As the team watched in near shock, the ground itself gave way, building and foundation and the very earth falling downward into a pit which swallowed not only the cursed structure but nearly all of its acreage, plants and trees, walkways—everything. The fire that erupted, engulfing everything combustible, was eventually blamed on the ruptured gas line. Neither the Douglases nor anyone from the Agency saw any reason to argue the decision.
Over the following few weeks, both Edward and Julie made, if not full recoveries, steps far enough back to normalcy that they were content not to bring suit against the Arkham Detective Agency. In the end, they decided that even in a town as dark as the one in which they lived, the law was neither backward-reaching or far-sighted enough to award damages in such a case. The settlement from their insurance, the gas company, and the original surveyors who had certified the land as stable was adequate for them to relocate.
“Besides,” the somewhat-restored Edward decided, “it was a nest of pain. Better it rot in whatever Hell it landed.”
The Douglases did not rebuild on their lot. That was donated to the municipality of Arkham, to do with as it pleased. The town elders were given sufficient warning as to what might still lurk below the surface.
It is believed that adequate precautions were taken before any excavations were attempted.
SLAVES FOR THE SLAUGHTER SECT
Robert M. Price
The name’s Frank Nardsi, as I guess you know by now, and, in case you’re getting old and forgetful like I am, I run the Arkham Detective Agency. I used to be a New York City cop before I retired and moved to what I somehow imagined would be a sleepy New England town. Yeah, I knew all about Arkham’s reputation as the magnet for mysterious goings-on and strange people, but I figured folks who believed in spooks might want to pay for protection from them. Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t looking to rip off gullible suckers or anything. It was just that if people wanted to buy peace of mind, I might as well be the one to sell it to them. There were rituals to go through to “exorcise” a “haunted house,” and you could sound real professional if you dreamed up technical-sounding jargon to describe them with.
It didn’t take me long at all to realize I was in way over my gray head. I had underestimated the job because I had underestimated reality, how small a container it is, and how much it can hold. Looking back, I am amazed that I survived some of the jobs I blundered through. It was back to school for me if I hoped to survive blundering through many more! And, lucky for me, the best school in the field happened to be right down the street: Miskatonic University. I hadn’t been in a library for years (I forget how many), so I stepped up to the help counter and felt like a fool telling the pretty librarian (her name was Annabelle Sawyer) what I was after. But she didn’t give me “that look.” Instead, she waved for me to follow her to the “Medieval Metaphysics” section and told me that, if I didn’t find what I was looking for, to tell her, and she might be able to wrangle me access to a restricted Rare Books room. I nodded my thanks, feeling pretty sure I was likely to drown in the wading pool. It would be a long time before I would have to worry about the deep end. Might as well start with some books on psychic phenomena, then move on to “practical magic,” then, if I still had the stomach for it, demonology.
I was still mulling over what I’d learned (or read, anyway) the next morning when I got to my small office and plopped down behind a desk that had seen better days—hell, better decades. Sort of like me. I was on my second cup of coffee when the glass pane rattled like a Model T car engine. The wood! You’re supposed to knock on the wood part, idiot! I thought it but didn’t want to say it. I only barked out, “It’s open! Come on in.” And the guy did.
He introduced himself (dog-eared business card in hand) as “Arlan Hellison,” I kid you not. In fact the first thing he said was to apologize for his name, which he swore was real. I tried to leave it at a raised eyebrow and motioned him to take a (or actually, the) seat, advising him to mind the splinters, while I went back to my side of the desk—you know, the authoritative side, the side that makes you look like you know what you’re doing.
The improbably named Mr. Hellison (c’mon—it had to be a pseudonym!) came to the point.
“Mr. Nardi? Or, gee, is it Detective Nardi?”
“Used to be,” I corrected the short, fidgety man. “When you’re a private eye, you don’t get the title. But I used to wear it, when I worked for the NYPD. Now what’s your trouble? You haunted by some unearthly nuisance or something?”
