Arkham Horror- The Deep Gate

by Chris A. Jackson

  Turning up Garrison Street, he headed south until he reached the university, then crossed and hurried along Church Street. Orne Library hove out of the sheets of rain like a pillared steamship out of a winter squall. Silas crossed the street and dashed up the stone library stairs. When he hauled on the lofty door, it creaked abominably. He wondered if he should tell them to oil the hinges, but decided they probably wouldn’t appreciate the advice of a sailor.

  The wind grabbed the door when he released it, slamming it shut hard enough to echo through the entry hall and draw a few shocked looks from the patrons in view. Silas shrugged, stomped the water from his boots, shook it from his hair, and promptly sneezed. The air in here felt stuffy and smelled of old paper.

  “Shhhh!” A skinny fellow in a black jacket and bow tie glared at him.

  “Sorry.” Silas wiped his face with his sleeve and asked, “Can you point me to the information desk?”

  The man wrinkled his nose and pointed to the centrally located pair of double doors. “It is the desk with the sign that reads ‘Information,’” he said in a hushed voice.

  “Thank you.” Silas ignored the man’s snide look, wondering why people whispered the same in churches and libraries.

  The huge vaulted room beyond the doors sported three different desks, each with its own polished brass placard: Reference, Lending, and Information. Probably could have figured that out yourself, Silas, he thought, altering course to approach the information desk.

  Eyes followed his progress across the marble floor. Those of the patrons ranged from curious to surprised, while the librarians looked mildly horrified. The woman at the information desk paled as he approached, stiffened, and licked her lips. Silas tried to smile amiably, but a near-sleepless night filled with nightmares and thoughts of intruders hadn’t put him in a pleasant frame of mind.

  “Can I help you?” the librarian asked when he was still several steps away.

  “I hope so. I’m here to see Abigail Foreman.”

  “She works in the restricted section.” The librarian’s eyes traversed him head to foot. “You are soaking wet, sir!”

  Silas bit back a surly comment. More flies with honey… “Yes, I know. I forgot my coat and it’s raining out. Could you point me to the restricted section, please?”

  “No.” She didn’t elaborate.

  He blinked at her. “Um…why not?”

  “Because, sir, it is restricted! That means only university faculty and library staff may enter.”

  “Oh, well, that makes sense, I suppose.” Silas reinforced his effort to be civil in the face of rudeness, knowing belligerence would get him nowhere. A legitimate explanation for his presence might serve better. “Could you please have someone fetch Miss Foreman for me, then? She asked me to work out some celestial navigation problems for her, and I have.”

  “Celestial navigation problems?” she asked dubiously.

  “Yes. Sailors use the stars to navigate, you see, and she asked me to—”

  “I know what celestial navigation is!” she huffed.

  “Oh, well, good. Miss Foreman said the astronomy professor was too busy to help her, so you understand why she needed a sailor to help her with the calculations.” Silas waited for a count of ten, but she just stared at him as if unable to make sense from his words. “So, if you could please send someone to fetch Miss Foreman for me, I’ll talk to her and stop dripping on your nice polished floor.”

  She pursed her lips so hard they blanched white. “Very well. Stay here.”

  She reached under her desk and the high-pitched chime of a bell rang through the chamber. A harried-looking young man in a white shirt and pleated pants emerged from behind the lofty shelves of books.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Go to the restricted section and tell Miss Foreman that a…man is—”

  “Silas Marsh, ma’am,” Silas offered.

  The librarian flashed him a cold glance. “That a man is here to see her.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The young man hurried off.

  Silas kept his face neutral. He understood the librarian’s animosity—an unwashed oaf had invaded the halls of higher learning and might damage their priceless works of literature—but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Of course, he’d seen enough prejudice against landlubbers from sailors, so such things were a two-way street. He folded his arms and stood there dripping on their floor while he waited.

  Finally, Abigail bustled into the room, her short quail steps click-clicking on the floor. Again, she held the tome close to her chest, and her face was alight with something that might have been eagerness mixed with fear. Silas knew that feeling well.

  Abigail glanced at the librarian behind the information desk. “Thank you, Evelyn.”

