Arkham Detective Agency: A Lovecraftian-Noir Tribute to C. J. Henderson

by C. J. Henderson

  - - -

  Hoffman had been able to give us good enough directions to the old man’s cabin, and that’s where we headed next, after a quick stop at my office where I rearmed and changed clothes. Hellison said he was okay as he was. Fine with me. It was his funeral, after all. I just had to watch out that he didn’t do anything stupid that would get me in trouble. I told him to follow my lead and stay behind me.

  The shack wasn’t hard to find, but it was empty, completely empty. Like no sign of occupation. But because it was so bare, that made it easier to spot a door in the boarded floor. Must be a basement. Maybe the old geezer kept his merchandise there, except there was no lock. This was a dead end, maybe even the wrong place after all. Or a trap. The square of floor opened up easily and fell backward with a slam. Our flashlights showed an empty, damp basement at the bottom of a ladder, with a flight of narrow, crudely hewn steps leading down from the far end of the room. So far Hellison seemed unperturbed, even eager, like a Boy Scout on his quest for a merit badge.

  These steps went down to a surprising depth. I started to wonder if this whole thing was much older than some present-day drug ring. We started to see more rooms along a corridor, with more hallways branching off at irregular intervals. It made me think of a doomsday prepper’s compound. Nothing fancy, but pretty extensive.

  I turned to comment on this to my shadow, Hellison, but he was gone! Had he been frightened off after all? If he had, I said to myself, good riddance. But I was surprised he had been able to beat his retreat so silently. But he might have taken off down one of those other passageways. This is the kind of stupid move I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to worry about.

  My flashlight showed me more than just the way ahead. I stopped to take a look at some wall murals. They were of surprising quality, though all pretty monochrome. Looking closer, I could see the whole thing had been painted in blood. It had flaked away in several places and been repaired by less talented hands. I looked at the scenes painted on one wall, then the other. Big monsters on one wall, worshippers opposite. I figured it was science fiction fan art, favorite scenes from those Japanese movies I saw when I was a kid. But there had to be more to it than that. Why would a bunch of nerds use blood for paint?

  As I made my way with caution further into the maze, I was sure I heard faint echoes of moaning and screaming. I stopped and listened to see if I could tell which direction it was coming from. Hard to tell with these acoustics.

  I jumped when Hellison reappeared out of a side shaft. He was lucky I didn’t shoot him. Short of breath, he apologized for taking off on his own, said he wanted to follow a hunch, then motioned for me to follow him. He had found something. I was feeling worse and worse about this, like the blind being led by the blind into who knew what danger?

  But I followed him down a long hallway which turned out to have a series of observation windows opening on a surprisingly large chamber lined with open cells, human figures chained within. Mostly women and children. There were armed guards, mostly hicks with shotguns, a few with more sophisticated weapons. I started figuring on how many of these hillbillies I could take down, shooting through these portholes.

  But there was an immediate change in plans as another bunch of degenerates burst into the narrow passageway, fists flailing. Close-quarters fights like this have advantages that are canceled out by equal disadvantages. Your attackers get in each other’s way, making it difficult for more than one or two to get their licks in. They hesitate to shoot for fear of missing you and plugging one of their own. But at the same time, you wind up slugging a knot of bodies and your impact gets diluted. But I didn’t have to zero in on a particular target. I didn’t give a damn which one of these gap-toothed morons I hit: the more the merrier. I think I nailed a couple before I got clubbed and blacked out. I didn’t have time to wonder what became of Hellison, but whatever happened to him, he’d asked for it.

  - - -

  I came to, being vigorously slapped in the face by none other than Arlan Hellison. “Frank? Hey, Frank!” I looked up to see he wasn’t tied up like me—and Annabelle! She was unconscious.

  “Hellison! Did you get free? Untie me!”

  “Sorry, Frank. Okay if I call you Frank? I have a little surprise for you. Take a look around, if the ropes allow for that.”