I was still feeling my way through this whole occult business and felt a bit embarrassed to speak of it seriously. But that was okay. It was a way of gauging just how seriously a prospective client took it. Hellison smeared his horn-rims with a crumpled handkerchief as he continued. Gotta admit I never liked a guy who carried a hanky. Seems effeminate. There’s always tissues—or your sleeve.
“Well, Mr. Nardi, I do have a case for you, but it’s not exactly mine. You see, I’m a writer, new to the area, like you, I guess, and I’m hoping you can help me with some research. I’m planning a novel on the occult, and I want to witness the real thing first-hand, if there is a real thing, that is. So I was wondering if I could go on an investigation with you. I promise I wouldn’t get in your way, and I might even be helpful.”
I was already getting my “No thanks” ready. (Is that supposed to mean “No, but thanks for thinking of me”? Or “I’m not thanking you for that”?) But then I thought of something else.
“I usually work alone, Mr. Hellison. Sometimes I call in one of my old pals, semi-retired cops like myself. But I don’t even like to do that because of the potential dangers. Bring in an outsider? Someone admittedly new to the whole damn business? But first things first. What’s the case?”
My would-be … client? Sidekick? Anyway, Hellison pulled out a folded newspaper and laid it flat in front of me. It was a week-old edition of The Arkham Advertiser. I hadn’t picked that one up. Front page, below the fold, was a bold headline: WHITE SLAVE RING IN ARKHAM?Above the fold was a report of two recent local disappearances, one a little kid, the other a Miskatonic coed. Now I could see that the slave ring item was speculation based on the disappearances. Scanning both pieces through my bifocals, I saw summary accounts of other recent missing persons. An old crone on a farm in nearby Aylesbury called in a tip, but it was of no help: she thought the Windwalker was responsible. And that the “old days” were returning. (Yeah, I know I said I’d come to consider some wider—and wilder—possibilities in my old age, but I could still tell when someone was just a nut.)
“Yeah, this is pretty awful, for sure, but it’s not in my wheelhouse anymore. Why bring it to me and not to the cops?”
“Oh, the police are already on it, not that they’ve made any progress. But I think there’s more to it. Some Satanist connection, I think.”
“That may be, friend, but most so-called Satanists are just kidding around. It’s strictly amateur theatre trying for shock value. And even if some black-robed kooks did take it too seriously, that doesn’t make them some supernatural menace. So far, it just sounds like a straight police case. What else you got?” I was getting bored as well as annoyed, if it’s possible to be both at the same time.
“As I’ve told you, Mr. Nardi … May I call you Frank? Well, I’ve been doing some digging on my own, like I said, and I hear things. There are certain people who keep to the shadows, people no one takes seriously because they’re known to say outlandish things. And, of course, if something outlandish they say were actually true, you’d never know about it—until too late. The other day I was in the Hoag Library—I believe I saw you there recently—and I heard this librarian, a Miss Sawyer I think, turning away a dubious-looking character who insisted that she let him browse the Rare Books collection. He stalked off cursing, and on a hunch I followed him out and down the street. He perched on the curb, and a policeman approached him, telling him to move along. He got up unsteadily, and I walked up, took him by the
arm and offered to treat him to a bite and a drink. He was happy enough to agree.
“Talk about your crazies, this guy was one of ‘em. And it became evident that he was embroidering some facts. He said he had run across some members of a cult. He wanted to know more about their activities, but they told him to get lost. But the guy said he had caught sight of something behind them, something part of a display or spectacle they had staged. And he swore he heard high-pitched screaming. That’s all he’d say.”
Nothing Hellison told me proved there was more at work here than a bunch of jaded lunatics. Still, there might be something to it … Even if it was “only” a violent group of fanatics the cops hadn’t caught up with, it might be my duty to look into it. I have skills your local police in a backwater like Arkham probably never had occasion to learn.