  “See that your…associate does not damage anything, Abigail. He is dripping wet.”

  Silas opened his mouth to say something, but Abigail beat him to it.

  “Mister Marsh is a sailor, Evelyn, not a barbarian. He knows the value of books.”

  The librarian looked skeptical but didn’t respond.

  “Please, Mister Marsh, let’s find someplace quiet to compare our findings.”

  Any quieter and you could hear a pin drop, he thought, following her as she tap-tapped down an aisle between two towering shelves and through an archway into a smaller chamber. Here, several reading tables and chairs were arranged amid more shelves of books.

  “They’ve changed again!” she hissed in a library whisper as she put her book down on the nearest table. Flipping to the correct page, she pointed to the celestial notations. “Compare them to the ones I gave you!”

  “I can’t. I don’t have them anymore.” He leaned near the book and noted that the date and time, at least, were different than those she’d given him the night before. Someone must have changed them again.

  “You don’t have them?” She blinked up at him as if he’d slapped her. “Whatever happened to them?”

  “They were stolen off my boat last night while I was anchored out in the river. I don’t know who could have done it, or why, but someone stowed away aboard, took your notes, my calculations, logbook, and my chart, and swam away.”

  “What?” Her eyes widened and her cheeks paled. “They swam the river? Who on Earth would do that?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll bet you double or nothing on that ten clams you owe me that if I ran the same calculations on those numbers,” he stabbed a finger at her book, “I’d get the—” Silas stopped cold, staring at the date and time noted in plain block script on the tome’s pages. They weren’t the same ones he’d seen only moments before. “Abigail…” His finger shook as he pointed to the new numbers.

  “What?” She looked and caught her breath, stumbling back a step. She fumbled frantically for her notebook and opened the page, her eyes darting back and forth between the two. “Again! They’ve changed again!”

  “They did! Just this moment!” The chill in his spine turned to ice. Silas had seen a lot of strange things, but never a book that changed letters and numbers by itself. “What in the name of heaven and hell is that thing, some kind of hocus pocus?”

  “I told you they changed! Didn’t you believe me?” The last came out accusingly.

  “I believe you now, sister, and I don’t want any part of it.” Silas turned away, intending to walk right out of the library, Arkham, and maybe right down to Boston to sign on with the first foreign-bound ship to set sail.

  “Wait!” Abigail grasped his arm, her small fingers barely getting a grip on his tense bicep. “You can’t just leave!”

  “The hell I can’t!” He wrapped his much larger hand around her wrist and pulled her grasping fingers free with little effort. “I’m a sailor, not some kind of magician. I’ll have no truck with nonsense like this!”

  He turned to go, but she dodged in front of him, her face livid. “You can’t just go, Silas! You haven’t told me what you found! What these numbers mean!”

  He sto
pped and considered shoving past her, but he had promised to tell her what he found out. “Fine. All three sets of numbers you gave me pointed to the exact same location. A spot just east of Innsmouth called Devil Reef.”

  “Innsmouth…” Abigail glanced past him at the book open on the table, blinked, and bit her lip. She trembled, and blood welled from between her teeth.

  “Abigail!” He grasped her arms as tears filled her eyes. “Abigail, stop!”

  She drew a ragged breath and her eyes flicked up to his. “Silas…please…look at the numbers again now and tell me I’m not insane.”

  He let go of her and whirled around to stare down at the tome. Yet again the date, time, and celestial data were different from what they’d been only seconds before. Cold fingers closed around his heart. “Jesus, oh Jesus…”

  “It knows,” Abigail whispered, stepping around him to stare down at the book. “It changes every time I get closer to an answer. First, when I spoke with Professor Withers, then when I spoke with you. It happened again this morning just before you arrived, and now again when you told me the location. Every time I get closer, the answer changes!”

  “The time changes, but not the place!” Silas gritted his teeth against the urge to flee, to run away from this intangible threat. “And if you’re insane, then so am I, but how can a book know anything? How can it change anything?”

  “I don’t know, Silas, but it’s the only answer.”

