, only parting as the dance floor began to empty and the revelers once again took their seats, sweat pouring from their faces and their eyes flushed with excitement. Amanda felt eyes upon her and turned back to the dance floor in time to see Jim Culver vanish behind a curtain at the side of the stage, as though he couldn’t wait to get away.

Marie Lambeau stood in the center of the stage, and she was looking right at Amanda.

The beautiful singer said something that cut through the din of energized voices crying for an encore. It was as delicate as a soft whisper in a thunderstorm, and went unheard by everyone save Amanda. Marie turned away and walked off-stage, and Amanda blinked, wondering if she’d imagined the moment. No, the words had been spoken for her and her alone, like the song that had reached her earlier in the set.

The club was swelteringly hot, yet a chill traveled the length of Amanda’s spine as she replayed the movement of the singer’s lips, matching them to the fading sounds echoing in her head. Marie Lambeau’s voice drifted like a ghost in her mind.

 “I’m truly sorry, child,” the singer had whispered. “Sorrier than you’ll ever know. Darkness is all around you, and there ain’t nothing anyone can do about it.”

* * *

The grounds of the university were bright and clear. Finn felt horribly exposed walking along the streets of the campus. He had no clear idea where he was going, as the few students he’d met hadn’t exactly been forthcoming in their help. Not that Finn blamed them.

 You want a good Samaritan to help you? Best not stink of booze and puke.

A couple of young guys had waved him in the direction of a large building of dark brick they’d called the Tyner Annex before hurrying on their way. He didn’t belong on these streets, and everyone who saw him knew it. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before someone sent word to the cops and had him rousted. Finn didn’t like the idea of spending any quality time with the law. That would only make his bad situation even worse.

There would be folk looking for him, folk who’d demand an explanation of what happened out in the woods down the barrel of a gun. And he wasn’t sure they’d like or believe what he’d tell them. Getting banged up in the slammer would only make it easier for the folk who wanted him dead to find him. Once he’d found what he was looking for, he’d get the hell out of here and hole up in Ma’s for as long as his dwindling reserves lasted.

Finn wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, but his mam had taught him to read and write, which was more than most folk of his acquaintance had. A brass sign on the wall by an arched doorway confirmed that this was the building he was looking for, and he hefted the blanket-wrapped sphere from the haversack looped over his shoulder.

This was some kind of science building, so if there was anyone who could tell him what this thing was, he’d find them here. Finn retreated to the shadows of a stand of trees in a park surrounding a tall clock tower and watched the comings and goings for a few moments. Not many folk went in or out, but a few minutes after the clock struck the hour, a surge of bright young things streamed from the door.

Finn took that as his cue and walked over to the building, scanning the faces for someone older, someone who looked like they were a professor. He was disappointed until he saw a bespectacled man with a lanky gait and neatly combed hair. He wore a tweed suit and tie, and carried a battered briefcase that bulged with papers and books.

“Aye,” said Finn. “You’ll do.”

* * *

Oliver watched the students as they flowed from the Tyner Annex, their patterns like divergent tides as they moved through the campus grounds. He wondered if there were some kind of formula that could be devised to predict such movements. He paused on the steps of the modern building and put on his hat, squinting against the low sun to scan the faces of the students.

Amanda Sharpe wasn’t among them, and according to her professors, she hadn’t attended her classes today. Though he tried not to be alarmed, he couldn’t help but feel a tremor of unease at that fact. Especially given his reading material over the last few days.

The book Alexander had given him sat in his briefcase like a guilty secret, its contents fabulous and hideous in equal measure. Oliver had read the book cover to cover, and had lost several nights sleep over its profane revelations. What sleep he had managed was fitful and filled with amorphous nightmares of guttural chants, slimy-skinned savages, and bloody altars draining into the sea.

Oliver’s eyes were gritty and his manner distracted from his restless nights as he made his way along the brick pathway leading to the Liberal Arts building. The academic in him wanted to ridicule the text of Shrewsbury’s book, placing it alongside W. Scott-Elliot’s The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria in terms of academic worth. Yet for all its fantastical claims, Oliver couldn’t help but feel there was a wretched truth to the work. He had never met Laban Shrewsbury, but his reputation among the Miskatonic cognoscenti as a greatly admired scholar warred with the strange and incredible ideas contained in the book.

The claim that a great creature from beyond time and space could be entombed beneath the oceans of Earth, and was worshipped by depraved cults throughout the world, was surely beyond belief. But Shrewsbury was a methodical academic, and his notes (though clearly written in haste and in some state of anxiety) were nothing if not complete. Oliver had cross-referenced many of the missing professor’s notes with extant works from a variety of disciplines and found too many corroborating sources to entirely dismiss the man’s incredible conclusions.

The Yopasi did not fit within this framework of devil-worshipping savages, a fact for which Oliver was monumentally grateful. The more he placed his own findings alongside those of Shrewsbury, the more it became apparent that the Yopasi had stood in direct opposition to this submerged demon creature.

Shrewsbury had rendered this creature’s name as Cthulhu, a word redolent with ancient evil with its abominable arrangement of syllables. Yet even amid its sheer alienness, there was a hint of something familiar to the word—a teasing memory lurking in the corners of Oliver’s mind, like he had once heard something similar.

The book’s frightening final chapter posited the dreadful notion that should any of these Cthulhu-worshipping cults succeed in awaking their star-spawned master, the world would end. Such an outcome was terrifying enough, but more horrible still was Shrewsbury’s contention that Cthulhu’s destruction would not be visited upon the Earth through some diabolical scheme of malicious evil, but through the simple act of his sunken city rising to the surface. As the world of men destroyed the habitats of the animal kingdom with unthinking expansion, wiping out entire species without even registering their existence, so too would Cthulhu destroy the race of Man.

That was as much notice as humanity merited within the monstrous, abyssal mind of this terrible creature of darkness.

Shrewsbury’s writings hinted that he feared for his life, and the work devolved into paranoia by its last paragraphs. Believing that swarthy men of mongrel appearance were following him, Shrewsbury had made veiled references of a plan to escape his pursuers. Whether he had met his end at the hands of some deranged cultist of Cthulhu, or had enacted his plan of flight, was a mystery to which Oliver could find no answer. If Shrewsbury had met an unsavory end, might Oliver’s research mean his own life was in danger? Was Amanda’s?

Indeed, were one to stretch the theory, might the destruction visited upon the island of the Yopasi be interpreted as a preemptive move in an imminent war? As opponents of this dread Cthulhu, had they been wiped from the face of the Earth in preparation for his great awakening?

This was just the same paranoia that had eaten away at Laban Shrewsbury.

But just because Shrewsbury sounded paranoid, didn’t mean he was wrong. Oliver’s skin chilled and he halted in the middle of the path, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. The fiendish text was making his imagination conjure the essence of Morley Dean’s rambling monologues from their time in Alaska to scare him with lunatic delusions of monstrous conspiracies and abhorrent things lurking in every shadow. Allowing his thoughts to run amok had almost destroyed Morley, and that was not a road Oliver wished to follow.

Alexander’s book had opened up terrifying new vistas of understanding, though the creeping horror gnawing away at Oliver’s sanity made him wish he remained ignorant of these new horizons. It was a blessing to live in innocence, to feel the world was a benevolent place in which Man was preeminent. To know the truth of its bleak hostility stripped away any comforting notion of natural justice and exposed the nightmarish insignificance of his species.

Oliver opened his eyes as a momentary dizziness threatened to overcome him.

His eyes were drawn to a suspicious-looking man staring at him from the trees growing around the Copley Tower. Their eyes met and Oliver saw grim purpose in the other man’s face as he left the shadows and strode toward him. Unkempt and of obvious low character, he came at Oliver with a cloth-wrapped bundle held in front of him.

Oliver swiftly retraced his route back to the Tyner Annex, but the disheveled man was quicker, grabbing his arm and turning him around.

“I really need to talk to you,” said the man in a soft Irish brogue.

* * *

Finn gripped the professor’s arm, and the man’s expression was like a panicked deer. The professor pulled his briefcase away from Finn, as though it contained gold bullion instead of term papers and impenetrable books about physics and chemistry.

“Relax, fella,” said Finn. “I ain’t here to rob you.”

“What do you want?” the man asked. “I don’t have any money.”

“I told you, I ain’t trying to rob you, and I ain’t begging,” said Finn. “I’m looking for some help. Science help.”

“I don’t follow,” said the man. The professor’s eyes continued to dart between Finn and the briefcase. Whatever was in there, the man was scared to lose it.

Or be caught with it.

“What kind of help?” continued the professor, his voice high with pumped adrenaline.

“I got something here I need to show someone with book smarts,” said Finn, holding the silver sphere out to the professor. “They tell me this place is full of smart people, so I figured I’d ask one of you fine professors. I need to know what this is, and I need to know pretty damn quickly.”

“Ah, I see,” said the man, staring in confusion at the sphere. “You don’t want me at all, actually. I’m not a scientist. My name is Oliver Grayson. I’m an anthropologist.”

“I don’t know what an anthropologist is, but I figure anyone with a job title that fancy has to be smart enough to help me.”

“Really,” insisted Oliver, tapping the sphere. “I’m not a scientist. At least not one who deals in things like this.”

“So how comes I find ye in a science building?” asked Finn.

“I was looking for someone,” said Oliver, before the ridiculousness of the situation occurred to him. “Not that it’s any business of yours. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

“Please,” said Finn, a measure of desperation entering his voice. “You gotta help me. I need to find out what this is or I’m a dead man.”

That stopped the professor in his tracks, and he looked around him as though they were in the middle of a booze deal and the cops were lurking just around the corner. He looked at the sphere, as though only now really seeing it. His eyes narrowed as he took in its queer strangeness, and Finn saw fearful indecision war with dangerous curiosity.

“Like I told you Mr.…”

“Call me Finn.”

“Like I told you, Mr. Finn: I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know what help I can be to you.”

“Yeah, but you know scientists,” pleaded Finn. “Else you wouldn’t have been in there, eh? Please, I’m asking for help and I got nowhere else to turn.”

Oliver stared at him, seeing the real desperation in his eyes. Finn saw the decision to help him take shape in his features and let out a sigh of relief.

“Very well, Mr. Finn,” said Oliver. “I think I know someone who can help you. Follow me, and for heaven’s sake, put that thing away. You never know who’s looking.”

“Sure thing, Doc,” said Finn.

“I’m a professor, Mr. Finn,” said Oliver. “Not a doctor.”

“Sure thing, Prof,” replied Finn. “God love you, but I think you might just save me life.”

CHAPTER NINE

You should never go to places that are frequented at night during the day. That was one of Rex’s rules, but he was breaking it by coming to the Commercial at noon. He’d been to speakeasies more than a few times, but never this one and never while the sun was shining. It made him feel acutely vulnerable, knowing that this was an illegal drinking den and he was here in broad daylight. Anyone could be watching.

A couple of days trawling the refectories and streets of the Miskatonic campus with pockets full of dollar bills had yielded the name of this speakeasy. The Commercial was apparently the place to go to listen to jazz and drink illegal liquor. If there was anywhere that Lydia Stone would have gone for a night on the town, it was here.

“Something wrong, Rex?” asked Minnie, taking a photograph of the club’s exterior.

“Hey!” said Rex. “Don’t take my picture in front of a damn speakeasy.”

“Aw, but you had a cute look on your face,” said Minnie, winding the camera on.

“Come on, this is serious,” said Rex.

“Yeah, I know,” replied Minnie. “Twenty-four missing girls serious.”

Rex shrugged and squinted at the nondescript door that led into the Commercial. There was nothing to pick it out from the dozens of other doors, if you didn’t count the extra locks and the screws sunk into the heavy wood at the top and bottom that indicated the presence of heavy deadbolts. And, of course, the letterbox located at eye height.

“Inconvenient for postmen,” noted Minnie.

“Yeah, but handy for anyone inside who wants to see who’s come to pay a call.”

Rex lit a cigarette, sheltering the match from the brisk wind blowing down the street. He looked along its length in both directions, seeing no one moving down the sidewalks or going about their business. The town had a strange, hinky vibe to it lately. It was creepy.

“This is creepy,” he said.

“What?”

“This,” said Rex. “All of it. I mean, how do we even know Stone’s on the level? He could be spinning us a line with all this talk of missing girls.”

“He’s not,” insisted Minnie. “I sent a wire to a guy I know in the New York office. Says he knows Stone and says he’s on the up and up. Told me the man was like a bloodhound—one of their toughest agents. Broke the Crookback Red strike in ’21. Almost single-handedly, so he says.”

Rex whistled, remembering the infamous labor union of the New York docks that had tried to resurrect the fearsome reputation of the Bowery Boys and the Plug Uglies: notorious gangs that had once filled the streets of New York with enormous riots and epidemics of violence.

“He did that, really?”

Minnie nodded. “And I looked in his eyes, Rex. I saw how bad he was hurting. He’s on the level, trust me.”

“Okay, I’ll take your word for it, but wouldn’t we have heard at least something if that many girls had gone missing from the university? There’s few enough of them as it is.”

“Rex, honey,” said Minnie, heading toward the door. “Shows what you know about being a woman.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I bet the deans of the university aren’t too bothered about women leaving their hallowed halls. I can’t say for sure, but I’d bet the farm they weren’t happy about letting them come to Miskatonic in the first place.”

“You think they know these girls are going missing, but just don’t care? That’s pretty harsh, Minnie.”

“It’s a harsh world,” said Minnie, knocking on the door. “Now are we going to do our job or what?”

“Sure, and here’s me thinking I’m the reporter and you’re the photographer.”

“I’m a woman—I can do lots of things at once.”

“So I’m learning,” noted Rex as the letterbox creaked open and a hostile pair of eyes regarded them with rather less affection than a panhandling bum.

“We’re closed,” said the eyes.

“We’re not looking to drink,” said Rex, stepping up next to Minnie.

“Then get lost.”

“Here,” said Minnie, shoving a ten dollar bill into the letterbox. It was snatched in by a pair of grubby fingers. “We just want to talk. A few minutes of your time, that’s all.”

“You ain’t cops are you?”

Rex laughed. “Do we look like cops? Hell, I’ll take a drink inside if you want me to prove how much of a cop I’m not.”

Minnie shot him a look and said, “We work for the Advertiser.”

“Reporters? What the hell you want with this place?”

“We heard that a lot of the girls from Miskatonic come here,” said Rex. “That right?”

“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that,” said the invisible speaker. “Rufus might, though.”

“Rufus?” asked Minnie. “Does he own this joint?”

The unseen doorman laughed and hacked out a consumptive cough. “No, he don’t own the joint, but if anyone knows what goes on in here it’s him.”

“Can we speak to him?” said Rex.

“Maybe.”

“Would another ten dollars get us a yes?” said Minnie, gesturing to Rex.

“You could try and find out,” said the voice.

Rex sighed and took a ten dollar bill from his wallet. He passed it through the door. The letterbox snapped shut, leaving them standing on the street like a couple of schmucks. They stood in silence for a few minutes until Rex scratched his chin.

“Well, that was a waste of money,” he said.

Just then the sound of bolts drawing back sounded in tandem with a heavy lock being turned. The door opened and a waft of stagnant air breathed outward from the hallway, laced with the acrid reek of old booze and stale sweat.

“Get inside,” said the doorman, a hunched figure in a dirty shirt and stinking canvas trousers. He had bad skin and thinning wisps of greasy hair that hung over his collar. Rex imagined him as some deformed assistant to a mad professor. “Rufus is downstairs.”

Rex crushed his cigarette beneath his heel and tipped his hat to the repulsive doorman as he descended into the depths.

“I wonder what level of Hell this is,” said Rex.

“I’d say the bottom one,” replied Minnie.

* * *

Oliver led the way through the halls of the Tyner Annex, trying not to notice the odd looks his newly acquired companion was attracting. Students looked at Finn with barely disguised loathing, while the members of the faculty gave Oliver looks that suggested the dean was going to hear of this latest faux pas.

“This where you work?” asked Finn.

“Me? No, I work in the Liberal Arts building on the other side of the square.”

“Right you are,” said Finn, as though he knew where that was.

They made their way along a bare corridor, walled with gleaming ceramic tiles and punctuated by heavy doors of iron labeled with strange symbols warning of all manner of potential hazards. Oliver smiled as he wondered if these symbols were simply mankind’s latest attempt at magical scribbling. Didn’t these warning symbols have the same power to warn off the unwary as did a bloody handprint or a mystical sigil scratched on the wall of a cave?

“So where did you get that thing, Mr. Finn?” asked Oliver. “Whatever it is.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Oliver felt an unexpected touch of kinship with the man, as though they were both privy to knowledge neither was intended to possess. He glanced over at Finn, seeing the lurking fear behind the Irishman’s studied calm. Whatever that device was, however he had come by it, it was clearly a source of some discomfiture to the man.

“Oh, you’d be surprised what I believe these days,” said Oliver.

Finn looked at him like he was trying to determine if Oliver was making fun of him.

“Aye, well, it’s been a strange couple of days,” said Finn.” Buy me a hot coffee and I might be persuaded to tell ye.”

Oliver nodded and pushed on a large button outside a heavy metal door of painted white iron. A yellow light flashed above the door and a heavy lock disengaged from the frame.

“Jaysus,” said Finn, stepping back. “What sort of place is this?”

“This is one of the electrical engineering labs,” explained Oliver, pushing open the door with his shoulder. It was heavy, but once moving it swung smoothly open on greased hinges. “Lots of big machines in here, high voltages and the like, so it can be quite dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” said Finn, shaking his head, but following Oliver inside.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Finn. Dr. Hayes is a very competent individual. Right now he’s developing a new kind of battery for the university’s proposed expedition to the Antarctic. He’s a heck of a clever fellow, so if there’s anyone that can tell what that…object is, it’ll be him.”

Inside, the laboratory was a steel vaulted chamber of bare brick and metal. Heavy benches bore the weight of enormous machines of green iron and looped coils of brass cabling. Things on the tables were strewn about: complex blueprints, boxes of tools, crackling battery packs, and disassembled machinery. A couple of student assistants tinkered in the guts of a machine that looked like it was some kind of generator.

A pretty girl with bobbed brown hair peered through a microscope at an arrangement of wires. A crackling hiss of soldering fizzed from the work at her fingertips. She looked up as they approached, blinking as her eyes refocused from the magnifications of the microscope.

“Hello,” she said, her voice timid and quiet. “Can I help you?”

“I certainly hope so,” said Oliver. “I’m Professor Grayson, and I’m looking for Dr. Hayes. Is he here?”

She shook her head, eyes downcast as though it was her fault the doctor was absent. “No, I’m afraid he’s not. He and Professor Pabodie are off testing his latest battery design with the new drill.”

“Ah, I see,” said Oliver. “Do you happen to know when they might be back?”

“Sorry, professor, I don’t,” she said. “Perhaps I can help you? I work closely with Dr. Hayes. I mean to say that he’s a great teacher and I, well, I might be able to help you if it’s nothing too complex.”

Finn transferred his bundle into the crook of his arm and stepped forward to take her hand, shaking it enthusiastically with a roguish glint in his eye.

“That’d be grand, lass,” said Finn. “Finn Edwards at your service. And who might you be?”

“Kate Winthrop,” said the girl with a shy smile. She was pretty, with a stylish haircut and the demeanor of a girl who liked the latest fashions, but would never dare to wear them beyond the confines of her bedroom. She wore a lab coat over a shapely figure of subtle curves. Oliver saw Finn taking in every one of them.

“Mr. Finn, I mean, Mr. Edwards,” corrected Oliver with a discreet cough, “has a strange device he’d like Dr. Hayes to have a look at if he gets a moment. I know he’s busy with getting everything ready for the Antarctic proposal, but if he could spare an hour or so, Mr. Edwards would be very grateful. Wouldn’t you, Finn?”

“Aye, very grateful,” agreed Finn, placing the sphere on the table and unwrapping it.

Once again, Oliver was struck by the sheer strangeness of the object. There shouldn’t have been any perturbation—it was just a sphere of polished metal—but there was some indefinable queerness to it that disturbed Oliver.

“Goodness,” said Kate, bending down to take a closer look.

Finn grabbed her arm and said, “Careful now, Miss Winthrop, that thing’s not quite…”

“Not quite what?” asked Kate when Finn didn’t proceed.

Finn struggled for the right word, before finally settling on one that seemed to fit the bill.

“It’s not quite stable,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I ain’t exactly sure now,” said Finn, sounding embarrassed. “I was movin’ the pieces on the surface around and my room at Ma’s started to go all screwy. It was like the world got, I dunno, thin or something. The walls were shifting and moving like I’d been on a three day bender with a gallon of bathtub gin. Which, I might add, wasn’t the case. I was sober as a priest on Ash Wednesday, I swear. Hungover maybe, but not drunk, no way.”

Oliver listened to Finn’s words, now beginning to regret his decision to allow him within the university buildings. The man reeked of cheap whiskey and had obviously not had a wash today. Clearly Oliver’s readings of Laban Shrewsbury’s book had left him open to believing all manner of outlandish nonsense.

“Ach, I see the way you’se are lookin’ at me,” said Finn. “You’ll be thinking I’m a crazy gobshite, I can tell. Well, to hell with you two, I ain’t crazy. I’ll figure this out on me own.”

Finn made to retrieve the sphere, but Kate stepped in front of him with a strange look in her eyes. Oliver had taken her for timid and shy, but her body language spoke of a fierce determination. How easy it was to misjudge people!

“I don’t think you’re crazy, Mr. Edwards,” said Kate, sounding intrigued. “Flux stability and magnetic resonance integrity are my fields of research, so I assure you, I will treat this matter with all seriousness.”

She bent down to take another look at the sphere, and Finn backed away from her.

“I didn’t get a word of that, did you, Prof?” said Finn.

“Not really, no,” said Oliver, turning to Kate. “Are you saying there might be something to what this man is saying?”

“Absolutely,” said Kate, a measure of her original quietness coming to the fore. “I mean, it’s all experimental, but we’ve been having problems keeping a charge in the new batteries, and I’ve uncovered something that might explain it. At least, I think I have.”

She led them toward a machine on a far desk, which looked like a cross between a candlestick telephone and a mangled trumpet. Copper wires were wrapped tightly around a central hub, while glass rods capped with brass ran the length of the device.

“Our detection equipment here is quite advanced, but still woefully inadequate to capture the full spectra of information I need to make my equations accurate enough. Put simply, the electromagnetic fields in this town are shot to hell, which means there are hot spots of dimensional instability that bear a striking resemblance to what you just described to me, Mr. Edwards.”

“Jeez, girl, where’d you learn all them big words?” said Finn.

“Here at Miskatonic,” said Kate, choosing not to take offense at Finn’s words. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

Her device was connected to a wall socket. When Kate turned the switch, the transparent rods hummed with a static buzz, and a flickering white light danced along the inner faces of the glass.

Oliver felt a curious metallic taste in his mouth and the hairs on his arms stood on end as an actinic charge hazed the air with static. The light in the room suddenly felt…thin, as though the skin of the world had been pulled tight over its face. Oliver lifted a hand to his forehead as a vertiginous dizziness threatened to overcome him.

Kate turned a brass dial on the device and the thinness was replaced by a heavy solidity; the lines of the bench, the floor, and the walls seemed to etch themselves indelibly onto the surface of his retina. Though he knew it was nonsense, it felt as though the mass of reality in the room had become infinitely greater.

It was a dreadfully uncomfortable feeling, and Oliver’s eyes watered as he felt the surrounding air exerting an inexorable pressure on his body. Though he had never been in a decompression chamber, Oliver had read of its unpleasant side effects if used incorrectly, and this felt a lot like the dangerous symptoms described in the medical journals.

“Good God,” said Oliver, feeling his stomach lurch and threaten to expel its contents.

“It’s…it’s…too real!” said Finn, gripping the edge of a nearby bench. “I feel like I’m gonna puke.”

 “It takes a bit of getting used to,” said Kate. “Breathing shallow helps.”

She reached over and switched the device off. Instantaneously, the world returned to normal and the alternating thinness and sickening solidity that had swelled around them vanished.

“What the hell was that?” demanded Finn.

“I call it the flux stabilizer,” said Kate, checking the device as though disappointed with the effects it had produced. “It can weaken or strengthen the electromagnetic field in a localized area, but I can’t get the resonance to a high enough level to fully counteract the anomalies we’ve been seeing.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow any of this,” said Oliver. “Nor do I see what this has to do with the sphere Mr. Edwards has brought you.”

Kate gave him a look that suggested he was being willfully dense and moved over to a machine that looked similar to the cylinder recorder his Cambridge friend Hillshore used. It was apparent, however, that this device did not record sound. A thin pen on a slender wire described a sinuous waveform across a long sheet of graph paper mounted on a slowly revolving drum.

Kate lifted the long length of paper that had already been drawn by the machine and held it out to Finn and Oliver. The inked line went up and down in a smooth curve at regular intervals, but Kate pointed to a sharp dip on one of the wave crests, which was immediately followed by a sudden spike.

“This is a modified Hospitalier Ondograph,” explained Kate. “It records a waveform image built up over time, using a synchronous motor drive mechanism and a permanent magnet galvanometer. It’s not the most accurate method of measurement, but it’s the best we have. Right now it’s recording the density of the electromagnetic flux within a two mile radius. Normally it’s pretty steady, but see these changes? That’s where I turned on my device. I weakened the field first, then strengthened it a moment later. You see? The ondograph captured the flux in black and white.”

Seeing Finn and Oliver’s confusion, Kate gave an exasperated sigh.

“For goodness sake, freshmen taking Physics 101 know more than you two. Electromagnetism is a fundamental interaction of nature; it’s like the glue that holds the world together. If you can measure it, you can learn where the weak spots are. My device is designed to strengthen the electromagnetic field for a short time. To shore up the walls between worlds so to speak.”

“I’m sorry,” said Oliver. “The walls between worlds?”

“Yes,” said Kate. “Now who sounds crazy?”

* * *

Rex led the way as they traveled down a dirty hallway and entered a ripe-smelling cavern of a room, its glossy floor wet with mopping, and the air bitter with an ammoniac reek of bleach. Tables and chairs were stacked up in front of what was presumably a dance floor, and the place was depressingly empty.

“Sheesh, this is where college kids come to get their kicks?” asked Minnie.

“Folk’ll do anything for a drink these days,” pointed out Rex.

This place was like a dozen other speakeasies Rex had seen, but bereft of drinkers, dancers, and music, it was a thoroughly miserable-looking place. A bulky man with dark skin wearing a heavy topcoat sat at the bar, drinking from a tall glass and smoking a cigarette, while a bartender cleaned glasses and tried to look disinterested.

“Are you Rufus?” asked Rex.

The man looked over at them, and Rex saw he wore thick, dark glasses beneath the wide brim of his hat.

“Ain’t no other,” said the man, blowing a mouthful of smoke. “So you’re reporters?”

“Yeah, Rex Murphy at your service.”

“And who’d you be, pretty lady?”

“Minnie Klein, photographer at large,” said Minnie. “How about a picture?”

Rufus shook his head and wagged an admonishing finger. “Uh-uh, you don’t wanna be taking my picture. Burn your film right out of that camera. Plenty more pretty things to be snapping, you get me?”

“Not really, but that’s okay,” said Minnie.

Rufus snapped his fingers and two drinks appeared on the bar, courtesy of the barman.

“On the house,” said Rufus, slipping his hand inside his coat pocket to remove a silver cigarette case. He snapped it open one-handed and held the case toward them.

Rex took one, and the bartender leaned over to light it. He inhaled deeply, almost choking on the unexpectedly bitter flavor. The cigarette reeked of strange ingredients and spicy, smoky flavors he couldn’t identify. He felt the hit between the eyes, like a regular Chesterfield always did when he inevitably quit trying to quit.

“Wow,” he said.

“Yeah,” smiled Rufus. “These’ll do that to ya. Miss Klein?”

Minnie shook her head. “No, thanks,” she said.

Rex snapped up his drink and sipped it carefully. “Martini,” he said. “Pretty good, too.”

“Martini, or something like it,” agreed Rufus. When Minnie didn’t take a drink, Rufus said, “You not partaking of my hospitality, Minnie Klein? A man could get offended.”

“No offense intended, Mr. Rufus,” said Minnie, looking at Rex as he polished off his drink and made a start on hers. “One of us has to keep a clear head.”

“You’re no dumb Dora,” said Rufus. “Okay, so what you want to know?”

Rex took out his notebook and sat next to Rufus, his mouth tingling with the alcohol and his head buzzing from the cigarette. Tucked between the pages was the picture of Lydia that Stone had given them. The young girl was pretty and posed in a black dress that looked like the one she had died in. Rex slid the picture across the bar toward Rufus and said, “This girl, Lydia Stone. Have you seen her?”

The barman chuckled and Rufus grinned, exposing brilliant white teeth. Another drink was poured for Rex and he took another draw of the cigarette. He blinked away flickers of shadow and light at the corners of his eyes as Rufus laughed. The big man took off his black glasses to reveal the puckered flesh where his eyes should have been.

Though his eyes were completely gone, Rex thought he saw a glimmer of something beneath the skin, like a shimmering awareness of the world around him. No sooner had he thought such a strange notion then it was gone and he shook his head.

“Ah, sorry,” said Rex, struggling to form the words in a mouth that suddenly seemed full of cotton wool. “I didn’t know. Sorry.”

“It don’t matter,” said Rufus, taking the picture and running his hands across the surface, as though the image had been rendered in Braille and he could identify her by touch. “Yeah, I seen her. She used to come here all the time.”

“With respect,” said Minnie. “How could you possibly know that? Rex, honey, show the picture to the barman.”

“Listen up, pretty girl,” said Rufus. “You may see things through that lens that no one else can see, but Blind Rufus sees things you don’t. Blind Rufus knows things you don’t. You think you know this world, think again. So, like I said, I knew her. I know lots of people in here. All kinds of people. I don’t make no judgments; this place is open to everyone, no matter who they are. I’m like America: I don’t turn nobody away, you get me?”

“That sounds great,” said Rex, with a dreamy smile on his lips. “Minnie, we could all learn something from that, you know? It’s like poetry or something.”

“Damn it, Rex, you’ve only had two drinks,” snapped Minnie.

“Yeah, but they were good…,” said Rex, surprised at himself for letting the booze get to him. He looked at the half-smoked cigarette, wondering if it had anything to do with the fog wrapping his mind in wet towels.

“Listen,” said Rufus. “It ain’t right what happened to that girl, so I’ll give you one more freebie on the house. She came here, yeah, a week ago maybe. Danced a lot, drank too much, and smoked too much. Girl liked to live it up, you know? Her and another gal, from Bolton I recall, hooked up with a couple of beaus and left before closing.”

“You remember what these guys looked like?” asked Minnie. “Jeez, I can’t believe I’m asking a blind man that question.”

“Ain’t the weirdest thing you’ll ask me, baby,” said Rufus. “Not by a long shot. But, yeah, they was a pair of good-looking white boys with money to spare. Jazz wasn’t their thing, but they weren’t here for the jazz, if you take my meaning…”

“I don’t,” slurred Rex, draining yet another glass of martini.

“They came to pick up girls,” said Minnie, and even in his strangely intoxicated state, Rex didn’t miss her annoyance. “For sex.”

“Right,” said Rex, finally catching on.

“Snapper girl’s right,” said Rufus. “That’s what your first time visit gets you. Now you best be getting gone, folks, but you can thank me next time you come.”

“We won’t be back,” said Minnie, helping Rex from his stool and walking him toward the door. Rex felt Minnie’s arm around him, but his flickering vision and unsteady legs seemed like they belonged to someone else.

“Christ, what’s wrong with me?” he asked.

“You want a list?” warned Minnie. “Because I’ll damn well give you one.”

“See you around,” said Rufus as they reached the exit to the club.

“We won’t be back,” said Minnie.

“Yeah, you will,” promised Rufus. “Everyone comes back to speak to Rufus sooner or later.”

* * *

Amanda opened her eyes, feeling a clawing sense of sickness in her gut. She was cold and felt wetness beneath her. Awareness returned, and the ground beneath her was cold and hard, like lying on a rock on the shores of Lake Champlain to catch the sun.

But there was no sun beating down on her, turning her pale skin a warm shade of nutmeg, there was only the cold and the dark. She tried to sit up, but a painful, cramping sensation surged in her stomach. She cried out, turning her head around to try and work out where in heaven’s name she was.

She heard dripping water, the echoes of which made her think she was in a cave of some kind. Where was she? How had she gotten here? The darkness pressed in on her, and she fought a rising panic as she saw dim walls of rock that glistened with moisture. She thought she saw a set of steps hacked into one wall, but couldn’t see where they led.

Amanda was still wearing the dress she’d had on at the Commercial, though it was torn at the shoulder and the hem hung from the last few pins that had lifted it above her knees. Her wrists were bound in thick manacles that were in turn linked to a chain bolted to the wall. Amanda screamed and hauled at the chains, but the iron dug into the meat of her arms. She pulled anyway, again and again, only stopping when she felt sticky blood running over her fingertips. 

“Hello!” shouted Amanda, sinking to her knees. “Can anyone hear me?”

Her words echoed in the cave’s blackness and Amanda bit her lip to stop herself from crying. 

This was like some bad dream—chained in a dungeon and waiting for the torturer to arrive. Except this was no dream. This was horribly real. She couldn’t see farther than a few feet, and the fear of what lay beyond in the smothering darkness was almost too much for her.

She slumped to the ground, burying her head in her hands and weeping in terror.

How had she come to be here?

The last thing she remembered was leaving the Commercial with Rita and…

 “Lord help me!” she cried. “Rita!”

They’d made their way from the club and toward the Garrison Street Bridge to head home. The streets had been dark, but the electric lights had glowed like little moons drifting in the night sky. They hadn’t seen many others on the streets and had been about to reach the bridge when…

 When what?

She remembered a misty cloud passing over the end of the bridge, a sort of wispy haze that smelled faintly of spoiled fruit and week-old milk. Rita had turned to her, holding her nose in pantomime disgust when something pale and thin had risen out of the mist behind her friend. Before she could shout a warning, she’d seen a similar look of shock and surprise on Rita’s face…

Amanda had been dragged to the ground by something with spindly, yet powerful limbs. She couldn’t recall what it was; her first thought was that it was some kind of animal. Then she had caught a fleeting glimpse of her attacker.

Long yellowed teeth and a stench of rotten meat.

Flesh that was filthy and scabbed with sores.

Scraps of hair that hung in lank rat’s tails from a grotesquely distended skull.

Eyes that burned with dreadful appetite.

She tried to shut out the monstrous hunger she’d seen in those eyes, but it was no good. She’d seen how much it had wanted to bury those fangs into her neck and tear out the soft meat, to chew the gristle of her throat and drink her hot, spurting blood...

Amanda screamed as she felt something brush her shoulder, the soft touch of an uncertain hand. 

She scrambled away, howling in stark terror as a shape came toward her, swaying and unsteady on its feet. She heard the clink of metal on metal and flailed her legs, hearing a voice calling her name, but unable to think past the animal panic holding her in its grip.

“Amanda!” cried the voice. “Mandy, it’s me! Stop fighting!”

It was a trick! Amanda struggled even harder, but a pair of strong hands took her shoulders and held her fast. She couldn’t see who was holding her and pictured those chisel-like fangs descending to rip out her throat.

“Mandy! For heaven’s sake, it’s me! It’s Rita!”

Amanda’s eyes snapped into focus, and she saw Rita’s face hovering in the darkness in front of her. She saw her terror reflected in Rita’s eyes, and the fight went out of her in an instant. She threw herself at Rita and the two of them held each other tight, crying in relief at finding each other in the dark.

“Oh, Rita, is that really you?” she wept.

“Yeah, it’s me. You okay?”

Amanda wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the question, but simply nodded.

“I think so,” she said. “I hurt my wrists trying to get these chains off.”

“You and me both,” said Rita.

“What happened? Do you know where we are?”

“I have no idea,” said Rita. “Last thing I remember is us just about to cross the river.”

“Me, too. What’s happened to us? I’m so scared, Rita; what are we going to do?”

Rita held her tightly by the shoulders. “Relax, Mandy. We are getting out of here. I promise you that. Ain’t a place built that can keep me in, and ain’t nobody gonna keep this girl in chains. No way, no how.”

Amanda took heart from Rita’s defiance, even though she knew it was borrowed courage.

Both of them jumped as they heard a rattle of iron, like a jailer’s key in a lock. Metal scraped on stone and rusted hinges squealed. They heard the splash of something moving through water—was there a pool nearby?—something that lurched toward them with wretched horror in every tortured step.

“What in the hell?” said Rita as a shape materialized out of the darkness.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” cried Amanda. “What in heaven’s name is that?”

It was a hunched thing with ashen skin and a fish-belly white underside. Its thin, wasted arms dragged on the rocky floor as it regarded them with hungry eyes, deep-set and red within a snarling, vaguely canine face bisected by a long scar. A heavy iron collar was fastened around its skinny neck, from which hung a long leash-like chain. Thick ropes of blood-flecked saliva drooled from its hanging jaws.

Amanda and Rita screamed as it dragged itself toward them.

CHAPTER TEN

A chill ran down Gabriel Stone’s spine for no reason he could adequately explain. He looked up from the spread pile of archived newspapers to check for anyone watching him. No one was, so he shook off the strange feeling. Muted streetlights, filtered through half-drawn blinds, kept the offices of the Arkham Advertiser dim, and Gabriel rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn.

Trawling through seven years’ worth of articles, obituaries, appointments, and banal local news was tiring work, and the faded ink of the words had begun to blur together. Murphy had provided him with a key to the office, together with an admonishment that tried to be stern, but just made Gabriel want to laugh.

“You better be out of there by seven a.m.,” Murphy had warned him. “Harvey’s always first in the office, and if he catches you there, first thing he’ll do is call the cops.”

“He’ll never know I was there,” Gabriel had reassured the nervous reporter. “Remember—”

“Yeah, I know, ‘you never sleep.’”

Gabriel looked at his pocket watch. It was quarter to three in the morning, and the motto of the Pinkertons notwithstanding, he felt like he could sleep for a week. He’d watched the owner of the Advertiser leave the building just after six the night before, and after waiting twenty minutes to make sure he wasn’t going to come back, he’d slipped into the building.

The paper didn’t have a morgue of old issues in the basement as he’d expected. Murphy had told him that there had been a great flood back in 1888, so perhaps that wasn’t so surprising. He found the collated back issues on the two walls behind a secretary’s desk, arranged chronologically, though he saw immediately that some were missing. Coincidence, or deliberate removal? Time would tell, and Gabriel knew you could learn a lot by knowing what was missing, as well as from what you found.

Now, after almost eight hours of searching, he had filled dozens of pages in his notebook with scraps of information. Some were related to Professor Grayson, others to the missing girls who’d vanished from the university, and other notes contained copious amounts of unsettling information on the town’s above-average occurrences of unusual phenomenon. Of these latter tales, each on its own might have been dismissed with a convenient explanation, but when gathered together, they painted a frightening portrait of a town in denial of its macabre underbelly.