I took Hellison’s phone number and told him I was interested enough to do a little preliminary checking. I promised I’d get back to him in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I made a mental note to check with the librarian at the college. How much could she tell me about that weirdo Hellison said she kicked out? And about Hellison himself, if she noticed him. Besides, it would make a good excuse to see her again. She was a looker, slightly silvered auburn hair, high cheekbones, full lips, and not completely outside my general ballpark.
- - -
Well, she wasn’t there. But I did some looking at the Advertiser files. Microfilm. Boy, do I hate that. The Hoag Library never evolved to the next stage, Microfiche, which of course is even worse. And computerized? Forget it. Hell, they hadn’t even retired the damn card catalogue. So it took me the hours you’d expect it would to find some of the previous disappearances. There were several of them, none ever solved. All took place inside the last year and a half. It looked like the small-town cops had tried their best to find the vanished victims or their abductors. I mean, there was no indication of a cover-up, but then there wouldn’t have been in a local paper. So I jotted down dates and names and decided I’d have to head for the Police Department next. They knew me over there, and we’d helped each other more than once.
Sergeant Cerasini put aside what he was doing to talk to me. I guess by now he knew that when Nardi walked on stage, something interesting must be afoot. And if it turned out to be too weird, he’d happily leave the matter to me. Just as well, I guess.
I asked him who had hatched the theory about the disappearances being the work of a religious cult. What do you know? It was a guy named Arlan Hellison. Well, I guess that made some sense. The cops figured it was a hunch worth pursuing and that floating it in the paper might cause somebody who had heard anything of interest to come forward with it. And it did count in Hellison’s favor that he’d tried to help the police. I started looking at him in a new light.
“Excuse me a minute, Frank. Yeah, Langer, what is it?”
“Another disappearance, Sarge. A woman named (here he checked his note pad) … Annabelle Sawyer. Works at the college library.”
This wasn’t meant for my ears, but I couldn’t help hearing—and reacting.
“What? I’ve met her. I was hoping to ask her a few questions this morning, but she wasn’t at the desk.”
“That’s right, Mr. Nardi. It’s not her day off. Her supervisor phoned to check up on her, see if she was sick. No answer. On her lunch hour she went over to Ms. Sawyer’s boarding house and knocked. No one there. None of the other residents had seen her go out.”
Yeah, yeah, I hardly knew the woman, but I had taken a liking to her, enough so that I suddenly felt like I had a personal stake in the case. I got up and told the boys in blue I had a possible lead to look into and I’d tell them if anything were to come of it. Out I went.
Almost reluctantly, I phoned up Hellison, who, not surprisingly for a geek, must have been sitting by the phone waiting for a call, whether from me or from somebody else he was pestering, and he picked up immediately.
“Hellison? Nardi. Tell me anything you heard from that weirdo about this cult, and don’t leave out any details.” He said he’d be happy to. Sounded eager, like an excited kid. We agreed to meet at a local eatery in an hour.
- - -
Since I’d told the pudgy little bastard I’d pay the check, he didn’t hold back. Between mouthfuls, Hellison told me his snippet of a story again, and I did manage to coax one more detail out of him, about how the guy he’d talked to had encountered these cultists. It was drugs. Big surprise. I should have guessed. Seems like everything goes back to that these days. There’s some contact point in the hills west of Arkham, a shack where some old geezer lives, and he has the goods. The guy Annabelle Sawyer had kicked out of the library needed to get a fix and looked up the old man. His first time there. The dealer, of course, didn’t kick him out. What the street guy told Hellison about there being a cult involved seemed plausible from something the junkie hadn’t thought of but that Hellison did. The guy in the hills must have gotten the drugs from somebody else. It wasn’t like he was making moonshine from his own private still. The old guy was the visible tip of an invisible iceberg. Naturally, that iceberg didn’t have to be a Satanic cult, or any kind of cult. But combined with whatever else the druggie had told Hellison about seeing something strange up there, well, it looked like two jigsaw pieces that matched.
“The cops told me you went to them about your cult theory, Hellison. That’s good. I’d like to go back and ask them a couple more questions based on what you’ve told me here. Let me pay, and we’ll go, unless you’ve got better things to do.”