  They did. I looked. I halfway hoped I was asleep, that I had been fed the Black Lotus and was hallucinating. I was trussed up in the middle of a museum of horrors. The stench of the place was only partially masked by tangible mists of air freshener. There were mutilated human corpses leaned against the walls, hanging from the high ceiling, posed like taxidermy exhibits in a gallery. Hands and legs were missing. Genitalia hung like fruit from stiffened arms; eyes peeked out from puckered lips, like an apple in a roasted pig’s mouth. Female torsos sported pigs’ vacant faces where breasts should be. Human heads topped gorilla bodies, and vice versa. And this is only the stuff I haven’t been able to repress!

  I vomited. Hellison laughed like he was getting mercilessly tickled.

  I noticed that he was wearing a bright red robe. I can’t tell you how stupid he looked, with that haircut and those horn-rims.

  “You sawed-off son of a bitch!”

  “Call me anything you want, Frank. I must say, you played your part to perfection. I did, too!”

  “What do you mean? Is this some sort of a game with you?”

  “Yes, in a sense it is! You see, Frank, I was serious about being a novelist. I really am doing research here. I’m planning a novel about a killer cult and was lucky to find a real one! I worked my way in pretty easily. As you’ve seen, these guys aren’t too bright. But I am. I’ve witnessed a couple of their sacrifices, and this one’s going to be my initiation rite! I’m really grateful for your help.

  “Now, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to get up on that platform and read an invocation to some hard-to-pronounce demon. I’ll be asking him to preside over our sacrifice in his honor. I’m saving Miss Sawyer for later, though. For now, I’ll be, um, raping her on the stage. Sex magic, you know. And after we’re all done here, the brethren will chop you up and add you to our little museum.”

  “What the hell’s with all these carcasses?”

  “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too sure, either. But I did some reading. Anthro books that Miss Sawyer here suggested, and it seems a lot of savages garnish their ceremonies with totems and masks combining parts of different animals and humans. The idea is to symbolize the passing over earthly boundaries they hope to achieve. Special effects, I guess you’d say. Well, we’re making life imitate art.”

  “How deep into this are you planning to get, Hellison? How far you taking it? You know you’re crazy, right?”

  “I’m guessing your sacrifice will give me some real clout. I guess we’ll see where it goes from there. But eventually, there’s the book I want to write. Hey, here comes the congregation now. Let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”

  A couple of the goons, swathed in ill-fitting, long-unwashed robes of their own, dragged me to my feet and up onto the stage. Luckily, Annabelle Sawyer was still out. I didn’t want her to see whatever might come next. Believe it or not, I felt neither dread nor panic. I couldn’t help feeling that something would pop up out of left field to save our butts.

  They dumped me into a chair as Hellison addressed his buddies. Most wore hoods and kept quiet, as if they were stoned on the Black Lotus and didn’t really hear anything that little bastard was saying. I did, though. But it meant nothing to me. Hellison was reading from a typed sheet, struggling through a text in a language I’d never heard before. He punctuated it with an occasional snicker, which nobody else seemed to notice.

  Finally, the others joined in as the chant reached a crescendo. It was surprising to think these yokels could have known an exotic foreign language, but for all I knew they might have been just speaking in tongues. Last thing I heard was a foreign word or name that sounded like Rhan-Tegoth, then one lon
e sentence in English: “Receive our offering of the unbeliever!”

  The candle flames started to flicker as in a wind. I was sure I heard the sound of one. The lights were extinguished to be replaced by a flare of bluish-purple radiance. Had Hellison and his band of inbred buffoons arranged all this? It was scarcely credible. I glanced over at Hellison and could see it was nothing he had expected. He stood silent and slack-jawed as Something began to gather substance from the unholy light. No thought disturbed my total shock as threshing tentacles and jointed, chitinous legs reached for Hellison and held him fast. Bits and pieces of his screaming form disappeared one by one, as if some unseen maw were rapidly devouring him.