Gabriel saw a faded picture from 1917 of a young boy from nearby Dunwich named Wilbur Whateley who was said to be four and a half years old, but who was clearly in his mid-teens with the faint outlines of stubble on his cheeks. At first Gabriel thought it a misprint, but when he came across the announcement of the child’s birth in February 1913, he knew it was not.

Other tales concerned unusual rumblings, of fires atop the strangely rounded hill-tops surrounding Arkham and, most curiously, a meteorite that landed in fields belonging to a farmer named Nahum Gardner. It had borne an unknown contagion that blighted the land around it for miles, rendering it barren and dead, though no amount of scientific examination could determine its nature.

But among all the strange and mysterious happenings to which the people of Arkham seemed able to turn a blind eye, none horrified Gabriel more than a sensational story from twenty-one years ago, the relevance of which was not lost upon him.

After a typhoid outbreak that killed a multitude of people in 1905, a deranged murderer had struck Arkham, slaughtering fourteen people and devouring three corpses in his maniacal killing spree. A night watchman at Christchurch cemetery had been found with the dawn, mutilated so terribly that doubt was cast as to the humanity of his assailant. Portions of the man, the newspaper reported gleefully, had been eaten right off the bone.

On the third night after the killer’s rampage had begun, a group of police and volunteers had wounded the hideous thing—a creature that had all the form of a monstrously malformed ape, but which was revealed to be a man, a man whose resemblance to the late Dr. Allan Halsey, dean of the School of Medicine at Miskatonic University, was uncanny.

This abominable killer was beyond reason, and could only mindlessly roar and beat itself bloody. Its wounds were treated and a padded cell was prepared for it at Sefton Asylum. Upon checking later issues for this feral killer, Gabriel had been horrified to learn that it had escaped in 1921, though the tale of a waxen-headed liberator and his silent army was surely a falsehood invented by negligent orderlies to cover their ineptitude.

 Yet Gabriel could find no trace of the cannibal monster’s fate. Was it possible it had returned to its Arkham hunting grounds? With some base, animal instinct, might the creature have followed a hideous trail back to its former abode and hid itself away until now? Gabriel knew most murderers were homebodies: they didn’t like to stray from where they felt comfortable, but did that apply to such a horrific killer? Could any existing model of psychology be applied to the behavior of something so far removed from humanity as to be almost unrecognizable? 

He didn’t know the answer to that, but couldn’t ignore how the feasting horrors of this monster matched what had happened to his daughter. Lydia had been eaten, the very flesh chewed from her bones, and…and…

Gabriel put his head in his hands, fatigue and grief welling up like Old Faithful and threatening to spill out in a raging fury of inchoate rage. His fists clenched the page, crumpling the paper. At that moment, Gabriel wanted nothing more than to rip the words and pictures before him to shreds, to tear every one of these damned newspapers to confetti.

He took a breath, calming himself and letting his anger ebb to a level where he felt he wasn’t going to do something stupid. He’d promised that the owner of the Advertiser wouldn’t know he’d been there. That might be a tough promise to live up to if he wrecked the joint, and Gabriel Stone wasn’t a man who broke a promise once he’d given it.

The only promise he’d ever broken was the one to his daughter. He’d promised to always keep her safe. The aching emptiness in his heart swelled to encompass his entire body, a numbing grief that was impossible to process and would never leave him. His little girl was dead, and no matter what he did here, she would never come back. No matter who he punished, killed, or brought to justice, Lydia Stone would never again dance a Charleston or a Black Bottom.

That thought alone brought him back to his senses. Lydia might be gone, but there were other girls out there who might be unlucky enough to run into whoever or whatever was killing with impunity in this town. To spare other mothers and fathers the horror that had risen up to engulf his life was reason enough to pursue this to the end. The idea that this killer might evade justice would not stand, and Gabriel knew then and there that he would not leave this town until he had seen justice done.

Not vengeance, but justice.

The line between the two was slender, and Gabriel hoped he would know the difference if he ever came face-to-face with Lydia’s killer.

Putting that thought aside, he took a small hip flask from his coat pocket and took a shot of whiskey. It wasn’t the best hooch, but at least it wouldn’t blind you. Reinvigorated by the fiery liquor, Gabriel returned his attention to the back issues of the Advertiser. He changed tack, and began looking into the dealings and newsworthy articles concerning Miskatonic University, specifically any stories or announcements relating to Professor Oliver Grayson.

There wasn’t much.

The university, as reported in the Advertiser, was a pillar of the community, an upstanding institution of lauded academics and exceptional students. Many of its graduates had gone on to prosper in the world beyond higher education, especially in the last few years. Yet as much as the newspaper loudly trumpeted the university’s many achievements, it did not overlook the tragedies that plagued its staff with more regularity than might be expected.

In 1908, a professor named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee collapsed during a class and suffered many years of amnesia, an affliction for which no physician could find a cause. Another professor, Laban Shrewsbury, had vanished in 1915 while walking down a country lane to the west of town. And in 1923, Henry Cartwright, a respected academic of the university had apparently gone mad and embarked upon an arson spree, burning down numerous buildings throughout Arkham before being incarcerated in the town’s asylum.

But what of Oliver Grayson?

The man had come to Arkham in the summer of 1919, a respected graduate of Brown University with a modest, but well-regarded, history of publications. The announcement of his appointment to the university was made with the typical pomposity common to all institutions of academia, but there was little to arouse Gabriel’s instincts save two fragile connections.

Like Laban Shrewsbury, Grayson was an anthropologist, and he was a friend of Henry Cartwright. It seemed unlikely Grayson knew Peaslee (he would only have been seventeen at the time of Peaslee’s attack of amnesia) and, according to his potted biography, on his way to Brown University in Rhode Island. It seemed Grayson had earned a reputation as a scholar of esoteric cults while studying at Brown, having traveled extensively among the more devolved tribal groups of the world.

Gabriel was no expert in such things, but he knew that men who got too close to the objects of their attention often became just like the things they were studying. He’d seen it plenty of times, where investigators going undercover in the labor unions began to sympathize with the very people they were trying to undermine. Even when they were pulled out of their operations, they were never quite the same.

Could something similar happen to academics in the field?

He didn’t know, but it was a lead worth following up on.

Gabriel leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “What might you have learned from those cults?” he whispered. “What might you have brought back in that head of yours?”

* * *

The scar-faced thing hissed and spat, drooling like a dog at feeding time. Its flesh dripped water and the stench of it was like a festering cesspit. Amanda pressed herself back against the rough wall, holding tight to Rita as it swung its arms at them. Iron chains rattled and the metal collar bit into the meat of its scrawny neck. Its eyes were the eyes of a madman, delirious and raving, but Amanda thought she saw something desperately human in them, a glint of something once noble and now debased beyond all recognition.

“It can’t get to us,” said Rita, weeping in relief. “It’s chained to the wall, too.”

“What is it?” cried Amanda, pressing herself into a tight ball and trying not to look at the hideous thing as it hissed and clawed at the air. Its teeth were crooked blades, sharp and elongated so profoundly that its mouth could not fully close. Its gums wept blood and sprayed the air before it with gobbets of the stuff.

“I ain’t exactly sure,” said Rita, moving to stand protectively in front of Amanda. The light was poor, but Amanda saw the chained collar pulled taut at the creature’s neck and the bolted plate in the wall where it was secured. Whatever this creature was, it was a prisoner, too.

“Oh, Rita, what’s happened to us? What is this place?”

“Damned if I know, Mandy,” said Rita, massaging the skin around her wrists. “Cave of some sort, but who the hell knows where?”

“Who would do this to us?”

“Listen, Mandy, you got to stop asking me questions I can’t answer,” said Rita. “Let’s just figure out a way outta here. Then we can start worrying about how, why, and where. Yeah?”

Amanda swallowed hard, trying to clamp down on her panic. The chained monster had sunk to its haunches, walking crab-like at the extent of its iron leash, as though testing the limits of its hunting ground. It had stopped thrashing and trying to maul them, but its animal hunger was undimmed.

“I bet that’s what killed that girl you found,” said Amanda.

“I expect you’re right, but it ain’t gonna kill us.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because I’m not about to let anyone treat me like this,” snapped Rita. “I worked too damn hard to get where I am, and I ain’t about to let anyone take it away from me!”

Rita cupped her hands and shouted toward the stairs. “You hear me, you bastards! This girl is gonna fight you every step of the way, and if you think you’re gonna throw me to that monster, you best believe I’m dragging you with me! Come on down here and see if I’m lying! I dare you, you damn cowards!”

Rita’s anger was infectious, and Amanda’s terror dropped to a level where she didn’t feel the world was collapsing in on her. Something terrible had happened to them; they had been kidnapped and tossed in this dank, lightless cave with a monster that ate people. They were chained up, but so too was the monster, which begged the question…

“Who lets it out?” said Amanda.

“What?” replied Rita, turning from her raging tirade.

“That…thing,” pointed Amanda. “It’s chained up, just like us. But someone let it in here, and someone lets it out. If it did kill that girl, someone let it kill her, and someone got it back here after it had done it.”

“Or she was killed here and just dumped at the athletics field,” said Rita.

“Oh,” said Amanda. “Yes, that does sound more likely.”

“But I see where you’re going,” said Rita. “If there’s someone here who tells that thing what to do, then they gotta come down here sometime. And when they do…”

“When they do, what?” said Amanda when Rita didn’t continue.

“Then we smack them on the head and get the hell outta here.”

“You think we can?”

“I know we can,” promised Rita.

High above them, a heavy door opened and a faint light spilled into the cave, finally illuminating their cavern prison. Amanda saw it was around fifty feet in diameter, with numerous iron rings set into the wall around its circumference. Only the rings binding her, Rita, and the monster were looped with iron fetters. A pool of oil-dark water lapped at one wall of the cave, where a filth-clogged culvert drained to some far distant reservoir. The reek from beyond was indescribable, a mixture of rancid eggs, decaying plant matter, and the sulfurous exhalations of a noxious swamp.

A dozen or so alcoves punctuated the wall opposite them, each secured with iron bars and a heavy padlock like a jail cell. Within each alcove a pale shape hauled itself to the bars, grunting and snuffling like a stray dog hungry for scraps. Elongated fingers tipped with filth and blood-encrusted nails gripped bars. Fanged maws worked up and down in blind hunger as the things within caught their scent.

The monster chained to the wall had come from one of those alcoves, the floor of which was littered with straw and gnawed bones. The terror in Amanda’s heart began to rise once more. They were going to be eaten by this monster and its pack!

The glow from above grew stronger, and the monster looked away from the light, shielding its eyes with one clawed hand and mewling like a whipped beast. It slunk away from the edge of the water and climbed back into its wretched abode. Despite her terror, Amanda couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pity for the thing. The others withdrew from the light, backing into their damnable cells as the light descended into the cave.

Two figures marched downward, each robed in flowing greenish robes and bearing an oil-burning lantern. No trace of their features could be discerned, for both wore deep hoods that veiled their faces in the blackest shadows. Amanda took Rita’s hand and felt the clammy wetness of her friend’s palm.

“Who the hell are you?” demanded Rita. “Hoods? I might have known! You damn cowards always cover your faces. You’re just like the damn Klan, always too scared to let people see who you are, because you know you’re bad men doing bad things. You think just because I can’t see your face means it’s all right to do this?”

Neither of the two figures answered her, descending each step in perfect unison as a pervasive smell, like the docks at low tide in summer, filled the cavern.

“You can’t even speak, can you?” shouted Rita, her belligerence giving her strength. “Answer me, damn you!”

The figures reached the bottom of the stairs and still their faces were shrouded in blackness. The soft light from their lanterns seemed unable to penetrate the gloom beneath their hoods, as they began to chant a meaningless doggerel.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

Amanda couldn’t tell what language it was, or even if it was a language. The hideous syllables seemed to run together with liquid evil, like a curse of the blackest nature, or a threat of the most unimaginable peril. Again they said it, more insistent this time, as though they expected a response from the two girls.

“What the hell are you talking about?” cried Rita. “Speak English, you bastards!”

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,” said the first figure, in a voice that was pure Midwest corn country. She didn’t know the voice, but its homespun American roots were at odds with the fear it engendered.

“You know what, go back to what you was saying before, cause I reckon it made more sense than that.”

“Who are you?” asked Amanda. “What do you want with us?”

“Just you,” said the second figure with an identical accent. “We don’t care about her.”

“Oh, you’re gonna care about me, you bastard!” shouted Rita, struggling at her chains and drawing more blood from her torn skin. “You’ll care about me when I tear that hood off and jam my thumbs in your eyes!”

“You have seen the face of the Great Old One,” said the first voice, and Amanda caught a hint of jealousy and fear. “You dreamed of his sunken city. You profaned his temple by speaking of it to others. You will tell us everything you saw in your dreams.”

“My dreams? What are you talking about?”

“We know you have dreamed of the lightless place beneath the sea, where the Great Old One slumbers. The dreamer stirs once again, called to the surface by his faithful believers, and you will tell us what you saw.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” pleaded Amanda. “So I had a few bad dreams, but that’s normal. I wish I hadn’t, but they were just dreams. They don’t mean anything!”

“They mean everything,” said a voice on the stairs above the two figures. Amanda squinted through the dim light to see a hooded figure dressed in crimson robes, like a high priest of some bloody religion from ancient history. He came down into the cave with measured slowness, his every step regimented and precise. Though he was just a man, Amanda couldn’t look at him. She felt her entire body tremble at his presence, and tears spilled down her cheeks at the sound of his voice.

The monster in the cell issued fearsome barking grunts, dragging its bloodied fingernails down the rock of its cell. Even monsters could know fear, it seemed.

“Only a rare few are permitted glimpses of the Great Old One’s entombed flesh,” said the man, “lost forever beneath the waves in an age before the vermin of mankind spread across the earth like an infection. You, Amanda, have seen the city, and you are going to tell me every last detail of what you saw.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I know everything about you, Amanda Sharpe,” said the man. “Now begin by telling me when it was that you first dreamed of the Great Old One.”

“And if I don’t?” said Amanda, with bravado she didn’t feel.

“Then I will feed Rita to Latimer,” said the priest, waving an elegantly manicured hand at the sniveling, grunting creature taking refuge in its cell. As if summoned, the beast emerged from the bloody alcove and crawled on its belly toward the man. It feared him, but its hunger was an equally strong pressure on its thoughts.

“Latimer is one of our oldest residents in the house, and he has developed quite a taste for human flesh, as well as a remarkable penchant for cruelty. Most of the girls Latimer has killed over the years didn’t die until a good amount of their bodies was devoured before their very eyes, so I can assure you, Rita’s death will be extremely painful. But tell me what I wish to know and this will be over soon.”

“And then you’ll let us go?” snapped Rita. “Call me crazy, but I don’t believe you.”

“Let you go?” said the priest. “Oh no, neither of you can be allowed to live, but if you cooperate, I promise I will simply have you shot in the head.”

“And that’s supposed to make me help you?” cried Amanda.

“It should. Defy me and once Rita is dead, I will cut you up slowly and feed you to Latimer piece by piece. Now, shall we begin?”

* * *

Oliver squinted against the sunlight, shielding his eyes as he made his way toward the Liberal Arts building. His mind was awhirl with terrible thoughts and the unreasonable fear that he had stepped into a world he hadn’t known existed. Sleep had eluded him again last night, more due to the insistent telephone calls from Dr. Hardstrom at Arkham Asylum informing him of Henry’s deteriorating condition.

His old friend had taken a turn for the worse. Night terrors, delusional visions, and violent acting out were now a daily occurrence. Hardstrom was inclined to believe that hospitalization at the more secure Sefton Asylum would be more in keeping with Henry’s current prognosis.

Oliver had promised to come and speak to Hardstrom personally, but that would have to wait. He had other matters to attend to. Behind him, the Administration building held only bad news for him. Neither Amanda nor her roommate had shown up for classes, and a swift trip to Dorothy Upman Hall had revealed that none of the girls there had seen either of them since the day before yesterday. The last any of the girls he spoke to had heard, Amanda and Rita were talking of going to the Commercial Club to see some singer from New Orleans. Oliver didn’t know the place, but guessed it was a jazz club speakeasy.

He had hoped to find some clue as to their whereabouts in the room they shared, but no matter how much he pressed, the dormitory monitor would not allow him within the building. Oliver had left with his fear for the girls’ lives growing with each passing minute.

Though he told himself that the two matters were unrelated, he wondered what manner of madness he might be opening himself up to by associating with Finn Edwards and his mysterious sphere. Beyond the walls of Miskatonic, Kate Winthrop’s talk of other dimensions and gateways between worlds would be ridiculed as patently absurd, and on any other day, Oliver would have denounced her and Finn Edwards as frauds.

But this was not any other day.

The lingering oddness, of which he had always known permeated every corner of Arkham, had now swelled to impossible proportions. Each evening as he walked to his car or turned a corner, he suspected a shadowy form would emerge from the shadows, knife in hand to end Oliver’s intrusion into matters he was not meant to plumb. What had once seemed quaint and charming to his city-born eyes, now seemed distorted and threatening, as though Arkham had withdrawn whatever transient welcome it had extended him.

His eyes had been opened to a new reality: one where the everyday curtain of ignorance was pulled away and the horrors lurking in the cosmos were starkly revealed. No wonder Shrewsbury had gone missing! The man had likely taken his own life in terror of the things he had dared to put down on paper. Could such things really be believed? In the light of day, with the normal mundane bustle of students and everyday folk passing him by, it was easier to dismiss such things as lunatic fancies. But as night closed in and his mind conjured terrors from the depths of memory, they became stubborn in the face of his denial.

A sudden recollection of the story that had appeared in the Advertiser, telling of a young girl’s body found on the athletics ground, filled Oliver with fear. His higher consciousness tried to stem the tide of dark imaginings pouring from the older, primal part of his brain, but against such horrors there was no refuge.

Could this girl have shared similar dreams to Amanda? Might the same forces that had presumably abducted Amanda and her roommate have murdered her? Was there a link between Finn’s strange device (a device he had not yet elaborated upon as to how it had come into his possession) and the disappearances of young girls over the years? It was all too much to take in, too much to believe, but if Laban Shrewsbury’s book had convinced him of anything, it was that there was no such thing as coincidence where such monstrous, ancient evils were concerned.

Oliver stopped beside the Copley Tower and rested for a moment. His body was drained after nights of troubled sleep and terrified wakefulness. He hadn’t shaved in two days and his clothes were in need of a good airing and pressing. He had to know the truth. He had to know whether he had unwittingly placed Amanda in danger. But where to begin and who to trust?

He needed help, but the police had been singularly disobliging. A detective named Harden had written down Amanda and Rita’s details, but Oliver held out little hope that the man would take any action until it was too late.

No, there was only one man in Arkham to whom Oliver could turn.

The clock at the top of the tower struck the hour and Oliver looked up its immense length as it tolled midday. The sun was directly overhead, and the carven finials of the tower seemed misproportioned and out of balance, as though twisted into dimensions unknown to the five senses of man. Stone gargoyles leered down at him, fangs bared and jaws spread wide. He blinked and the moment passed, the clock tower resuming its earthly dimensions and architecture, but it was yet another fragment of the ever-growing catalogue of dark wonders plaguing him.

“Oliver?” said a concerned voice, and he sighed in relief as he recognized it as belonging to Alexander Templeton. “Are you all right? You look dreadful. Is something the matter?”

Oliver turned to see Alexander staring at him with genuine concern, his hat pulled low against the uncharacteristically bright September sun. His appearance stood in stark contrast to Oliver’s, his suit immaculately pressed, his shirt carefully starched, and the Windsor knot of his tie perfectly centered at his collar.

“Alexander!” cried Oliver. “Good God, man, it does my heart glad to see you.”

“Good to see you too, old man, but why the fervor of the greeting? Not that I’m not glad of it, you understand.”

“I need to talk to you,” said Oliver, clutching his briefcase up to his chest. “About that book you loaned me. And some other things…”

Alexander looked around to ensure they were not being observed and there were no eavesdroppers within range. He took Oliver by the arm and walked him away from the tower. His step was sure and his grip powerful as he steered Oliver down streets away from the main thoroughfares of the campus.

“I urge you not to speak of that book so freely,” said Alexander as the brightness of the sun appeared to diminish fractionally. “Its contents are, as I am sure you now know, not for the easily shocked.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” said Oliver. “The things Shrewsbury talks about, they’re too fantastical to be real, too…”

Alexander shook his head. “I agree, it’s a lot to take in at once, but you need to get over any residual hysteria if you’re to help me, Oliver.”

“Help you?”

“Of course,” said Alexander. “Why do you think I loaned you the book in the first place?”

Oliver was at a loss for words. “I thought because you wanted to help with Amanda Sharpe’s dreams? You had another purpose?”

“I did, but your interests were also served by that purpose,” said Alexander.

Oliver’s mind raced. He looked around him, trying to identify where they were, but the buildings on either side of the street were unknown to him. He was sure he and Alexander had walked less than a block, but he had absolutely no idea on which street he now found himself. The noon day sun seemed somehow dimmed, as though a pall of ash now blotted out the heavens, and the roofs of the brownstones seemed to lean in like teetering cliffs, dark, looming, and massive with crushing weight.

“Where are we?” asked Oliver. “I don’t recognize this street.”

“We are in Arkham still, but there are other books than Shrewsbury’s to which I have access, books with formulas to cloud the perceptions of those who might seek to hear what I must say to you now.”

Oliver looked at Alexander with new eyes, suddenly fearful of this man who owned ancient tomes of forgotten gods and to whom the arts of mystical misdirection appeared second nature.

“You have nothing to fear from me, Oliver,” Alexander assured him. “I gave you Shrewsbury’s book because I adjudged you a man of determined character and stout consciousness. I know things in the book are shocking, sacrilegious even, but you must be made aware of the nature of the enemy if you are to help me fight it.”

“Fight them? Good God, Alexander, how do you fight things like that? We might as well be ants attacking an elephant!”

“You assume too much of our race,” said Alexander. “We are smaller than bacteria to the Great Old Ones. Yet were not such lowly microbes the undoing of Wells’s Martians?”

Oliver paced across the deserted street, hearing the silence that enveloped them as firmly as the winter’s cold. The street was utterly silent, bereft of bird song, traffic, or people. The complete absence of sound was unnerving in the extreme, and Oliver felt his heart rate quicken at the thought of what Alexander was telling him.

“Amanda is missing,” he said at last. “So is her roommate, a girl named Rita Young.”

“That is truly terrible, and is yet another reason for us not to hesitate,” said Alexander, coming close to Oliver and gripping his arms. “Don’t you see? Our enemies are moving against those who are aware of their diabolical plans. Amanda and Rita, and who knows how many others, may already be dead. You and I, Oliver, we alone are aware of the terrible forces moving against the world. We two, we happy two, may alone prevail against this gathering terror.”

Oliver backed away from Alexander’s fervor, shocked by the depth of his friend’s passion. This was too much for him. As much as he needed to do something to try and save Amanda, the idea of joining forces against foes too terrible to comprehend was beyond him. He sat on the curb and put his head in his hands.

“For heaven’s sake, Alexander, I don’t know if I can,” he said.

“You must,” said Alexander, sitting next to him. “For I desperately need your help.”

“I’ve seen where this road leads,” said Oliver. “It almost destroyed Morley, and it left Henry a raving lunatic. I don’t know if I have the strength to embark on such a journey. Look what happened to them. I don’t have a tenth of their mental fortitude.”

“You are stronger than you know,” said Alexander. “I understand such things, Oliver, believe me. After the war, I was drawn to Arkham as a moth to flame because I sensed it was a center of activity for the Great Old Ones described in the horrid books I read. This is a place where metaphysical energies and cosmic forces converge in horrifying ways. I had thought to bear the burden of their opposition alone, but it was too much for me. I knew I would need allies in my struggle to defeat these beings. I had thought Henry Cartwright might be such a man, but he and I had a…falling out in Flanders, and he would not be reconciled.”

“I know,” said Oliver. “What I mean to say is that I know something happened between you, but Henry would never elaborate on its nature.”

Alexander looked as though he too would remain close-lipped on his spat with Henry, but at length he sighed and his shoulders slumped as he recounted the cause of the friendship’s dissolution.

“I was a Marine captain during the war,” said Alexander. “My company was billeted within a ruined chateau in northern France during the spring of 1918. It was a grand structure, a fine example of north European fortification architecture, but its pleasing lines and fanciful turrets concealed a darker secret. I found a hidden library that had been uncovered by the impact of German shells the week before, a buried entrance sealed by bricks and mortar and other, more esoteric, means. Of course, the common soldiers paid the revealed books no mind, but Henry and I eventually understood full well the significance of our find.

“The Germans didn’t attack for another three days, and in that time, Henry and I acquainted ourselves with the contents of the long-dead Comte’s books.”

Alexander shook his head at the memory, and Oliver saw pain and grief etch themselves in quick succession across his face.

“Though Henry deemed it unwise, some of the more inquisitive Marines joined us in the library. I berated him for his academic elitism, but oh, how I wish I had listened to him. A measure of the true horror of this universe was contained in those blasphemous books, and while Henry and I could compartmentalize the abhorrent truths, some of my men were…less able to withstand them.”

“What happened to them?” asked Oliver, almost afraid of the answer.

“Four went mad and shot themselves with their side arms. Another leapt from the battlements, dragging two other men to their deaths as they tried to rescue him. Three others descended into catatonic states from which they only emerged upon their return to the United States. We had unlocked a dreadful Pandora’s box, and it was too late to seal it up once again. Henry blamed me for the deaths of those Marines, not without some justification, but I had no idea how much the revelations of those books had irrevocably scarred his mind.”

“Henry was changed after the war,” agreed Oliver, “but until the fire starting he was as sane as you or I.”

Alexander raised an eyebrow at that and said, “His madness was a creeping sort, like an invisible contagion that weakens the mind’s defenses little by little until it eventually snaps. Diseases of the mind are no different to those that infect the body, or societal maladies that corrupt mankind as a whole. I came to Arkham to try and help Henry and turn him into an ally, but I failed.”

“And so you come to me now,” said Oliver. “I fear I will be a poor second to Henry Cartwright.”

Alexander shook his head. “If I thought that, I would never have given you Shrewsbury’s book. You have a resilient mind, Oliver, and together we may yet hold off the encroachments of the Old Ones. Say you will join me, my friend. I need your help, more than you know.”

Oliver looked down at his hands. They were trembling with the enormity of what Alexander was asking. He was a scholar, more at home in a library than on some abstract field of battle. To take sides in a war no one else even knew was being waged was a terrifying prospect, one for which he was wholly unprepared. Yet, even as he protested his unsuitability to play the role of hero, he knew he could not refuse Alexander’s plea for help.

Did Pierre Aronnax refuse when the United States government tasked him with discovering the nature of the undersea threat in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Did Phileas Fogg balk when challenged by Andrew Stuart to travel around the world in eighty days?

No, they did not, and if Oliver were to live up to the exploits of his fictional heroes, he could not refuse this call to adventure.

“Very well, Alexander,” he said at last. “If you are in need of allies, then you may count me among your staunchest.”

Alexander offered his hand, and Oliver shook it firmly.

“Good man,” said Alexander. “I knew I could count on you.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The low-level hum filling the laboratory was a comfort to Kate Winthrop as she wrote up her notes and observations from the day’s experiments. Frank Pabodie and Dr. Hayes had returned from their testing of the new batteries, and the job of collating their notes and tabulating the results had fallen to her. It was a thankless task requiring convoluted equations and precise arithmetic, but one Kate was happy to perform. The calculations were her constant, the mathematics a universal language that could be used to unlock the very secrets of the universe. 

She finished a set of Dr. Hayes’s books and rubbed her eyes, looking up at the slit windows high on the wall of the laboratory. The clock on the wall said it was half past five, though only blackness could be seen through the iron meshed windows. She set down the book, and looked over at the device Professor Grayson and the Irishman had brought her.

It sat in a cardboard box covered with the cloth they used for cleaning their coffee pot. It had been in Kate’s thoughts ever since it had come into her possession. 

If what Mr. Edwards had described was true, then the sphere might well be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century: though she seemed to be the only one to think so.

Neither Frank nor Dr. Hayes had been interested in even looking at the device. Their thoughts were on the upcoming expedition to Antarctica and ensuring that their newly developed technology would be sufficient to meet the hostile environmental demands placed upon it. Kate couldn’t blame them—a great deal of money, time, and effort was being poured into this expedition, and the prestige the university would gain from its subsequent findings was beyond measure.

Yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that this sphere was something that would eclipse any discoveries made upon the cold wastelands of Antarctica. 

Unable to contain her curiosity any longer, and deciding that she had done enough work for one day, Kate put aside the reams of data on conductivity, resistance, voltages, and energy drop-offs. She crossed the laboratory and lifted the strange sphere from the box and set it on the workbench. Its weight was surprising, far in excess of what something of its dimensions would warrant.

Following a strict methodology, Kate took a fresh notebook from a drawer and made a number of sketches of the device. She had taken photographs the previous day and was waiting for them to be developed. It appeared to be made from machine-finished steel, but polished to such a high degree that its silvery surfaces were mirror-like. What looked like a sheen of gasoline covered the device, distorting her reflection like a fairground mirror that makes you look taller or fatter or squatter. 

Yet the surfaces were not uniform, and Kate wondered if the device was in fact made up of numerous interlocking pieces, cunningly wrought to form its perfectly spherical form. Angular lines and sweeping curves crossed its surface like impossibly complex wiring diagrams, or strange and unknown writing.

Using precise calipers, Kate took measurements of the device, finding that it was perfectly spherical. She could see that much with her eyes, but to find that it had been machined to tolerances beyond what she could detect with the laboratory’s instruments was a surprise. 

With her initial observations and the sphere’s dimensions recorded, Kate placed it onto a set of scales and added weight after weight to the opposing side until she finally determined its weight.

The scales balanced at precisely seventeen pounds, not an ounce more or less. The metal, or whatever lay at the sphere’s core, must be incredibly dense.

“Precisely weighted and precisely measured,” she wondered aloud. “Who made you?”

Kate lifted the heavy sphere over to the machining table, a long bench fitted with clamps and vices where Frank ran prototypes of his new drill bits. Spiral-wound threads of scrap metal littered the surface of the table. Kate swept them aside to lodge the sphere in a secure iron vice. She didn’t intend to drill through its surface, just to take a sliver of its surface material to submit to Dr. Ellery in order to ascertain its metallurgical composition.

The drill was mounted on a sliding rail that could be adjusted by a crank that ran alongside it. Kate gradually powered up the drill as she eased it toward the sphere. The noise of the drill filled the laboratory, and Kate winced at the volume. She snatched up a pair of Greenwood ear defenders and settled them across her head before continuing. Carefully, she touched the whirring, whining bit against the surface of the sphere.

The drill bit screamed as it touched the material of the sphere, smoking and throwing off sparks like a welder’s torch. A high-pitched screech filled the air as acrid fumes poured from the point of contact between drill and sphere. Weird light bathed the laboratory, strange spectra emanating from the sphere and flashing like a strobe. Kate backed the drill away as a faint thrumming noise pulsed outward from the sphere. She missed the sound at first, the ear defenders blocking out the low frequency rumble.

The drill was ruined, its sharpened tip flattened without having left a mark on the sphere. Kate leaned in close, realizing that the sphere was composed of a material hard enough to withstand even the most powerful drill the laboratory possessed.

“Heavens above!” she cried, jumping back as the surface of the sphere began to move. 

The pieces that formed the device clicked and began reorienting, like three dimensional jigsaw pieces reassembling themselves into a new configuration. Portions lifted up and rotated, others sank into the body of the sphere, while others appeared to spontaneously reform into new, previously unseen forms. The device impossibly changed its geometry from moment to moment, becoming a cube, triangle, and cylinder within the space of a few seconds.

Kate backed away and pulled the ear defenders from her head, now hearing the bass note emanating from the device. Like some clockwork automaton, the whirring, spinning pieces finally slotted back into the body of the device, and once again it was a sphere. Then, a powerful pulse of high energy noise erupted from the sphere and the vials and test tubes rattled glassily in their racks. Kate felt the vibration deep in her bones as another pulse, louder and deeper than the previous note pounded like an enormous heart beat.

“Oh no,” hissed Kate, backing away from the device as it began to emit a brilliant light that threw stark shadows around the laboratory. Another sound wave blasted outward, this time knocking over loose items and rattling even the heavy equipment benches.

Kate ran toward the iron door and mashed the locking button that released the magnetic catches that secured it. Nothing happened for a maddening second, but at last the light above the door flashed and she hauled it open. Another sound wave battered her, hurling her through the door and sending her sprawling to the tiled floor.

She rolled onto her back as incandescent radiance spilled from the door, bathing the corridor in bleaching white light. The noise was incredible, a repeating sound wave of low frequency energy almost beyond the threshold of hearing. Kate scrambled to her feet and hauled the iron door to the laboratory shut as a final pulse surged from the device and destroyed the laboratory.

* * *

“You heard from Stone?” asked Minnie, placing a sheaf of photographs on Rex’s desk and pulling up a chair to sit next to him. Rex looked up from his typewriter and nodded.

“Yeah,” he said, aware that he still had to tread carefully around Minnie. “He says he’ll meet us tomorrow at Lucy’s, fill us in on what he got from the archives.”

Rex rubbed the heel of his palm against his forehead as a sudden spike of pain filled his head. He still felt rough from their trip to the Commercial, far worse than if he’d been drunk, and he was feeling the after effects even now.

“What about your source? You get anything from your guy in the cops?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said. “I’ve not heard squat. Face it, Rex: we’ve hit dead ends all round, and you know Harvey’s going to be looking for something juicy or our backsides are out the door.”

Rex lit a cigarette and gestured to his typewriter. “I know. There’s only so many ways I can spin this to read like I got something to say.”

“How you pitching it?”

“Moral high ground stuff, public outrage. You know, good girls undone by drink and drugs,” said Rex. “I don’t know what Rufus is putting in his drinks, but it’s crazy stuff. Get girls drunk like that and who knows what’s going to happen.”

“Still think he spiked you?” said Minnie with a sly grin.

“You’re damn right I do,” said Rex. “Sure I like a drink, who doesn’t in this town? But no way would I get that messed up after a few martinis.”

“Oh I don’t know, I’ve seen you pretty drunk. Remember that time you tried to prove you could jump the fence around Independence Square and caught your pants on the spikes? I wish I’d had my camera on me that night to catch your full moon.”

“Very funny, doll face,” said Rex. “I would have made it if I’d had a better run up.”

“Regardless of your lack of athletic prowess, I’ve just got these back from the lab,” said Minnie, tapping the photos. “Not much, but maybe enough to keep Harvey off our back.”

Rex flipped through the pictures noting images of the original crime scene, the Commercial (including one of his face), and the university campus. One showed a professor-type in front of a modern-fronted brick building talking to some lowlife with a cloth bundle held out before him. Rex didn’t know them, but it looked pretty shady.

“Who are these guys?” he asked.

“The guy in the suit is Professor Oliver Grayson,” said Minnie.

Rex looked up and nodded appreciatively. “Good work, girlie. And the other guy? He doesn’t look like someone a professor ought to be hanging around with.”

Minnie smiled. “He isn’t. I showed his mug around to some people I know in low places and I got a name. Finn Edwards.”

“Never heard of him,” said Rex. “Should I have?”

Minnie shook her head and rubbed her temple, like she too was suffering from a mild headache. “Not unless you’re involved in bootlegging. He’s low-level, a foot soldier for one of the Arkham gangs. Basically, he’s a goon for hire who’s handy with a pistol and fists, and none too shy about using them. Not too smart, but not too dumb either, I’m told.”

“He got a record?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” said Minnie, dropping a carbon-stained arrest sheet in Rex’s lap. “Mostly misdemeanors: petty theft, assault, disorderly conduct, drug possession, and one count of public indecency where he pulled his pants down on St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Sounds like a character, right enough,” said Rex. “What’s he doing with Grayson?”

“I don’t know, but Grayson looked like a spooked deer when Edwards spoke to him.”

“Like he’s got something to hide?”

“Could be,” agreed Minnie.

Rex leaned over and planted a kiss on Minnie’s cheek. “Damn, you’re good.”

“I know,” said Minnie, reaching up to touch her face. “Remember to tell Harvey that when we talk pay raise.”

A shadow fell over the pair of them and Rex looked up to see Harvey Gedney looking down at them. For a moment, Rex feared Harvey had learned of Stone’s intrusion to the building to search the back issues, but one look at the anger in the editor’s face told him this was something far worse.

“Hey, Harvey,” said Rex, keeping his tone light. “What’s the good word?”

“Good word?” thundered Harvey. The editor-in-chief of the Advertiser was a florid-faced forty-two-year-old, with a face forever pulled in a grimace like he was passing a continuous string of kidney stones. His suit was permanently rumpled, and he liked to project an aggressive image that was reflected in the inquisitive nature of his reporters.

Harvey slammed a folded newspaper down on the desk, scattering Minnie’s pictures and spilling some of Rex’s coffee. “How in the hell did Peck get the jump on you? I thought you were all over this? Damn it, Rex, I let you run with this one, but by God, if Peck’s humbugged us, I’ll throw your ass out the door so fast your head will spin.”

Rex picked up the paper. It was a copy of the Arkham Gazette, the Advertiser’s only rival for news in this town. Where the Advertiser was bullish and asked awkward questions, the Gazette was a local newspaper in every sense of the term. Its managing editor, Willard Peck, usually only ever printed items filed by county correspondents concerning town and valley events. The Gazette did little to ruffle local feathers and hardly ever reported international events.

Which made the front page of tomorrow’s edition all the more surprising.

Rex took one look at the headline and his mouth fell open with a shocked gasp.

“Peck printed this?” he said.

“He will,” snapped Harvey. “It’s tomorrow’s first edition.”

“What’s it say?” asked Minnie, alternating between looking at Rex and Harvey.

Rex laid the paper out on his desk for Minnie to read the headline:

GRUESOME DISCOVERY UNDER GARRISON STREET BRIDGE HORRIFIES ARKHAM!

Anonymous Tipster Leads Police to Charnel House of Dead Bodies Beneath Bridge.

Garrison Street Sealed Off as Hunt for Savage Killer Intensifies.

At Least Ten Bodies Found.

Terror Seizes the Streets of Arkham!

“Tell me you have something on this,” said Harvey. “I’ll not have that odious little shit, Peck, trumping me on something this big.”

“We got some leads, yeah,” said Rex, stalling for time. “We’re working with an outside informant that looks promising.”