“What better, Frank! Mind if I call you Frank? The plot thickens!”
“Yeah, yeah. The game is a foot, huh?”
The PD was just a couple of blocks away. Cerasini was still there. I asked him what was new on the local drug scene. He said he thought he had heard of something unusual a few days before and made a call to Mercy Hospital. This one directed him to that one until he was able to talk to the right doctor. The sarge listened stoically, scribbled a couple of notes on a pad, hung up, and tore off the page and handed it over.
“Yeah, Frank. There’s a kid over there now who you oughta talk with. Here’s the name and room number. They’ll be expecting you—and you, Hellison. I see you’re still interested.”
- - -
His name was something or other Hoffman—can’t quite remember now, but so what? The guy was big, strong-looking, prematurely balding with sandy hair. He was conscious but looked disoriented. Willing to talk, though.
“It’s not my thing, really, Mr. Nardi. Actually it was a fraternity stunt. See if I’d do what they told me if I really wanted to become a member. I thought it was kinda strange, the place they sent me to, out in the middle of nowhere like that. But I figured I could handle myself. The old hermit was willing to part with the stuff pretty cheaply. That seems even weirder in retrospect, seeing how powerful it was. He called it the Black Lotus. I waited till I got back to my dorm room to try a pinch of the stuff …”
I interrupted. “So this old man was the only one you saw? The only one there?”
Hoffman stopped to try and remember.
“Yeah, I think so. I’m pretty sure he was …” He gave Hellison a squinting glance but said, “Yeah, that’s all I remember.”
Hellison asked, “So what happened once you took the stuff?”
“It’s like one of those dreams that’s hard to describe. Nothing like waking experience, you know? I think I found myself in a crowd of people waiting for someone or something to arrive at a huge gate. Like a celebrity or the President was supposed to show up. There was a general feeling of eagerness mixed with dread, half like we were stoked, half like we were trapped there and knew we couldn’t get away.”
I prodded him. “What about the people in the crowd? You recognize any of them?”
I think he gave Hellison another glance, but he could just as easily have been doing that thing where your eyes wander into the distance when you’re trying to think of something.
“No, no, I
don’t think so, but I do seem to remember that a lot of them were cripples. Badly maimed and still bleeding. Missing limbs like they were bombing victims or something … And then there seemed to be a hint of motion inside the gate, but I don’t remember seeing anything come through. After that, I mainly remember feeling overcome with panic, terror. This seemed to last a long, long time. When it subsided, I noticed it had happened to me, too: I was missing my left arm and my right hand. And I felt afraid to look into the mirror. But when I came out of it, as you can see,” and here he extended his hands toward us, “I was okay.”
“Some bad trip. Any aftershocks since it happened?”
“Surprisingly, no. It’s been, what? Three days? I was in a coma most of that time, but if I had any dreams, I don’t remember. I still feel weak and a little dizzy, but I’m surprised it wasn’t a whole lot worse.”
“Did you make it into the frat?”
“I guess so, but I haven’t been awake to talk to any of the brothers, if any of ’em came to visit me.”
“And none of these jerks told you what the effects of the drug might be? Short term or long term?”
“No. That was part of the challenge. Did I trust them enough to take the risk?”
“Do you know if the rest of them had taken the Black Lotus?”
“I have to assume they did, but, come to think of it, I guess I don’t actually know. And, uh, what do you mean ‘long term effects’? Do you know anything about the Black Lotus?”
“Not a damn thing. Never heard of it, and that’s kind of alarming.” My words weren’t exactly calculated to reassure Hoffman, but then that wasn’t my line of work—at least not if I wasn’t getting paid for it. I got up and Hellison followed like an obedient dog. You know, I guess I should have asked him if he knew anything about the stuff, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. No reason it should have.
Arkham Detective Agency: A Lovecraftian-Noir Tribute to C. J. Henderson Page 6