  “Well, the book didn’t swim out to the middle of the river last night and climb aboard my boat to steal my chart!” he countered. “Someone left wet footprints across the cabin. Who would…no, who could do that? Nobody could swim the Miskatonic the way it’s flowing now and survive!”

  “No one?” She blinked up at him, then tapped the margin of the tome where fish-like faces stared up from the page with lurid eyes. “No one human, you mean.”

  “No!” Silas stepped back, denial rising like an inexorable tide from his gut. “Those are just pictures, Abigail! They aren’t real! They can’t be…” Silas swallowed hard as his nightmares surged up from his memory, the voices calling him to the sea… Can there really be a connection to my nightmares? “Why me, Abigail? Why did you come to me?”

  “I…I didn’t. Well, not you in particular. I was just looking for someone who knew how to navigate using the stars. The other men I spoke with thought I was crazy. Then you seemed to understand.” She shook her head. “I thought you believed me.”

  “I believe you, Abigail. How can I not when I saw it change with my own eyes! But what do you want me to do about it?”

  “I thought…” She bit her lip again and winced, licking away the blood. Flipping to the page beyond the prophecy, she pointed to a full-page illustration. “I thought you would help me try to stop this. It’s Armageddon, Silas! The end of the world!”

  Silas’s eyes fell on a scene straight out of his nightmares. A vast city beneath the sea loomed up from the page. A huge beast, its wingspan blotting out the sky, rose above masses of shapes. Some were human; others half-fish, half-man; others unnameable horrors; and all were devouring and being devoured in grisly detail.

  No one would call Silas Marsh a coward. He’d stared down the throat of a hurricane at sea, sailed the iceberg-strewn Southern Ocean, stood against pirates and cutthroats the world over, but this… The illustration was too much like his visions to be a coincidence.

  “Bloody mother of…” Silas clenched his gnarled hands into fists and closed his eye tight, but the half-fish, half-man faces waited there in the darkness for him, calling him home. Why… Why me? Why do my nightmares and some ancient book foretell the same thing?

  “Silas?”

  He snapped his eye open and whirled to face Abigail, gritting his teeth so tightly he thought they might shatter. “Fine! I’ll help you, but there’s not a whole hell of a lot we can do as far as I can see.”

  “What do you mean?” She still looked scared but wasn’t trembling quite so much.

  Though loath to touch the vile tome, he flipped back a page and jabbed his finger at the recently transformed entry. “I’ll run the calculations on those numbers for you, but if they point to Devil Reef like the others, there’s nothing we can do.” He tapped a finger on the date and time. “That’s only three days away, and this nor’easter’s not going to let up before then. I can’t take Sea Change around Cape Ann in this weather.”

  “Then they’ll win, Silas.” Her voice came out as lifeless and cold as a corpse, defeated. “Whatever they are, they know we’ve discovered their plans, and they’ve changed them to beat us. There’s got to be an intelligence behind this!”

  “They…” Silas furrowed his brow. These things can’t be real. They have to just be nightmares. Half-man, half-fish—twisted limbs, voices calling to him, calling him home. Home… He glared at the margin of the tome and thought of his childhood home, of Innsmouth. Maybe…maybe the old stories about Devil Reef aren’t just stories. And maybe there is a way to get out there and stop this…thing from happening.

  “Maybe…” Silas turned to Abigail and gripped her gently by the shoulders. “Do you have a car?”

  “No,” she said, but her eyes brightened. “But I can borrow one! Where are we going?”

  “We’re going to Innsmouth, Abigail.” Silas dragged the musty air of Orne Library into his lungs and let it out slowly. Try as he might to avoid the place, the town of his birth seemed to be inexorably drawing him back. “From there, the waters out to Devil Reef are protected from the storm. Someone there might have a boat we can use.”

  Chapter Four

  Innsmouth

  The old rattletrap Abigail borrowed had nearly pounded Silas’s backside to jelly by the time they crossed the last bridge to Innsmouth. The road from Arkham to Bolton, rough in the best of conditions, had been reduced to a mire of puddles and potholes strewn with debris by the storm. Twice they’d had to stop for Silas to move downed tree limbs from their path. Thankfully, Abigail drove. Silas could pilot a ship through the eye of a needle, but he was all thumbs when it came to cars. Once on the highway, they made better time, although the old flivver could barely make twenty miles in an hour on the best of roads. They stopped in Ipswich for a quick bowl of chowder and a sandwich, and rolled into Innsmouth early that afternoon.