“Looks promising?” barked Harvey. “I don’t care about promising, I want results! You’ve been working that dead girl on the athletics field for days now, and you’ve got nothing to show for it. Now get your asses up there and find an angle on this or so help me God, you’ll never work in Massachusetts again. By the time I’m done with you, you’ll be lucky to wind up covering county fairs for the Weekly Iowegian.”

Rex held his hands up, as if to ward off Harvey’s anger.

“I know this looks bad, but you got to trust me, Harvey. We’re on to something big.”

“Your ‘informant’ tell you that?” demanded Harvey. “Who is he anyway?”

Rex looked at Minnie, who gave him an almost imperceptible nod. She was right, there was a time for cleverness, and this was most definitely not it.

“It’s a Pinkerton agent,” said Rex. “The girl at the athletics field was his daughter.”

“A Pinkerton’s daughter?” said Harvey. “That’s a good angle. And you say there are leads? What kind of leads?”

“We need to do a bit more digging, but it could be big, Harvey,” said Rex, tapping the front page of the Gazette. “Bigger than this. Turns out there might be a lot more bodies than even the cops know about under the bridge. There are links to the university and one of its professors, and we’ve just gotten word that there’s a link to illegal bootlegging, too. Just give us a little longer and I swear we can break this wide open.”

Rex hated giving away his story before he’d even written it or, for that matter, figured out if there even was a story. He was taking a big gamble by pitching to Harvey like this, but he had a gut feeling that this was going to be the big one, the one that got him a Pulitzer.

He could see it was working. The idea that the Advertiser might break a story even bigger than the one in tomorrow’s Gazette appealed to Harvey’s one-upmanship with Willard Peck.

Harvey tapped the newspaper on the desk and locked his gaze with Rex.

“Break it open in the next week, or you’re history,” said Harvey.

* * *

Oliver wrapped his scarf around his neck and marched toward the steps of Arkham Asylum, bending against the cold wind and holding his hat tight to his head. Though it had taken him longer than he would have liked to answer Dr. Hardstrom’s summons, Oliver had finally managed to find the time to drive to the northern edge of town to meet with the institution’s senior physician.

He was admitted to the building with his customary awkwardness, the orderlies eyeing him with suspicious glances that made Oliver think they were getting ready to subdue him and carry him to his own cell. The thought had occurred to him before, of course, but in his current mental state, it seemed a much greater possibility.

Monroe gave him a particularly evil stare, one that Oliver could not return. He didn’t think he had offended the man. Or was it simply his association with Henry that engendered such hostility? Could his old friend’s behavior have become so troublesome that merely knowing him brought disapproving stares?

At length, Dr. Hardstrom appeared from one of the side corridors, accompanied by a nurse with pale skin, dark eyes, and brown hair pinned in a tight bun. She gave him a crooked glance that seemed to say I know the things you know…

Oliver blinked and the moment passed. The nurse was simply giving him a polite smile of welcome as she returned to the reception desk. He smiled weakly, feeling foolish for giving in to such paranoia. Dr. Hardstrom held a hand out to him, and it took Oliver a moment to recognize the gesture for what it was.

He shook Hardstrom’s hand as he fought to get a grip on his nerves. His mental stability was always threatened whenever he came to the asylum, but with all that he had recently learned, it was especially off-kilter.

“Professor Grayson,” said Dr. Hardstrom. “Good of you to come at last.”

“Yes, sorry it’s taken me so long,” said Oliver, catching the implied criticism of his delay. “Work at the university, you know how it is.”

“Of course, if you’d like to follow me,” replied Hardstrom, leading him deeper into the building. Monroe led the way, unlocking doors before them and sealing them again in their wake. Oliver had never been to this part of the asylum, its bare walls dark and pressing in like the walls of the trap chambers rumored to exist in the pyramids. Anonymous paintings hung like gallows victims in their frames and the dreary subject matter seemed calculated to drive anyone who saw them into a fit of depression.

They passed no one as they walked, and the only sound was the sharp tap-tap of their heels, the clang of metal doors closing behind them, and the wind rattling the panes of the windows. They might be all alone in this vast building for all Oliver knew.

Hardstrom stopped before a nondescript door of bare metal and gestured for Monroe to unlock it. From the nature of the keys required to open its thickness, Oliver guessed this was not the office of the good doctor.

“If you please,” said Hardstrom.

“Of course,” said Oliver, entering a good-sized room of gleaming ceramic tiles of antiseptic white. Banks of machinery stood against one wall, while a number of beds lined the other. A single nurse stood by the only occupied bed, and Oliver did a double-take as he recognized her as the one he’d seen at the reception desk, but surely it could not be her. She hadn’t accompanied them...but perhaps there was another way to this part of the asylum.

Henry Cartwright was secured to the bed by heavy leather straps, his eyes glassy and unfocused as he drooled a steady stream of saliva onto the sheets. Oliver felt monstrously guilty for having left his old friend to the none-too-tender mercies of the asylum staff.

“Good God,” said Oliver. “Is all this really necessary?”

“I am afraid it is,” said Hardstrom, moving past Oliver to stand beside Henry’s bed. “Your friend has become rather more agitated of late. He has become violent to himself and others, and raves of things I shall not repeat in the presence of a lady.”

Oliver looked into Henry’s eyes, and recoiled from the ghastly horror of their depths. Knowing now a measure of Henry’s past, he saw the anguish of too much knowledge and the fear of what lay beyond the common understanding of men. Oliver’s fear that he too might end up in the care of this institution was doubled at the sight of Henry. Secrets to which his friend had become privy during the war were now Oliver’s to bear. His sanity was already cracking under the strain. How much longer would it take before he was strapped to a bed and drooling into his pillow?

“I thought you didn’t use restraints here,” said Oliver.

“Normally we don’t,” agreed Hardstrom, “but I am afraid Henry’s physical outbursts became too violent and sustained to be adequately controlled by pharmaceutical means. This was the only way to prevent him from hurting himself.”

“Hurting himself?”

“Indeed. There have been several suicide attempts,” Hardstrom informed him.

“God above,” said Oliver, sitting beside the bed and taking Henry’s hand. “I’m so sorry…”

“I have taken the liberty of recording the sessions where I tried to reason with Henry, but I was able to glean little from his words.”

“Why not?” said Oliver bitterly. “Aren’t you supposed to be an expert?”

“I am a leader in my field,” said Hardstrom. “But that is neither here nor there. The reason I could make little headway was due to Henry speaking in languages I could not understand.”

“Languages? What manner of languages?”

“I wish I could tell you,” said Hardstrom. “Some of it was English, and I believe some was French, but much of it was simply gibberish.”

“And you say you recorded this?”

“Of course.”

“I want to hear those recordings,” said Oliver. “All of them. Now.”

“As I said, Professor Grayson,” said Hardstrom, glancing over at the nurse. “Some dreadful things were said, things of a perverse and bloody nature that I would rather keep between us men. You understand, of course.”

Oliver took a deep breath and said, “I don’t give a damn for your sensibilities. I want to hear those recordings, and I want to hear them now.”

* * *

Darkness closed in on Arkham, and though people told themselves that this night was no different than any other, they knew, via forgotten and atrophied senses, that it was not. It began in mid-evening, when a wave of nausea spread through the town, surging outward from the grounds of the university to encompass the entire town and locales as far away as Dunwich to the west and Innsmouth to the east. Men and women complained of sudden headaches as dogs barked furiously at the moon and choirs of cats took to the roofs of Arkham to mewl through the night. Stray animals banded together, taking refuge in the dark corners of the town, and the streets emptied as the air became charged with a loathsome, stomach-churning static.

Children woke from horror-filled dreams, shrieking in terror as the last slimy vestiges of watery nightmares drained from their memories. Mothers held their children tight, soothing their terrors with soft platitudes they could not quite believe.

Arkham’s lights winked on throughout the night as restless sleepers stirred and wakeful families huddled together in fear of some boundless dread they could not articulate. Among the common folk of Arkham, none could place a name to this fear, but within the communities of poets, artists, and sculptors, there broke out a feverish night of creativity. Grotesque clay figurines, unsightly canvases, and diabolical verses were conjured into being by this frightful muse.

Few of these nightmarish creations survived past morning, when their creators, disgusted by the foulness they had wrought, smashed them to pieces or hurled them into fireplaces. Four young artists committed suicide at daybreak, while others sought to erase the memory of that night with alcohol or drugs.

When at last Apollo spread his light over Arkham, it was greeted with the kind of relief that might be expected upon the return of the sun in benighted places such as Alaska, where night held sway for weeks at a time.

That relief was to be short-lived, as Arkham residents tried to immerse themselves in the mundane reality of the world by reading their newspapers. Here, they hoped to forget the night’s disturbing madness by reading of local events, county elections, and upcoming sporting events.

The front page of the Gazette shattered any such hope, and the town drew a collective gasp of horror as the bubble of ignorance and denial that protected its veneer of normality began to crack. On the trolleys to work, on street corners, and in chill offices all over Arkham, the talk was of the dead bodies found beneath the Garrison Street Bridge.

Panic and terror combined in a psychological alchemist’s brew, producing fear and suspicion. By mid-morning, immigrant houses in Lower Southside had been vandalized and accusing fingers were already being pointed at those suspected of involvement.

Fearful citizens besieged the Arkham police station, demanding to know what was being done to find this deranged killer. The Chief of Police stood before the station and reassured the public that they had a number of promising leads and an arrest would be made soon. His assurances were delivered in a wavering monotone, and few in the crowd were convinced by his words. Throughout the day, police rousted drifters, loiterers, and men unlucky enough to catch the eye of a heavy-handed patrolman. The jail soon filled with the usual suspects, and additional facilities within the courthouse were called into service.

Arkham had not known terror like this since the cannibal murderer’s rampage in 1905. 

And things were only going to get worse.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Rubbing his bleary eyes with his fingers, Oliver almost didn’t see the commotion around the Tyner Annex. It had been a long and painful night, listening to Henry’s monstrous ravings on the wax cylinders Dr. Hardstrom had eventually been persuaded to give him. To hear so erudite a man reduced to lunatic screams of such bloodcurdling horror was no easy task, but too many significant convergences were occurring for him to dismiss what Henry was saying. Learning that the root of Henry’s madness lay in damnable books and hideous knowledge found in a sealed library made it all the more vital.

Oliver bumped into a gawping student and turned to admonish him for his clumsiness, when he saw the sorry state of the building to his right. 

The Tyner Annex looked like it had suffered the effects of a recent earthquake. Oliver had seen photographs of the dreadful quake that had hit San Francisco in 1906, and the deep cracks crazing the building’s frontage were strikingly similar. Every window was shattered, and broken glass lay strewn on the grass and paths surrounding the building like glittering knife blades.

“Good God,” said Oliver, surveying the damage done to the building and the surrounding structures. The Liberal Arts building had lost a few windows and the trees to either side of the pathway had been stripped of leaves. Bright yellow blossoms carpeted the grass and hundreds of roof tiles lay in shattered piles throughout the parkland surrounding the Copley Tower.

Construction workers nailed boards over the windows and members of the School of Applied Science gathered in concerned knots before the building, shaking their heads and pointing to various areas of structural damage. Oliver grabbed the student he had bumped into and said, “What happened here? Was anyone hurt?”

The student shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. Everyone’s saying a bomb went off inside.”

“A bomb?”

“That’s what they’re saying, sir.”

“Christ! A bomb? Kate…,” said Oliver, setting off toward the entrance to the building where the science faculty gathered like crows in their dark suits. His fear rose up and threatened to overcome him. Had he put Kate Winthrop in danger by passing that device of Finn’s to her? Oliver’s pulse boomed in his ears and he tried not to believe that this incident was yet another link in the chain that led back to Amanda’s dreams of a sunken city.

“Dr. Abbott!” cried Oliver, spying the dean of the science faculty. “What in heaven’s name happened here? Is everyone all right?”

Abbott turned to regard Oliver with mild disdain. Lawrence Abbott was an engineer by training, a serious-minded man whose level-headed ambition had seen his faculty rise to become one of the preeminent departments of the university. Gray-haired and severe, his critical mindset was at once imposing and inspiring.

“Professor Grayson,” said Abbott. “We are still in the process of determining what happened, but thankfully no one was seriously hurt. The building was largely empty when the accident occurred.”

“Accident? I heard it was a bomb.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, man,” said Abbott. “I have been inside and can say without fear of contradiction that this was no explosive device.”

“Then what was it?”

“That is yet to be ascertained, though we will reach the bottom of the matter, I assure you. This building cost a great deal to construct and houses some extremely valuable research. It won’t do to have spurious rumors spreading of experiments gone wrong. This is a faculty grounded in empirical research and safe practice, and I would thank you not to voice such demented notions again.”

“Of course,” said Oliver. “I apologize for speaking out of turn.”

Before Abbott could respond, a man stalked toward Oliver with his face colored a vivid red. Oliver recognized Dr. William Dyer, one of Miskatonic’s rising stars in the field of geology. Fifty years old and immaculately dressed, Dyer seethed with anger. His fists were bunched and for a moment Oliver thought the man was going to punch him then and there.

“Damn you, Grayson!” shouted Dyer. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

Oliver struggled to form a reply. His first thought was to profess ignorance of what had happened here, but the lie would not form on his lips.

“You’ve cost us years! All the work we’ve done to prepare for the Antarctic expedition is lost. Up in smoke!” raged Dyer. “Priceless research blasted to atoms and machinery that took years to design and build pulverized. And it’s all your damn fault. I ought to knock your block off. Don’t think I won’t be reporting you to President Wainscott!”

Oliver was shocked by Dyer’s outrage, but then the man had just seen his life’s work set back by years, a situation of which Oliver was not unaware. The Antarctic expedition was to be the jewel in the university’s crown, and to have that delayed, even slightly, might allow others to explore the land first.

“You must be mistaken, Dr. Dyer,” said Oliver. “I haven’t set foot on the university grounds since yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh, I know that,” snapped Dyer. “You gave an unstable item to a graduate student, and rather than consulting with the heads of faculty, you had her conduct experiments using equipment she was untrained to use. You see the results of that folly here before you.”

“Kate Winthrop, yes, I spoke to her and asked her to look into a matter of a scientific nature, it’s true. What happened to her, is she hurt?”

“She’s unhurt, no thanks to you. Thank God she managed to get herself out of the lab before the energy surge,” growled Dyer. “Whatever the hell that thing you gave her was, it caused all this damage and wrecked one of our most important laboratories.”

“An energy surge, is that what caused this?”

“Of course it was. A massive, low-frequency sound wave pulse.”

“Where is Miss Winthrop now?” asked Oliver. “I should really speak to her.”

Dyer threw up his hands. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment and facilities ruined and he wants to know about a damn graduate student! Just because your own expedition failed doesn’t give you the right to try and sabotage mine, Grayson.”

“What? You think that I…”

Before Oliver could complete his rebuttal, Dr. Abbott said, “Perhaps you should take your leave for now, Professor Grayson. I suspect the engineering professors will be in extremis for quite some time, and the last thing anyone needs is a scene. You understand?”

“If you think it wise,” said Oliver, swallowing his anger at Dyer’s accusation, “then I’ll be on my way.”

“Good man,” said Abbott. “It’s for the best just now.”

Oliver nodded. “I’ll say good day then, Dr. Abbott.”

“I will be in touch as matters progress.”

“I’d appreciate that,” said Oliver as Abbott turned Dyer away to consult with the faculty professors and structural engineers on the damaged building’s stability.

As Oliver made his way back to his office, his mind raced over the possible causes of this accident. Sabotage? A genuine accident? Or some hidden property of the device? He was grateful that Kate had come through this disastrous incident unscathed, but he had to know what had become of the device he and Finn had brought her.

He entered the Liberal Arts building and climbed the stairs to his office, slumping in his chair to look out the window. Though the day looked clear and crisp, he couldn’t help but feel that something sullen had settled over the town, like a shroud placed over a body in a mortuary. Oliver tried to shake off the eerie sensation without much success and turned back to his desk. His briefcase contained the wax cylinders he had taken from Arkham Asylum and he spread them over the surface of his desk.

“Just like Hillshore,” mused Oliver, ordering them in chronological order. There were two dozen cylinders, which meant around a hundred minutes of material. Oliver knew it would take at least three listens to each cylinder to truthfully transcribe its contents, with the quality degrading each time. This would be a long day, but fortunately Alexander had agreed to cover his classes.

He would need a phonograph machine to play these cylinders, but as he was about to leave his office and speak to the staff in charge of such devices, he spotted a folded piece of paper wedged between The Mysterious Island and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Intrigued, Oliver pulled it out and read the hurried handwriting. It read:

Still have the sphere. Didn’t want to leave it with faculty heads.

Too much work still to do. Will be in contact later.

K.W.

* * *

The talk at Lucy’s was all about the bodies. It seemed the prospect of ten or more corpses turning up in various states of decomposition did not dent the hunger of your average citizen, and the diner was nearly full to lunchtime capacity. Gabriel Stone was already waiting for them, seated in the same booth in which they had first compared notes. He sipped a coffee and flicked through the pages of his notebook as he waited for them to join him. As Rex and Minnie made their way through the crowded diner, Rex sensed a dark undercurrent to the place, like everyone was on edge.

They’re deathly afraid, he thought. And I’m not sure I blame them.

He’d noticed the tension in the air on the way over to Lucy’s. The town’s streets were awfully quiet. This time of day, Rex would have expected lots of folk to be out and about—working, shopping, or just out for a stroll—but everyone was keeping indoors. For all the talk on the wireless of the bodies being those of transients and hobos, the good citizens of Arkham were, for once, not buying it.

People knew something terrible was going on, they just didn’t know what to do about it.

They reached Stone, and the Pinkerton agent looked up. He didn’t smile or welcome them, just went back to his notes like he didn’t even know them.

“Stone,” said Rex, letting Minnie slide into the booth first.

“Murphy. Klein,” said Stone, and Rex thought the man looked dreadful. Like he hadn’t slept in weeks. Perhaps his lawman persona was cracking under the weight of what he was investigating? Rex took no pleasure in seeing the man’s deterioration. His daughter was dead, and Rex couldn’t imagine what Stone must be feeling.

“So, looks like you were right,” said Rex, gesturing to the counter for some coffee.

“About what?” asked Stone.

“About there being more bodies.”

“Kind of wish I wasn’t.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, but it is what it is, right?” said Rex. “You figured the missing girls were dead.”

“I know, but like I said, I hoped I’d be wrong,” said Stone. Rex saw the smoldering anger in his eyes. The grief was still there, but time had distilled it to the essence of a father’s need for justice. “But since I’m not wrong, we best get on, right?”

“Sure,” said Minnie pulling out a brown envelope of photographs and laying them down, one by one, in front of Stone. “I’ll show you these first.”

Stone leafed through the pictures, stopping at the one with Oliver Grayson and Finn Edwards. Quickly Minnie outlined who Finn Edwards was, and Stone nodded, adding another note to his growing compendium of information.

“So I gotta wonder what the good professor is doing hanging around with a known criminal,” said Stone. “Man keeps strange company, but this Finn Edwards better watch out. People Grayson associates with often wind up crazy.”

“You learn that from the archives?” asked Rex.

Stone nodded, pausing as a waitress came and poured some coffee for Rex and Minnie. He flipped back to the beginning of his notebook.

“Came to Miskatonic from Brown in 1919. Seems he made his name studying tribal cults in Alaska. Went there with a guy called Morley Dean, some big shot professor who came back and had himself committed to an asylum soon after.”

“What for?”

“Don’t know, but it was real bloody stuff they were researching by what I read. Real horror show material, you know? Blood sacrifices, hearts ripped out and eaten, that sort of thing. Would send most normal folk to the nuthouse. But not Grayson. The man knows his way around a ritual murder, if you take my meaning?”

Rex looked at Minnie and they shared a horrified look.

“Ah, what? You’re saying Grayson is the killer?”

Stone shrugged. “I don’t know yet, maybe. I seen it before, guys going native. You spend too long on the frontier, you get to like what you see, make it your own. Happens all the time in undercover stings. Guy gets too close to the people he’s selling out, and when it comes to the bust, he can’t do it. He warns them and the whole deal is blown.”

Minnie looked up from her own note taking. “I don’t know, it sounds kinda far-fetched.”

“Oh yeah?” said Stone, leaning in and rapping his knuckles hard enough on the table for other diners to turn around and look at them. “Why don’t you tell me what you think is going on, doll face? You got anything better? I’d sure love to hear it.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Minnie, meeting Stone’s glare with one of her own. “All we have is background stuff. Could be nothing, could be something. I’ll lay it out for you, see if it fits with anything you’ve been finding.”

“Okay, doll, dazzle me,” said Stone, the words a challenge as much as a request.

“We did some digging around the campus, tried to get a vibe on where the kids went to dance and drink. We heard of a few places and checked them out. Most were pretty tame joints, a little liquor and some local flavor, but nothing that raised any red flags.”

“Until we went to the Commercial,” said Rex. “Don’t know who owns it, but a guy named Rufus is the big wheel that runs it. Old black guy, blind he claims, but he says he sees who comes and goes in the club.”

“How does a blind guy see anything?”

“You got me, Stone,” said Rex, “And call me crazy, but I think he’s on the level. He said Lydia was in the Commercial. Said she came there a lot. He…uh, well, he said…”

“Come on fella, spit it out,” snapped Stone. “What else he say?”

“He said the Commercial was a place where students hooked up for sex,” said Minnie without blinking. “Said it was a place where seniors came to find girls they could get drunk and sneak back to their dorm rooms.”

Rex held his breath and waited for Stone’s inevitable anger.

“You don’t pull your punches, lady,” said Stone at last, and Rex breathed a sigh of relief.

“Neither do you, Agent Stone,” said Minnie. “Ain’t we a pair?”

Stone nodded and said, “What else this Rufus say?”

“Said Lydia came to the club with a girl from Bolton, though we haven’t been able to find out who that might have been. Rufus said they drank too much and left the club with, in his words, ‘a couple of beaus.’”

“Did he give you a description?”

“No, but he said they were a couple of white boys who didn’t like jazz and who had money to spare. They were only there for the pickups.”

“Damn,” said Stone, shaking his head. “You know, I came here wanting it to be something terrible, something so bad that I could hardly believe it. That’s the only way I could believe my little girl would check out, but that…it’s just too damn obvious. And that’s why I don’t buy it.”

“Don’t buy what?”

“That what’s happening here is just about these killings. I mean, why now? Those bodies couldn’t have been under that bridge for too long, they’d have been washed down to the sea. Someone dumped them there because they wanted them found now. It doesn’t make sense that there would be that many bodies if it was just a couple of guys picking up girls in a club to rape and kill. There’s got to be more to it than that.”

Stone sat back and let out a breath of realization. “It’s classic misdirection. Damn, but I should have seen it sooner.”

“What do you mean?” asked Minnie. “Why would any killers want the bodies to be found? Surely that just exposes them and gives the cops more opportunities to catch them?”

“It’s like sleight of hand,” explained Stone. “You get people looking where you want them to look while you’re palming the coin. And it’s working. Everyone in here is talking about ten dead bodies like a pack of rabid wild animals killed them or a touring carnival of freaks or something. They’re not looking deep enough to understand why this is happening.”

“So why is it happening?” asked Minnie.

“Fear,” said Stone. “I’ve known fear before. You see it every day in New York and this city stinks of it. While everyone’s thinking about the bogeyman and wild animals, something else is going on. I just know it.”

“Something worse than twenty plus girls being murdered?” said Rex. “What could be worse than that?”

“I don’t know,” said Stone. “But I got a feeling we’re not going to like it.”

* * *

Oliver kept his office blinds shut, as though he didn’t want any hint of what he was hearing to escape into the world beyond. It had been mid-afternoon before one of the university technicians could procure him a phonograph, as such machines were on the verge of becoming obsolete. Gramophones with their double-sided pressings were replacing wax cylinders, and American universities were rushing to embrace this new technology.

With the door locked, Oliver sat through each cylinder’s contents once more, not taking notes or making any judgments, simply listening. Henry’s voice, rising and falling in pitch with the motion of the rotator, filled the office with scratchy and tinny fidelity. It was heartbreaking to hear the voice of a dear friend so afraid, so brittle, and so lost within his own madness.

Though the recordings were short, each cylinder lasting no more than five minutes, it took a lifetime to go through them. Much of what Henry was saying made no sense, merely meaningless collections of syllables with no business being strung together. Other portions were hideously clear, evil descriptions of cannibalism and bloodletting on a frightful scale. 

— The knife goes in under the solar plexus and cuts outward.

— Cuts must be made transverse to preserve the integrity of the heart and lungs.

— Some fat is good on human meat. Marbling gives it texture and flavor.

— Ten maidens were offered to the Outer Ones, their blood drained and their souls devoured by the night-haunting terrors. The Dark Waters rise in the south, but drown the north. His time is coming, whereupon the vermin of mankind will be wiped from the earth. The signs of his coming are there to see, the words of the Atlantean Gods speak true! Seek the writings of Nereus-Kai, for he alone bears the burden of all knowledge!

— The Fire falls from the sky at 142, burning all it touches…oh God, they’re burning. Meat and cloth and earth burning together! 142, 142! Oh, God in Heaven, the stench of it!

— Fireflies in the sun, dancing like spinning embers. Iä Cthugha! They flit like capricious demon sparks, and ignite that which cannot be burned. Iä Cthugha! The fire devours everything! Iä Cthugha!

Henry described in vivid detail the torture and mutilation of men, women, and children, and Oliver began to understand Hardstrom’s reluctance to discuss such things before the nurse. The more he heard, the less he believed the voice was that of his old friend.

As he had been told, some of Henry’s lunacy was delivered in French. Eloquent phrases and liquid monologues were delivered in a fraught, archaic style that seemed at odds with the terrible fear in Henry’s voice. Until now there had only been Hardstrom’s gently interrogative tones and Henry’s fearful rambling, but as the French words spilled from the speaker horn, Oliver would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that there had been a third person in the room.

Oliver had no idea what Henry was saying, nor was he aware that his old friend even knew French. Henry could have picked up a smattering while serving overseas, but the words being spoken here sounded fluent, like a native speaker. Oliver would have Professor Drouet in the Modern Languages Department take a look at his transcriptions for a translation.

With the recordings finished, Oliver rubbed his temples with the heels of his palms. A steady, throbbing pain pulsed behind his eyes, and his mouth felt parched. A low-level buzzing seemed to fill the office, like static from a badly tuned radio. The phonograph hissed and spat repeating crackles as the needle trailed over the smooth wax at the end of the last cylinder, and Oliver lifted it off. He took a fresh notebook from his desk and opened it to the first blank page, carefully annotating it with the date and time of the transcription.

Thrice more he listened to the recordings, feverish and sick with the horrors he was transcribing. The sickness of Henry’s mind poured out onto the page with every stroke of the pen. Oliver felt a nauseous bile build in his stomach with every damnable phrase committed to paper. Each time the recordings played, the pain behind his eyes grew worse and worse until he was forced to take a break and pace his office for half an hour until the pain receded. When he took his seat once again, he saw that the light had vanished completely from the day. No hint of streetlights filtered in through the blinds.

Time had flown past him, its elastic nature seeming to compress during his pursuance of Henry’s vile outpourings. Oliver glanced at his watch, shocked to see that it was past ten at night. How had he lost track of so much time? Had he been so caught up with his obsessive transcription that the day had fled in fear from his compulsion to render every horrid syllable as accurately as he could?

The Liberal Arts building would be deserted by now, its staff and students long since returned to their homes for dinner, the company of loved ones, and perhaps a radio play. Though Oliver had never yet desired to marry or raise children, the thought of returning to the bosom of a family that loved him suddenly seemed like the most desirable thing in the world. Briefly he thought of calling his mother and father in Baltimore, but dismissed the notion. In his current state of mind, he would only scare them with his repressed terrors.

He looked down at his notebook, its pages filled with fragments and hideous ramblings, many of which were obscure to the point of uselessness. Much of what Henry said bore the unmistakable hallmarks of Shrewsbury’s conclusions. This was yet another corroboration of the truth of the Great Old Ones and their agents, yet another pillar of his world of certainties pulled down. Henry knew of this secret world beneath the surface of the waking world of sanity, and it had driven him mad. Oliver could already feel his own grip on reality slipping, and struggled to maintain his focus.

Too many things vied for his attention.

Amanda and Rita’s disappearance, and the gruesome discovery of the devoured bodies beneath the Garrison Street Bridge—it seemed impossible they were not connected.

The device Finn had brought to him that Kate believed to be some kind of key to unlocking the gates to other dimensions.

His alliance with Alexander to stand against the return of the Great Old Ones.

Yet for all that, nothing would ever be the same. Normal life had been snatched away from him, and there was no going back. He knew that without those to stand against these dreadful, alien creatures from beyond time and space, the race of Mankind was utterly doomed. To think that he might be part of that opposition was absurd, but what general ever went into battle with everything he needed?

Oliver turned off the phonograph, and the sudden silence that filled his office was unwelcome and unnerving. The silence of a deserted building was a strange thing. Once bereft of humanity, the structure took it upon itself to stretch its hidden girders, flex its skin of brick, and exhale from the heart of its boiler room. Sounds that were obscured by the bustle of students and the chatter of classrooms now came to the fore, little dry echoes and soft zephyrs blowing through half-opened windows.

He closed his eyes, letting the night sounds of the building wash over him. He listened to the rattle and gurgle of pipes within the walls, the gentle hum of dormant electrics, and the silent echoes of empty hallways and corridors.

Then, a sound out of place.

A sound that had nothing to do with absence.

A sound that spoke of activity and presence. 

Glass breaking. Falling to the floor and scattering like shards of ice.

Irregular footsteps, like football cleats scraping on concrete.

Oliver rose from behind the desk and unlocked the door of his office. He opened it and listened again. The sounds were faint, coming from below. He eased cautiously out of his office and into a wide hallway carpeted along its length in plush red, gold, and green. Portraits hung on the walls, and diffuse light from outside spilled through the arched windows at both ends of the corridor where stairs to the ground floor were located.

Below the window, light from the atrium entrance to the building filtered up, casting strange, elongated shadows that moved like waving undersea fronds. Oliver couldn’t recall anything in the atrium that might cause such shadows, but he had never been in the building at this time of night...

He edged along the hallway to the stairs and leaned over the polished wooden banister.

 Bracing himself for what he might see, Oliver looked down through the open stairwell to the black and white checkerboard patterned floor of the atrium. Pale shapes, hunched over and uncertain, lingered in the shadows, barking and gibbering to one another in some vulgar parody of language. There were four shapes moving onto the lower reaches of the stairs. With each uncertain step they took, Oliver heard the scraping tap-tap he’d heard from his office.

Oliver’s eyes widened at the sight of these hideous monstrosities, unholy mockeries of the hominid form with their wretchedly wiry arms, skulls vaguely suggestive of canine morphology, and claws and teeth more in keeping with the African big cats. These were natural weapons designed to tear a victim’s flesh from his bones. As he struggled to comprehend the horror of the creatures, Oliver was put in mind of the dead girl on the athletics field and the bodies under the bridge.

“Dear God have mercy…,” he said.

Though he had spoken in the softest whisper, one of the beasts snapped its head in his direction. Oliver jerked back, but an excited jabber of exchanged whoops and brays told him he was too slow.

The creatures had seen him.

And they were coming to kill him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Oliver turned and ran back along the hallway, horrified at the sight of such disgusting creatures within the university. He heard them bounding up the marbled stairs, the scratching sound of their hooked claws and taloned feet a dreadful cacophony of animal hunger as they pursued him. Their gibbering barks and howls echoed from the walls as he ran, the solemn-faced portraits watching his desperate flight with dispassionate eyes.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw the first of the beasts vault over the balustrade, landing with an ease that spoke of years on the hunt. Oliver’s terror got the better of him. The sight of so abominable a face shocked him to the core, and his body was suddenly no longer his to control. He stumbled and fell to the carpet in a tangle of his own limbs. He rolled and scrambled away on his backside.

The creature smiled, and Oliver cried out in horror at the sight of so human an expression on so monstrous a beast. Its face was all teeth and malevolence, ears ragged and bitten, its scarred features curiously canine, yet retaining an impression of humanity beneath the degeneration. It was naked, but a layer of encrusted filth covered its leprous flesh as it loped down the hallway toward him. 

Its pack mates clustered behind the monster, hooting and snarling as they smelled his fear and sweat. Bloody nails as long as talons clicked as the light behind the beasts wavered. Oliver felt his numbing shock dissipate at the thought of being eaten alive, and volition returned to his body. He pushed himself to his feet and ran back toward his office as though all the demons of the pit were chasing him.

He realized this wasn’t too far from the truth.

The hallway seemed to stretch out before him, like some nightmare vision where the object of desire continually moves out of reach. His office couldn’t be so far away! He walked this route every day, and it had never felt so impossibly distant. At every moment, he winced in expectation of razor claws slashing through his jacket and shirt to tear the flesh from his back. He let loose incoherent cries of panic and fear, arms pumping as the shadows of the monsters’ clawed arms stretched out on the walls on either side of him, ready to envelop him and drag him into their lethal embrace.

Though he knew it was foolish, he risked a glance over his shoulder to see that the hideous beasts were keeping pace with him, loping and bounding after him like predators toying with a wounded prey they knew couldn’t escape. They were stalking him. Oliver wept with relief as he saw the open doorway of his office ahead of him. He threw himself through and spun on his heel to slam the door shut behind him.

Oliver fumbled with the key, but his idiot hands were unable to grasp the brass key sitting in the lock. His trembling fingers finally gained purchase and he twisted the key, crying in relief as he heard the heavy click of the lock turning. He backed away from the door, his mind racing as he realized he’d just trapped himself in a small room three stories up.

Furtive grunts and sniffing noises sounded beyond the door, and the patterns of light on the floor were disrupted as the creatures stopped outside. Remembering the breaking glass sound he had heard, Oliver wondered if such animalistic monsters could grasp the mechanical complexity of a door and handle.

A heavy crashing weight striking the door told Oliver the point was moot anyway. The timber bowed inward as the monsters threw themselves at the door once more. Oliver frantically scanned his office for a weapon. He had always eschewed firearms, believing that men of character should be able to resolve their differences without resorting to violence, but right now he would have sold his soul for a .45 automatic. His eyes alighted on a letter opener sitting on the corner of his desk, and he snatched it up.

It was a pitiful weapon, with a moderately sharp tip and two dull edges along the length of the blade, but was better than nothing. Oliver already felt better having something, no matter how pathetic, to defend himself with.

The timber panels of the door cracked, and splinters flew from the broken wood.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God…,” hissed Oliver, clutching the tiny weapon to his chest.

A clawed hand punched through the door, tearing out the inner panel as it was withdrawn. A face appeared at the hole, red-eyed and hungry. A scar bisected its features and thick saliva drooled between its irregular teeth. It loosed a freakish bark, that Oliver thought for a mad second might have been the word meat.

Oliver lunged forward and stabbed the letter opener at the snapping face. The tip plunged into the beast’s face, and it bellowed in pain. The screeching face withdrew, wrenching the letter opener from his grip. From the split second glance he’d had, Oliver thought he’d managed to put out one of its eyes.

A petty act of defiance, but defiance nonetheless.

Oliver backed away from the door, weaponless and bereft of stratagems to deny the beasts their prize. He turned to his window, frantic in his desire to escape. It offered no chance of survival, only a forty-foot drop to hard concrete. There was no way out.

Oliver turned back to the door and sank to his haunches with his head buried in his hands.

A booming report echoed from beyond the door, immediately followed by a scream of pain. Another deafening bang filled the hallway, surely a gunshot. Four more shots were fired in quick succession, each one drawing a cry of pain from the beasts.

The assault on Oliver’s door ceased and he heard the rapid scraping tap-tap of their bare feet as they fled from the shooter. Moments later came the sound of shattering glass, followed by a blessed silence, punctuated only by his rapid breathing. Oliver raised his head, waiting to see what would happen next. He hardly dared to hope he had been rescued, but what other explanation could there be?

Another face appeared at the shattered panel of his door, but this face was wonderfully human and unremarkable in its appearance. It was a man, his countenance deeply lined and stoic in the face of what he had just done. Oliver almost wept with relief to see a face as normal as the one now at his door.

“Professor Grayson?” said the man. “Oliver Grayson?”

“Yes,” gasped Oliver. “Yes, that’s me… Good Heavens, you saved my life!”

“You can thank me later,” said the man. “Now open the door!”

Oliver climbed to his feet, but hesitated before heading to comply. Having survived one attempt on his life, he didn’t want to take any chances.

“How do I know you’re not going to shoot me?”

“Shoot you? Jesus Christ, I just emptied my Colt saving your sorry ass. Now open the damn door, professor!”

“Who are you?” asked Oliver. “At least tell me your name.”

“For heaven’s sake,” said the man. “Open this door before I break it down. I need to reload, and I’d rather do it in there if that’s all the same to you. I don’t think those freaks will be back in a hurry, but I could just leave and let you find out for yourself.”

“I take your point,” said Oliver, crossing his office and unlocking the door. His rational mind was taking over, compartmentalizing the horror he had just experienced and moving his body like an automaton. Shock and trauma would come later, he knew, but for now he was content to function on adrenaline.

The man entered the office and broke open a matte black revolver, swiftly snapping home a speed loader to fill the chambers. The cylinder snapped back, and the man swung the pistol around to cover the door.

“You okay?” asked the man. “You hurt?”

“No, I’m not hurt,” said Oliver, unable to believe that fact. “Who are you? And not that I’m not grateful, but how did you know I’d need help?”

“My name’s Gabriel Stone,” said the man. “And I didn’t know you’d need help. This just happens to be your luckiest damn night on Earth.”

* * *

They went to a late night speakeasy Stone knew and Oliver let him lead the way, too numb and horrified by what had just happened to take any active part in the proceedings. His hands were shaking by the time Stone placed a tumbler of whiskey in his hands. He’d begun to feel quite sick. Whiskey was the last thing he wanted.

“Drink it,” commanded Stone. “It’ll help.”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” said Oliver.

“You won’t,” said Stone. “It’s just shock. You had a rough time there, professor. I’ve seen my share of gunplay and trouble. I know how it affects you, so drink the whiskey and then have another. Trust me.”

“I don’t even know you.”

“But I know a lot about you,” said Stone, knocking back his own shot and giving the bartender a wave. The man went to pour, but Stone tapped the bar. “Leave the bottle,” he said.

“How do you know a lot about me?” said Oliver, drinking the whiskey in one go. It was cheap stuff and burned like flaming gasoline, but its kick doused the queasiness in his gut. He realized the man had neatly deflected the opportunity to be more forthcoming with his identity and purpose. He studied Stone as another shot was poured.

Tall and broadly built beneath his brown duster and battered fedora, Stone was clearly a man to whom violence was no stranger. That would normally have made him threatening to Oliver, but since he owed this man his life, the least he could do was hear him out.

“I’ve been reading up on you recently,” said Stone. “I wanted to know who you were, what made you tick before I came to see you.”