  The cultists were discombobulated, some running to and fro in terror, others prostrating themselves in worship. It was pretty clear this wasn’t the way these get-togethers usually went. Then I saw a bunch of them, maybe the same ones that rushed me in that tunnel, running toward me, probably intending to complete Hellison’s plans for me. Others, already naked, headed for Annabelle Sawyer. Now I panicked.

  The unearthly light with its Occupant blinked out during the melee, but then death appeared in another form, as a group of Arkham’s finest, with Cerasini and Langer in the lead, burst into the chamber, guns blazing. They paled at the sight of the ghastly, hybrid corpses, which were all the evidence they needed. In mere seconds, the backwoods devils were littering the floor, oozing a red lake between them. Then more cops emerged from the tunnels, led, this time, by Hoffman, who had obviously recovered his natural vigor. It must have been Hoffman who led the cops to the cult’s lair.

  By the way, Hoffman sicced the cops on his would-be frat brothers, figuring they might have had some connection with these cultists, but all of them had already fled the campus. That’s dear old Miskatonic for you, I guess.

  - - -

  A week later, I sat in Arkham’s nicest restaurant, wearing the closest thing I had to a decent suit. I sat opposite Ms. Sawyer. She had been spared the sight of the chaos. I didn’t fill her in on most of the details, but I told her about Hellison’s role in the thing and what finally happened to him. I expected she would surely think I was nuts when I described how Hellison died. But she didn’t.

  “Frank, you forget. I work in the University Library. I know all about the Rare Books collection and what’s in it. I know why we have to turn away most of those who ask to see it. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened here.”

  Something occurred to me then. She could see the gears turning in my head. Or maybe it was the light bulb that suddenly appeared above my noggin.

  “What is it, Frank?”

  “I think I understand something now. Hellison called on that Thing to destroy ‘the unbeliever.’ But nothing happened to you or to me, because we aren’t skeptics. We’ve both seen enough to convince us. But Hellison thought the whole thing was a big charade. Ritual murder, sure, bad enough, but he never really expected anything to happen. He was the only unbeliever in the place, so when it happened, it happened to him.

  CALL AND RESPONSE

  William Meikle

  From Astronomy Answers

  http://www.astro.uu.nl/~strous/AA/en/2012.html

  “The only effects that can be expected associated with the conjunction of 21 December 2012 have to do with the attention that people draw to that conjunction and date. If people expect that unusual things will happen on a certain date, then on that date they’ll behave differently than usual, and that in itself is already an unusual thing. In this way they can fulfil their own expectations.”

  Remember when the world didn’t end?

  It was supposed to be cataclysmic—waves crashing on Himalayan mountains, rich old farts trying to build escape pods in time, sinners converting to religion in the hope of instant redemption—a planet- wide shit-storm, all at once in glorious Technicolor.

  When it finally came it was just after ten past eight in the evening on the 21st December, 2012. It came, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a slightly disappointed fart.

  From Google

  Results 1 of 1 for Glasgow Scotland “Derek Adams” detective 2009

  June 10th 2009 started like many other days.

  I dressed, I made coffee, and I sat at my desk trying to magic up a client through the power of my will. All I managed to magic was a headache. I spent five minutes trying to roll a cigarette, but the paper and tobacco wanted to lead separate lives and refused to become anything that even resembled anything smoke-worthy. I felt cranky, so much so that I seriously considered making a dive for the whisky bottle even though it was only an hour since breakfast.

  The front door creaked, which is usually a precursor to footsteps on the stairs. I got the crumpled mess of paper and tobacco into my top drawer and just had the time to straighten my tie when he walked in.

  A cop stood in the doorway. An American cop, judging by the cut of his clothes—too much polyester and not enough heft for the rigors of a Scottish summer. Sunglasses on top of his head covering a thinning hairline, a jaw that had been shaved to within an atom’s width of its life, and a pair of leather boots that would have paid my rent for a year. He smiled, and my estimation of him went up several notches. On a second look he proved to be older than I’d originally thought, somewhere in late middle-age, but he’d taken care of himself. His skin was smooth, his teeth the perfect white we’ve come to expect of Americans rich enough to travel. Only the crow’s feet at his eyes and the start of that jowly look around the neck betrayed him.