  The dilapidated town of Silas’s birth greeted them like a stranger in a speakeasy. Pale faces watched from behind rain-streaked windows, and passersby scowled from under broad sou’wester hats. Many buildings had been boarded shut, left vacant after the plague some eighty years ago. Their windows glared like eyes stitched closed, the paint on their clapboard siding peeling with neglect. That nobody ever moved into those empty houses from other towns seemed normal to Silas when he was growing up here. Now, he wondered why.

  “Looks like the place has seen better days,” Abigail said as they clattered up Eliot Street and rounded the old statue in the square. Turning onto State Street, they paralleled the roaring Manuxet River until, finally, he caught a glimpse of the ocean ahead.

  “It has.” Silas struggled to keep his voice even. There had been little cheer for a young boy to find in a town like this, and the only time he’d regretted leaving had been when he received news that his parents had died. “Good-sized ships used to run cargo in and out of here back in the day, but storms silted in the harbor. There was talk of dredging, but the only folks in town who had the money to do it were the Marshes, and they refused to pay. Now only fishing boats come and go, and the old Marsh family has the corner on that market.”

  “Marsh? Relatives of yours?”

  “Yes.” Silas didn’t elaborate. He hadn’t told Abigail his connection with Innsmouth or anything about the old family of Marshes. He’d also kept his nightmares to himself. She’d think him stark raving mad if he told her his dreams were mirrored by the illustrations in her book. But insanity might be a kinder fate than discovering any truth to the tome’s prophecy. “I grew up here.”

  “Well, that’
s ducky! I mean, your relatives will help us, right?” She stopped at the corner of Water Street and looked at him when he didn’t answer. “Right?”

  Silas stared out the windshield. From here he could see beyond the spit of land that protected the harbor, beyond the lighthouse flashing across the stormy sky, out the channel with its dented red and green buoys bobbing in the buffeting winds and chop, to the sea. The waves crashing on the rocks called to him, as they always had, but now, instead of the freedom of the sea in their roar, a more sinister susurration urged him. Come home… The yearning to heed that call plagued him like a toothache, impossible to ignore.

  “Silas?”

  Silas tore his gaze from the sea. “Maybe. We’ll just have to see.” He tamped down the nagging, pleading call echoing with the pounding waves, and pointed left. “Cross the bridge and find a spot on the shore side to park this jalopy. We’ll see who we can find to talk to.”

  “Okay.”

  Along the shore, the town had fallen into even deeper disrepair. The old shipping warehouses stood like emaciated scarecrows, weathered down to their bones by years of neglect. Roofs sagged and boards had been stolen from some, while others had completely fallen in, victims of fire, salvagers, or simple vandalism. At the north end of the bay, a dozen or so fishing boats bobbed on moorings near the one remaining fish plant in town, Marsh Seafood.

  That, Silas resolved, will be the last place we’ll ask for help. With any luck, they could find a weathered-in fisherman willing to earn a few bucks and keep his mouth shut. They’d get no help from the main family of Marshes.

  The sheltered harbor wasn’t much better off than the rundown buildings lining the shore, with half-sunk vessels dotting the once-bustling waterway. The silting had made the harbor unnavigable to all but shallow-draft boats about the size of Sea Change. He scanned the water, looking for anything they might rent or borrow. An old ferry sat at one pier, unable to move, stripped of what little brightwork or gear that could be sold. Other large vessels lay scattered about like tombstones in an ill-kept graveyard. There were several relics of the war waiting to be scrapped, and one old cod schooner now down at the stern, her once proud masts denuded and warped. The shipyard itself had fallen into ruin and rust, the jitneys streaked with the hue of dried blood, and powerful cranes thrust up like the bones of a skeleton’s rotting fingers reaching from the grave. Smoke streamed away from only one of the old furnace’s stacks, the one that the Marshes used for whatever ironwork they still did.