“You picked a strange time to come and see me,” said Oliver. “Though I’m glad you did.”

“I wasn’t coming to see you,” said Stone. “I was coming to break into your office.”

Oliver was startled at the honesty of so criminal an admission and gave Stone a wary look. He knew nothing of this man and here he was confessing to a crime. He didn’t know quite what to make of that.

“Might I ask why? I don’t keep anything of value in there. At least, not to anyone other than a collector of Jules Verne.”

“I wasn’t going to rob you,” said Stone, taking a gleaming badge from his coat pocket and sliding it over. Oliver read the inscription on it and his eyes narrowed.

“Why would a Pinkerton agent want to break into my office?” he asked.

“I wanted to see if you were hiding anything.”

“Like what?”

“Like about the murders of all those girls,” said Stone. “About the murder of my daughter.”

Oliver nearly choked on his drink and struggled to keep the liquor in his belly at Stone’s inference. He looked at the man to see if he was joking, but the coldness in Stone’s eyes told Oliver that he was not a man to whom humor came naturally.

He took a deep breath and said, “Why would you think I would know anything about that?”

“Just a hunch,” said Stone. “Like I said, I’ve been reading up on you, and I know you know a lot about some real messed up stuff: blood rituals, cannibal murders—that sort of thing.”

Oliver stared at Stone, horrified that the man thought he could possibly be responsible for such reprehensible crimes. His anger flared briefly, then abated as the content of Stone’s previous utterance struck him.

“Your daughter was killed?”

Stone nodded.

“What was her name?” asked Oliver.

“Lydia Stone. They found her body on the athletics field.”

Oliver let out a pent up breath. “Ah, yes, I read the story in the Advertiser. I can only offer my condolences for your loss and assure you I had nothing to do with her death.”

“I think I know that now,” said Stone. “Tonight convinced me of that.”

Stone contemplated his whiskey and spoke in the halting tones of a man holding on tight to his grief, but who didn’t know how much longer he could keep it in check.

“She used to write me back in New York,” began Stone. “Told me you were one of her tutors and that she liked your class. A lot of it went over my head, but she was always the smart one. Even as a kid, she used to run rings around me, asking questions I couldn’t even understand, never mind answer. I figured her coming to Arkham was a bad thing, but the longer she stayed here, the smarter she got, and I relaxed. Figured she didn’t need her dumb old man crowding her on her way to the top, you know? I was so proud of her, professor. She was my baby.”

Oliver struggled to think of something to say to Stone that wouldn’t come out as pedestrian or insultingly trite. Instead of anything too emotional, he settled for something academic. 

“I knew Lydia reasonably well, Mr. Stone. She came to a number of my classes on the spread of language and technology throughout the ancient world. She was a fine student: very bright, and always eager to learn. She had a real drive to succeed, and I believe she would have gone on to achieve great things.”

“That’s my girl,” said Stone, raising his glass.

Oliver clinked glasses, and they drank to the memory of Lydia Stone.

“Are you helping the police to catch whoever killed her?” asked Oliver.

“Hardly,” grunted Stone. “Cops here are decent enough, but they’re not used to this kind of savagery. I’m here to find out who killed her, and if you can help me, then I’d sure appreciate it, professor.”

The noise in the speakeasy swelled briefly as a pair of drunks argued bitterly about sports, politics, or something else that felt ridiculously mundane in the face of what Oliver and Stone were discussing. In a town where horrors stalked the streets and the machinations of those who served beings older than the Earth were played out in its shadows, it seemed impossible that people could care about such transient things.

“So, professor,” said Stone, touching on the elephant in the room and shaking Oliver from his dark reverie, “what were those things outside your office tonight?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

“Some kind of animal?” suggested Stone.

“No, there was something horribly human about them,” said Oliver. “I don’t know what they were, but they weren’t animals. More like feral humans, hill folk, or a pack of children raised to adulthood in the wild by beasts. Like Kipling’s Mowgli, but without the humanity.”

“Where the hell could something like that happen in America?”

“Admittedly, I’ve only lived in Arkham for seven years, but I’ve heard my fair share of strange stories of things that would make your head spin. The backwoods of the country hereabouts is replete with incredible strangeness and quiet corners that haven’t seen the tread of civilized men in hundreds of years. Though it would be incredible, I could well believe something like this might take root here.”

“You believe things like that pretty easy then?”

Oliver poured another drink of whiskey. “If you’d asked me that a week ago, I’d have said no, but now? Now I’m not sure of anything. So much has happened that I’m questioning everything. Amanda and Rita going missing. Henry’s ravings. Finn’s sphere. And now, on top of everything, monsters are trying to kill me. I don’t know if I can take much more.”

Stone’s head snapped up. “Who are Amanda and Rita?”

“What? Oh, they’re students at Miskatonic. Amanda came to me with some strange dreams that correlated with some work I’d been doing, but now she and her roommate have gone missing. I had been trying to help Amanda get to the root of her dreams, but she vanished before I could make much progress.”

“What happened to her?” said Stone. The urgency in his voice was alarming.

“I don’t know for sure. I heard they went to a jazz club one night and didn’t come back, but that’s all I know.”

“Was it the Commercial Club?”

Oliver nodded. “Yes, I think that was the name.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Stone, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips. “That’s the hunting ground. That’s where they’re taking them from.”

“Hunting ground? What are you talking about?”

“Whoever’s taking these girls is using the Commercial to choose their victims,” said Stone. He paused, then looked like he’d come to some internal decision he wasn’t sure was too smart, but had realized was his only play. “Listen, I’ve been working with a couple of word-slingers from the Advertiser, a guy and a gal. He’s kinda hangdog, but he’s got good insight. She’s the smart one of the operation, though she tries to keep that quiet. I reckon if we all pool our resources, we might be able to do some good here, maybe even find those two gals before it’s too late for them. We’ve done some digging and found out a bunch of crazy stuff. Listen, you know this place and what’s going on better than me, so what do you say, professor? You want to step up and do some good?”

Oliver took another shot of whiskey, feeling the heat in his belly fending off the horror of the night’s events. Though he knew it was booze-bravery, he took heart from Stone’s appeal to his altruism and nodded.

“Yes, Mr. Stone, I think I do,” he said. “And I have a friend who might be of invaluable help. He knows far more of the rum and uncanny than I.”

“Get him along. The more heads we can bring together the better,” said Stone. “We’ve been using Aunt Lucy’s as a base of operations. You know it?”

“On Armitage?”

“Yeah, that’s the one,” said Stone. “How about I get you home and you meet us there tomorrow morning, say around eleven?”

“I can do that,” said Oliver. “But let me tell you this, Mr. Stone: so much is going on that I don’t know if there is anything we can do against what’s happening. It’s so unbelievable that I think I will have a hell of a job convincing your reporter friends that I’m not completely mad. I believe that what is happening in Arkham is bigger than all of us.”

“I knew it,” said Stone with a rueful shake of his head. “I’m not going to like it, am I?”

“No, I’m afraid you’re not.”

“I knew it,” repeated Stone. “I just damn well knew it…”

* * *

Finn counted out the few remaining coins in his pocket with a heavy heart. With every last cent he had scraped together, and a dime he’d been lucky enough to find on the sidewalk, Finn’s entire wealth amounted to a dollar fifty, which was pathetic in anyone’s book. He could afford to spend one more night here at Ma’s, before he’d have to descend to the level of a hobo. That meant finding a bed in the railroad yards or swallowing his pride and heading to The Beacon of Hope on River Street.

He wasn’t too keen on that last idea; the cops sometimes came through the Baptist charity house to see who was new and pick up wanted felons who’d chosen to hide out there. But if he got there early enough, he’d get a bed, some supper, and prayers for his soul from the well-wishing volunteers that worked there. Supper would be welcome, as would the bed, though the prayers he could do without. If his mam found out he’d taken charity from Baptists, she’d skin him alive.

The thought of his mam brought a smile to Finn’s face, imagining what she’d do to the men who were no doubt still seeking him through the seedier streets of Arkham. Though it had been risky, Finn had taken daily walks through the town while he’d waited for Professor Grayson and that pretty science gal to get back to him about the silver sphere. Touring his old haunts was out of the question. The gangsters looking for him would have eyes on every street corner, so he stuck to the neighborhoods where the swells lived in their marble-fronted brownstones and fancy townhouses. This too was a risk, as rich folk tended to take a dim view of scruffy characters like Finn walking around their neighborhoods. Quite rightly, they thought he looked like a burglar or worse, so he kept his pace quick and his route twisting.

Though Finn had lived in Arkham for a few years now, he felt like he didn’t even know the place anymore. He saw areas of Arkham he hadn’t known existed: dark winding passages through cobbled streets that seemed to wind back on themselves and spiral into areas of threatening garrets, and gambrel-roofed tenements that leaned crazily upon stones laid down when the first pilgrims had come ashore and set down their roots.

Blackstone churches and graveyards fenced in rusted iron appeared from the shadows. Shuttered houses with creaking doors and smoke-stained eaves ended streets that he would have sworn led to well-trafficked thoroughfares. It was ridiculous, but Finn felt like Arkham had somehow shifted, turned itself inside out or reoriented its geography in the last few days. 

Of course he could still find his way around the town, but any time his attention wandered, he would find himself in streets he didn’t recognize: weed-strewn squares in the cold shadow of a crooked steeple, or a dead end surrounded on three sides by leering windows from which issued hacking coughs, child’s cries, or the cackling laughter of crones.

On the streets he did recognize, the sidewalks were quiet and empty of people, which was bad for him, since it made him easier to spot. But it was more than just the quiet of emptiness; it was the silence of abandonment. He’d seen a good many stores with concertinaed gratings over the windows and boards hammered over their doors. From the Georgian and Colonial Houses of Northside, to the tumbledown warrens of lower Southside and everything in-between, he’d seen the same expression on every face.

Fear.

He’d seen something similar a few years back in Boston, during the height of the Spanish Flu epidemic, when anyone could be infected and you were scared to shake a friendly hand for fear of the invisible contagion. Thousands had died in the space of a few months, and the deadly terror that had spread in the wake of the disease had isolated whole swathes of the population as people became too afraid to travel. A siege mentality had pervaded the city, with the very lowest of Boston’s inhabitants bearing the brunt of the deadly plague.

By the end of the epidemic, God only knew how many had died. It had taken at least a year before the mood of the city returned to normal and people began to breathe the air like they were enjoying it, instead of fearing it might kill them. The deserted streets, the boarded up stores and the people crossing the street to avoid you: that was Boston at the height of the epidemic. 

And that was how Arkham felt right now. Like a city that people wanted to abandon, but were too afraid or too poor to leave.

Arkham wasn’t in the grip of a disease, but the unspoken fear that hid in plain sight behind its inhabitants’ eyes was all too apparent to Finn. Nobody was speaking of it, but everywhere he went he saw people go about their business with unaccustomed speed, refusing to linger where once they might have stopped to gossip about the weather, an upcoming fair, the latest church choir, or some other refuge of normality.

The streets around the schools were quiet, like the kids had been taken out of classes by scared parents, and the playgrounds were empty at recess. The teachers were keeping those few kids they had in class indoors, fearing something unutterable might happen were they to be left outside for even a moment. The town was quiet, weirdly so. Even the birds seemed to know something was wrong, keeping silent and close to their nests rather than venturing into the tainted sky above Arkham.

Finding those bodies under the bridge had scared the bejesus out of Arkham’s inhabitants. It was the final straw that had forced them to finally admit there was something unwholesome lurking beneath the carefully maintained New England façade. The surface had cracked, and Finn had seen dozens of cars and trucks hit the road by way of the turnpikes heading toward Boston and Essex. Some of those people would be back, some wouldn’t, but none of those who left could meet the eyes of those who remained behind. To flee was cowardice, but to stay was more than many could bear.

Finn didn’t blame them for leaving. He could sense the feeling of impending doom as well, a drum-taut tension in the air, like the hours before a big storm hits. Shadows seemed more menacing. Days felt shorter and the nights endless, as though the light were fighting a losing battle for supremacy over the long, fear-filled darkness. A heavy sense of foreboding lurked at the threshold of sensation, and Finn fought the urge to pack up what few possessions he owned and leave town.

But where would he go and what would he do?

He had no answer to those questions, and the thought was discarded as soon as it appeared. Finn had decided to face whatever was coming the moment he had seen young Jimmy torn to pieces by those flying monsters. Besides, he knew in his bones that the crimson-robed priest who’d led the army of cannibal monsters would find him no matter where he went.

The desire to flee was, paradoxically, tempered by the very danger that hung over Arkham like a gathering thunderhead. Better to face it on his terms than to be forever looking over his shoulder. Besides, he still had his revolver and ten bullets for anything that came for him. It was an old gun—battered, scraped, and well-used—but it had never let him down.

God help any bastard who tried to kill him.

At least the first ten of them.

* * *

Stone walked Oliver back to his home in Easttown. By the time he closed his door on the Pinkerton man it was past midnight. Fitful beams of streetlights and the faint glow of the moon lighted his home. He made his way unsteadily to the bottom of the stairs, gripping the banister tightly as he swayed on the deceptively level floorboards.

It had been an interesting evening he decided, and then laughed at the fabulous understatement of the thought. Monsters had tried to kill him, and he let out another bray of hysterical laughter. 

The booze had smoothed the rough edges enough for him to converse with Gabriel Stone, but as its effects began to wear off, the full horror of what might have happened in his office struck Oliver forcefully.

He imagined the office door breaking down and the dog-faced killers bursting in to tear him limb from limb and gnaw the flesh from his bones. Like everyone in Arkham, Oliver had heard the tall tales of ghoulish eaters of the dead that lingered in the shadow-haunted catacombs beneath the graveyards, but every town in New England had versions of such macabre superstition.

He wanted to go upstairs to bed, but his body had had enough, and he collapsed on the bottom step, sobbing at the nearness of death. What had he stepped into? What manner of world had he become part of, with its star-spanning horrors from beyond space, who possessed no concept of good and evil? In context of such extra-terrene entities, what did such notions even matter? Good and evil were simply humanistic ideas, and did not apply to creatures that had once ruled this world and were destined to rule it again if ancient prophecy and myth were to be believed.

The walls of his house, once homely and welcoming, were now suffocating and imprisoning. His books and papers were meaningless collections of ephemera, inconsequential and worthless in the face of humanity’s ultimate extinction. Oliver could barely grasp the edges of the world he inhabited, every certainty and pillar upon which his world had rested was now revealed to be as insubstantial as mist.

He rose angrily and went to the first shelf he could reach, tearing the books out and hurling them across the room. His rage and fear consumed him. Oliver emptied his shelves, a library’s worth of information and knowledge strewn around and discarded like so much trash. Oliver howled in inchoate rage, breaking the spines of books accumulated over two decades of study and academic research. Papers were torn, books broken, and diplomas smashed from the walls.

His rage spent, Oliver collapsed in the middle of the room, surrounded by the debris of his hysterical vandalism. With his hands over his face, he wept for his species, his soul, and the lives that walked through this world with no inkling of the infinitely terrible things surrounding them.

How he envied them!

Oliver’s breath and heart rate finally slowed, and he took a heaving breath as his mind fought to hold onto the frayed ends of sanity remaining to him. Was this how Henry had felt after reading those terrible books in the French chateau? And Morley Dean? Had this been what had driven him to seek solace within the walls of an asylum for the mad? Both these men had faced horrors and succumbed to them. Of the two, Morley had emerged from his time of madness to make his solitary way in the world, but Henry remained lost in his delusions.

It had taken four years for Henry’s mind to collapse, whereas Oliver had been reduced to lunatic aggression in the space of a few days. What kind of ally would he make for Alexander if his mind could not face up to such truths without buckling? How terrible it must have been for Henry to know the truth of the world and feel it eating away at his mind with terrifying inevitability.

Thinking of Henry and Morley brought a measure of calm to Oliver, and though he knew he teetered on the brink of an endless abyss from which there could be no escape, he willingly stared into its blackness. He felt it looking back at him, daring him to accept its truth and yet still present a quotidian face to the world. Could he do that?

He stared at the destruction he had wrought on his own possessions and knew the answer to that question.

Slowly and with infinite care, Oliver began replacing every book and paper on his shelves.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Funny how you could get used to almost anything given enough time, thought Amanda. Her wrists didn’t hurt as much from the iron fetters and she’d given up trying to ignore the hunger pains in her stomach. The darkness of the cave wasn’t nearly as scary as it had been when she’d first woken up, and even the strange snuffling, grunting snorts of the chained creatures in the caves seemed less threatening.

Or perhaps that was just the fatigue talking.

Rita lay next to her, breathing in short, shallow gasps as she dreamed fitfully. Amanda had lost track of time, and didn’t know whether days or weeks had passed since that night at the Commercial. With no sunlight to leaven the gloom, the passage of time became impossible to judge. There had been no contact with the robed men to give any indication of how long they had been here.

The only change in their environment had come when they’d heard through their drowsiness the creak and clang of metal as the cage doors were opened and the pale-skinned monsters were allowed to slunk from their confinement to venture beyond the cave. Rita and Amanda had listened to them leave, barking and hooting to one another as though they were talking. Here and there Amanda had thought she recognized a word, but that was surely just her imagination.

Rita stirred from her uneasy sleep and rolled onto her side.

“What… Where?” she said, before remembering where she was.

“Hey you,” said Amanda, her voice little more than a faint croak. She was so thirsty, and licking the brackish moisture from the rock walls was hardly a substitute for a long drink of water. Even at the fullest extent of their chains, they couldn’t reach the edge of the inky black pool, though from the smell of it, Amanda figured that was a blessing.

“Oh hell,” said Rita. “It wasn’t just a nightmare.”

“No,” said Amanda. “I’m afraid it’s not.”

“I miss anything?” said Rita, sitting upright and massaging her belly with the heels of her palms. She groaned in hunger.

“I don’t think so,” said Amanda. “I think I dozed for a little bit, but I don’t really remember. It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

“Tell me about it,” said Rita, her voice little more than a croak. “What I wouldn’t give to have Mama Josette here right now. Or my daddy with his shotgun. Both would be nice.”

Amanda didn’t say anything, not entirely happy with Rita’s faith in such strange beliefs. Everything she’d heard about voodoo, which admittedly wasn’t much, told her that it was bad news. Right now, though, she’d take any help they could get.

“Those things come back yet?”

“I don’t think so,” said Amanda. “Where do you think they went?”

“I don’t wanna know. Probably off killing for those robed-up sons of bitches.”

It felt good to hear a curse so earthy and grounded when their world had been turned upside down.

Amanda sighed, “At least they haven’t come back downstairs.”

“Who?”

“The men in robes. I thought they’d come back with some food.”

“Food? Where do you think we are, a hotel?”

“No, but if they’re going to keep us here, they need to feed us.”

“I don’t think they plan to keep us here all that long,” said Rita. “Leastways, it’s not like they’re going to head out and get us some somethin’ fresh from Velma’s Diner.”

“Oh, let’s not talk about food anymore,” begged Amanda. “I’m so hungry I could eat until I burst.”

“Sorry,” said Rita. “But you brought it up.”

“Golly, I’m so hungry,” said Amanda, leaning her head back on the cave wall.

“They’re just trying to get us so weak that we’ll do what they want.”

Amanda pulled at her chains and whispered a swear word under her breath.

“But it’s all so unnecessary,” she pouted. “You heard what they told me. I have to tell them about my dreams or they’ll kill you.”

“You ain’t thinking of saying anything are you?” said Rita, sitting up suddenly.

“Of course,” said Amanda. “You think I’d let them hurt you?”

“Don’t be foolish,” said Rita, turning to look her straight in the eye. “You tell them about your dreams and we’re both dead.”

“But they’ll feed you to those…things.”

Rita shook her head. “They’ll do that anyway. Now you listen here, Amanda Sharpe, don’t you say nothing to no one about your dreams. If they want to know what you been dreaming about, it ain’t for any good reason I can think of. All this talk of ‘Great Old Ones’ smacks of some real black magic to me, and if what you been seeing helps these bastards out, then you got to hold on tight to that. Don’t breathe a word of it, you hear me?”

Amanda nodded, but said, “I won’t let them hurt you. I can’t watch them…do anything to you. I just can’t.”

“Don’t you worry none about me,” said Rita. “I got some moves.”

“What are you talking about?”

Rita held up her right hand, which glistened red with blood. It took Amanda a moment to realize what was different about it. Her hunger and thirst had dulled her mind so much that she didn’t at fist register that Rita’s hand was no longer confined to the manacle.

“Your hand!” cried Amanda. “How did you—”

“Quiet down, Mandy,” hissed Rita. “You want the whole world to know?”

“Sorry,” said Amanda, clamping a hand over her mouth. “But how?”

“I told you. I got moves. And I got skinny wrists and a high tolerance for pain.”

Before Amanda could say more, distant light from one of the barred cells filtered into the cave, followed by squealing grunts that might have been pain or triumph. It was hard to tell. A door opened somewhere above them and more light spilled into the cave as a trio of robed figures made their way down the carved steps.

Rita put her hands behind her back and slumped against the cold wall. She gestured at Amanda to do the same. The two girls watched as the robed priest followed two of his acolytes into the cave. It was impossible to tell whether it was the same two they had first encountered, but there was no mistaking the terrible purpose emanating from their leader.

One of the figures unlocked a grate in the wall, and a bedraggled group of shapes emerged into the light. Two of the dog-faced monsters, their pallid flesh streaked with blood, hauled in two more. One of the dragged bodies was clearly dead, its chest punctured by two cratered wounds that looked like bullet holes. Its body was dropped unceremoniously upon the floor and Amanda saw its back was a ruined mess of blood and bone fragments. The gun that had made those holes in its chest must have been a heavy caliber. Amanda’s dad had taught her and her brother to shoot as soon as they were able to hold a pistol, and while her brother was the better shot, Amanda had held her own. Right now she wished she had her dad’s .38 revolver to finish the job on the rest of them. The other beast being carried wept blood from two gunshot wounds in its belly and chest, and its breath heaved in tortured hikes.

The creature the robed priest had called Latimer appeared to have lost an eye, and his monstrous companion had taken a bullet to the shoulder. The priest barked a string of guttural commands, unintelligible to Amanda’s ears, but somehow understood by the monsters.

The wounded beast dropped to its knees, and it squealed in terror. It raised its hands in supplication, but there was no mercy to be had. Latimer’s claws slashed out and tore the kneeling beast’s throat. Blood arced across the chamber, squirting like a punctured pressure hose. The creature gurgled in pain and fear, falling onto its front and convulsing in its pitiful death throes. Another command was issued, horrid and animal and hideous that it had issued from a man’s throat.

The two surviving beasts fell upon their dead brothers, clawing and biting in a frenzy of hunger. Raw chunks of meat were torn from chests and thighs, lifted to bloodied jaws, and devoured whole. They attacked the corpses with tooth and claw, ripping flesh, snapping bones, and sucking the marrow as if they’d been starved for weeks.

Amanda buried her head in Rita’s shoulder as the butchery continued, the slurping, smacking, chewing, and tearing noises too terrible to contemplate. This was no genteel feast, but a frenzy of diabolical appetite. Snapped off limbs were hurled aside, bones gnawed clean of meat were discarded like trash and scooped out skulls were tossed into the water.

At last it was over, and Amanda looked up to see the red robed priest standing before her. She tried to see past the shadows clinging to his face beneath his hood, but the fuliginous darkness was impenetrable and she could see nothing.

“Amanda,” he said, his voice sounding almost reasonable. “You see now that my ghouls are none too tender in their mercies. Do you really want to see Rita thrown to them? Their hunger has been sated for a moment, so they probably wouldn’t kill her quickly. I imagine they might gnaw her leg to the bone for a day. Then perhaps they would move on to the arms, taking a finger at a time as a snack. And after that they might kill her as they look for sweeter morsels in the belly or skull. Can you imagine listening to your friend as she screams for death? Think of hearing Rita beg for mercy that you can give her as she is slowly eaten alive over a period of days.”

“Don’t you tell him nothing, Amanda!” spat Rita.

The priest loomed over Rita and backhanded her across the face. Her head snapped back and she spat a mouthful of blood.

“Please! Don’t hurt her!” cried Amanda.

“I won’t,” said the priest. “But I can make no such promise for Latimer and his brothers. You can end this now by telling me everything I want to know. I gave you time to consider your position and to understand the seriousness of this matter, but now I require an answer.”

“Don’t you say nothing,” hissed Rita. “Keep your mouth shut!”

“We’ll see how brave you are when you see your body being eaten in front of you,” said the priest, gesturing toward where the ghouls swallowed whole handfuls of raw, bloodied meat. “Time is now of the essence, so I will return again this evening. If you are still of a mind to resist, then that is when Rita will die. The choice is yours, Amanda.”

Amanda blinked back tears and said, “I’m not telling you anything.”

The man shook his head, as though disappointed.

“You will change your mind, I promise.”

“No,” said Amanda. “I won’t.”

“We’ll see,” said the priest, as his robed acolytes herded the flesh-sated ghouls back into their cave cells. With a final shake of his head, the priest turned and ascended the stairs, his acolytes in tow, leaving Amanda and Rita in the familiar twilight of their prison. The occasional grunt and smack of lips from within the monsters’ cells echoed as the ghouls ate the last mouthfuls of their ghastly meal.

“Oh! Rita, what are we going to do?” said Amanda when she was sure they were alone. “He’s going to kill you. I can’t let him hurt you. I can’t let that happen! I’m sorry. I’m going to tell him everything I’ve been dreaming.”

“I told you already, you ain’t saying nothing!” said Rita, lying on the ground and stretching her chain as long as it would go. She reached out with her free hand toward something wet and glistening on the floor. Amanda couldn’t see what it was, but Rita grunted as she stretched to the farthest extent of her reach.

Rita scrabbled on the ground. “Come on, damn you…,” she muttered.

“What are you doing?” hissed Amanda.

“Getting armed,” said Rita triumphantly as she snagged the object. Rita rolled back and sat up in front of Amanda.

“What is that?”

“This, Amanda,” said Rita, holding up her prize, “is our way out of here.”

She held up a pale white object dripping, red, and coated with gobbets of chewed flesh. It was a splintered thighbone, one end like a clenched fist, the other sharp and jagged where it had been snapped below the trochanter.

“Anyone comes near me and I stick this in their throat,” said Rita.

“And then what?” cried Amanda. “There’s no way out of here.”

“Weren’t you watching?” said Rita with a feral grin. “I thought you were the smart one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you see? The bits of meat those ghouls threw into the pool? They got pulled into the grate by a current. That means the water is tidal. I’d stake my life that pool connects to the Miskatonic.”

Rita tucked her makeshift weapon behind her and stared at the black waters of the pool.

“It’s not much, I know,” she said, “but it’s a way out, and that’s good enough for me.”

* * *

Oliver woke to the sound of a telephone ringing. His head hurt and his eyes had trouble focusing. His mouth felt dry and sticky, and it took him a moment to remember the numerous shots of whiskey he’d had with Gabriel Stone at the nameless speakeasy. How much had he had to drink? He didn’t take much in the way of booze, and it had hit him pretty hard. The ringing of the telephone was insistent and wasn’t going away, so he swung himself out of bed and threw on a bathrobe before making his way downstairs.

The telephone sat on a table beside the door and Oliver rubbed his eyes as he picked it up.

A voice in the earpiece said, “Putting your call through now,” and after the requisite buzzing crackle, a woman’s hesitant voice sounded in his ear.

“Professor Grayson, is that you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Who is this?”

“It’s Kate Winthrop, Professor Grayson.”

“Miss Winthrop, thank God you’re safe!” exclaimed Oliver. “I feared the worst when I saw what had happened to the laboratory. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you. I got out of the laboratory before the sound pulse went off.”

“I’m so glad to hear it,” said Oliver. “And please accept my apology. I am so dreadfully sorry for putting you in danger. I had no idea that device would prove to be so dangerous.”

“No, no, not at all, I’m glad you did.”

“You are?”

“Of course,” said Kate, and Oliver could hear her excitement through the miles of copper wiring that connected them. “This is an incredible device, and it only caused that damage because it believed it was under attack.”

“I’m sorry,” said Oliver. “I don’t understand.”

“I was drilling into the device when it unleashed that sonic pulse,” explained Kate. “It interpreted that as an attack and defended itself. Now listen carefully, Professor, I’m in the library just now. In fact I’ve been here all night looking into the symbols etched into its surface, and…and I think I know what this was built for.”

“You do? Excellent. What is it?”

“Well, I think it’s part of another device—a component of a similar, but much larger object. The different configurations of the device alter the local electromagnetic fields, breaking down the molecular bonds in the walls between worlds. Essentially, this is a key that can be used to unlock gateways between worlds. If you know the right sequence of movements of its surface lattice you could travel between two impossibly distant points in a single step.”

“Miss Winthrop, that’s incredible! How did you come to such conclusions?”

“I know it sounds ludicrous, but the readings I took from the lab after the accident go a long way to proving it. And I’ve looked into some of the books Professor Armitage keeps in the restricted section, and…well, I think that it might not be of…of…human manufacture. I mean, it’s made of an alloy that I can’t identify, and the diamond-tipped drill in the lab didn’t even scratch the surface.”

“Not human?” said Oliver, realizing how natural that sounded to his ears now.

“Yes,” said Kate, as if daring him to contradict her.

“And you say you’re in the library just now?”

“I am, yes.”

“Then stay there until I come and find you,” said Oliver. His coat was hanging by the front door, and he fished in the pocket for his watch. “It’s…damn, it’s almost ten o’clock already, and I have a rather important meeting that may have a bearing on your findings. But I will come to the library directly afterward and we will track down Mr. Edwards. It’s about time we made him tell us how he came upon this device once and for all.”

* * *

The door to Oliver’s office looked like someone had taken an axe to it. By the time he reached the university, his headache had begun to abate, though his mouth was still gummy and tasted of sour bile. A number of the faculty staff gathered around the entrance to his office as the building’s custodians took it from its hinges and lifted it away. Oliver brushed aside inquisitive looks and questions, spinning a number of lies about frat boy pranks or drunks looking for a place to sleep. He didn’t care whether his explanations sounded convincing or not. He just wanted people to leave him alone.

The interior of his office appeared to be untouched, a fact for which he was profoundly grateful. The notes he had made from the wax cylinders of Henry’s ravings were still lying on his desk.

He gathered up the notes and swiftly penned a letter on university-headed notepaper to Professor Drouet of the Department of Modern Languages. This he folded and placed in an envelope, together with a carbon copy of the words Henry had spoken in French. Marking the envelope urgent, he popped the letter in the interdepartmental mail slot fixed to the wall outside his office.

It felt strange transitioning between his office and the hallway without recourse to a door, but the smashed remnants could hardly be left hanging in splinters. He returned to his seat behind the desk and checked his watch. Twenty-five to eleven. Time enough. Alexander would be here soon—Oliver had called him before heading to the campus—and then they could make their way to Aunt Lucy’s in time for the meeting with Stone and his reporter friends.

Oliver gathered up the wax cylinders and placed them back in the box in which he had transported them from Arkham Asylum. Hardstrom had been explicit in his desire for the cylinders to be returned to him, and Oliver saw no need not to comply with the doctor’s wishes. As he filled the box, the cold wax and linear grooves were a reminder of how easily a mind could crumble. Last night’s clarity of purpose might be short-lived, and Oliver closed his eyes as he tried to reorder his thoughts.

“I’m not interrupting am I?” said Alexander from the doorway.

Oliver looked up and gave a weak smile.

“No, of course not. Come in.”

“It isn’t like I need an invitation now, is it?” said Alexander, moving through the unbarred portal to Oliver’s office. “What the devil happened here?”

Oliver ushered Alexander into his office, waving him to silence. As Alexander took a seat in front of the desk, Oliver quickly outlined the events of the previous evening, the transcription of Henry’s madness, the attack of the beasts, his rescue by Stone, and the subsequent laying of plans to meet.

“And you trust this man?” asked Alexander.

“I do,” said Oliver. “If he wanted me dead, he could have just left me to those creatures.”

“I suppose,” mused Alexander. “Though it does seem rather convenient his being there just as you needed help. Perhaps he has an ulterior motive in mind.”

“I don’t think so. The man seemed genuine, Alexander. For heaven’s sake, his daughter was murdered. Hardly makes him a candidate for suspicion, now does it?”

“True, but we are engaged in a perilous game here, Oliver,” said Alexander. “We must suspect everyone and trust nothing. Stone could have set those creatures on you and then driven them off to earn your trust, which he seems to have done admirably.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Oliver.

“You have no idea how devious our enemies can be, my friend,” warned Alexander. “But we shall give this man the benefit of the doubt for now. And these transcriptions, you still have them?”

Oliver nodded and passed over his notebook. Alexander scanned the words with interest, and Oliver saw him recoil in horror from the lurid and grisly details recounted upon the pages. “Dear Heavens!” said Alexander. “This is dreadful stuff, Oliver. And you say this is all from Henry Cartwright?”

“I’m afraid so,” nodded Oliver. “The poor man’s mind has unraveled beyond the pale. Do you recognize or understand any of the text? I thought it sounded somewhat old, though I confess I have no understanding of French.”

“Yes, it’s old right enough,” agreed Alexander, tracing his finger along certain portions of the text. “The verb form and some of the sentence structure is quite archaic, a form not used much now except by some very old-fashioned scholars. Like you, my expertise is more in the Arabic and proto-Aramaic languages, so I can’t help with the translation.”

“Not to worry, I’ve sent a copy to Julien Drouet in modern languages,” said Oliver. “He should be able to translate it. And once I have that, I plan to send it to an old colleague of mine from my days at Brown. Morley Dean, do you know him?”

“By reputation only,” said Alexander. “Are you sure it’s wise to disseminate these words so freely? After all, Dean’s mind snapped once already under the pressure of such horrors. This might cause him to experience another breakdown.”

“I thought about that, but there’s no one better qualified to get to the bottom of where this text came from and what it might mean.”

Alexander spread his hands wide and gave a short bow of the head. “Very well, Oliver. I bow to your greater familiarity with Mr. Dean. I look forward to hearing what he has to say.”

Oliver checked his watch again and stood to retrieve his coat.

“It’s ten minutes to eleven,” he said. “We should probably be on our way.”

Alexander rose from his seat. “And again I have to ask if you are sure this is a good idea? Not everyone is equipped to understand or comprehend the foes ranged against us. In such dealings I find it is always best to proceed with caution.”

“Then let caution be our watchword,” said Oliver.

* * *

Oliver hadn’t seen Gabriel Stone through the window of Aunt Lucy’s, an eatery in which he’d never taken a meal. It was mostly empty, too late for the breakfast crowd and too early for the lunchtime rush. The décor was faintly rustic, reminiscent of his grandmother’s parlor back in Fell’s Point in Baltimore. A pair of waitresses toured the tables, dispensing coffee and taking orders, but there was little for them to do.

“Do you see him?” asked Alexander.

Oliver finally spied Stone in a booth toward the back of the establishment, almost out of sight of the diner’s main thoroughfare. He sat with his hat perched on the back of his head despite the hour and being indoors. A man and woman sat with him, but Oliver could only see the backs of their heads just now.

“Over there,” said Oliver, setting off across the worn carpet toward their rendezvous.

He and Alexander arrived at the chipped table booth and Oliver removed his hat.

“Mr. Stone,” he said. “Sorry we’re a bit late. Got a bit caught up with all that happened last night, you understand.”

“Sure,” said Stone. “I get it. It was a rough night for you. Grab some coffee and join us. These are the reporters I was telling you about.”

When Stone didn’t continue, Oliver extended his hand. “Oliver Grayson, professor of anthropology and ancient languages at Miskatonic University. And this is Alexander Templeton, professor of ancient religions. Also at Miskatonic.”

“That’s a lot of ancient,” said the man opposite Stone. The reporter was disheveled and looked like he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a month. Oliver knew how he felt. His rumpled face was handsome in a downtrodden way, and the dark rings framing his eyes spoke of heavy burdens being carried by an old soul.

The young man stuck out his hand. “Rex Murphy, I work at the Advertiser.”

Before Murphy could introduce her, the woman stuck her hand out and said, “And I’m Minnie Klein, photographer of the strange and impossible. I sometimes work at the Advertiser, but who knows how long that’s going to last, eh, Rex?”

“Harvey will get a good story,” said Rex. “Look at the sources we have now.”

“Okay, so we’re all buddies now,” said Stone. “We’re all here for one reason, and one reason alone. Someone’s been killing girls in this town for years, and it’s time they were stopped. Between us we probably know enough to get a good idea of who that might be. Or if we don’t, we’ve got a hell of a good head start on the cops. Agreed?”

Murphy and Klein nodded, and Oliver wondered what they and Stone had uncovered in their investigations.

“Right, if we’re going to do this together, we can’t have any secrets,” continued Stone. “We’re here to lay out everything we know, full disclosure. And once we’ve gotten everything out in the open, we’ll try and figure out what it means and what we can do about what’s going on in this damn town.”

Oliver nodded. “That sounds eminently sensible.”

“I concur,” said Alexander. “We can have no subterfuge between us.”

“Agreed,” said Rex with a wry smile. “Full disclosure.”

“I got nothing to hide,” added Minnie.

Oliver felt a strange frisson to this meeting, as though this assembly of very different people was meant to happen. In the normal run of things, Oliver would never expect to deal with a Pinkerton agent and two reporters, but there was an energy to this gathering he could see reflected on every face around the table.

This was right. This was the beginning of something.

It wasn’t much to oppose the dreadful forces at work in Arkham.

But it was a start.

Part Three

Waves on the Shore, 1926

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Stone opened their assembly with the sad tale of his daughter’s death. He told how he had come to Arkham and met up with Rex and Minnie and the content of their first meeting. The two reporters filled in their half of the story, beginning with their sighting of Stone on the edge of the athletics field and the suspicion that he might have something to do with the murder.

The Pinkerton man went on to describe how he had discovered that many more girls were missing than anyone had thought. Oliver and Alexander gasped at these revelations, unaware that their monstrous enemies had exacted such a horrific toll upon the town. Oliver spoke of Amanda Sharpe and Rita Young’s disappearance, now appreciating that their vanishing was but the latest in a bloody chain stretching back many years.

At a nod from Stone, Rex spoke of how he and Minnie had canvassed the students at Miskatonic and learned that the Commercial Club was the place to go to listen to jazz, dance, and sample the delights of illegal liquor. Minnie took up the tale, outlining their visit to the Commercial Club, and the details, so far as Blind Rufus had told them, of Lydia Stone’s last night there.

“That’s where Amanda and Rita went the night they disappeared,” said Oliver.

“I reckon the Commercial’s the key,” said Stone. “Whoever’s doing this is using it as their own private game reserve. All those young girls, drunk or high or both…it’s easy pickings.”

Though he spoke with hard-boiled candor, everyone seated around the table could see how difficult it was for Stone to keep his composure.