  He looked around, taking in the torn linoleum, the battered desk and the old leather armchairs on either side. “You don’t put up much of a front, do you?”

  I tugged at my ear and gave it my best Bogart reply. “There’s not much money in it … not if you’re honest.”

  “That line is older than me.”

  “Yep. And not half as pretty,” I said. That got me another smile.

  “I bet you say that to all the boys.”

  “Only the ones that want to hire me.”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” he said. “Go ahead. Impress me.”

  “What with?” I replied. “I have an extensive knowledge of malt whiskies, film noir, card games and local blondes. What do you want to know about?”

  “Do you have to work hard at it?” he asked, looking me up and down. “The image, I mean?”

  I wore my ‘work’ clothes: black high-waisted trousers with the watch chain running from the belt loop to the pocket, black braces attached to the trousers by large wooden buttons, thick white cotton shirt and a kipper tie that reached only two-thirds down the front.

  “The suit came from Oxfam, the pocket-watch from my grandfather, but the rest is all me.”

  He looked around the room, laughing. “Where’s the big-busted secretary?”

  “It’s her day off … she tires easily.”

  That got me another laugh, so infectious that I joined in.

  “So which is it?” he asked, “Spade, Hammer or Marlowe?”

  “It depends on how tough I’m feeling,” I said. “Today I’m a pussycat, so you get Marlowe. He gets a better class of client.”

  He smiled. It looked like something he’d been practicing for a while but wasn’t quite comfortable with yet. I motioned him over to the desk but he went to the window and looked out. He still showed no sign of sitting down. I let him take his time. Some came in here and blurted out their stories like vomit over my desk. Others had to be left to get there at their own speed.

  I knew it wouldn’t be long now. He’d cased me out; I hadn’t frightened him, too much; now he was preparing to tell me why he was here.

  Finally he moved.

  He sat in the armchair opposite me and sighed loudly. As did the chair—it had been a while since anyone had sat in it, and I worried that it might give way. That got me wondering about my insurance cover, and my mind wandered so far that I had to focus to catch up.

  “I need a smoke,” he said. “It w
as a long flight.”

  I liked him better all the time. I got the tobacco and papers out of my drawer. To be fair to him he sat patiently and watched me try to roll a cigarette for more than thirty seconds before he offered to take over.

  “Pass the makings over here, sonny,” he said, laughing. “It’s a lost art these days, but I was doing this before you were born. I was taught at my Kentucky grand-daddy’s knee.”

  I tried not to be too embarrassed as I watched him put the cigarettes together. He had fast, nimble fingers and we were soon lit up and puffing merrily at each other.

  “I like a man that likes to smoke,” he said. “I don’t meet enough fellow travelers these days—apart from the Prof, and he favors a pipe.”

  “I like a man that likes a man that likes to smoke,” I said. “And tell me more about this Prof.”

  He smiled.

  We both sat back. An unspoken signal went between us.

  It was time for business.

  From My Calculator

  21 / 12 / 2012 = 0.000869781312

  12 / 21 / 2012 = 0.000284010224

  Division gives us 3.0625 which is the standard width in inches of a DVD box label

  “So, what can I do for you, Mister …?” I let it dangle, hoping he’d fill in the blanks.

  “It’s Nardi. Franklin Nardi. NYPD. Retired.”

  He blew smoke rings at me. I blew a few back, harder, to show him who was the boss. I don’t think I impressed him much.

  Finally, he decided to talk. “The world is going to end. And it’s up to you to stop it.”

  I started to laugh, then realized he was being serious. He took a DVD box from the bag.

  “You need to watch this,” he said.

  I powered up the laptop while he blew more smoke at me. Neither of us spoke until I’d gotten the disc loading. The screen filled with snowy static.

  “What do you know about the Cosmic Microwave Background?” he asked.