“So what do we do, stake out the joint?” asked Rex. “It can’t be me or Minnie. Rufus would recognize us.”

“I thought you said he was blind,” pointed out Oliver.

“He is, but he…well, he sees somehow,” said Rex. “Trust me, he’d know.”

Stone shook his head. “We don’t got time for that. Those two girls have been missing for three days now. If we don’t find them soon, they’re as good as dead.”

“If they’re not already,” said Rex.

“They’re alive,” said Stone. “I know it. If they were dead, someone would have found their bodies by now. Like I said, whoever’s doing this wants this town afraid. They want folk so scared they shut all their doors and bar all their windows. People that are afraid are easy to control and they do what they’re told. All those bodies turning up threw the town into a panic, and folk are leaving every day. I’ve seen the boarded up stores and I’ve seen how people look at each other. Hell, the Brits could march back in here and take over again and no one would notice right now.”

“You think that’s what these killings are all about?” asked Alexander.

“Yeah, I do,” said Stone. “In themselves they’re not the killer’s goal, but they’re paralyzing Arkham and making it real easy for someone to get on with another plan and not have anyone else notice. And it’s been going on for a long time.”

Stone went on to list the many unusual incidents that had occurred throughout the history of Arkham, a string of events that painted a grim tapestry of the macabre and inexplicable. It seemed absurd that a man new to town should be the one to point out the madness lurking beneath the surface of their home, but sometimes it takes an outsider to see what’s hiding in plain sight.

Rex nodded when Stone recounted the decades-old case of the cannibal murderer who stalked the streets in the wake of the typhoid outbreak.

“Yeah, I remember that,” said Rex. “Before my time, of course, but I remember the old guys that used to staff the office talking about it. Big news in its day, closest this town ever got to waking up from its morning coffee.”

Alexander dismissed Stone’s theory that such a madman could still be on the loose.

“If he were such a deranged maniac, then he would have kept killing until one of two things happened: either he would be caught again or you would have seen a consistent number of murders occurring since his escape from Sefton.”

“Thing is, professor,” said Stone in rebuttal, “we have. If this guy escaped in 1921, then he might have been kept controlled or, I dunno, chained up in someone’s basement until now. The first disappearance I have is Mary Ellen Masters, last seen October 15, 1923. And then I got a steady flow of missing persons, murder victims, and runaways that ain’t runaways.”

“True, but the murders we’re seeing here seem more planned,” said Alexander, “like the girls are being chosen, almost as though there’s something special about them. That doesn’t seem to fit how the Sefton killer hunted.”

“There’s that,” admitted Stone, realizing the truth of Alexander’s words. “And killers don’t tend to curb their lusts, only develop them. I knew it was a long shot, but what else we got?”

And so Oliver told them of Finn Edward’s curious silver sphere and Kate Winthrop’s belief that it was a key that would allow its bearer to open doors between worlds. The others looked at him strangely, but Oliver carried on regardless. He had no idea whether Finn’s object held any relevance to the murders, but they had declared that there would be no secrets between them, and Oliver intended to hold true to that intent.

Minnie told him of Edward’s criminal past, and Oliver felt a little queasy at the thought of having dealt with such a violent member of society. A bootlegger and brawler—what else might Finn Edwards be mixed up in?

Taking a moment to compose himself, Oliver went on to tell of how Amanda Sharpe had come to him with her dreams of a sunken city, a desolate undersea mausoleum that bore a striking resemblance to the one described in the myth cycles of the Yopasi tribe. He told the assembled group of the patterns he had discovered in the legends of other tribal groups scattered throughout the world. Some of these, explained Oliver, were actively worshipping the being said to be entombed within the submerged city, while others were engaged in some manner of warding duty.

Though he was reluctant to voice the hideous name of the slumbering demon within the seaweed-encrusted city, he finally said it out loud.

Cthulhu.

The name was unknown to the others, yet its utterance had a profound effect on all three. Rex blanched at the name and Minnie’s eyes widened in fear. Stone’s fists clenched, and Oliver gave them a moment to recover before continuing. He told them of the tome Alexander had given him, the damnable work of Laban Shrewsbury, and in hesitant, halting words, he told them the gist of its fractured, incomplete contents.

Though it was close to noon, the light from outside Lucy’s seemed to dim, as though the mere mention of such beings as the Great Old Ones was enough to affect some atmospheric change. Shadows appeared where no shadows should have been, and the five of them drew closer around the table. Minnie took Rex’s hand as Oliver spoke of these monstrous godlike beings who slumbered in the forgotten places of the world, and whose devotees worked in the shadows to hasten their return to the mortal realms.

He could see skepticism on Stone’s face, but it was studied denial—the face of an investigator confronting a criminal’s truthful alibi: wanting it to be false, but knowing it wasn’t. 

Alexander spoke of how some people were more sensitive than others to the horrid dreams of the slumbering Cthulhu: how artists, sculptors, and poets might often be moved to loathsome bouts of creativity by some strange psychic vibrations from uncounted fathoms beneath the ocean.

Minnie nodded at this and told of how, in March of last year, she had been moved to take some of the strangest photographs she had ever conceived. Though hesitant to talk of them openly, Minnie described how she had traveled in the depths of the night to the riverfront to take photographs of the Miskatonic River and the strange, blasted island nestling between the Garrison and West Street Bridges. Fires burned on that island, and the images she later developed in the Advertiser’s darkroom bore no relation to what she had believed she had captured on film: strange, phantom images of the water, the ripples forming vague suggestions of grasping tentacles reaching up from the bottom of the river; glimmering obelisks, hidden so deep as to be unreachable, wavering in the black water; shadowy suggestions of giant creatures capering in the ruins of a half-glimpsed city formed from titanic blocks of unimaginable scale.

“What did you do with the photographs?” asked Oliver.

“I burned them,” said Minnie, sheepishly. “I couldn’t keep them in the house. They gave me the creeps and I couldn’t sleep knowing they were there.”

Rex too was moved by Minnie’s confession to nod and admit to a period of strange mood swings around the same time.

“I was an okay reporter,” said Rex. “Nothing too sharp, though. I could spin a good yarn to keep your average Joe interested, but I was never going to win any prizes. Most of my stories had a habit of getting away from me at the last minute. A witness would forget what they saw, or some real juicy bit of proof would get lost in the post or something. It was a bad time for me. I was drinkin’ too much and I didn’t know from one day to the next whether I’d have a job. From the sounds of it, looks like it was around the time Minnie was taking those weird photographs that I started getting these hinky vibes whenever I saw a crime scene. Before, I’d just look at it and write what I saw, but then I started writing what I was feeling. I could look at a place where someone had died and I’d know, just know, what the emotion of the place was. I could write about the murder like I’d been there, like I’d felt what the victim had felt. I could write about death like I was Fitzgerald or Hemingway. All of a sudden folk wanted to read what I was writing, but it went just as quickly. I’ve been trying to get it back ever since, but so far it ain’t happening.”

“So, we’re buying into this?” asked Stone. “Monsters beneath the sea?”

“I’ve seen too much and read too much to take such matters lightly, Mr. Stone,” said Alexander. “Our very reluctance to believe in these creatures is their strongest ally. As we march into the modern world, with its glitz and glamour and so-called technological innovation, we forget the history the younger generation seems in such a rush to leave behind. All history becomes legend and myth with enough time. And even if you don’t accept what we are telling you, isn’t it enough to know that the people we are looking for believe it?”

Stone shrugged. “I guess that’ll do for now. I don’t care whether they believe in some underwater squid monster or fairies in a garden. All I need to know is what they are and how we stop them.”

“I think I can shed some light on what they are,” said Alexander. “But first I will need to tell you a little more of how I came to be in possession of the unholy knowledge of the Great Old Ones.”

And Alexander told them of the Great War.

* * *

“I was a Marine captain in the 3rd Division during the war, part of the American Expeditionary Force,” said Alexander. “We were billeted in a little place called Pavont when the Germans attacked the western front in March of 1918. It was part of their spring offensive, and they were hoping to push the British army back before the American forces were in place. But they didn’t figure on old Bundy, Major General of the US 2nd.”

Alexander’s eyes lost their focus and Oliver knew he was back in the mud and horror of France, reliving the terror of those days of battle and bloodshed. He could only imagine how vile it must have been to take part in such slaughter.

“The British 5th Army took a hell of a beating, and there wasn’t much left of them by the time the Germans were finished. I remember seeing the stragglers and wounded coming south in a never-ending convoy. I don’t mind telling you that it scared me to see so many men broken and bloodied in so short a time. What had we come to as a species when we could inflict such mayhem on one another? But I was a captain and I had a job to do. The brass threw us forward to Château-Thierry alongside the 2nd Army Division and we took up position in the shelled ruins of the castle, stretched out along the southern banks of the Marne. We were there for a few days before the Germans attacked, but before then, Henry Cartwright and I discovered a hidden library secreted in the catacombs of the castle.”

“Cartwright?” said Stone. “The guy in Arkham Asylum who set those fires back in 1923?”

“The very same,” said Oliver sadly.

“Yes, Henry and I served together in France, and may God forgive me, but what we found in that library is what set him on the road to his lunatic fire-starting. He and I descended into the library, a dusty, cobwebbed place filled with ancient books, scrolls, and collections of what looked like occult paraphernalia. Henry and I, together with a few Marines of a more academic bent perused the books, and not a day goes by where I wish I had not succumbed to my curiosity and thirst for knowledge. What I read in those books has haunted me ever since and my happy ignorance of the horrible truth of the universe was forever shattered. Yet as great an effect as those books had on me, it was nothing compared to the effect it had on Henry and the others. Most could not bear the horrors recounted in those books, and they took their own lives, but before we could learn much more, the Germans attacked.”

Alexander paused, and such was the pregnant weight of expectation hanging on his words that no one dared press him to continue. This was a tale that would be told at its own pace.

“We came under heavy shellfire at dawn, followed by wave after wave of German soldiers. The smoke was thick over the river and the rain was making it hard to see much of anything, but we were Marines and we train harder than anyone else. My men fought like damn heroes, even though we felt like we were in our own Alamo. But even Marines have their breaking point, and by the end of the afternoon, we’d reached ours. We’d taken heavy losses, but just when I thought we were going to be overrun, the damnedest thing happened. Huge fires erupted among the German forces, like living balls of flame that leapt from man to man, igniting everything they touched. I swear it was like the fire was alive. Like fireflies made of fire. A storm of embers engulfed the German soldiers and I reckon it would have gotten us too if we hadn’t taken shelter behind the walls. Inside of a minute, the battle was over. All that was left of the attackers were blackened corpses, burned so far beyond recognition it was hard to tell they’d once been human.”

“What was it?” asked Minnie, still holding onto Rex’s hand. “What happened?”

“At first we thought it was our artillery dropping incendiary rounds. Dropped hellishly close to us, it’s true, but we didn’t mind since they’d saved our bacon and no mistake. It was only later I found out we didn’t have any guns nearby with those kind of shells. You needed to be close to use incendiaries, as the phosphor burns up so quickly. There wasn’t a gun with that kind of shell within ten miles of us.”

“So what was it?” said Rex.

“It was Henry,” said Alexander. “The books we’d found contained all manner of arcane secrets, the names and histories of creatures so terrible as to defy explanation. They also contained the incantations, formulae, and vile words needed to summon aspects of their form to Earth. Henry had made use of one such rite to bring down a shred of a being known as Cthugha, an ancient Old One whose matter is said to be composed entirely of fire that burns with the intensity of a star.”

Oliver listened with stoic intensity, now understanding a measure of the mysterious rants Henry had issued in the years since his incarceration. To hear of things that could only be described as spells was incredible, but what was even more incredible was the ease with which he could assimilate this into his new worldview.

“Of course, I didn’t realize this at the time; it wasn’t until later I learned of what Henry was capable. In any case, we were obliged to fall back from the castle the following day, and despite my misgivings, Henry insisted we bear with us as many of the accursed books as we could before the Germans took Château-Thierry.”

Alexander paused, allowing his audience a moment to process what he was telling them. After a mouthful of coffee, he continued.

“The next time we fought the Germans was at a place called Belleau Wood. Fritz had punched through the French to our left, so our boys marched six miles through the night to take up positions along the Paris-Metz highway. It wasn’t pretty, but the pasting the French had taken didn’t leave us a lot of choice. We were told to hold where we stood, so we dug shallow fighting pits and when they came at us we gave them hell with volley after volley of gunfire. We sent them running with their tails between their legs. The Frenchies kept telling us to fall back, but we told them straight, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!” I have to give the Germans their due—they kept coming, but we held our positions. No way were we letting them through.

“Anyway, we had them stuck fast, and before they could plan something else we took the initiative and hit them first. The French attacked to our left and we launched an assault on Hill 142 to stop them getting torn up by flanking fire.”

Oliver’s breath caught in his throat.

“142!” he exclaimed. “Henry keeps raving about 142! Sometimes it’s all he can scream before they have to sedate him. What happened on that hill?”

“It’s where Henry lost all sense of reason and humanity,” said Alexander. “It gives me no pleasure to relate this, Oliver, but I suspect it will give you some insight as to the nature of Henry’s madness. It was a hell of a fight, and we lost a lot of good men getting up that hill, but we damn well took it and began our advance into Belleau Wood. We were taking heavy fire, and heavy machine guns were cutting men down all around me. I was utterly terrified, expecting a bullet to hit me with every step I took. We pushed into the south end of the wood and ran into a nightmarish assembly of machine gun nests, barbed wire, and snipers. You could hardly see anything for the smoke, but we got in among the Germans and it was the most terrible thing. The fighting was hand-to-hand, men tearing at each other with bayonets, knives, entrenching tools, pistols, and grenades. It was hideous, seeing men that were grade school teachers, accountants, mechanics, or cooks reduced to the level of animals, fighting and killing like beasts. I suppose we were all beasts that day.

“We couldn’t go forward and the Germans were on the verge of pushing us out of the woods, when Henry came to me and told me what he wanted to do. He told me that what he had done at the Château was the tip of the iceberg, that the fires he had summoned were the servants of Cthugha. Today he would summon the essence of Cthugha himself! I tried to talk Henry out of it, to tell him how dangerous it was, but he would have none of it. He even called me a coward for shrinking from such power. The following morning, the forest was all but destroyed.

“The brass later said it was a coordinated barrage, but it was nothing of the sort. I watched as the sky tore open with a hellish red light, as though the clouds themselves had ignited. It was like watching a vast ocean of fire fall from the heavens. We pulled back as lashing tendrils of flame and ruin slammed into the earth and destroyed everything they touched. The noise of it was the most terrible thunder, and by the middle of the afternoon, there was nothing left of the forest but a devastation of shattered trees. We could only look at this burned wasteland like it was the surface of the moon. Almost the entire wood was gone, wiped off the face of the Earth along with every living thing inside it. That wasn’t the end of the battle; it took six attacks before we pushed the Germans out of there, but that firestorm broke them and sucked the fight right out of them. We’d taken the woods and held the German offensive, but Belleau Wood turned out to be the bloodiest, most hard-won battle our boys fought in the whole of the war.

“I sought Henry out at the end of the fighting, for I had lost contact with him since he had enacted his mad plan to bring a fragment of Cthugha’s essence to Earth. I found him weeping among the wounded, a broken man. He begged my forgiveness for what he’d done, for the thousands of lives he had ended, but I couldn’t help him. I was too horrified by what he had done to grant him any kind of absolution. He cursed me and I didn’t see him again until I came to Arkham.”

“Sheesh,” said Minnie.

“That’s a hell of a story,” added Rex.

“Yeah,” said Stone, “but it doesn’t answer my question. What are these things hunting the girls of Arkham?”

“I haven’t finished yet,” said Alexander, taking a deep breath, as though the telling of the terrible fighting against the Germans had exhausted him. “After the battle, I was promoted and transferred up the chain of command, but I heard rumors from my old company, vile tales of mutilations and torture done under the cover of darkness. I dismissed these stories at first, thinking they were nothing more than the product of some soldier’s over-active imagination that had spread through the ranks like dysentery. But then I thought back to the books we found in Château-Thierry, and I realized there might be more to what I was hearing than just rumor.”

“So what else was in those books?” asked Rex.

“Horrible things, my good man, horrible things,” said Alexander. “They weren’t just occult tomes of devilish incantations and forbidden rites. They were the diaries of a madman, a man who had dwelled in the castle two centuries earlier. His name was Francois-Honore Balfour, the Comte d’Erlette, and he was a terrible individual who learned how to transform men into monsters through cannibalism and cruelty. He created his own army of twisted, degenerate ghouls to serve him with unquestioning loyalty, and his diaries spoke of how such a process could be hastened. All wars have their horror stories, their tales of battlefield ghosts and the inexplicable, but as I began to hear more and more stories of half-eaten bodies and other dreadful tales circulating around my old unit, I began to fear that Henry had begun to put some of the Comte’s hideous teachings into practice.”

“So what did you do?” asked Minnie. “Did you stop him?”

“I was going to, but before I could do anything I was wounded in a German attack and sent back to the States. By the time my convalescence was over, the war had ended and our boys were back home. I tried to put the war behind me, but then I heard that Henry Cartwright was a member of the staff at Miskatonic University, and I knew I had to see what had become of him. Needless to say, our reunion was not a happy one, and he all but threw me into the street when I arrived on his doorstep. I had applied for a position at the university, but Henry vehemently opposed my appointment. I suppose he had tried to bury the memories of what he had done during the war deep within his subconscious, but my appearance must have shaken them loose. Not long after my arrival, the fire-starting began and then it wasn’t long before the poor fellow was incarcerated in Arkham Asylum.”

“These ghouls remind me of those things I scared off outside your office,” Stone said to Oliver. “I reckon your old friend sent them to kill you. If the bastard’s locked up, then it sounds like he got what he deserved.”

“Steady now, Stone,” said Oliver. “Henry is my friend, and I am struggling to reconcile these revelations of Alexander’s with the man I knew. It’s all so insane.”

“I know how it must sound, Oliver, but Henry stared too deeply into the abyss, not realizing that what dwells in the darkness was looking back at him. He hid it well, but a man’s sanity can hold on by its fingertips for only so long.”

“So you reckon Henry made himself some of these ghouls?” asked Rex. “He got some folk and turned them into monsters?”

“I think that’s exactly what he did,” said Alexander.

“But why?” said Minnie.

“I fear we will never know,” sighed Alexander. “Perhaps he once had a devilish plan, but it was derailed by his sudden descent into madness. Whatever his ultimate goal may have been, his creations are now loose and are killing according to the last design he may have left them. The secret to their defeat may lie locked in Henry’s mind.”

“Then I’ll get it out of him,” said Oliver.

“It will be buried deep,” Alexander warned him. “And you may not like what you find along with it.”

“I don’t care,” said Oliver. “If Henry is responsible for these killings, then I may be the only one who can find out how to stop them.”

* * *

After deciding to meet again the next day, the ad hoc band of investigators split up, and Oliver made his way back to the university. Alexander declared himself too drained by the retelling of his years in the war and made his way home, while Rex and Minnie returned to the offices of the Advertiser to hunt down anything that might help in the identification of where Henry’s ghouls might have made their lair. Stone declined to mention where he was heading, and took off in his Crossley.

Oliver’s office had been newly furnished with a door, a sturdy portal of polished oak that nicely matched the surrounding frame and looked solid enough to resist any future attacks. Oliver hoped there wouldn’t be any further attacks, but it was good to have such a robust barrier between him and the outside world.

Lying upon his desk was a brown envelope marked with his name. Oliver recognized the elaborate cursive handwriting of Professor Drouet. He tore open the envelope and saw a copy of the French text he’d sent over for translation. A sheet of paper was clipped to his own transcription, and as he read the English translation, he sat behind his desk like someone was slowly letting the air out of him. His heart hammered and his skin became clammy.

He’d wanted to deny what Alexander had told their group about Henry’s cannibalistic monsters, but this, combined with his intelligible ravings, left no doubt in his mind as to the depths of horror his friend had plumbed during the war.

The text read:

— In the sphinx-haunted deserts of the pharaohs, the bestial ones are worshipped. Men once, flesh-eaters now…Anubis judges the dead and casts them back. Eaters of the dead, they exist in the shadows, ashen, degenerate things. An army of them in my catacombs falls from the lofty grace of god-created man, becoming something less and something more.

— As our race moves ever on, so too can that march of progress be reversed.

— And the Men of Leng know degeneration is progress of a sort.

— The things I have seen, the things I now know…these are the secrets of which the Mad Poet of Damascus spoke. Yakthoob of Irem schooled him, and though he was taken to those spaces in-between, where dwell the Great Old Ones, his revelations live on. The translation of Wormius eludes me, but the Black Man of Egypt yet retains a copy that escaped Torquemada’s pyres. What price might he demand? Whatever it is, I shall gladly pay it, for what price can any man place upon illumination?

— They gather against me: the delusional Sun King, his foolish clergy and the fearful peasants! They fear the truths I know, yet once the wine of knowledge is uncorked it can never be sealed again. Though the walls of my château are cast down and the mob rampages, destroying treasures of a thousand years without a thought, my works will endure. Others will come, and they will learn what I have uncovered…

Reading these words, Oliver felt a chill of revulsion and horror creep across his skin. These were terrible, monstrous ramblings, and he could not imagine how damaged a man must be to put such vile things down on paper. God only knew what Professor Drouet must think of him for having sent this over to him!

Oliver read the words again, and knew immediately they did not belong to Henry, but to the madman whose diary he had read during the war. He had no idea what much of it meant, the names obscure and the concepts too fantastical, but he knew a man who would: Morley Dean, his colleague from Brown University and companion in adversity during the expedition to Alaska.

Oliver took out a pen and dashed off a letter to Morley, his pen scratching across the surface of the paper in a spidery scrawl that reminded him of the last few missives the intended recipient of this letter had sent him. In as economical terms as possible, Oliver outlined the nature of the books he had recently read, and copied the translated French onto a separate sheet, together with selected highlights from the text he had transcribed from the wax cylinders.

He folded the sheets of paper and slid them into an envelope, thinking long and hard about whether to post them. Morley had suffered greatly in pursuit of arcane truths, and did Oliver have the right to potentially damage him yet again with his request for information and help? Were it not for the gruesome nature of the situation in Arkham, Oliver would have left Morley to his quiet life in the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Lives hung in the balance, and Oliver knew he had no choice but to seek whatever help he could, no matter the cost. He scribbled Morley’s address on the front of the envelope and gathered up his coat as he made his way from the Liberal Arts building. As he passed the staff facilities at the front door, he dropped the letter to Morley into the external mail tray.

Outside, the sun was a little over halfway through its journey to sunset, and he pulled his coat tighter around him as he crossed the open park space on his way to the Miskatonic Library and his appointment with Kate Winthrop.

Anything to divert his mind from the horrible murders.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The hallway of Ma’s Boarding House was like a sepia photograph in a volume of Wild West history. It was late afternoon, and everything was bleached of color. A fine coating of dust lay on the ornaments, portraits, and knick-knacks, none of which looked like they’d been moved since they were put in place by the first Ma, back in the late seventeen hundreds. Only the threadbare carpet was dust free. Clearly this boarding house was an establishment with a fast turnover of guests.

Oliver and Kate looked around with the awkwardness of strangers appearing in the hall of someone they knew only slightly and who didn’t want to break anything. Oliver carried the heavy sphere in a carpetbag Kate had brought in order to transport it safely, and the weight of it was beginning to hurt his arm.

Finn appeared on the landing above them and gave them a wave.

“Jaysus, about time you two got yer arses round here,” he said. “I’ve been going bloody stir crazy, so I have. C’mon up, and tell me what ye’ve got.”

They went upstairs and followed Finn into an anonymous room that smelled of sweat, whiskey, and unwashed clothes. The Irishman stood perched beside a faded dresser and waved them toward the unmade bed. 

Oliver looked at the state of the sheets and took a breath, not wishing to offend a man he had come to learn was a hardened criminal. He looked around for a gun or a knife in the room, but wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t see it. It would be tucked into Finn’s pants at the small of his back wouldn’t it?

He sat on the bed. Its worn springs squealed like an injured cat.

“So?” said Finn. “What is it then? The round thing I brought ye. Any ideas for me?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Oliver, placing the carpetbag between him and Kate, who opened the bag and took out the sphere, careful not to disturb the patterns etched onto its surface. Gingerly, she placed the device on the floor.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Finn.

“It means that we’re not telling you anything about this object until you enlighten us as to how it came into your possession,” said Oliver.

Finn ran a hand through his unruly hair. “Ah, y’know I’d love to, professor, I really would, but ye’d never believe me. I was there, and I ain’t too sure I believe what happened.”

 “Trust me, Mr. Edwards,” said Oliver. “Nothing you could tell me would eclipse the strangeness of the things I have learned in the last week. Please, tell us how you came by the device.”

Finn paced the room, looking like a caged animal and wringing his hands like some of the lunatics Oliver had seen in Arkham Asylum.

“You’ll think I’m a damn maniac,” said Finn.

“Please, Mr. Edwards, it’s vitally important you tell us,” pressed Kate.

“Well, seeing it’s you, pretty lass,” said Finn, stopping his pacing and pulling a creaking chair out from beside the dresser. He reversed it and sat facing them with his arms folded over the solid backrest.

“I don’t exactly know where to begin,” said Finn.

“The beginning is traditional,” said Oliver, then wished he hadn’t when Finn flashed him an angry glare.

“All right, then. Well, sometimes I work for some shady characters, you know?” began Finn. “I do a bit of work that you fine folks might find a bit…outside of the law. A bit o’ this, a bit o’ that, if you take my meaning? I help the good folks of Arkham have a wee drinkie. A little bit o’ whiskey never hurt anyone, I say. Well, aside from me brother, who kept getting into fights on a Friday night in the pubs in Battery Park. But that’s by the by. Anyway, like I said, I have to work for some bad men, just to turn a penny you understand, and sometimes that means I gotta do some stuff I ain’t proud of.”

“Mr. Edwards, I know about your brushes with the law,” said Oliver. “And I can assure you that we have no interest in reporting anything you might tell us to the authorities.”

“Just as well,” said Finn, and Oliver felt a tremor of fear at the implied threat.

“So, the device?” prompted Kate, and Finn nodded.

“Aye, well, me and some of the lads were out in Billington Woods the other week to collect a whole lot of whiskey from the Newburyport boys. Let’s just say that the deal didn’t go as smooth as we’d have liked. We were meeting by an abandoned house, a nice place, but falling to pieces, so it was. I thought I’d seen something in one of the windows, so me an young Jimmy takes a look inside, and sure, isn’t it deserted, like no one’s been there in years? We goes upstairs and into the attic, where I swore I seen a head or a face at a window. But when we got up there, we found it weren’t no face I’d seen.”

Finn paused and Oliver said, “What was it?”

“I dunno,” said Finn, and the haunted expression on his face was one Oliver had come to know all too well in the last few days. He’d seen it in his bathroom mirror every morning. “There was two of them, like some giant bugs or somethin’, I don’t know for sure. Bigger than anything God put on this Earth, that’s for sure. I mean they was bigger than Irish Wolfhounds, but shiny like raw meat. But that ain’t the worst of it, not by a country mile. They didn’t have heads, at least I don’t think they did. It was hard to make out exactly what they were, all I got was snatches of them, like they weren’t all there.”

“They didn’t have heads?” said Kate. “Surely everything has a head?”

Finn shook his head. “No, lass, these things didn’t. Just pink blobs, like something you see squashed on the road by one o’ them automobiles. Wet meat rolled up into a ball and stuck on bastard ugly bodies.”

Oliver was repulsed by Finn’s description, disgusted that such aberrant beasts could possibly exist. How could they have evaded discovery for so long? But as he was coming to realize, there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy.

“What do those things have to do with this device?” asked Oliver.

“The two of ‘em were working on that thing, floating like them little birds that beat their wings so fast you can’t hardly see ‘em. They weren’t no animals; they were working on that thing like they were making it or fixing it, and when we came into that attic, they didn’t like it, no sir. Jimmy was three sheets to the wind and fell on his arse as he came in, and, soon as they heard us, they was on us. I think I shot one, but it didn’t make no difference. I got outta the way, but they got Jimmy and cut him up like they was dressing a dead steer.”

Finn got up and paced the room, his voice stretched taut by this retelling, and Oliver felt a twinge of guilt for having judged him so harshly. To see such a sight would have unmanned any sane person.

“I grabbed that sphere thing and jumped out the window,” said Finn. “Lucky I landed on something soft, cause outside it was like a war was goin’ on. Bullets was flying all around and the whiskey we’d come to buy was burning up like the High King of Ireland on his pyre.”

“What was it, a rival gang?” asked Oliver.

“It weren’t no gang,” said Finn emphatically. “It was a bloody army of monsters. Half-naked and like wild dogs that had learned to walk on two legs. A dozen of them at least, wild things that jumped Sean and Fergal and ate them up right in front of me. I damn near shat meself to see them. They were killing men with their bare hands, tearing whole lumps of meat straight from the bone and wolfing it down like it were prime steak. No way was I gonna get eaten like that so I ran like the devil himself were on me tail. I got into the trees and looked back, and that’s when I saw him.”

“Saw who?” asked Oliver when Finn didn’t continue.

“The priest in red,” whispered Finn, like he was afraid his voice might reach the ears of the man he was describing. “The man who was in charge of them there monsters.”

A chill traveled the length of Oliver’s spine. Though Finn’s description was minimal, he felt the same fear that had settled in the Irishman’s bones at the sight of the priest.

“There was a man leading them?” he said at last. “Did you see his face?”

“No,” said Finn. “An I’m damn glad for that. I didn’t see nothing of him, but as God is my witness I know he was pure evil. Like the devil and all his demons got together to make the wickedest man they could. Like the Antichrist was walkin’ the Earth.”

Oliver felt a spark of connection fire in his mind and he thought back to the meeting in Aunt Lucy’s. If Henry had created these monsters, then someone else had to be directing their atrocities, since Henry was securely incarcerated within Arkham Asylum. Had Henry inducted an apprentice to continue whatever diabolical plan had been set in motion all those years ago? Or was Henry in fact innocent of any complicity in these murders?

Before he could voice his thoughts, a droning, buzzing sound filled the room and the window vibrated in its frame. Oliver looked around him as the sound grew ever more intense, as though an invisible swarm of flies had somehow invaded the room.

Finn’s face crumpled in sudden fear as the noise increased in volume, invading the skull like the insistent, whining buzz of a dentist’s drill.

“Dear God in heaven,” said Oliver, putting his hands over his ears. “What is that noise?”

“Oh, Christ on a crutch,” said Finn. “It’s them, it’s the…”

Before he could finish his sentence, the window of Finn’s room exploded as a grotesque beast with a pinkish blob of raw wet meat for a head burst inside.

* * *

Two of the cultists came down the stairs, but thankfully neither was the red robed priest that had spoken of their deaths. Rita watched as they descended, the sharpened length of thighbone in her fist feeling like a heavy weight as she tightened and loosened her grip on its moist surface. She’d sharpened the splintered end on the rocky floor and was ready to bury it in the throat of anyone who tried to do her harm. Amanda stood slightly in front of her to disguise the fact that her right hand was free of the manacle. They’d tried to loose the other hand, but either her left wrist was bigger than her right, or the remaining manacle was fitted more tightly.

“You ready?” whispered Rita.

“I guess so,” said Amanda.

“You better be,” said Rita. “I’m counting on you.”

“Thanks,” muttered Amanda. “Like I wasn’t scared enough already.”

The hooded men reached the floor of the cave and the two girls backed up against the wall. As before, cowls wreathed the cultists’ faces in shadow, but Rita didn’t need to see a face to plunge home her sharpened weapon. She just hoped she had enough strength to take them both.

“Have you come to a decision?” said the leftmost of the figures. Again, his country accent was at odds with what he was saying, and Rita couldn’t shake the image of some dungaree-wearing dirt farmer beneath those robes. “Will you tell the master what he wants to know?”

“He can’t ask himself this time?” sneered Rita.

There was a momentary pause, as though the two had no answer.

“The master has finished with you,” said the other figure. “You are not worthy of his attentions anymore.”

“Then we got nothing to say to you two chumps,” said Rita. “Do we, Mandy?”

“No, nothing to say,” said Amanda, her voice choked with fear. That was good; they’d figure it was fear of what they were going to do to the girls, rather than fear of the coming bloodshed.

“Then your friend dies,” said the first figure, drawing a set of keys from beneath his robes. The other robed cultist came toward Rita, who sagged as though in defeat. She let her legs give out beneath her and slumped to the floor of the cave with a groan of fear she hoped was convincing. The robed man reached down to lift her, and Rita surged upward. She thrust the sharpened thighbone out before her and rammed it home into the darkness beneath the cultist’s hood.

Blood squirted, and the man shrieked in agony. He hurled himself away from Rita and wrenched the bone from her grip. His hood fell back and even though this man had been about to feed her to the ghouls, she winced at the damage she’d done to him. The thighbone jutted from the underside of his jaw, a steady stream of blood pumping around the makeshift weapon. His face was matted with crimson. He dropped to his knees, and every time he screamed, Rita saw the white of the thighbone in his mouth.

The key-holder ran toward Rita, drawing a curved knife from a leather sheath on his belt.

“I’ll kill you, you bitch!” he yelled.

Rita was exposed. There was nothing she could do. The man had her cold.

Then Amanda lashed out with her heel and caught the cultist on the side of the knee with force enough to make any football kicker proud. He fell with a strangled yelp and the knife fell from his hand as he landed on the stone floor of the cave.

“The keys, Mandy!” screamed Rita as the man began to pick himself up.

Instead of reaching for the keys, Amanda delivered another hefty kick to the man’s face. His neck snapped backward and he groaned as he rolled away, the hood falling to reveal his features. The keys dangled from his limp fingers.

Across the pool, the ghouls were going wild, battering themselves at the bars of their cages as they caught the scent of blood. The beast the girls had come to know as Latimer hammered the door of his cell with massive hands and one of the bars came loose from the rock. The cultist Rita had stabbed was still squirming at the edge of the pool, his body flopping and jerking like a landed fish.

“Quick!” cried Rita. “Get the damn keys!”

Amanda knelt beside the dazed man and reached across him to his outstretched hand. She couldn’t quite reach the keys. She made one last desperate lunge, the metal of her manacles digging into the raw flesh of her wrists. She got a fingertip to the ring and strained to hook her broken nail around the nearest key.

The man groaned and turned toward her in his daze. Amanda blinked as she realized his young face was one she had seen before. He had blond hair and wide-spaced features so common in the Midwest, but the name wouldn’t come to her. His eyes opened and focused on her just as she gained a purchase on the ring of keys.

Amanda rammed her forehead into the boy’s nose and was rewarded by a sudden yelp of pain. She rolled off him and threw the keys to Rita as he sat up with a growl of anger.

“Here!” shouted Amanda.

Rita caught the keys and swiftly undid the lock on her chained wrist. Another of Latimer’s bars tore loose from the rock as the creature battered itself bloody in its attempts to reach her. Its clawed arms reached through the bars and its guttural barks of hunger echoed deafeningly around the chamber.

Rita started to move toward Amanda, but the cultist her friend had knocked down rolled to his knees. His face was awash with blood, twisted in a mask of fury. He recovered his long knife, and Rita knew that even if she had time to pull the sharpened bone from the other man’s face, there was no way she could win a fight with this guy.

Amanda saw the same and shouted, “Go!”

“I ain’t leaving you!” shouted Rita, backing away from the knife-wielding cultist.

“You have to,” pleaded Amanda. “Just go, please! Find Grayson! Just get the hell out of here for heaven’s sake!”

“I’ll be back,” said Rita, splashing into the pool. The bottom sloped sharply and the water got deep quickly. Rita threw herself forward and began swimming out toward the grate in the wall. The cultist with the knife followed her into the pool, but his robes slowed him down. He wasn’t going to catch her.

Rita pressed herself against the grating and took a deep intake of breath. Its bars were spaced tight, but not so tight she couldn’t squeeze through. First her arm, then her head and chest pressed through. She rotated her hips, falling backward into the scummy froth on the surface, tasting the dreadful soup of decay and rotten meat the ghouls had discarded.

“Get back here, you bitch!” shouted the cultist, slashing through the bars with his knife.

“Not a chance in hell,” said Rita, turning and swimming away from the cave.

* * *

Oliver leapt from the bed, instinctively pushing Kate behind him as the creature hovered in the center of the room. Its loathsome body was insect-like and crustaceous, with dangling pincer arms and fluids dripping from strange orifices. Its form was unlike anything he had seen or read about, repulsive and unknown to any devotee of Darwin. Flickering wings that shimmered like light from a broken movie reel hummed at its back, but the supreme horror was the pulpy mass of peristaltic flesh crowning its segmented body. Unknown colors rippled across the surface of the brain-like organ, and Oliver’s limbs locked in fear.

Finn dived across the room, rolling to his feet beside Kate with a revolver in his hand.

The weapon boomed twice and the bullets struck the creature’s body with a wet meat smack. The monster appeared not to notice the impacts as Finn emptied the revolver with four thundering bangs.

“Go!” yelled Finn. “Let’s get the Christ outta here!”

The reports of Finn’s pistol shook Oliver from his paralysis, and he turned to push Kate toward the door. The girl was no longer at his side. While the terrible beast hovered on its impossible wings, she scooped the sphere up from the carpet. No sooner had her hands touched the object than the monster’s sensory organ flashed a vivid purple and its pincer arms snapped out like serrated shears. Oliver had no doubt those appendages would be able to snap through flesh and bone with horrid ease.

“Kate!” he shouted. “For the love of God, get back!”

Holding the sphere, she scrambled away from the creature as a pair of thready limbs extruded from its glossy flesh. Instead of bearing claws like the other limbs, Oliver saw a curious device at their termination. It resembled a tuning fork with an attached disc-like device at its base. Crackling sparks of electricity leapt between the tines.

Finn threw open the door as a deafening whip-crack sound filled the room and lightning arced from the creature’s device. The air between them and the creature buckled explosively, and the door was enveloped in a wash of pellucid electrical fire. Finn yelped as his gun sparked and flared with heat, the red-hot metal falling from his grip. Oliver cried out in fear, pulling Kate to her feet and struggling from the room. Finn followed behind them onto the landing as the electrical flames reduced the remains of the door to powdered ash.

Faces were poking through other doors along the length of the hallway, but they closed just as quickly at the sight of the three terrified people fleeing toward the stairs.

“Come on!” shouted Finn. “We gotta get the shitting hell out of here. Doc, you got a car?”

Oliver nodded and gestured down to the boarding house’s entrance hall. Finn set off down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Oliver and Kate, still gripping the sphere, followed behind as the horrible creature emerged from the room, the vile buzzing sound grating along his nerves and setting his teeth on edge.

Oliver looked back and saw its bizarre electrical weapon aimed at them once again.

“Down!” he shouted, dragging Kate to the floor.

Another whip-crack discharge, and the wall at the bottom of the stairs erupted in flames as the bolt struck it. A portrait of some long-dead tenant burned in the alien light and liquid blue fire dripped to a table clustered with ceramic ornaments.

Finn was at the front door, wrestling with the handle and rattling it uselessly in his grip.

“Bastard thing’s locked!” he yelled in anger.

“Then kick it down!” shouted Kate.

Oliver and Kate stumbled down the last few steps as Finn delivered a hefty boot to the lock. The door shook in its frame, but didn’t move.

“Ah, Jaysus, Ma,” wailed Finn. “Everything else in this place is fallin’ to pieces, but you had to go and get yerself a bloody solid door, didn’t ye?”

“Kick it again!” pleaded Oliver as the flying monster loomed overhead, not deigning to come down the stairs, but simply swooping over the landing balustrade to aim its hellish weapon at them once more. Though Oliver’s terror was close to overwhelming him, he saw that the creature’s weapon no longer coruscated with sparks and electricity. Did such a weapon require time to recharge?

“Hurry, Finn,” he said, with a calmness he certainly didn’t feel. “Please hurry.”

“I’m trying,” snorted Finn, thundering his boot into the door, once again with no effect.

“Wait,” said Kate, dropping to her knees and twisting the surface of the sphere with a look of intense concentration.

“What are you doing?” asked Oliver as the creature drifted down through the stairwell. Sparks began to writhe along the length of its lightning weapon. Oliver knew they didn’t have much time.

“If this is a key,” said Kate. “Then let’s use it.”

The sphere began to hum and vibrate in sudden agitation. Its surface began to move, its segmented pieces rotating and sliding over the spherical body like the mechanism of an engine. A greasy, thin sensation touched the center of Oliver’s bones and a powerful, keening whine built from the interlocking plates of the sphere as they shifted with ever-greater speed.

Then, with a tortured ripping sound, the hallway around them seemed to rupture. Dark light spilled from a dozen cracks that now hovered impossibly in the air. A gibbering chorus of squeals, shrieks, and hisses issued from within them.

The cracks spread wider, swiftly linking together to form a mystical window through which could be seen an inconceivable vision of a distant alien landscape. Geometric mountains, endless plains of writhing flesh, and horrifying vistas of nightmare-haunted wastelands shimmered between the lambent borders of this fantastical gateway. The scent of hot spices wafted through on alien winds and a hideous piping seemed to issue from beyond the incredible portal.

“What have you done?” demanded Oliver, horrified by the apparition.

“Do you want to die?” snapped Kate. “This is our only way out!”

“The lass is right, Doc,” said Finn, finally giving up on the door of the boarding house. “If it’s goin’ through this or gettin’ fried by that bastard, I’ll take her way out anytime.”

Kate took the lead, and leapt through the portal between worlds, crossing into another dimension in space and time. Finn followed her with a resigned shrug.

Oliver took one more look at the hideous creature and its crackling weapon and decided that Finn might be right.

“God help us all,” he said, and jumped through the portal.

* * *

Cold, red light shining in his eyes woke him. Oliver groaned in pain, feeling every muscle in his body ache. He felt strung out, like he’d been stretched on a medieval rack. A curious sense of dislocation spun in his belly, and the light beyond his eyelids felt wrong. He sat up, his entire body trembling like a terrified hound afraid of its master’s wrath.

He opened his eyes slowly, letting the red light filter into his senses.

His first thought was that he was dreaming. Somehow he had lost consciousness and was now staring out over some fantastical dreamscape. Had the creature pursuing them along the hallway of the boarding house managed to render him unconscious? Was he now lost in a fantasy?

The landscape around him was soaring and craggy, like they’d landed in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. As colossal as the Rockies were, however, they were little more than hillocks compared to these towering escarpments that clawed the black vaults of the sky. Lightning arced between the titanic peaks, and the thunder of them was like the coming of the end of the world.

The ground and surrounding rocks were lit by a strange phosphorescence, as though the cliffs themselves glimmered in the dimness with their own internal light. A red sun shone in the glowering sky, but its radiance was dim, as though its energies were all but spent and its raging core was now winding down to death. Distant forms moved languidly in the sky, black shapes against the deeper dark of the sky. Oliver thought these shapes had vast wings, out-flung like enormous bats, but it was impossible to be certain.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet, looking around for his companions, now that he had accepted this was no dream, but hideous reality. Kate and Finn lay nearby, both picking themselves up and looking around in wonder. Kate had opened a gateway through the gulfs of space and reality, but where had it led them? 

Looking around, Oliver saw that he stood at the top of a towering cliff, at the base of which a vast wasteland of turned earth spread for uncounted miles in all directions. Enormous stone monoliths, colossal tomb structures, and city-sized mausoleums—like the graveyard of an entire world—marked its rugged width and breadth.

“Dear heavens,” said Oliver. “This is a world of the dead.”

Crawling forms, humanoid but rendered minuscule by distance, scavenged in the ruins of the vast cemetery, worrying the flesh of uncounted corpses and sucking the marrow from the bones. Hundreds of carrion eaters dug the grave earth with bare hands, and hungry eyes turned in the direction of the cliff, as though aware they were being observed by warm beings of succulent meat. Packs of them loped toward the cliffs, and Oliver shrank back.

Surely they were too high to reach?

Finn came alongside him, his eyes wide and disbelieving. He wrung his hands like a guilty man and walked like a drunk, blinking furiously in the hideous reality of this dreadful place.

“Holy Mary Mother of God!” exclaimed Finn. “Where in the name o’ the wee man are we, lass? Where have ye taken us to?”

Kate shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” said Oliver. “You opened that…doorway and led us through, and you don’t even know where we are? Well, that’s just wonderful. Good job. Well done.”

“Easy, Doc,” said Finn. “We’re still alive, aren’t we?”

Finn turned to Kate. “We are alive aren’t we?”

“Of course we are,” said Kate. “You’re breathing aren’t you?”

“Aye, ye have a point there, lass,” agreed Finn. “And that’s a damn sight better than we’d be faring if we hadn’t gotten out of that place, eh?”

“I suppose so,” agreed Oliver, massaging the back of his neck. The strange sense of dislocation still tingled the extremities of his limbs, and his mind struggled to accept the notion that they could have crossed over such incredible distances to this impossible place in a single step. “But we need to figure out where we are and get back to Arkham.”

“Agreed,” said Kate. “I think I know how to reset the sphere to get us back home.”

“Good,” said Oliver. “Then get to it, Miss Winthrop.”

Kate gave him a sidelong look. “I don’t have it,” she said, “you were the last one through.”

“Well I don’t have it either,” said Oliver.

“You didn’t bring it with you?” cried Kate.

“No one said I was to bring it!”

“You really don’t have it?” said Kate. “But that was our only way home!”

“Oh, and I was supposed to know that? You’re the damn scientist here.”

Kate turned away, her hands planted on her hips and her face flushed at what she saw as his willful stupidity. Oliver bit back an angry comment, realizing how pointless it would be, and said, “Let’s think. There must be another way out of here, wherever here is. We found a way in, so it stands to reason there must be a way out.”

“Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t,” snapped Kate. “We could be trapped here.”

“Hey!” called Finn, moving to the edge of the shelf of rock upon which they stood. His neck craned to look back at the crags behind them. “Anyone got any idea what that place up there might be?”

Oliver picked his way over the rocks to stand beside Finn, and followed his gaze up the mountainside. His jaw dropped open in amazement at the sight above.

A colossal cityscape of blackened, soaring, cyclopean towers occupied the summits of the mountains. It was impossible to assign any kind of scale to the sprawling necropolis, for its funereal towers rivaled the mountains for their monumental size. Oliver’s eyes itched just looking at this towering city, for it appeared to be damnably close one moment and an unreachable distance away the next.

Yet even among such sinister peaks, one edifice soared taller than the rest, a crooked mourning tower studded with lancet windows that glimmered with black light and deathly fires.

The sight of so nightmarish a vision of mortality was almost too much for them. Kate gripped onto Oliver’s arm, and Finn steadied himself by dropping to his haunches and lighting a cigarette he pulled from behind his ear. The sepulchral city squatted like an evil spider brooding over death-haunted halls, and a palpable sense of dread, loathing, and fear bled from the city’s lightless garrets and abandoned cloisters.

Oliver stared at the vast tower, its peaked summit surrounded by ghostly clouds of lightning-shot mist. Spectral images flickered within that mist. Tantalizing images burned into Oliver’s retina with each arcing bolt of electrical discharge. Streets, houses, and parks, each achingly familiar and homely. With a start, Oliver recognized these images as snapshots of Arkham, phantom traces of the world they had left behind.

“God in heaven!” said Kate. “What a horrible place!”

“We’re in Hell, aren’t we?” said Finn. “Oh, Jaysus, we’re in bloody Hell.”

“That might not be too far off the mark, Mr. Edwards,” replied Oliver, looking at the soaring tower and the fading echoes of their own world. “But I think I see a way out.”

“Up there?” said Finn. “Tell me your jokin’, Doc.”

Oliver shook his head and looked down the cliff to the continent-sized graveyard. Hundreds more eaters of the dead were swarming toward the base of the cliff, clawing their way up its sheer sides to feast on the three of them.

“If we want to see our world again, Mr. Edwards, we’re going to have to climb out of Hell.”

“No way,” said Finn, shaking his head. “I ain’t going anywhere near that place. It’s cursed is what it is. Evil!”

“It’s either that or get eaten alive,” said Oliver.

Finn looked down at the creatures swarming up the cliff.

“Let’s climb,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

No light illuminated the tunnel as Rita navigated her way through the twisting, brick-walled darkness with her outstretched hands. The depth of the water was inconsistent, sometimes leaving her less than six inches of air to breathe, sometimes a few feet. Its movement was sluggish, but the stench was foul beyond imagining. Years’ worth of human detritus had been tossed into the pool and carried via the sluggish tidal action toward the river.

At least that was where Rita hoped it led.

She pushed herself onward, despite the pain in her joints, the ache in her belly, and the fatigue that begged her to let her body rest. She had no idea if she was being pursued, but couldn’t risk a moment to find out. If Latimer was coming after her, there was nothing she could do about it. All she could do was get the hell away from here as fast as she was able.

Tears streamed down her cheeks at the thought of having left Amanda behind, but what choice did she have? Surely without her there, the red robed priest would have no leverage to force Amanda to confess the substance of her dreams.

Rita tried not to think of what they might do to Amanda as a reprisal for her escape. Every time her tired muscles threatened to give out, she reminded herself what might happen to Amanda if she faltered. She focused her mind, shutting out the pain and fear, and concentrated on just moving forward. This was a long-distance run, nothing more. The same dedication that drove Paavo Nurmi to win five gold medals at the Paris Olympics spurred her on, and Rita harvested every scrap of energy and determination to continue.

She had no idea how far she had traveled or how long it had been since her escape. All sensation of the passing of time and distance were meaningless in the blackness. The tunnel seemed never-ending, but it had to end somewhere, didn’t it?

Rita splashed forward under the water as the tunnel dipped suddenly. She swallowed a mouthful of reeking liquid, tasting the acidic bile of its contamination. Rita cried out and spat the brackish fluid out, coughing as dribbles slid down her throat to her stomach. Floundering in the water, she felt the pull of current, and let it take her. A scum of liquefied bone and fat filmed the water’s surface.

Christ, how many girls have met their end here? Ten, a dozen? More?

Rita came closest to giving up then, her gumption as close to the edge as it ever was when she hit the wall in a long run. But, as always, she found that extra reserve of strength and character to push through the pain and the desire to give up.

With an angry snarl, Rita pushed her feet to the bottom of the tunnel and pressed on, her second wind surging through her like a cure-all tonic. She felt the surge within the tunnel increase, a definite wash of tidal movement, and cried out as she realized she could see distant flickers of splintered light on the fractured surface of the water. The thought that she might be nearing the end of the tunnel gave her fresh strength, and she threw herself flat and swam with powerful strokes as the current picked up.

The force of the tide increased sharply. Rita was too weak to fight it. She let it carry her through the last of its debris-garlanded length. Frothing bubbles and swirling currents spun her around as she shot from the mouth of the tunnel. Water closed over her head, and she fought for breath as she bobbed up and down like a spinning top.

Rita broke the surface intermittently, popping up for air and gulping whole lungfuls of icy water. The frozen chill of the water sent a spike of adrenaline through her, and Rita thrashed her arms as the current swept her through the deep waters of the Miskatonic.

She saw lights on the shore, pinpricks of lamps, and electric streetlights, but she couldn’t make out where she was. A looming black shape rose out of the water, a stone pier of a bridge, and Rita screamed as she passed beneath it, hearing the rumble of railroad stock and the braying of riverboat horns.

The water continued to buffet her, spinning her around until all sense of left and right, up and down, were completely lost to her. Rita dug deep for a last reserve of energy, but she was empty. She had nothing left to give. Her thoughts turned toward Amanda as she let herself go, her body finally claimed by the river.

She sank beneath the river, but no sooner had the water closed over her head than she felt solid ground beneath her feet. Rita’s head broke the surface and she dragged a heaving gulp of air into her lungs. Her feet scrambled on the soft sand, and she thrashed her arms, digging great handfuls of dirt as she hauled herself onto the shore.

Rita wept with relief, lying in the mud and letting cool air fill her lungs as her head grew heavy and her sight dimmed. She lay there and probably passed out for a time. It was hard to be certain. All she knew was that by the time enough of her strength had returned to allow her to lift her head from the mud, it felt like no time at all.

The sky was beginning to lighten, and in the dim twilight Rita saw she hadn’t yet reached either shore of Arkham, but had pitched up on the island between the West Street and Garrison Street Bridges. That meant she was closest to the north bank. She groaned as she realized she would need to swim to shore.

Then she cursed, wondering how long she’d been out of it.

Amanda was counting on her. Every minute was crucial.

“I promised I wouldn’t let you down, Mandy,” sobbed Rita, climbing to her feet and making her way north on unsteady legs to the point where the island was closest to shore. She followed narrow trails of hard-packed earth, the rising sun illuminating her path as if trying to aid her escape from the ghouls.

The farther she traveled, the more Rita began to realize that she was not this island’s first visitor. Clearings with the remains of fires dotted her path, and scattered around them were curious collections of random ephemera.

A woman’s high heel wrapped in an emerald pashmina.

A broken string of black pearls.

A dented brooch with a red flower in the middle, a scrap of sequined cloth still attached.

Mixed in with the debris of flappers’ outfits, Rita saw other items, terrible objects that echoed the dreadful place of captivity from which she had just escaped. A grinning skull sat in the remains of a cold fire, the bone blackened and scorched. A picked-clean ribcage lay discarded at the edge of one clearing and a pile of bones, stacked like cordwood sat beside the kind of log you might sit on to roast marshmallows.

“Oh, hell no,” said Rita as the truth dawned on her. “This is where they killed them. They killed them and ate them here. Oh sweet baby Jesus, no.”

Terror flooded her at the thought of the ghouls feasting on the living by the light of dancing fires. This was their killing ground, where God only knew how many girls had been tortured and murdered for these sick bastards’ amusement.

Though her body was drained beyond the point of exhaustion, Rita ran through the darkness of the island toward the north shore.

* * *

Rex took a mouthful of coffee, then wished he hadn’t. He and Minnie had been up all night cooking up some pieces to keep Harvey off their backs, and had drunk pot after pot of the stuff. The story they’d promised the irascible editor was turning out to be far more outrageous than they could have ever believed, and Rex wasn’t sure Harvey would buy into all this talk of ancient gods and forbidden cults.

They’d filed some puff pieces about the inability of the cops to catch the murderers and the effect it was having on Arkham. It wasn’t hard to see how scared the townsfolk were. There’d been a couple of lynchings where “concerned citizens” had beaten up some poor unfortunate caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. A few immigrant windows had suffered bricks thrown through them, and one tenement had been set on fire. The building was supposed to be abandoned, but Rex had heard on the grapevine that some bodies had been found in the basement: hobos, fugitives from the law, or something worse?

In Arkham you never knew.

It was just past ten, and Lucy’s was quieter than Rex had ever seen it. Only a few working stiffs sat at the counter, and most of the booths were empty. The few folk that were in avoided eye contact and spoke in hushed whispers, furtively glancing over their shoulders to see who might be listening in on their words. Looking through the painted window, Rex could see the street beyond was virtually deserted.

Ghost streets.

Rats deserting a sinking ship.

Is Arkham the ship?

What happens if it goes under?

It was only a short walk from the offices of the Advertiser to Aunt Lucy’s, but Rex would have expected to see a few pedestrians on the street. Automobiles hadn’t yet taken over Arkham like some doomsayers predicted they would in every city in America.

Minnie appeared with two plates of apple pie topped with fresh cream and placed one before Rex. She sat down and took a forkful of her own slice with a smile of relish.

“Bit early for pie, isn’t it?” said Rex.

“It’s never too early for pie,” said Minnie. “Besides, we deserve it after all the work we put in last night. Not how I usually like to spend the night while I’m awake, but never mind.”

Rex took a slice of pie and nodded. “Not bad. Pie in the morning. Could be the start of something, Minnie.”

“You and I sharing breakfast together?” said Minnie with a tired smile. “People will talk.”

Rex laughed. “This ain’t a big town, Minnie. Talk is all people do here.”

They lapsed into a comfortable silence as they ate their pie and drank their coffee while they waited for Stone, Templeton, and Grayson to arrive. They were early, but that suited Rex just fine. It would give the pair of them time to mull over all that had happened the day before, the fantastical things they had heard, and the monstrous nature of the dark forces at work in Arkham.

“Maybe it’s the tiredness or the caffeine kicking in, but the more I think of all we heard yesterday, the harder time I have believing it,” said Rex as he laid down his fork.

“You don’t think there’s anything to it at all?”

“I didn’t say that,” replied Rex. “I just mean that it’s a lot to believe. Going from thinking the world is a pretty normal place to finding out it’s anything but takes a bit of getting used to. I think it’ll take time for it all to sink in.”

“I know what you mean, but I think I’ve had longer to get used to it than you.”

“How so?”

“Those pictures I took last year, the ones I burned? They weren’t the first like that I’ve taken. I’ve always had an eye for the creepy and the bizarre. Did you know my dad took me to Arkham Asylum when I was thirteen?”

Rex almost choked on his coffee. “He did what? Why?”

“I’d saved all my allowance for a year, and got myself a camera from Walter’s Optics. But I didn’t want to take family portraits or photographs of our dog. I went out and took pictures of dark alleys, road-kill, and the creepy guys you see hiding in the graveyard. Looking back, I can kind of see where Dad was coming from, but at the time I didn’t understand why he couldn’t see the things I was seeing. To keep my folks happy I stopped taking photographs of the things you only see out of the corner of your eye, and just snapped stuff for the family album. They bought it, but I could still see what was going on behind the white picket fences of the town. I just didn’t take photographs of it.”

“And what was going on?”

“The kind of stuff we heard yesterday,” said Minnie. “I’ve always known Arkham wasn’t like other towns, and now I know why. I’m not going to turn away from it now. I’m not a little girl anymore.”

“So you’re a paid up believer now?”

“Yeah,” nodded Minnie. “I think I always have been. I just didn’t know it.”

“Good enough for me,” said Rex. Alexander Templeton entered the diner, followed a few seconds later by Gabriel Stone. The two men joined them at the booth, accepting Rex’s offer of coffee, but declining the chance to have pie.

They said their good mornings and exchanged pleasantries with the awkwardness of strangers until Stone looked at his watch and saw that it was twenty minutes past the agreed time for their meeting. Oliver Grayson still hadn’t shown up.

“Anyone heard from the professor?” asked Stone. “The other one I mean.”

No one had, and Rex got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. He scribbled in his notebook.

Missing.

Gone.

No longer of this Earth…

* * *

Stone left to check on Oliver’s house while Rex, Minnie, and Alexander hurried to the university campus to see if he had spent the night engaged in research and simply lost track of the time. Stone drove his Crossley to Easttown, while Rex and the others piled into Rex’s battered Ford to the Miskatonic campus. In lieu of finding Oliver they agreed to rendezvous at Lucy’s around midday.

Rex parked up on College Street and slammed the door as he got out.

“Me and Minnie will check the professor’s office,” he said. “We got charm and beauty enough to bluff our way past any secretaries, right?”

“Sure Rex, but which one of us is which?” asked Minnie. “On second thought don’t answer that. You’ll only embarrass yourself.”

“I’ll check the library,” declared Templeton. “There’s a good chance Oliver may have become engrossed in one of Armitage’s restricted books. I will meet you back at Lucy’s, agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Rex.

He and Minnie walked briskly toward the Liberal Arts building, finding the streets as empty here as they were throughout the town. Students were just as prone to fear as anyone else it turned out. So much for the rebellious spirit of today’s youth, thought Rex.

They climbed the steps to the building, noting a glazier replacing panels to the side of the grand entrance door. Inside the checkerboard foyer, they found Oliver’s name and room number on the staff directory. A couple of university custodians manned an inquiries desk, but they were engrossed in an animated discussion and paid the two reporters no mind as they made their way upstairs.

Three floors up, Rex was out of breath.

“You need to get in shape,” said Minnie.

“Slightly paunchy is a shape,” said Rex. “Just not a fashionable one. You’ll see. I’m a trendsetter and one day everyone around here will look like me.”

Minnie ignored him and strode down the carpeted hallway until she reached Oliver’s office. The door was open, but Oliver wasn’t in. Two matronly ladies were cleaning up some spilled papers and Rex began to fear the worst when he noted the expressions of concern they gave him as he knocked on the doorframe.

“Hello, I wonder if you fine ladies can help us,” said Rex. “We’re looking for Oliver Grayson. Is he around?”

The first woman shook her head, but it was her companion who answered.

“No, he’s not here, and if he keeps having visitors without scheduling them in the appointments book, I’ll be having words with Professor Grayson.”

“He’s had other visitors?” said Minnie.

“Yes, a student came to see him early this morning,” said the woman Rex now took to be the department secretary. “She was in a terrible state. Covered in scratches and bruises and almost hysterical. She didn’t have an appointment or anything.”

Rex looked at Minnie and the excitement between them was tangible.

“Did this girl tell you her name?” said Minnie.

“I believe she said her name was Rita. She said she had to see Professor Grayson,” said the woman, “but before I could tell her that she’d need to make an appointment, the wretched girl collapsed right here in Professor Grayson’s office. I don’t mind telling you that she looked like she’d been on the wrong end of a beating. I don’t make judgments on people, but the Lord grants to each what they deserve.”

“Very charitable of you,” said Minnie. “Where’s the girl now?”

“Dr. Morgan took her to St. Mary’s Hospital a couple of hours ago,” replied the woman, but Rex and Minnie were already running for the stairs.

* * *

Oliver’s lungs heaved with the effort of climbing the winding steps cut into the side of the mountain. This route of ascent toward the nightmare city was not designed for travelers of human proportions. Each uneven tread and riser was hacked into the rock with a creature of far greater size in mind. As such, each step required considerable effort to climb. The dying red sun did not move in the sky and the shadows never changed, fixed forever in unchanging aspect and making the discernment of the passage of time impossible. They had climbed for what seemed like an eternity, rising hundreds of feet into the mountain, yet the city of the dead seemed no closer. The crooked tower loomed over them like a grim sentinel, daring them to approach its cyclopean immensity with the promise of escape.

“Does that bloody thing ever get closer?” asked Finn, echoing Oliver’s thoughts.

“It must,” said Kate, dropping to her knees and taking gulping breaths between each word, “if we keep climbing toward it then it must draw nearer.”

Oliver shook his head as he stopped for breath. “The customary universal laws don’t seem to apply here, Miss Winthrop. I suspect we will be able to trust nothing our eyes tell us in this place, least of all scale and distance.”

“Can we trust that?” said Finn, looking back down the oversized steps to the cliffs upon which they had first awoken to this new world. A dozen gray-skinned scavengers—the beasts that picked the bones of the giant cemetery clean—had gained the cliff and were circling and sniffing the dusty ground in search of prey. One of the beasts let out a baleful screech and bounded toward the base of the steps, moving with feline grace and agility.

“Not again,” said Oliver. “Will I never be free of these damned ghouls?”

They climbed on, each step an ordeal as the ghouls scrambled over the square-cut steps far below them, squealing and braying in anticipation of fresh meat and warm blood.

“Hurry up, folks,” said Finn. “Those things are bloody fast, y’know.”

Oliver struggled to keep up with Finn. The Irishman had clearly kept fit through his nefarious activities as a bootlegger, but Oliver found himself and Kate falling behind with every passing moment. Numerous expeditions to foreign lands had kept Oliver trim and wiry, but only now was he beginning to appreciate how his stamina had waned since his last trip.

“Too much time in the library,” he said to Kate. “Not enough on the playing field.”

“Too much time in the lab,” she wheezed. “None on the playing field.”

Oliver put an arm around her shoulders and helped her up another step. “Come on, Kate. As you say, that tower must be getting closer now, eh?”

She smiled weakly, but Oliver saw she didn’t really believe him. He looked back down the steps. The ghouls had closed half the distance already. The cannibal beasts would be upon them within minutes at their present rate of pursuit.

“Where’s Finn?” gasped Kate. “I don’t see him.”

Oliver craned his neck along the length of the winding steps, hoping to see Finn looking down at them with a wisecrack or a curse on his lips, but the Irishman had vanished.

“I don’t see him,” said Oliver as an unsettling suspicion settled in his belly.

“He’s left us, hasn’t he?”

“No, I expect he’s just scouting ahead or something.”

Kate gave him a dubious look, and Oliver’s heart sank. Finn had abandoned them to make his own way up the cliffs, leaving them in his wake to distract the ghouls long enough for him to reach the tower and home. Oliver supposed he couldn’t blame the man, but he had hoped common decency would overcome his “natural” criminal tendencies.

He and Kate struggled onward, each oversized step a trial to climb and each one gained a small victory. Oliver could hear the whooping barks of the ghouls behind them, and tried not to imagine the pain of being eaten alive. Claws scrabbled on stone and angry yelps sounded as the flesh-eaters fought past one another to be the first to claim the meat prize.

Oliver had nothing at all with which to defend himself, save his fists, but he was no pugilist. Kate disentangled herself from his helping arm and curled herself into a tight ball as the screeching yelps of the ghouls echoed like the chittering of bats off the rocky walls. Oliver turned toward the pack of beasts, determined to at least face them on his feet. He looked over his shoulder with one last hope that Finn might be there, but there was nothing to see except more steps.

He almost laughed as he saw how close they had come to their goal.

The crooked tower split the sky above him, its base surely just around a spur of glassy obsidian. Was this world mocking them now, teasing them with the dream of escape only to snatch it away at the last moment? Oliver let the anger come, and balled his fists.

The first ghouls came into sight on the steps below, predatory things of pallid, rugose skin stretched too tight over their bony frames and large skulls. Maws filled with flat, yellow teeth jutted from distended jaws and brackish saliva drooled over lipless mouths. To feast on corpses was merely existence, but a feast of living flesh was the choicest sweetmeat.

There was no finesse to their attack, the creatures bounding over one another in their desperation to feed. Dirty claws reached for Oliver and Kate, but before they tore the skin from their bodies, a wild, ululating war cry echoed from the mountains. Like Cúchulain himself, Finn leapt through the air and landed on the step beside Oliver. He held a long spar of broken wood, and there was a wildness in his eyes that reminded Oliver of the Yopasi warriors as they gave him a demonstration of their fighting style.

The timber spar lashed out and caved in the first ghoul’s skull. The reverse stroke broke the neck of another. A monster leapt at Finn, but he swung the timber around and slammed it into its spread jaws. Blood and teeth flew, and the beast dropped alongside its fallen kin.

“Go, Doc!” yelled Finn. “Get the lass up and run! The tower’s just up ahead now. I can hold them here for a time.”

Oliver wanted to tell Finn not to be so stupidly heroic, but knew that he and Kate would never escape without such bravery. He nodded, galvanized by Finn’s actions, and picked Kate up as the timber slammed down on another ghoul’s head.

“Come on, ye shower o’ worthless devils! Take more than you ugly bastards to get past this son of Erin!”

Another ghoul went down as Finn swung his ad hoc weapon like an axe-wielding logger. A ghoul’s ribs were splintered, and another had its arm broken before they were finally able to draw some of Finn’s Irish blood. A claw hooked in under the spar and ripped across his thigh. A wash of red spilled down Finn’s leg, and he dropped to one knee with a cry of pain.

Oliver finally reached the top step. The breath heaved in his lungs and his heart hammered the inside of his ribcage. Clear of the steps, he saw the impossible tower rising up to the stars, its ragged flanks glittering and uneven like the napped flint spearhead of primitive man.

A vast archway led within and an ancient door of rotten wood hung on rusted hinges. Together Oliver and Kate struggled toward the entrance, the nearness of home giving their tired limbs a new burst of energy. As they reached the door, Oliver saw a portion of it had been broken off with a fist-sized rock.

“So that’s where he got his weapon.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t going to leave us,” said Oliver. “He was arming himself.”

Finn’s wild yells of battle drifted from below and Oliver’s guilt weighed down on him like the albatross of Coleridge’s tale of the Ancient Mariner. Oliver pushed Kate toward the tower and said, “You have to go, Miss Winthrop. Get home and tell the others what happened here.”

“What are you talking about, Oliver? Come on, we need to go!”

“I can’t leave Finn like this,” said Oliver, turning and running back to the steps.

Before he reached them, Finn came into view. The man’s chest and legs were savagely clawed and the skin of his cheek hung loose like a flap of cloth. Oliver blanched as he realized he could see the man’s teeth through the hole torn in his face.

“Coming back for me, Doc?” said Finn, his voice a wet gargle of blood.

“Yes,” said Oliver. “Christ Almighty, Finn. Look at the state of you!”

“Aye, but you should see the state o’ the damn ghouls,” said Finn, spitting a mass of bloody teeth. “They’ll not soon forget Finn Edwards in these here parts. Now what do you say we be getting outta here. I gave the first lot a good hiding, but there’s plenty more coming up behind them, an I think I might have a bit of a job seeing them off too, you know?”

“Absolutely,” said Oliver, humbled at Finn’s selfless courage in defending them.

“I almost didn’t come back for ye,” said Finn, shaking his head. “Damnedest thing. I got to that there door and I was all set to climb to the top when I swear I heard the voice of me dead mam saying, ‘Finn, lad, if you don’t go back for them folks, I’ll skelp your backside till it’s red raw, dead or no.’ And trust me, that woman had a mean right hand on her.”

Oliver didn’t know what to make of that, so he kept his mouth shut as he helped Finn through the door. The man had lost a lot of blood and had suffered a great many deep gouges all over his body. God only knew what kind of filth or diseases those creatures carried beneath their claws, and the sooner he could be seen by a doctor the better.

The inside of the tower was hollow, its walls uniformly smooth and polished to a mirrored sheen. Vague, suggestive shapes swam in the capricious reflections thrown back by the ambient phosphorous light of this world. Glittering fog filled the space, and Kate was waiting for them on the bottom step of the tower’s stairs. Unlike the corkscrewing staircase that had brought them here, these steps were more human-sized in their dimensions, built into the inner face of the tower and spiraling up its length.

They raced upward as quickly as possible, bearing the weight of the injured Finn between them and keeping close to the reflective walls. The Irishman was leaking blood with alarming rapidity, and his bravado grew less vocal the higher they climbed. Oliver looked down as he heard a bellowing roar from below, a terrifying cry that could not have come from the ghouls. Something giant blundered in the glittering mist, a towering beast with slate gray flesh and a muscular, simian-like frame.

Its barrel-sized head turned upward and its jaw spread wide as it loosed a deafening bellow of rage. Oliver almost dropped Finn in terror. The beast’s jaw, in defiance of all other creatures on God’s Earth, opened vertically, a fang-filled gash that split its face down its length. A pair of broad arms swung at its heavily muscled shoulders, but at the elbow, each arm split apart to form two furred paws that ended in vicious claws.

Kate screamed at the sight of the monster, and the fragile courage Oliver had built after their survival against the ghouls evaporated in the face of this new horror. What manner of beast could defy the basic principles of evolution so blatantly? Its anatomy was proof of the lunacy of this terrible world, and Oliver struggled to hold onto his diminishing ability to function.

The creature roared again, and something in the timbre of the sound told Oliver that this was not a roar of mindless animal hunger, but one of outrage, as though they had committed some hideous trespass within some sacred place. The giant monster lumbered onto the steps, but before it could climb higher, a dozen slavering ghouls swarmed through the tower’s open doorway and fell upon it.

The giant swatted them with its monstrous, clawed hands, but for every ghoul it plucked from its body and crushed, two more leapt onto his back or legs. Like prehistoric hunters working to bring down a mammoth, the ghouls snapped and bit and tore at the hideous giant, but before the outcome of the bloodshed was decided the mist closed in until all that could be heard was the bellowing roars and shrieking barks of the combatants.

“Are ye gonna stand around all day or get on with climbing this fekkin’ tower?” asked Finn groggily. “Cause that’d be just grand, folks.”

The very banality of Finn’s question spurred them to action, and leaving the sounds of the dreadful fight to the death behind, Oliver and Kate carried onward to the tower’s summit. Oliver feared that the sheer immensity of the tower’s height would defeat them, but once again the baffling geometries of this world confounded him. Though they could only have been climbing for ten minutes at most, the top of the tower was soon within sight.

A great stone trapdoor gaped above them and the weak light of the dying sun seeped into the tower. Oliver and Kate dragged Finn onto the roof, relieved beyond words to have finally made it here alive.

Nebulous fog surrounded the summit, blistering arcs of blue energy flashing randomly with colors beyond those of the conventional spectrum. With each burst of lightning, a faint vision of the world they had so recently left would shimmer in the depths of the iridescent mist. Some Oliver recognized, others he did not, but all were ill-favored places: tumbled churches long since abandoned, decaying graveyards, blasted heaths, or forgotten tenements where vagrants had died unnoticed and unmourned.

“So what now?” said Kate. “How do we get back home?”

“I’m not sure,” replied Oliver. “I was hoping that we would find another doorway similar to the one that brought us here.”

“Are you two thick as navvies?” slurred Finn. “There’s only one way to escape from the kingdom of the Sidhe.”

“What’s he talking about?” asked Kate.

“I fear he is delirious,” said Oliver, but Finn shook his head. 

“You two are the professors, and here’s me the clever one. Who’d a thought it?”

With that, Finn shook off their supporting arms and lurched like a drunk at closing time toward the edge of the tower as another bolt of lightning flashed. A broken field of fallen tombstones and weeping angels worked in granite appeared within the clouds.

“Only one way home!” shouted Finn. “A leap of faith!”

The Irishman threw himself into the cloud and his body vanished with a bang of displaced air and a hiss of static. Oliver shouted Finn’s name, but the man was gone as surely as if he had never existed.

A bellowing roar issued from beyond the trapdoor: the terrible giant climbing toward them to cast them from its holy place.

Kate offered Oliver her hand and said, “Looks like it’s a leap of faith then.”

“I suspect you might be right,” replied Oliver.

Hand in hand they leapt into the glittering mist.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Rex sat by the hospital bed, his head nodding as sleep kept sneaking up on him. The bustle from the nurses’ station down the hall had become a droning blur of hushed conversation, and the bitter cup of hospital coffee hadn’t helped him stave off his tiredness. Minnie sat next to him, resting her head on his shoulder, and he liked the easy intimacy of the gesture. She was a great gal, and Rex wondered why she’d never found herself a good man, and kept hanging around with him.

Alexander sat in a chair beside the door, while Stone paced the room, tapping his notebook against his thigh in a nervous tattoo.

Rex could understand his frustration.

Rita Young lay on the bed, her eyes closed and her body swathed in bandages. She hadn’t regained consciousness since collapsing in Oliver’s office, and the doctors had told them she was severely dehydrated and suffering borderline malnutrition. The many cuts and gashes on her arms and legs were also likely infected. All that could be done was to clean the wounds regularly and hope Rita’s own immune system could fight off the infection.

Rita had come back to them, but what of Amanda?

Rex doodled on his own notepad, the words coming unbidden from the depths of his subconscious.

Survivor

Visionary.

Key to the mystery.

But for good or ill?

Stone’s frustration was getting to Rex, the constant pacing, the grunts of impatience, and the constant tap, tap, tap of his notebook.

“Will you sit down, Gabriel?” said Rex. “This cat on hot bricks routine is getting on my nerves.”

Stone flashed him an angry glare, and put away his notebook, but continued to pace up and down. Every now and then he would throw a glance at Rita and grunt. Rex shook his head and opened his mouth to chide Stone again.

“Rex, honey,” sighed Minne. “Leave it. Don’t poke the bear.”

“I heard that,” said Stone.

“You were meant to,” said Minnie, lifting her head from Rex’s shoulder. “The pair of you need to learn some patience instead of getting all riled up. Take a leaf out of Alexander’s book. You don’t see him getting all bent out of shape here.”

“I understand that there is little I can do to affect the outcome of Miss Young’s condition,” said Templeton. “War and its aftermath teaches a man to be sanguine about those things in life he cannot change”

“Rita’s gonna come out of this,” said Minnie, “and when she does, we’ll find out who took her and where they are.”

“And if Amanda dies in the meantime?” snapped Stone.

“Then we did the best we could.”

“That’s not good enough,” said Stone, bunching his fists, and Rex saw the volatile core of this man bubbling close to the surface. He realized he knew very little about Stone’s past, and saw that only an iron discipline kept the wild anger within him in check. “They took my Lydia, and I won’t let them take Amanda, too.”

“And we’re doing everything we can,” soothed Minnie, getting up and standing in front of Stone. She took the Pinkerton agent’s hands and Rex felt a sudden stab of jealousy that surprised him. “But it’s up to Rita now. She’s a strong girl. She managed to escape from the guys that held her prisoner, and that’s not nothing. She’s got guts most of us can only dream about, so I just know she’ll pull through. Okay? Have faith in her, Gabriel. For me.”

Stone nodded and cleared his throat, turning away as Rex saw a glimmer of moisture in his eyes. He took a seat on the opposite side of the bed and folded his arms across his broad chest. Rex let out a breath, feeling calmed by Minnie’s words himself. Rita was a fighter, that much was obvious from the cuts and bruises she’d sustained in her captivity and escape.

He rose from his seat with a yawn.

“I know it’s like hot mud, but anyone want a coffee?” said Rex. “I think I heard them put on a fresh pot.”

Stone and Templeton declined, but Minnie nodded. Rex flashed her a crooked smile and left the room, heading back down the hallway to the nurses’ station. He could smell brewing coffee, and hoped whoever had made the last pot had finished their shift and someone with at least rudimentary coffee-making skills had made this batch. Like cops, journalists were connoisseurs of damn fine cups of coffee, and Rex made no apology for it. The English could keep their tea; coffee was where it was at.

He smiled at the nurses as he passed and filled two cups with steaming coffee from the small drinks area beside the hospital’s entrance. He tossed a few coins into the donations bowl beside the pot. He wasn’t a freeloader, after all. Gathering up the drinks, he turned back toward Rita’s room, and the coffee almost fell from his hands as he saw three figures lurching through the doors of the hospital.

“Holy Christ!” said Rex. “Where have you been, and what the hell happened to you?”

“You’d never believe me if I told you,” said Oliver.

* * *

Leaving word with the nurses to fetch them should Rita awaken or Finn’s condition worsen, they gathered in one of the hospital’s waiting rooms. Rex quickly told Oliver how they feared he had been abducted or worse by the unknown forces behind Arkham’s woes, going on to describe how their hunt for him had led them to Rita.

Oliver introduced Kate Winthrop to the group, explaining in halting terms what had become of them after paying a visit to Finn Edwards’s lodgings. Once again, eyes widened and credulity was stretched by the tale, but such was the earnest sincerity in Oliver’s retelling that no one doubted the truth of his words. And when Kate produced a fragment of strangely iridescent rock that glimmered like no terrestrial stone ever could, the matter was sealed.

“We leapt from the tower and it felt like…like I was being born anew,” said Oliver. “I can’t think of any other way to describe it. When we went through the first time it was horrible, like dying in slow motion, but this was, well, actually quite pleasant. We didn’t fall from the tower, rather it was like stepping through a dazzling waterfall of light. When I could see again, we found ourselves in the Old Arkham Graveyard on Church Street. Finn was terribly hurt, so we made all speed to the hospital.”

“So where do you think you were?” asked Minnie.

“Who knows?” said Kate. “We traveled between worlds, dimensions, time itself. Without the sphere, it’s impossible to know.”

“What happened to the sphere?” asked Alexander. “Do you think the creature took it?”

“I suppose it must have, though without returning to the boarding house I can’t say for sure,” said Oliver. “I imagine the proprietor would be none too pleased to see us return, given the damage that was done to the place.”

“Then our enemies have obtained a powerful weapon,” said Alexander.

The high spirits of the reunion were deflated by that thought, and they sat in silence for a while. Rex was the one who finally broke the mood of quiet despair.

“So what’s next?” he asked. “We won’t get anything out of Rita until she wakes up. How do we proceed from here?”

“I’m heading back to the laboratory with this,” said Kate, brandishing the strange rock. “This might be the key to making my flux stabilizer lock into the resonances of other dimensions.”

“I don’t know what that means, but okay,” said Rex. “Stone?”

“I’m gonna stay with Rita,” said Stone. “Someone needs to keep watch on her in case the bad guys try to come after her again.”

“Makes sense,” agreed Rex. “Alexander?”

“I will continue researching in the library. Perhaps there is something we’re missing, some vital clue that may help us.”

“Sounds good. Minnie, you’re with me. We’ll try and get this written up. I got a feeling we’re getting close. This is almost over, I can feel it.”

Minnie nodded and said, “And what about you, Oliver? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to Arkham Asylum to talk to Henry,” said Oliver. “If he is involved with any of this, I intend to get the truth from him one way or the other.”

* * *

Oliver pulled up in front of Arkham Asylum, parking in the shadow of the tower rising from the central block. Once, it had intimidated him with its looming presence, but after what he had seen in the other world with Kate and Finn, it seemed a pitiful, inconsequential thing now. Truly the monuments of men were nothing compared to the titanic geometries of the universe. How minute were the works of the human race, confined to their small rock in the solar system, when alien intelligences, vaster than comprehension, could walk between galaxies in the blink of an eye.

Yet as Oliver looked at the tower, the molded finial, the leering gargoyles, and the delicate carvings around the lancet windows, he knew that it wasn’t the scale of man’s endeavors that was important, it was that they were made at all. Yes, the universe was a colossal wilderness, uncaring and impartial in its infinite procession, but that did not lessen the achievements won in such a place.

It magnified them.

Oliver realized in that moment, as the twilight shadows crept over the stonework of the building, that no matter how small their chances of survival were, no matter how monstrous their foes might be, it was always worth fighting. The point was not whether a victory could be won, but that a fight was made at all.

With a surety to his stride that had never existed before, Oliver marched up to the front door of Arkham Asylum and rang the bell repeatedly until a sour-faced Monroe answered the summons.

“I heard you the first damn time,” he snarled.

“Then why was I waiting for so long?” said Oliver, sweeping past the man and signing in at the desk. The orderly behind the desk flashed a questioning glance at Monroe, and the man shrugged. 

“Henry Cartwright,” said Oliver. “Take me to him. Now.”

“Hey, you can’t just walk in here and bark orders at me, you know,” said Monroe with petulant belligerence.

“No?” said Oliver. “I am a professor at Miskatonic University, and a close friend of Dr. Hardstrom. Do you really want to stop me from seeing my friend?”

It was a bluff, but a calculated one, and Oliver had a feeling that Monroe wasn’t a man of any particular strength of character. He had the look of a man who enjoyed his job for all the wrong reasons, a petty man of spite. A man of whom Oliver had always been wary, but now didn’t fear at all.

“Uh, no, Professor Grayson,” said Monroe, taking a ring of keys from his belt and unlocking the door to the patient wards. Oliver followed behind, a newfound confidence evident in his stature, as Monroe led him through the gloomy hallways and locked doors of the asylum. Oliver remembered the unease that always dogged him in these corridors, but having tasted a measure of the strangeness of the world beyond, he knew now that his mind was far stronger than he had given it credit.

Stronger, but not without its limits, he reminded himself.

Monroe unlocked the door to Henry’s cell and pulled it open.

“Do you want me in with you?” he asked. “I mean, he’s been a bit active of late.”

“No,” said Oliver. “I don’t want you in there. For your own protection, it’s better if you don’t hear what we have to talk about.”

“My own protection?” said Monroe.

“Exactly so,” said Oliver, entering the room and closing the door behind him.

* * *

Henry sat perched on the end of his bed, his face hanging in forlorn, catatonic repose. The drab hospital linens hung from his spare frame, and Oliver tried to reconcile his feelings toward his old friend. The things he had learned of Henry’s actions during the war irrevocably colored Oliver’s memories, yet still a suspicion lingered that Henry was innocent of such terrible crimes.

As frail and broken as Henry looked, it was an improvement on the restraints and chemical confinement he had been subject to upon Oliver’s last visit. Oliver saw the bandages around Henry’s wrists and at the side of his neck, remembering Dr. Hardstrom’s talk of suicide attempts.

He sat on the bed next to Henry and said, “Henry, it’s Oliver. Can you hear me?”

Though he had given no outward sign of his awareness of Oliver’s presence at first, Henry slowly nodded, the movement all but imperceptible. Oliver thought he saw a faint glimmer in his eyes, like a single candle in a darkened church, but it vanished almost as soon as he saw it.

“I’m sorry it’s been a while since I’ve come to see you, Henry, but a lot has been happening in Arkham recently,” said Oliver. “Events that you might be able to shed some light upon. Young girls are going missing, and ghoulish creatures are eating their flesh.”

Was that a flicker of recognition? Guilt?

“I know what you did in the war, Henry. I know about Château-Thierry. I know about Belleau Wood and Hill 142. I know about the Comte d’Erlette and his books. Alexander told me what happened over in France, and…and though I can’t say I understand it all, I know now how severe a toll such books can take on a man’s mind.”

At the mention of his wartime exploits, Henry looked up, the lone spark in his eye flaring to become a smoldering ember. His face took on a measure of animation, the slack, sightless gaze now turning to focus upon Oliver.

“I tried to stop it,” said Henry, a look of painful devastation engulfing his features. “The words…they wouldn’t stop. I could feel them crawling inside me, pushing up my throat, weighing on my tongue, and pressing against my teeth. They wanted to be said, and I couldn’t help it.”

Oliver put his hand on Henry’s arm. Henry recoiled from the touch, pushing himself to the far corner of the bed, but not before Oliver realized Henry was crying.

“Mustn’t touch me,” cried Henry. “The fireflies will come down from the sun and burn you. They burn everything. I saw it. I saw them fall and it burned the wood. It burned it to the ground. I tried to stop it, but it was too late…”

Oliver took a deep breath. To understand Henry’s madness was a step forward, but knowing the things he knew now, he wasn’t sure it was a step he was happy to have taken. To look at this pitiful figure and know he had been privy to such fiery annihilation was proving harder than Oliver had imagined.

“And after the war, when you came home,” said Oliver. “What happened then?”

Henry looked at Oliver, as though there was a measure of understanding flowing between them. Perhaps this was what it had taken to unlock Henry’s mania, a tiny wedge of inside knowledge that  could gradually pry open the prison of his thoughts.

“Tell me about the ghouls, Henry,” said Oliver. “Tell me why they came back with you.”

Henry buried his head in his hands, his chest heaving as he sobbed. He shook his head.

“Please, Henry,” begged Oliver. “People are dying. There’s a young girl out there who will be murdered if we don’t find her soon. Her name is Amanda, and you can help us find her before it’s too late. Whatever you can tell me might help us, so please speak to me. Who is the priest in the red robes? Did you teach someone else how to create these monsters?”

“I can’t. I don’t know. I saw them, but they knew…they already knew.”

“You saw them? Who? Tell me, Henry, who did you see?”

“The ghouls!” cried Henry. “I found their lair and saw the words written there! I saw what had become of them, but they were too far gone to stop. I ran and sought the rites to destroy them, but the wrong words came out. I opened the damned books, but there was a paper where there shouldn’t have been a paper. Words I didn’t want to read, but which printed themselves on my eyes! I tried not to say them, but they spilled out, no matter what I did. I ran. I tried to seal up my mouth with needle and thread, but the words burned away the stitches. Everywhere I went I saw the fire! Oh God, it was following me. I tried to stop, to push my hand so far down my throat the words couldn’t come out, but they kept coming! I was going to burn the world!”

Henry’s words made little sense to Oliver, and he reached out to him before remembering that would be a bad idea. Henry’s fingers gouged at his face, leaving angry red wheals down his cheeks. His eyes were bloodshot and spittle gathered at the corner of his mouth.

“It’s too much,” sobbed Henry. “I feel it getting closer every day: the rocks tumble, chains of ancient days weaken, and the sea churns with the stirring of its form. Dark waters are rising, and the stain of man will be washed away. Noah and his kin had the way of it. Only way to live, to flee the rising waters. Wash it all away, the filth, the corruption, the lost souls, and the organism that failed.”

“Henry, what are you talking about? Please, you have to help me! Amanda’s life depends upon it. Where are the ghouls? Who is the priest in red? If you know, you must tell me!”

“I can’t,” screamed Henry. “I don’t know. There’s nothing left of me. No memory, no will. I am Nemo, you understand? The no-man now. The things I saw, the things I did…please forgive me, but I tried. It was too much. The things we read, may God forgive me…”

“Please,” said Oliver, taking Henry by the arms.

There was no strength left in Henry, and Oliver easily held him fast.

“No! Please, no!” screamed Henry. “You can’t. Mustn’t. The darkness is coming, and everything will die, wiped away for a fresh start.”

“Henry, for the love of God, please help me!” shouted Oliver.

“Do well, whatever you do,” cried Henry. “It’s the most important thing!”

Something of this last utterance struck Oliver as relevant, but before he could dwell on it, Henry curled up at the end of his bed. Henry’s arms curled around his head as he rocked back and forth. Oliver felt a moment’s pity for his old friend. The drive to know everything, to unlock the mysteries of the world was a compulsion Oliver knew only too well. The desire to understand the workings of the world and the people within it were what had seen Oliver enter the world of academia. But as he was coming to realize, there was such a thing as too much knowledge, limits beyond which it was unsafe to venture.

Oliver sat back, resting his head on the cold wall as Henry quietly wept into his sheets.

It had been a wasted trip.

He had learned nothing.

* * *

Oliver made his way back down through the hallways of Arkham Asylum, his mood despondent and his spirits low. He had been sure there was still some shred of the old Henry left, a part that retained some good, but that aspect of his friend was as broken as his sanity. Whatever remained of Henry Cartwright, the professor, the colleague, and the fellow traveler on the road of enlightenment, was gone.

Tears pricked the corners of his eyes, as Oliver mourned his lost friend. While Henry had remained in the asylum, Oliver had always held out faint hope that there might be a cure or solution found to bring him back from the edge, but this latest encounter had dashed that hope. Henry was gone, and Oliver felt the pain as keenly as any death.

Monroe was contrite as he led the way back to the main vestibule of the asylum, and Oliver gave him a numb nod of thanks as he opened the last door. Oliver made his way to the desk and scratched the time next to his name as he signed out of the building. The orderly who normally sat there was absent, so Oliver simply made his way toward the main door.

Before he reached it, he heard hurrying feet and looked round to see a woman emerge from one of the offices. She wore a nurse’s uniform, and Oliver recognized her pale skin, dark eyes, and brown hair from his last visit. Her red lips seemed at odds with her clinical bearing, and she flashed Oliver a knowing smile.

“Professor Grayson?” she said.

“Yes?”

“There was a telephone call for you,” she said, making it sound like a huskily voiced invitation, though Oliver couldn’t imagine what such an invite might portend.

“Oh, did the caller give a name?”

“He said his name was Gabriel Stone,” she said. “From the hospital.”

Oliver’s guts tightened in anticipation. “Did he leave a message for me?”

“He did,” confirmed the nurse. “He said to tell you that Rita’s woken up.”

* * *

The mood in the hospital room was quietly optimistic, though no one dared voice any such sentiment for fear of jinxing it. Rita was sitting up, propped by a mountain of pillows and sipping a glass of crushed ice. Too much fluid would have been just as bad for her as none at all, so the doctors were limiting her intake. Finn was also responding well to medical treatment. His wounds were severe, but Arkham’s doctors were more than competent. Despite some serious blood loss, Finn Edwards was resilient and wasn’t going to make it easy for the Sidhe to carry him to Tir Na Nog.

Rex, Minnie, Stone, and Alexander gathered around Rita’s bed, trying not to crowd her, but eager to hear what she had to say. Introductions had already been made, and Oliver was the last to arrive, speeding across town at a lunatic forty miles per hour to get to St. Mary’s. Though he had never met Rita before, he was elated to hear she had awoken, and rushed up the steps and along the tiled corridors to her room.

Stone in particular appeared to have taken the greatest joy at Rita’s awakening, and it wasn’t hard to understand the reason why. Rita’s survival was a symbol, a tiny spot of light against the dark, but a light just the same.

“You get anything from Cartwright?” asked Rex as Oliver entered the room.

“Little I think will be of use,” said Oliver.

“Damn,” said Minnie, surprising them all with the force behind her curse.

“Are you Professor Grayson?” asked Rita, her voice little more than a croaking wheeze.

Oliver moved to stand beside her and delicately took her hand.

“I am, yes,” he said.

“Amanda told me to find you,” she said as tears eased from her eyes. “I went to your office, but you wasn’t there.”

“No,” said Oliver. “I was…uh, elsewhere. I’m sorry.”

“You have to find Amanda,” said Rita. “I left her there. I’m sorry, Mandy. I didn’t have no choice. I had to get out and get help.”

“You did the right thing, Rita,” soothed Oliver.

“I couldn’t just sit there and let them kill us.”

“Let who kill you?” asked Stone.

“I dunno…those guys. They wore robes, like priests or something. There was one, a guy in a red robe. He wanted to know about Mandy’s dreams. Threatened to feed me to the monsters unless she told them.”

“The ghouls,” said Alexander. “She was held in their lair.”

“A man in a red robe like a priest?” said Oliver excitedly. This was the link between the murdered girls, the ghouls, and the sphere Finn had taken from the monstrous flying creatures. It was all linked, every gruesome thread part of a larger design, with the minions of dread Cthulhu at the heart of the web.

“Yeah, he was like a Klansman in red,” said Rita, wiping her face with her sleeve. “I don’t know who he was…we could never see his face, but he scared us. I mean, more than any man should. He had bad mojo in him, real bad, the worst I ever seen.”

“Bad mojo? I don’t know the term,” said Oliver. “What does it mean?”

“Means he’s evil,” said Rita. “Evil in his heart like it went bad, you know? Nothing smells worse than something that’s gone rotten.”

Rita screwed her eyes shut at the memory of this man. Eventually she sighed and Oliver stroked strands of hair from her forehead.

“Rita, this is very important,” said Oliver. “Can you tell us where you were? Do you remember anything about the place you were held prisoner? Even the slightest detail could help us find Amanda.”

Rita shook her head. “It was a cave, underground somewhere. We never saw how we got there. We got jumped on the bridge after we left the Commercial, and that’s the last thing I remember before we woke up in the cave. They had those things in cells around the wall. Oh hell, Mandy, I’m so sorry! We have to find her!”

“We will,” Stone assured her. Behind him, Rex wrote furiously in his notebook.

“You have to, before he gets her to tell,” said Rita. “Mandy’s a good girl, but she won’t last, not without me to keep her strong. She’ll tell him, and then he gets what he wants.”

“What exactly was he wanting?” asked Oliver.

“Her dreams,” said Rita. “Everything she dreamed about that damn city under the water.”

“Do you know why?” asked Rex.

“He thought he could find it, I guess,” said Rita. “I think he thought Amanda’s dreams would show him where it was.”

“Can he do that?” asked Minnie. “It was only a dream, after all.”

Alexander shook his head. “No, it wasn’t. It was a vision of another place. Maybe even another time. After what’s happened to us all recently, is that so hard to believe?”

“I guess not,” agreed Minnie.

“How did you manage to escape?” asked Rex, earning him a stern glance from Stone.

“A few ghouls came back one time, and some looked wounded. Like they’d been shot.”

Stone and Oliver exchanged a look of understanding.

“The others ate them right in front of us. It was horrible, but I got a weapon out of it.”

Rita told them how she had fought the cultists, and Oliver felt his admiration for this courageous girl soar at her desperate escape from the lair of the ghouls. To have survived so long and still have the pluck and energy to fight free was staggering.

“Did you see where you came out into the river?” asked Stone.

“I tried to,” said Rita, “but I got turned around too much to see for sure. Somewhere upriver of the West Street Bridge, but I can’t say for sure. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m surprised you remember anything after all you’ve been through,” said Oliver.

Stone and Oliver quizzed Rita for another hour, learning everything they could of her terrible ordeal. As Rita began to doze off again, they were no nearer to finding Amanda’s location, save that it was likely somewhere in the western parts of the Campus or Merchant District. But that still left a lot of properties in which Amanda might be held prisoner.

Stone approached Oliver and said, “Rex tells me you got nothing from your friend at the asylum. Tough break.”

“It’s hard to know what to make of what he was saying. I’m no psychiatrist, though perhaps I could have my colleague, William Hillshore, come out from San Francisco to examine him more thoroughly in the days to come,” said Oliver.

“Maybe,” agreed Stone, “but that won’t do us much good just now.”

“I know, but sometimes it felt like Henry was on the verge of saying something profound, but then he would veer off into raving lunacy. I’m afraid the experience of the war has broken him. Henry kept talking of the world being wiped clean, of the stain of humanity being washed away.”

“Do you know what he meant by that?” asked Minnie.

“Not really, no,” said Oliver. “But it bears relation to the rise of the demon’s undersea tomb city. I suspect Henry’s madness and the machinations of the Cthulhu cult to be inextricably linked.”

“You’re sure he didn’t say anything that’d help us find Amanda? Think, professor.”

“He said he’d seen the ghouls, found their lair even, but he didn’t give me any clue as to where it might be located.”

“Damn,” muttered Stone, turning away and sitting at the end of Rita’s bed.

Oliver shrugged and said, “I do think he wanted us to find Amanda. The more I think about it, the more I have a hard time believing that this was Henry’s doing. If anything, he seemed utterly horrified by the idea of these ghouls loose in Arkham. I had the very distinct impression that he’d found them, and tried to stop them, but was in turn stopped himself.”

“By the guy in the red robes,” suggested Rex.

“I suspect so,” agreed Oliver.

“We need to find him,” said Stone. “Whoever he is.”

“I’m not sure I want to,” said Rex, jerking his thumb toward the recumbent figure of Rita. She was dozing, not quite awake and not quite asleep. “If even half of what Rita says is true, then this is one serious guy. He doesn’t mind getting his hands bloody at all, and I don’t want to be the next item on those ghouls’ menu.”

“We don’t have a choice, Rex,” said Minnie.

Rex slumped in his chair and tapped his pencil against his pad. “So what else did Henry say, Oliver? Gimme a quote to end on, eh?”

Oliver massaged his temples with his fingertips. “Henry did give me one piece of advice. He said it was the most important thing.”

“Yeah? What was it? Don’t eat yellow snow?”

“Hardly,” said Oliver. “He said, ‘Do well, whatever you do.’”

No sooner had the words been said than Rita sat bolt upright.

“He said what?” she demanded, her eyes alight with sudden fervor.

“‘Do well, whatever you do.’ Does that mean anything to you?” asked Oliver.

“I knew they were bad news!” exclaimed Rita. “Get me outta here. I’ll kill ‘em!”

“Woah, there,” said Stone as Rita tried to hurl herself from the bed. “You’re in no condition to go anywhere, missy. Lie back and tell us what that means, okay? I got a big gun, and if anyone needs killin’, you best be leaving it to me. You understand?”

Rita looked up at Stone and recognized a man who never broke his word, never lied, and never made a threat he wasn’t prepared to back up with violence if need be. Oliver felt an acute relief that he counted Stone as an ally, for he would make a potent enemy.

“What does it mean, Rita?” Oliver asked again. “What is its significance?”

“It’s their motto,” said Rita. “He told us at the Commercial. ‘Do well, whatever you do.’ He was bragging, telling us how smart they was, how lucky we were to be with them. All he did was look like some rich kid boasting he had more money than me.”

“Who was this?” asked Oliver.

“Wilson Brewster, he’s part of the AQA Fraternity,” said Rita. “Oily bastard’s been trying to be Amanda’s sugar daddy ever since he laid eyes on her.”

“AQA? What’s that?” asked Rex.

“Age Quod Agis,” said Oliver. “It’s a Latin abbreviation, and means—”

“‘Do well, whatever you do,’ I get it,” finished Stone. “Where’s their frat house?”

“It’s on West Church Street, I think,” said Alexander. “Near the graveyard…”

“That’s it,” said Stone, his hand drifting toward his pistol. “We got ‘em.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Amanda slept fitfully, her hunger and thirst now too great to ignore or keep at bay with willpower. The brief surge of hope she’d felt at Rita’s escape had lasted as long as it took for the cultist she’d taken the keys from to rise and beat her unconscious. She’d tried to remember his name, and where she’d seen him before, but it wouldn’t come. Exhaustion, fear, and malnutrition were eroding her ability to think clearly.

She’d woken with blood in her eyes and a thudding pain between her temples. All trace of the struggle had vanished, though freshly chewed bones littered the far side of the pool. She’d thought she heard distant chanting, mixed with angry shouts from above, but it was hard to be sure of anything.

Rita had gotten free, and Amanda’s only hope now was that her friend had managed to find help and was bringing the cavalry to her rescue. It wasn’t much of a hope. Even if Rita had made it back to civilization, how would she know where to return? She glanced toward the grate Rita had snuck through. Would her rescuers come back in that way?

She drifted in and out of consciousness, letting her mind wander the forgotten pathways of her memory and taking refuge in memories of childhood. She remembered swimming through the crystal cold waters of Lake Champlain, racing her brother to the yellow buoys that marked the edge of the safe swimming area.

Amanda would always swim a few strokes beyond the buoys, and tease her brother mercilessly for being chicken. Then he’d swim out to her and they’d laugh and dunk each other...until that one time a fish or some submerged piece of driftwood brushed against her leg. She’d screamed and thrashed like a maniac, thinking that Champ, the lake’s legendary monster was attacking her. She’d immediately pictured slimy tentacles pulling her down, like a rubbery octopus wrapping its oozing bulk around her and dragging her toward its beak-like mouth.

After that summer, she never swam out beyond the buoys.

The memory of the lake faded, and Amanda saw herself as a young girl, poring over her father’s atlas, memorizing the different names of all the countries. Capital cities, rivers, mountains, and forests—she memorized them all. That faded too, and she was in the automobile factory where her father worked, watching the assembly lines from the gantry above as line after line of men riveted, bolted, hammered, and welded the cars together. It never ceased to amaze her how all these pieces of metal, shaped, pressed, and molded together, could form such an incredible machine.

Amanda had spent every moment she could at her father’s side, learning all about the science behind these automobiles and the machines the men used to build them. 

She wondered why her escape into memory had brought her to these moments.

Then she remembered. They were an escape from pain.

 When had that pain happened?

The memory of that pain surged, though it was without a point of reference or anchor in her mind. It might have been days ago, weeks ago, minutes ago. She could no longer tell.

A voice had whispered to her, beguiling and soft, though she couldn’t hear the words. They were calming, and though she knew how this scene would play out, she wasn’t afraid. The voice came again, and this time it felt like it was asking her something.

“Tell me, Amanda,” said the voice, “what did you dream?”

“What?” she replied foggily.

“The dreams of the sunken city. The ones you told to Oliver Grayson. Tell me what you saw and I can return you to your pleasing fictions of memory.”

“I don’t remember them,” she said as a warning voice deep in the farthest reaches of her mind screamed at her not to relive this horrible memory.

“I think you do,” said the voice. Amanda opened her eyes to see the red robed priest kneeling before her. A glittering fog filled the space between them, like they were inside a snow globe filled with flecks of silver and gold. She screamed and shrank back from him, feeling his hatred of her as a palpable force. It washed off him like sweat, a powerful disgust at her very existence. No, not just her existence, but her existence as part of the human race.

His hood was right in front of her, but she still couldn’t see his face. Unnatural darkness clung to his face like a mask, and all the pain and hunger vanished as the force of her terror blotted out all other thoughts.

“No,” she said emphatically. “I won’t tell you. I can’t. I promised.”

“You do remember, and you’re going to tell me. Time has run out for you, Amanda. I tried to do this without you suffering unduly, but my patience is at an end. With Rita rotting in the tunnels beneath Arkham, I no longer care whether I kill you, so this is your last chance. Tell me what I want to know or you will die screaming in pain.”

Amanda fought to hold back her tears, but no dam could restrain the tidal wave of emotion that surged through her. Tears flowed down her face and wracking sobs shook her body as days’ worth of fear surged to the fore. Without Rita beside her, she wasn’t strong. She couldn’t resist the man’s horrible demands.

She nodded, but Rita’s voice sounded in her ear.

Don’t you say nothing, Mandy. Don’t you dare!

Amanda laughed to hear Rita’s voice bullying her from far away, but that laugh only enraged her captor more. She felt herself dragged to her feet as the chains binding her wrists were released. She sagged against the man, her legs unable to support her weight. She tried to struggle, to fight like Rita had fought, but there was no strength left in her. Rita trained every day and she had barely managed to fight her way free.

The priest dragged her across the chamber, her legs splashing through the pool and scraping her knees bloody on the rocky floor. The ghouls barked and growled as he approached, thinking he had brought them a fresh meal.

“Still choosing to be stubborn?” said the man.

She didn’t answer him, and he shrugged. With surprising strength, he locked one hand around her throat and hauled her upright. Her feet dangled as he slammed her back against a barred door to one of the ghoul’s cells. Amanda struggled for breath, his rough hands almost, but not quite, cutting off the air to her lungs.

“Latimer!” called the man. Amanda screamed in fear.

The sound was barely out of her mouth when razors sliced down her back on either side of her spine. Red-hot claws tore her bedraggled dress and cut strips from her back, the skin and flesh curling down like rolled up paper as the ghoul’s paw shredded her flesh. The torn strips of skin were gathered up, like strands of hemp being wound into a length of rope. Warm, sticky wetness poured down her back.

Amanda bucked and thrashed in the man’s grip, but his strength was enormous and he held her pinned. With a grunt and a savage jerk, the ghoul wrenched the strips of torn skin from her back and Amanda wept in pain and horror as she heard its jaws chewing the meat of her body.

“No!” she screamed. “Oh no, please, no! Oh God, please, mister, what do you want to know about my dreams? They don’t mean anything, oh, please don’t hurt me again!”

“Tell me what I want to know,” the man insisted. “Otherwise Latimer will peel the skin from your arms as easily as you’d remove an opera glove.”

Sharpened claws settled on her shoulders, digging deep enough to draw blood.

“I’m sorry Rita, I’m so sorry…,” Amanda wept.

“Speak up, girl!” snapped the priest.

“I’m floating in the ocean,” began Amanda. “I don’t know where, but I’m not afraid…”

“Go on,” said the man.

Amanda told him everything in her dream, every nuance and every subtlety, no matter how inconsequential. He made her tell it three times at least, going over every detail, highlighting different aspects depending on the questions the man would ask to clarify certain points. She sobbed with each retelling, ashamed she had broken her promise to Rita. Her head knew there was no weakness in speaking under such circumstances, but her heart would not be dissuaded that she had committed some hideous betrayal.

“Look up at the stars,” said the man, as she went over her last sight before the waters dragged her beneath the surface. “Tell me what you see. Describe them.”

“There’s one group,” gasped Amanda. “Like a crucifix. It’s the brightest of all.”

“The Southern Cross,” said the man. “As I’d expect, but what of the other stars?”

“I don’t know,” said Amanda, hearing the frustrated, snuffling hunger of the ghoul at her back. At any moment it could tear more of the skin from her body. The thought of that made her tremble in fear.

“I don’t know them!” she yelled. “I don’t know stars. I’m not an astronomer.”

“No, but you are an engineer. Describe them, their shape, their position, their relative brightness. Do it now.”

Amanda cried in abject fear, but she did as he demanded.

* * *

Henry’s steps carried him in a brisk circuit of his cell, his hands knotting together in frantic motion as his ruined mind tried to order itself. Oliver’s visit had thrown him for a loop, and the chaotic nature of Henry’s mind was undoing a measure of its disorder. For the first time in years Henry could think clearly.

He knew it was a fleeting window of clarity, and he fought to hold back the anguish of his lost years and the horror of his current life. Oliver had spoken of terrible things, events he had tried to bury in the darkest vaults of his memory, but that prison was now unlocked and the dreadful events of 1918 returned to haunt him. 

The dead bodies, the gnawed bones, and the fire falling like incandescent waterfalls from the heavens. Flesh liquefying on bone and pouring from bodies like molten rubber. How easy it was for enlightenment to turn to horror! The treasure trove of books he and Alexander had found had turned out to be a poisoned chalice, a tainted well from which they had drunk too deeply.

Henry remembered Jameson babbling in a tongue no one knew, weeping as he put the pistol in his mouth and blew his brains over the castle walls. Mortimer had dashed his skull to destruction on the stone floor of the hidden library, while Warren had turned his madness outward, fighting the Germans like a berserker from the Norse legends, tearing men apart with his bare hands. He’d received a medal for that, yet for Warren it was no passing thing, no act of bravery spurred on by danger, but a near-constant state of being.

He could remember little else of the war, just fleeting images of bloody bodies, fire, and accusing eyes reflected in pools of dark water. The guilt of those days burned brightly in his heart, but he had tried to make amends, tried to put those years behind him. Was everything he had done since the war meaningless?

Henry turned to the window and gripped the bars tightly. He looked up at the moon as it hid its face behind the clouds.

“I’m so sorry, Oliver,” he said. “I tried to stop it, but it had already begun.”

The moon appeared from behind its clouds, bathing him in its stark illumination.

The universe cares not for your regret…

Henry shrieked, hearing the words as though voiced by an invisible speaker at his shoulder. He spun around, seeing his room slashed by black spars of shadow from the barred window. The far wall undulated, as though constructed from billowing sailcloth instead of brick and mortar.

“Oh God! Please not again!” wailed Henry. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

The shadows did not answer him, writhing on the rippling surface of the bare wall, spreading and reaching out to him as the light from the moon diminished. Though the darkness was impenetrable, Henry could hear the sound of guttural chanting, hideous grunts, and the smack of wet lips from beyond. The stink of stagnant water and blood filled his senses.

Henry screamed and ran to the door of his cell.

“Please!” he cried. “Monroe! Anyone! Please, help me! It’s me, Henry Cartwright! I need help. God, please I need help!”

No one answered his cries, and he pressed his back to the iron door as the shadows on the wall oozed onto the floor, flowing like oil pouring from a ruptured drum. The darkness glittered with sparkling iridescence, flecked with gold and silver as something pushed its way up through the floor. An outline began to form as the amorphous slick rose higher and higher through the floor: a man’s shape, yet no features were visible, only darkness.

Henry covered his eyes and wailed in terror to see this black form of a man appear before him. It was no man, of that he was certain, rather some dread avatar summoned from the depths of his guilty memories. Fully emerged, the oily liquid drained away, leaving the unblemished form of a man in a Marine Corps service uniform with a badge depicting the winged staff of a corpsman pinned to his lapel.

Henry looked into the man’s eyes, seeing the face he had known he would see, the features he saw in the mirror when he was taken to be washed. His doppelgänger smiled, yet there was no warmth to it, only cold malevolence.

“Say the words, Henry,” said the uniformed figure.

“No, no, no, no…,” cried Henry. “I won’t. Not again.”

“You feel them inside you, I know you do. They are still there, crawling and slithering within. They need to be free. You have to let them out. Go on, say them for me. You learned them once, you can say them now.”

“Please don’t make me.”

“I must.”

“I can’t.”

“I want you to.”

“You’re not me!” shouted Henry. “You can’t be me!”

“I think you know that’s not true,” said his mirror image. “I am the guilt you feel at every moment. I am the fear and horror of what you did. I am the absolution you crave. I am all these things and more, but you have to say the words. Let the fire free, Henry. Let it do what it does naturally. Bring the fireflies out. Do it, do it now.”

“Please don’t make me,” begged Henry.

“You need to do it, Henry,” said the man. “Time is running out and threads must be severed before the design unravels. You understand, don’t you?”

“I don’t,” sobbed Henry. “I never did…”

The doppelgänger waggled an admonishing finger and grinned. “Now, even you know that’s a lie. Say the words with me, Henry, Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha…”

“Don’t make me,” said Henry. “I can’t.”

Even as he said it, he knew his will to resist was crumbling like a wholly insubstantial flood barrier. The waves of his hideous interlocutor’s will were battering down the fragile clarity and strength he had regained. The intolerable madness that had engulfed him for the last three years closed in on him.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh…,” he began, each dreadful syllable torn from his throat under protest, his vocal chords tortured by sounds no man was ever meant to utter. Henry clamped his mouth shut, pressing his hands to his jaw in an attempt to strangle these sounds at birth.

“That’s almost it,” said his doppelgänger. “But you have to say the rest, Henry. I need you to say it all.”

Henry fought to keep the words from coming, biting his tongue and filling his mouth with blood. It streamed down his chin and the reek of it sent his mind spinning through time to the moment the heavens opened and a magma rain fell upon a once picturesque French wood.

* * *

“Shouldn’t we wait for the police?” said Oliver as Stone climbed out of his Crossley and took off his long brown duster. Stone’s entire demeanor had changed since they had uncovered the location of the ghouls’ lair. His face was hardened to granite, and his words came out clipped and brutal, as though he had donned a facet of his persona that would allow him to kill another human being.

“You think Amanda’s got till they get their fat asses outta bed?” said Stone. “We don’t move now, she might be dead by morning.”

Oliver had to agree with Stone’s logic. With Rita’s escape, Amanda’s chances of survival dropped dramatically. No sooner had they divined the location in which they believed Amanda was being held than Stone had set off for his car. Rex and Minnie had bundled into Stone’s ex-military car while Alexander had placed a call to the Arkham Police Station, and Oliver had fetched his own Ford from the street outside. Thus gathered, they had driven three blocks to Crane Street in the shadow of Axton Field House, the newly built training ground used by Miskatonic’s sporting crowd.

Oliver’s Ford and Stone’s Crossley were parked in one of the narrow alleyways that gave access from Church Street to the numerous service courts at the rear of the buildings. Splintered crates and packing materials littered the edges of the alley, and the reek of rotting trash was a pungent stench.

Stone eased up to the edge of the alleyway and looked out. Behind him, Oliver and Alexander hugged the wall, while Rex and Minnie kept to the rear. Minnie had her camera out, though Rex was lumbered with carrying the tripod. Oliver’s heart was in his mouth at the thought of them rescuing Amanda. Stone was armed, the Pinkerton agent a force of nature, like a hero from the movies. Unstoppable and implacable. But he was the only one.

Church street was cobbled, and formed one edge of the main shopping area of Arkham. The stores here were varied and numerous, and Oliver had spent many a leisurely Saturday afternoon wandering its length, peering into shop windows and marveling at all the new things there were to buy these days. The character of the street was subtly altered now. The sidewalks were empty and many of the shops were boarded up, their proprietors having fled the town for safer locales.

The building on the corner of Crane and West was still under construction, an iron-framed shell that would house the university’s new School of Language, Literature, and the Arts. A thin chain-link fence surrounded the construction site, but there were numerous gaps in the fence where kids had pulled it open.

 “All clear,” said Stone, dropping to one knee and turning to face Oliver. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We run straight across the street and go through one of the holes in the fence around the construction site. Follow me, step where I step, and keep low. We get to the far side of the site, and that should put us right on the corner of the AQA frat house.”

“And then what?” asked Oliver.

“Then I go in and I get Amanda,” said Stone.

“What about the rest of us?” asked Rex.

“What about you?”

“Do we go in with you?”

“You ever fired a gun?”

“No.”

“Then you stay outside,” said Stone. “You’re a reporter, so report.”

“Suits me,” said Rex.

Stone turned his attention to Alexander. “Templeton, you’ve used a weapon before, right?”

“I have, but I swore I wouldn’t fire another gun so long as I lived,” said Alexander. “I fear I would be of no use to you in a gunfight, Mr. Stone.”

“I’m going in with you, Gabriel,” said Oliver. “I promised Amanda I would help her, and that’s what I’m going to do. I failed her once before, but I won’t this time.”

Stone looked set to argue, but Oliver cut him off. “Don’t waste your words, Gabriel. I’m going in with you. Now you can either give me a gun or I’ll find a two by four in that site and come in swinging at your back. Which would you rather?”

“I’d rather neither, to be honest,” stated Stone. “But if you’re coming in, watch my back.”

Stone rolled up his trouser leg and unsnapped a small, snub-nosed pistol from an ankle holster. He slapped it into Oliver’s hand.

It was lighter than Oliver had expected, and almost ludicrously small. It looked like a child’s toy, but this was no toy—this was a device that could kill a man. With one tiny pull of the trigger, an entire human life could be snuffed out as easily as blowing out a candle. The thought gave Oliver pause, and for a brief moment he considered handing the pistol back to Stone. Instead, he gripped it even tighter.

“Okay professor, this is a .22 revolver. It’ll put a man down at close range, but you’ll need to put a couple of rounds in him to make sure. It ain’t no small thing to shoot another man, but you got to know that if you don’t kill him, he’ll kill you. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” said Oliver, though the thought of actually shooting another living being was making him sweat. He didn’t know if he could do it, but what choice did he have?

“Just remember to point it at bad guys and try not to shoot me or Amanda,” said Stone, before adding, “or yourself for that matter.”

Stone quickly demonstrated the safety catch and how to reload the weapon. Once again, Oliver was struck by the childish simplicity of it all. Surely a weapon designed to kill should be complex and difficult to use? But then, how complex was a club, an axe, or a sword? The one thing humanity excelled at was in making it easy to kill one another.

Satisfied Oliver understood the basics of the weapon, Stone nodded and set off across the street. Oliver and the others followed him, ducking down through the hole in the chain-link fence. Cut off from the streetlights, the incomplete building was a bleak, lightless form against the sepulchral sky. With half-finished walls, stairwells with no stairs, and gaping voids where floors were yet to be raised, its outlines were strange and unfamiliar.

Stacks of lumber and bags of sand and cement lay piled in neat rows, conveniently providing shelter from the nearby buildings. It seemed incredible that they were moving like soldiers through enemy territory when this was Arkham, a seemingly normal town in the heart of New England. Of course, Oliver knew it was far from normal, but the strangeness of their actions was not lost on him.

Starlight and a faint, diffuse glow from the moon illuminated their journey. A particularly bright star hung low in the southern sky, outshining its closest neighbors by quite some margin. Oliver had no idea which particular star it was, but it shimmered with a faint reddish hue, as though caught in a ripple of heat haze. He dismissed the star from his thoughts as Stone came to the edge of the construction site and peered through a gap in the fence that separated it from the edge of the frat house.

Oliver joined him at the gap as Minnie and Rex began setting up the camera. Alexander pressed himself to the fence and gripped Oliver’s shoulder tightly.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Oliver?” asked Alexander. “You don’t have to, you know.”

“No, I do have to,” said Oliver. “Amanda’s counting on me. I promised her.”

Alexander sighed. “Nothing I can say will dissuade you from entering that building?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Then remember Stone’s advice. If you have to shoot, shoot to kill. Show no compassion, for they will surely show you none.”

Oliver took Alexander’s hand and shook it. Rex and Minnie shook his hand, too, and wished him luck.

“You ready?” asked Stone, removing a long-barreled Colt from his holster. The powerful handgun made Oliver’s weapon look like a pea-shooter.

“Frankly, no, but let’s go before I lose my nerve completely,” said Oliver.

* * *

Stone ran in a crouch, swiftly closing the distance between the edge of the construction site and the frat house. Oliver ran after him, feeling awkward and exposed in the glow of the stars and the lights from the house itself. Stone reached the frat house and pressed himself against the brick walls. Oliver did likewise, and the pair of them edged around the building toward the back door.

Oliver could hear voices from within, and took a deep breath at the thought of pointing a gun at the owners of those voices. Stone’s eyes swept the back yard of the frat house, looking for anyone loitering outside.

“What are we waiting for?” whispered Oliver.

“Getting a feel for the place,” said Stone. “Waiting to see if there’s any guards.”

“Are there?”

“I don’t see any, but what do you suppose those are?”

Stone pointed to the rear of the yard, and it took Oliver a moment to see what he meant. A number of metallic pipes emerged from the ground, almost flush with the ground, but not quite. Some effort had been made to disguise them with trash, but it was clear that these had deliberate purpose.

“Air vents maybe?” suggested Stone, when Oliver didn’t answer.

“Perhaps,” agreed Oliver. “But air vents for what?”

“If you’re going to keep an army of cannibal monsters in the middle of town, you’d best keep them underground, right?”

Understanding dawned. “The cave Rita was held in. It’s right underneath us. That means the ghouls are down there, too.”

“Most likely,” agreed Stone, snapping off the safety on his Colt.

Oliver did the same with his own gun, and followed Stone as he climbed the steps to the back door of the frat house. Stone moved slowly, his steps silent on the concrete. He pulled open the screen door and tried the handle of the inner door. A shake of the head indicated it was locked.

Stone stepped back and delivered a thunderous kick to the lock. The door swung open, smashed to pieces by the force of the impact. Stone slid inside the building and Oliver ran after him, keeping his gun low at his side.

“Amanda Sharpe!” bellowed Stone. “Are you in here? Amanda Sharpe! If you can hear me, shout out!”

Oliver stepped into a long hallway, and was immediately hit by the faint, but unmistakable miasma of rotten meat. Stone walked coolly down the tiled hall with his Colt stretched out in front of him. Voices shouted from upstairs and Oliver could hear the clatter of running feet. Though it was cold outside and not much warmer inside, Oliver was sweating profusely.

A figure appeared at the end of the hallway, clutching a long knife with a serrated edge.

“Drop it!” shouted Stone. “Do it now or I swear to God I’ll put a bullet in you!”

The figure ran toward them with a strangled roar, raising the knife to strike.

A deafening bang filled the hall and the attacker was snatched back with a hole blown in its chest. Stone fired another shot, and the body slumped to the ground, leaving a fan of bright blood on the wall. Stone moved forward and Oliver went with him.

The corridor brought them out into a wide vestibule, probably at the front of the building, the hallway they had just come along connecting the two sides of the house. Oliver glanced down at the man Stone had killed, and winced at the terrible damage the bullets had done. Two bloody craters had blown out chunks of his spine and shoulder.

Oliver knelt beside the body, and turned the man’s face toward him. Drawn in a rictus mask of anger, the features spoke of the nobility of humanity being twisted into something darker. Any doubts Oliver had harbored as to the nightmarish truth of the AQA fraternity were swept away by the sight of a face devolving toward the bestial. Was this an intermediary stage of devolving a human being into a ghoul? Had this man, this boy, willingly submitted to be so altered?

The thought of volunteering for so terrible a transformation horrified Oliver, and his grip on the pistol tightened. It would be a mercy to put such twisted abominations out of their misery and spare them from the horror that awaited them at the end of this blasphemous degeneration.

“Come on, Oliver,” snapped Stone. “We have to keep moving.”

As if in answer to that thought, two booming reports filled the entrance hall. Oliver cried out as a portion of the wainscoting beside him exploded in a blast of wood splinters and plaster dust. He fell onto his backside as Stone dropped to one knee and brought his weapon up to aim at the landing above.

He fired twice and another man fell dead. Stone moved to the bottom of the stairs as another target presented itself. Before he could fire, a shot smashed into the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and made him duck back. Oliver heard more shouts coming from the rooms on either side of the hallway.

A door opened next to him and a young man carrying a shotgun emerged. Its twin barrels were aimed directly at Stone’s back. Oliver acted without thinking.

Oliver squeezed the trigger, and the bullet took the man in the shoulder. He yelped in pain, but remained upright. The young man spun toward Oliver, the shotgun still held in his good hand. Unlike the first man Stone had shot, this man’s face was completely normal, and Oliver hesitated a fraction of a second before shooting again. More by luck than judgment, his bullet impacted under the man’s jaw and punched a hole out the top of his head.

Oliver cried out as the man fell dead, wanting to throw the gun away, but knowing that his life depended on it. Stone fired again, two shots, before ducking back underneath the upper landing. He snapped open his Colt and slid home more shells.

“Find Amanda!” shouted Stone. “Quickly! I got my hands full here!”

Oliver nodded and crawled along the hallway toward one of the frat house’s front rooms. He couldn’t hear any voices from that room, but didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. More shots and screams sounded from behind him: shouting voices and desperate demands from Stone for surrender.

“Amanda!” shouted Oliver, though how she was supposed to hear him over the clamor of battle he didn’t know. “Amanda! We’re here to help! It’s Professor Grayson! If you can hear me, shout out!”

CHAPTER 20

Amanda drifted in and out of consciousness. The pain from her lacerated back was intense. She lay broken and at the end of her endurance, hearing voices from her past and images of strange futures. Though she thought she was awake, it seemed that she could hear shouting voices and distant bangs, like backfiring cars.

She raised her head, seeing the surface of the pool ripple with the distant tides, and in its inky blackness, she thought she could see strange reflections. The city she had dreamed to life and which had led her to this place shimmered in the depths of the water, a tomb not for the mighty undersea demon, but for her. She had not dreamed of a long-slumbering monster, but her own doom.

The ghouls in the cells across from her snarled and howled, rattling the bars of their caves as though in agitation. They were hungry and wanted to finish the job of devouring her. She had given the red priest exactly what he’d wanted, describing in great detail the layout of the stars in her dream. She thought she had passed out before finishing her description, but couldn’t be sure.

She couldn’t be sure of anything just now.

She hoped the man had lied about Rita rotting in the tunnels.

Amanda turned her head as a sound drifted down from the darkness above. She knew the meaning of the sound, but couldn’t place it. It sounded like a voice she once knew, and it wasn’t a sound from this place. It was a voice she trusted, a voice that had promised to help.

She knew the man whose voice she was hearing, and her entire body shook as the name finally came to her.

Professor Grayson!

Amanda pulled herself upright, her entire body a mass of pain and exhaustion. There was no part of her that didn’t hurt, no part of her that hadn’t been degraded and humiliated by her captors. No part of her save the desire to live.

“I’m here! Down here!” cried Amanda.

Deprived of water and food for so long, her voice was little more than a cracked whisper, but she gulped and tried to moisten her mouth with saliva. Fresh determination filled Amanda, and she rose on wobbling legs, using the cave walls to support herself. She shouted again and again, each time growing louder and louder as the thought of rescue grew from a forsaken hope to a potential reality.

“Professor Grayson!” she screamed. “Down here!”

Each time she yelled out, the ghouls in the cells roared and howled in rage, as though they could sense their prey might be snatched away at the last moment. Latimer hurled himself at the door of his cell, and Amanda blanched as she saw yet another bar come loose. Her captors had not seen fit to repair the damage Latimer had wreaked on his cell when Rita had made her escape.

Latimer reached out and tore one of the bars from his cell completely off.

“Professor Grayson! Hurry!” yelled Amanda.

* * *

“Come on,” said the mirror image in Henry Cartwright’s cell at Arkham Asylum. “You’re so close. If you look outside you can see Fomalhaut clearly. The Great Old One is almost here, so why stop now? Just one more try, what do you say?”

“No,” said Henry through gritted teeth. “I. Will. Not. Say. It.”

“Yes, you will,” said the figure. “If I have to come over there and reach down that throat of yours and rip the words out with my bare hands.”

The veins stood out like taut hawsers on Henry’s neck, and his skin flushed a deep red. Blood vessels hemorrhaged in his eyes, and a crimson curtain fell across his vision. Henry’s muscles spasmed and he fell onto his back, jerking and convulsing like a patient undergoing electro-convulsive therapy.

His fingers clawed at the floor as the light of the moon shone down on him, its gibbous glow eclipsed by the red star that hung low over the horizon. Its glow shimmered like hot air above an asphalt road in the summer. Even in his delirium, Henry felt as though it was a gelid eye staring unblinkingly at him with a monstrous appetite. It was an intelligence of old acquaintance to Henry, a being he had seen once before in all its hellish majesty as the landscape of France burned. He had seen this terrible creature’s avatars at work, sparking into horrid parodies of life before the walls of Château-Thierry, and knew how capricious and destructive they could be.

His shadow-self leered down at him.

“You see,” it said. “The Great Old One is almost here anyway. You might as well say the rest of the incantation.”

Henry tried to fight the sounds pressing against his teeth, but it was no use.

He heard the hideous words vomiting up from inside him.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha Formalhaut n’gha-ghaa naf’l thagn! Iä Cthugha!”

Henry’s back arched and his mind fled to the forgotten darkness in its deepest recesses.

* * *

Oliver crawled through the chaos of the frat house, hearing frantic yells and gunshots echoing from the walls. He was utterly terrified, and had no idea where Stone was, but the fact there was still a gun battle raging surely meant the man was alive and fighting. He kept shouting Amanda’s name, and had all but given up any hope of receiving a response when he heard a faint voice calling his name during a brief lull in the shooting.

He turned a corner and saw two young frat boys with blond hair and Ivy League good looks at a door secured by a heavy iron padlock. One had a red robe draped over his shoulder and clutched a ring of keys. The other carried a heavy axe, like an executioner’s blade that might once have beheaded kings. They looked up as he came into view, and Oliver thought they looked familiar, but didn’t have time to wonder where he’d seen them.

“Kill him, Wilson!” said the boy with the keys.

The boy identified as Wilson ran toward him, but Oliver was acting on pure instinct and adrenaline now and shot the boy twice in the chest. Wilson collapsed, screaming in pain, but Oliver ignored him, training his gun on the second boy.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” said Oliver. “But I will.”

“No, you won’t,” said the boy, ducking through an open door beside him. Oliver fired, but his shot missed and smashed into the doorframe. Oliver cursed and ran down to the locked door. He pressed himself to the door, hearing the faint pleas of a young girl.

“Amanda!” he shouted. 

Oliver heard his name shouted in reply, the cry surely belonging to Amanda. Oliver rattled the handle as he uselessly pulled at the door. There was no way he could repeat Stone’s feat of breaking the door down. At least not without a tool to help him. Oliver returned to the groaning body of the boy he’d just shot and retrieved the axe, surprised at its weight as he hefted it over his shoulder.

He was about to take a swing at the door, when he saw he wouldn’t need to.

In his hurry to escape, the other boy had dropped the ring of keys.

Oliver swept them up and slid a key into the lock. The angels were looking down upon him, and the first key he tried turned out to be the right one. The lock snapped open with a satisfying click, and Oliver pushed the door open. A set of steps was cut into the earth beneath the house, and the rank stench of putrefaction wafted up from below, as though this was the entrance to the very bowels of Hell. 

Fear of the dark and the unknown warred within Oliver as he imagined the terrible things he might see below. This was surely the lair of the ghouls. What debaucheries might he find within so wretched a place?

He took a deep breath and checked the chambers of his pistol.

He was down to his last bullet.

“Damn you, Stone, why didn’t you give me any more bullets?” said Oliver.

Should he find Stone to reload? No, that was foolish. Instead, Oliver took up the executioner’s axe as Amanda’s scream of fear and the clang of metal on rock echoed from somewhere below the frat house.

Oliver set off down the stairs at a run.

* * *

The sound of gunfire was audible from outside the frat house, sounding tinny and distant from the construction site. Rex eased closer to Minnie as the first shots sounded, subtly placing himself between her and the house.

“Getting gallant in your old age, Rex?” she said.

Rex gave her a lopsided smile, the kind she had grown to love over the last few years. “I guess so. It’s gotten a bit too real now, I guess. Do you think we ought to go in and help?”

“Not unless you got a gun in your pocket you haven’t told me about.”

“Point taken,” said Rex. “But I don’t like this. Sitting on the sidelines isn’t my style.”

“I would have thought it was exactly a reporter’s style,” said Alexander, crouched behind a mass of heavy cinderblocks and alternating his glances between the frat house and the sky. “What I mean to say is, isn’t it a reporter’s job to simply report and not get involved? Surely the best reporting is unbiased and objective?”

“I guess,” answered Rex. “But this is different. We’re not here as reporters, but as decent human beings who want to help. But what are we doing out here to help?”

“Staying alive,” answered Minnie. “If this all goes south, then the three of us are all that’s left to keep digging and carry on what we’ve begun.”

Rex gave a weary shrug, accepting the logic of what Minnie said, but not too happy about it. Minnie knew that Rex was itching to get in on the action, or at least seen to be getting in on the action. It wasn’t that she thought Rex was a coward, far from it, but he was a man who knew his limits. Getting involved in a shoot out was way beyond his limits.

Beyond hers, too, for she had no wish to put herself in harm’s way.

Having her camera set up so near to a gunfight was about as close as she wanted to get to conflict. Some reporters had traveled to France in the wake of the war, sending back harrowing stories from the aftermath of the fighting, and there was talk of newsmen being allowed to travel with the armed forces as they consolidated their hold over Europe.

As much as the idea of getting that close to the news scared her, she couldn’t help but think of the kinds of pictures she might get. The whip-crack of a passing bullet made her duck. She hid behind the tripod of her camera, even though she knew it was useless as protection. 

She looked over at Alexander, the man taking cover as though he feared a stray bullet might somehow penetrate the ten feet of cinderblocks he was sheltering behind. He glanced up at the sky once more, and a flickering red glow shimmered faintly across his normally unflappable features.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Is it just me, or does that star look a lot closer than it ought to be?” said Alexander.

Minnie and Rex looked up, and their breath caught in their throats as they saw the blazing light of a red star hanging over the frat house. The night sky seethed with orange and red, and a rippling haze compressed the air as a curtain of suffocating heat descended. The clouds flashed to superheated steam as the sky was pulled apart with the sound of tearing cloth.

Waterfalls of fire fell from the heavens amid a billowing cloud of spinning embers that darted like fireflies.

* * *

Gabriel had burned through five speed loaders, and the gunfight showed no sign of letting up. These frat boys were putting up a hell of a fight, and it was lucky for him that most of them couldn’t shoot worth a damn. Bullets zipped through the air, twitching the clouds of smoke. The reek of cordite was thick in his nostrils. He’d shot maybe ten or fifteen guys, but felt no remorse for their deaths.

They had tried to kill him and were responsible for the death of his daughter.

Fifteen deaths didn’t even begin to make up for that loss.

Three guys rushed him from a side room, two armed with guns, another with a large machete. Stone shot the first, and dodged to the side as the other fired a wild burst of shots. The doorframe broke apart into splinters, and Gabriel threw himself back as another bullet tore through the lath and plaster wall he’d been standing against. He swung back and put a bullet into the face of the shooter, catching a fleeting glimpse of a face contorted into a ravaged mask. His bullet destroyed the face before he could get a good look. Gabriel was grateful for this small mercy.

The machete swung at him, and Gabriel had no room to move. The blade hacked into the meat of his upper arm, and the pain was the most terrible sensation he’d ever known. The gun dropped from his hand, and he staggered back, falling to the carpeted landing as the frat boy came at him again.

Gabriel rolled onto his back and kicked out with both legs. The heels of his heavy boots slammed into the boy’s knees, and Gabriel heard a satisfying crack of bone. The boy fell to the floor with a shriek that said he’d never walk again. Gabriel reached over with his left hand to snatch up his fallen gun.

His right arm felt like it had been dipped in burning gasoline, but Gabriel pushed the pain aside as he brought his pistol to bear. The boy with the shattered kneecaps was dragging himself toward Gabriel, though the pain must have been incredible.

“Nice try, buddy,” said Gabriel. He squeezed the trigger and blew the guy’s head off.

His Colt was empty, and he snapped the cylinder open. He struggled to free a speed loader from his pocket with his good hand as four frat boys emerged from a room farther along the upper hallway.

“Christ, how many more of you are there?”

Armed with a mixture of knives, pistols, and shotguns, they ran toward Gabriel with murder in mind.

They never reached him.

A cascade of fire, like molten metal pouring in a steel mill lashed down through the ceiling and obliterated them in the time it took to blink. Gabriel fell back from the sudden rise in temperature. The inside of the frat house was now as hot as a furnace. Each breath felt like he was in the middle of a Texas heat wave. Gabriel blinked as hundreds of pinpoints of light suddenly sparked into being throughout the frat house.

“What the hell?” he cried.

Flames leapt from the walls and floor where these spinning sparks landed. Pictures and team pennants were hungrily devoured by the flickers of light, and Gabriel felt a horror of recognition as they darted and spun against the flow of the ragingly hot air. Entire portions of the frat house were simply disintegrating, instantly vaporized in random conflagrations.

Fire flowed like liquid across the ceiling, turning the timbers to ash in moments. Blooming thunderheads of white heat billowed and seethed through the walls, bellying them outward as the materials exploded. Gabriel picked himself up and ran for the stairs as the searing heat rampaged through the frat house. Each breath was fiery pain, and he felt his hair begin to crackle and burn in the terrible heat.

Gabriel skidded down the stairs, the carpet catching light in his wake and burning to greasy smoke instantly. He passed a window that slithered as molten glass vitrified in the frame. He knew just what was happening. This was exactly like Alexander’s description of the destruction of Belleau Wood, and despite the intolerable heat filling the frat house, Gabriel’s blood turned to ice in his veins.

“I ain’t going out like this,” he said.

Gabriel ran for the front door and shouted, “Oliver! We gotta get out of here!”

* * *

Oliver ran down the stone-cut stairs, heedless of the risk to life and limb if he slipped and fell on the axe or took a tumble and broke his neck. Amanda was below and he had to get to her. Barking howls and the clang of fists on metal echoed up from below.

“Amanda!” he shouted. “I’m coming! Hold on!”

“Hurry!” came the shouted response. “Latimer’s almost out!”

Oliver didn’t know who Latimer was, but that didn’t matter. The stairs curved around, finally opening out into a wide, high-ceilinged cave that reeked of unwashed bodies and decaying flesh. The stench made Oliver gag, and he retched dryly as he saw the grisly tableau before him.

Cut into the walls were man-sized alcoves, each barred by an iron grille, and each home to a pale-fleshed thing that yapped and screeched as it battered itself against its confinement. This was the lair of the cannibals, the beasts that had preyed on the young girls of Arkham, the monsters that had attacked Finn’s fellow bootleggers, and the killers who had come to murder him in his office. Though they were all these things and more, Oliver couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for these beasts.

Had they chosen this fate, or had it been forced upon them?

The point was moot, for they had killed dozens of people and there could be no forgiveness for that. Oliver saw Amanda chained to the wall, looking thin, bloodied, and terrified, but it was the monster across from her that commanded Oliver’s full attention.

A moment of recognition surfaced as Oliver saw the ghoul’s ravaged face. Seeing its ruined eye socket, Oliver realized that this was the ghoul that had come to kill him. His letter opener had taken the missing eye, and knowing what he knew now, he saw the humanity submerged in its bestial features. He saw the face of a young man transformed by ancient rites, grotesque practices, and debased acts into a monster beyond imagining.

Was this Latimer?

The creature’s body was gangling and powerfully muscled, its physique fed by a horrific diet of human meat and God knew what else. Skin flaked from its limbs and running sores wept infected fluid as it tore the bars from the iron door keeping it imprisoned.

The last bars were coming loose, and it would be moments before it was free.

“Professor!” shouted Amanda, her eyes wide and pleading. “Hurry!”

Oliver needed no further prompting and ran down the last steps. A pool of fetid water filled part of the cave, and his admiration for Rita soared as he realized the courage of her escape in taking so horrible a route to freedom.

“I’m here,” said Oliver, rushing over to Amanda. He rested the axe against the wall as she threw herself into his arms, sobbing in fear and relief.

“Thank God,” wept Amanda. “I can’t believe you found me.”

“Rita led us here,” said Oliver, prying himself free of her desperate embrace.

“She’s alive?”

“Very much so,” confirmed Oliver. “But we’ll talk later. Let’s get you out of here, yes?”

Amanda nodded, holding her hands up to Oliver. The manacles were tight, and Oliver handed his gun to Amanda as he fished out the ring of keys. He stood to one side to give himself better light, and tried those keys that looked small enough to match the manacles. His hands were trembling, and it took him two attempts to get the first key in the lock.

It didn’t fit. He tried another, but it didn’t fit either.

“Come on!” cried Amanda.

“I’m trying,” muttered Oliver.

Amanda screamed and pulled free of him. The keys dropped to the floor and Oliver spun as he heard the bestial roar of Latimer as he broke free of his cell. The ghoul sprang from the alcove, its wiry musculature propelling toward Amanda with a bounding leap. Oliver saw its jaws spread wide in slow motion. Its yellowed teeth had been sharpened to lethal points, and its claws were devolved to tear warm meat from the bones of living prey.

A thunderous boom split the air and the back of Latimer’s head exploded.

Though it was utterly impossible, Oliver felt sure he saw a flattened bullet emerge from the ghoul’s skull amid the mushrooming bloom of his pulverized brains. Latimer’s leap ended with him slamming into the wall beside Amanda, who stood with Oliver’s smoking pistol in a two-handed shooter’s grip. Latimer rolled onto his back, and Oliver saw a thin trace of smoke curl from where Amanda’s shot had punched clean through the creature’s remaining eye.

“I don’t believe it,” said Oliver. “That was a hell of a shot.”

Amanda didn’t answer, and aimed the weapon at the fallen ghoul. She pulled the trigger and sobbed each time the hammer slammed down on an empty chamber. The ghouls in their cells gibbered and yelped at the death of their pack leader, hurling themselves with greater ferocity at the bars of their cages.

Oliver gently took the gun from Amanda and slipped it into his pocket as she slid down the wall. She spat on the dead creature and held her hands up to Oliver.

He retrieved the keys from the floor, swiftly finding the right one and unlocking the manacles. Amanda’s wrists were bloody and raw, but just being free of them brought a smile to her cracked lips. With Oliver’s help, she got to her feet, and the determination on her face was astounding. This was a girl who was stronger than he could ever imagine. To have survived this long in such desperate straits was nothing short of miraculous.

“Let’s get out of here, Amanda,” said Oliver, seeing that the frantic attempts of the ghouls to break free from their cells was bearing fruit.

Oliver lifted the axe and put his free arm around Amanda’s shoulders. The two of them made their way toward the stairs, climbing them at a rate much slower than Oliver would have preferred. Amanda’s strength was all but gone, and Oliver had to bear her weight for much of the climb. The descent had been mercifully short, but the ascent seemed to be taking forever, and Oliver was reminded of the climb through the jagged mountains in the other world. Was it his lot to be forever climbing to safety?

Triumphant yells and barks sounded from below, and Oliver’s heart sank as he knew the ghouls had finally broken free of their cells. The top was close, but he was carrying too much weight. He reluctantly dropped the axe, knowing that he couldn’t fight the ghouls with it. He was no Finn Edwards to valiantly defend the stairs while Amanda escaped. In any case, it was doubtful she could go anywhere without his help.

“We need to go faster,” he said, all but dragging Amanda up the stairs.

A billowing orange light illuminated the head of the stairs, and Oliver heard the hungry bellows of the ghouls climbing the stairs behind him. With a burst of fear-induced strength, Oliver carried Amanda up the last of the steps and emerged into a corridor alive with flame.

Fire had taken hold of the frat house and almost every surface seethed with white-hot flames. Oliver coughed as the smoke hit his lungs, and he was bent double by the fumes.

The heat was intolerable and he could barely draw a breath. He let Amanda slip to the hardwood floor and turned back to the cellar door. Firelight danced on the rocky walls of the stairs, and Oliver saw the first of the monsters appear below him. He slammed the door shut and slid the padlock through the hasp.

Before he could close the lock, a terrific impact struck the door, hurling Oliver backward. His head struck the wall hard, and he took a choking breath of smoky air. His sight blurred and he struggled for oxygen as the flames billowed and roared. Sparks and tiny dots of light spun in the air, darting to and fro like fireflies as they gleefully sought things to burn.

The door shuddered in its frame, and the padlock wobbled, ready to fall to the floor.

Before it could drop, a shape moved in the smoke, and snapped the lock shut. Oliver couldn’t see who it was, but recognized the voice as he felt strong arms lift him to his feet.

“No time for lying down on the job, Oliver,” said Gabriel Stone.

“Amanda…,” groaned Oliver.

“I got her, too,” said Gabriel. “I got you both.”

* * *

Rex watched in horror as the firestorm consumed the frat house. Lashing tongues of molten light hammered down from the sky, incinerating its timbers, tiles, and floors with every impact. Smoke billowed from the blazing structure and the heat was so intense it drove them deeper into the construction site.

“We have to do something!” he cried. “We need to help them!”

Neither Alexander nor Minnie answered him, but what was there to say? The inferno was impossible to approach, and there was nothing they could do. Minnie had her camera set up behind a block of stacked bricks and was desperately trying to capture this terrible event on film. Alexander sheltered with her, his hands over his ears as the roaring from above threatened to blot out the crash of splitting timbers and falling masonry.

Rex felt the awful heat from the sky and tried to understand what was happening. Though he too had heard the tale of Belleau Wood, he still found it almost inconceivable that he was looking at the flaming underbelly of a god. To believe someone when they told you of such a thing was one thing, but to bear witness to its horrific manifestation was quite another. The terrible magnificence of simply the essence of a creature older than time was awesome in its spectacle, the human mind and vocabulary insufficient to truly capture the sublime horror of its presence.

He tried and failed to find a way to rationalize the world in light of the seething monstrosity that filled the sky with its lava-like body. Arkham was bathed in its diabolical radiance, and surely nothing would ever be the same after tonight. Rex dropped to his knees, unable to tear his gaze from the ocean of molten light above him. It burned his eyes, searing into the heart of his brain with its brilliance, and the sheer incandescence of the sight was beyond his ability to cope.

Rex saw movement silhouetted in the roaring flames, and shielded his eyes.

“Look!” he shouted. “Someone made it out!”

The flame-limned outline of Gabriel Stone ran from the bellowing flames, dragging two shapes behind him. He came through the fence and fell to the baked ground of the construction site in a retching heap. Oliver and Amanda fell with him, coughing and hacking the smoke from their lungs.

A final cascade of flame spilled from the clouds and the frat house collapsed as the last of its structure disintegrated. It fell inward, a riot of ashen timbers, and no sooner had its remains fallen to the ground than the seething firestorm in the heavens began to dim as the essence of the red star began to fold in on itself, and the sky began to darken.

Rex wanted to go to Oliver and Amanda, to help them up, but he couldn’t tear his gaze from the dissolution of the fire god in the clouds. With crackling rapidity, the fire in the sky faded as the power that had destroyed the house withdrew to its celestial abode.

The last spirals of darting embers swirled around it like devotees.

Soon, they too were gone.

EPILOGUE

The fire at the frat house had, thankfully, been entirely specific to its plot of land, much to the relief of its neighbors. Not so much as a single ember or brand had gusted from the blazing structure to ignite nearby properties, and little remained to indicate that a building had stood there at all. The Arkham Advertiser did not report the fire, though a small piece in the Gazette reported that a faulty gas main had been responsible for the tragic fire that had consumed the AQA building.

The Miskatonic Crier lamented the passing of so many fine young men, while subtly managing to insinuate that it had been the fault of those within the house that had seen it burned to the ground. Of the part its inhabitants had played in the disappearance of so many of Arkham’s brightest and most beautiful young woman, nothing was mentioned, and none save a few hardy souls were even aware there was a connection.

No one would ever know how many had died in the fire, as the temperatures reached by the blaze had been so great that not a single body could be recovered from the ashes. By the time the fire department’s trucks arrived, much of the frat house had been swallowed whole by a vast sinkhole that had mysteriously opened up beneath its foundations. And if anyone thought it strange that the interior faces of the sinkhole were vitrified, turned to glass by heat more commonly found in the heart of a volcano, then those thoughts were never voiced.

The mystery of the fire on Church Street would never be solved, but such was the way with mysteries in Arkham, and that suited the townsfolk just fine. They had glimpsed a measure of their home’s dark underside, and were quite content to allow the façade of everyday life to be re-established. Nothing good ever came of knowing too much, and ignorance was a collective state of mind favored by the majority of the good citizens of Arkham.

Those who dared to voice dissenting opinions were quietly ridiculed, and by the time a week had passed, the matter of the blaze at the frat house was old news and no longer the subject of corner store gossips.

As September moved into October, the panic that had taken hold of Arkham seemed to loosen its grip. In the absence of murder and mayhem on the streets of the town, some of the stores that had previously been closed once again opened for business. After all, the business of America was business. Slowly, though none could explain the reason for the shift in perception, Arkham began returning to normality.

Or as near to normal as Arkham ever could be.

* * *

Amanda Sharpe returned to classes alongside Rita Young, both young girls bearing up surprisingly well after the horror of their captivity. When questioned by the police, neither was able to shed any light on the identity of their captors, though Detective Harden remained convinced that there was much the girls were not telling him.

That was true, of course, but their lips were sealed.

* * *

Finn Edwards recovered from his injuries, though he too was tight-lipped on how he had come by such brutal wounds. His hospital bills were paid anonymously, though the Irishman seemed in no hurry to be discharged, as he was enjoying resting in a comfortable bed, with three meals a day brought to him by pretty nurses with whom he flirted mercilessly.

At his own request, he received no visitors, and spent his convalescence flicking through directories of various American cities. Whenever the nurses would ask him what he was doing, Finn would smile and tell them that he fancied a change of scenery.

Chicago was looking good, or maybe Los Angeles.

Anywhere far, far away from Arkham.

* * *

Rex wrote up the entire fantastical story, sparing no details, but was persuaded by Alexander and Oliver not to publish it. Though they had no story they could give their boss, their first-hand account of the blaze on Church Street persuaded Harvey not to fire them, though Rex knew they were on thin ice. 

Reluctantly, he filed the incredible story in a safe deposit box at the First Bank of Arkham, alongside Minnie’s incredible pictures of the night the frat house had burned. Though taken under extreme pressure, her pictures displayed unimaginable scenes of a sky alight from horizon to horizon, and would surely have won Minnie numerous awards had anyone been allowed to see them. 

One photograph was all that remained outside of the box, and Rex hid that one in a secret place. 

Not even Minnie knew he had kept the photograph, but he needed it close to him, and would take it out every now and then to study it intently.

He would stare at the captured image of the conflagration raging in the heavens—a glimmer of its fire reflected in the black of his pupils.

* * *

In the newly restored laboratory of the Tyner Annex, Kate Winthrop took samples of the curious rock she had brought back from her incredible voyage to another world. As she had hoped, it had proven to be key in her research, and while Dr. Dyer and Professor Pabodie attempted to rebuild the new technologies they had developed for the now-delayed Antarctic expedition, she confined her studies to perfecting her flux stabilizer.

The work was going well, but even as Kate drew closer to a solution, she failed to take into account that most basic principle of the universe.

Like attracts like.

* * *

Charles Warren stood at the window of his office as the DCV Matilda Rose sailed from New York Harbor. The missing piece of the device had been delivered by one of the Travelers six nights previously, and fitted aboard by the island folk with the burnished bronze skin. He’d fired every other worker the day before, and with the silver sphere installed, those same island folk climbed aboard to crew the vessel.

He watched as the Matilda Rose sailed past the Statue of Liberty, the ridiculous gift from the French that promised freedom and liberty to all. He pictured her submerged beneath dark waters, only the tip of her upraised torch visible above the surface.

Warren smiled and turned away as the vessel disappeared over the horizon.

He made his way from his office, pausing only to dip his finger in a sticky pool of congealing blood smeared across the desk of his erstwhile secretary. Warren put his finger in his mouth, and the taste of the blood sent a delicious thrill through his body. The coppery flavor took him back to Europe when he had first eaten the flesh of dead men in the devastation of what had once been beautiful woodland.

“Good times,” said Charles Warren.

* * *

Oliver Grayson and Alexander Templeton returned to their teaching duties at Miskatonic, though there were stern questions to be answered after many of their students had repeatedly arrived to class to find neither man there to teach. Unexplained absences were unacceptable, and only after lengthy debate and a week’s suspension were both men allowed to return to work.

Alexander and Oliver met with Gabriel, Rex, and Minnie at Aunt Lucy’s one last time to discuss Arkham’s recent events in full, with Oliver and Stone recounting all they could remember from the frat house. With one arm still in a sling from his machete wound, Stone told of how he had shot down a great many of the corrupted members of the AQA fraternity, while Oliver explained how he had found Amanda in the basement.

Though there was a great deal left unresolved, it seemed this current horror had been ended, though no one could say for sure if all the killers had died in the destruction unleashed by the unnatural firestorm. 

Believing that Henry Cartwright may have unwittingly been behind that aspect of the night, Oliver paid a visit to Arkham Asylum, only to be told that Henry had lapsed into a catatonic state from which no external stimuli would rouse him.

Whatever answers Henry might have been able to provide were locked inside him forever.

With his daughter’s murderers brought to justice, Gabriel Stone departed Arkham in his battered Crossley. He offered no heartfelt offers of friendship, but told his fellow survivors that he stood ready to help if trouble reared its ugly head in Arkham again.

Though he added that he hoped never to hear from them.

* * *

Ten days after the destruction of the AQA frat house, Oliver opened the pages of Around the World in Eighty Days and began to read. It had been too long since he had delved into the world of fiction. Life had taken too serious a turn of late, and it would be refreshing to lose himself in the humorous exploits of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout as they attempted to circumnavigate the globe. Oliver had barely finished the first page when the telephone at the edge of his desk began ringing.

Without knowing how, Oliver knew this was a call that would prevent him from escaping into the worlds of his beloved Verne.

“Yes,” he said into the receiver.

“Professor Grayson?”

“Speaking,” said Oliver.

“I have a Morley Dean on the line for you.”

The line crackled as plugs were slotted home and the connection was established.

“Oliver?” said a voice on the end of the line. “Are you there?”

“Morley? Is that you?”

“Yes, but I won’t be on for long.”

“Heavens, man,” said Oliver, ignoring the tremor of warning in his former colleague’s voice. “It’s good to hear from you, Morley.”

“Whatever you are doing Oliver, stop it now,” stated Morley. Ever since the Alaskan expedition, Morley had been afflicted with an intensity that many found disturbing. Even over the telephone, that intensity was ever so slightly off-putting.

“You got my letter then?” asked Oliver.

“I did,” confirmed Morley. “I thought I had made it clear that I was breaking off contact for your own safety. There are things that no man should willingly know, and I had hoped to spare you from them. It seems I have failed.”

“Morley, listen to me…”

“No, Oliver,” said Morley. “You listen to me. I read the transcriptions you sent me. And though every fiber of my being resists the idea of being drawn once again into such terrors, I can remain idle no longer. I have sought the writings of Nereus-Kai, and you must come to New York immediately.”

“New York? Why?” asked Oliver.

“Something terrible has begun in your little town,” said Morley.

“No, it’s all right,” replied Oliver, letting out a breath of relief. “We prevailed.”

Morley laughed, the sound a bitter bark of frustration, sorrow, and regret.

“You’re wrong, Oliver,” said Morley. “I fear the horror has just begun.”

End of Book One

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hailing from Scotland, Graham was first exposed to the horrors of the uncaring cosmos when he came across the works of H.P. Lovecraft in the sci-fi section of his local library. Haunted by the experience, he narrowly avoided the sanity drain of a career in surveying to join Games Workshop’s Games Development team, which, frankly, was a lucky escape. He worked there for six and a half years before taking the plunge to becoming a full-time author. With a New York Times bestseller under his belt (and a replica of Snaga, the axe of Druss the Legend, which he received after his novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award) and twenty novels in his back catalog, he reckons he chose the right path. 

Graham lives and works in Nottingham. You can keep up with what he’s up to by visiting his website at www.graham-mcneill.com.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Part One: Strange Tides, 1926

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Two: Ripples on the Surface, 1926

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part Three: Waves on the Shore, 1926

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

About the Author