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

by C. J. Henderson

  “Uh-huh. Baby’s too big, but he loves to play. And—“

  “Yuh. Never know when Junior’s liable to have a spell, I told them, and they always nodded like they knew nothin …”

  - - -

  “Dunwich,” Galtoni observed out the side of his mouth. Thunstone nodded. “Boil on God’s ass. Army Corps of Engineers keeps talking about Eminent-Domaining it for a lake or some such thing. They should get on the stick.”

  Galtoni frowned at first, but got the expression by context. “You remember the Big Fire last year, out there. Someone set that. Probably someone whose daughter got taken in the last Troubles. Like in the memo.

  “Hsst,” I piped in. “Lurch speaks again …”

  - - -

  “Nothin’. Daddy had Junior growing, down in the dark of the cellar-hole, for some time. We all knew. It was nothing to me. Way I took it, Junior weren’t made entirely from no real stuff, anyway, not the stuff like you and me’s made out of, my truck, my chair, my beer. Nosuh, Junior was some other kind of thing, though. When he got loose he liked to rip and blow and cuss up in the hills, and make windstorms and tentacles and suck the dead right up out of their pauper’s graves into his own essence. Now, some of them dead was neighbors’ dogs I shot when they come on my property. I don’t feel bad about none of it. They was vicious. I just hate having to waste too many shotgun shells on the same damn animal.”

  Thunstone looked like he was about to get up and go in the office. But he couldn’t. It just wasn’t in him, as a professional, and it was like watching a Rottweiler trying not to bark.

  - - -

  “So I kep’ top eye on Junior, and maybe some perimeter security I ordered from some fellahs I know. Had me a couple of Claymore mines on electrified razor wire at ever’ corner just under the window, and a photoelectric cell I rigged up from a coupla old supermarket doors, you know the kind I mean? Except the motor don’t make the door come down, no.

  It goes to a home assembled flame-track I ain’t got time to tell you about. But I ain’t mad at Junior at all, no more’n I’d be if we had a velociraptor or a damn hippopotamus swimmin’ around out back. I’m still sore at Daddy, is who.

  Daddy said Junior was “My votary, Denny, my vessel, just like your Great-Cubed Grandpa Johnny Dee said could be done with Paracelsus’ brick-oven altar formation he talked about usin’ to grow a embryo … Paracelsus done scratched out half his notes ’fore Mother Church come in with her long, sharp nose, but I know what that old Swiss were tryin’ to do …”

  “I guess maybe Junior had his own rules to live by, and since Daddy called him up with powders and books and whatnot, he was his problem. I was scairt to go out back there. See, Daddy died two nights ago.”

  Nardi finally cracked the seal. I heard him let out a breath, and growl, “Mr. Whateley, I must point out that as a licensed and bonded investigator in this state, anything you tell me …”

  Denny Whateley made a sound that I didn’t expect. “Daddy died at Arkham General. I brought him here into town in my damn truck. Merc’ry pois’nin’. Paracelsus didn’t know everything. All that alchemical shit, that’ll getcha.”

  “But Junior busted out. And me and some of the cousins had to open up a darker circle when Daddy tried to come back through. Into the body of his votary. You … see? That shoggoth Daddy called forth with his very own essence punched clean through the barn wall, spraying soup bones and sheet rock dust every which way but back together …”

  “We stood our ground, me and the family. We had us them little soapstone squid-headed idol things, the ones I got down’t’Boston from that Old Lady Two-Head in Roxbury, and we put ’em in the water, and then they …”

  “Well, then the stones just went on and made that hole, that caught Daddy/Junior, and started to pull him down into that eldritch light. Daddy, a-wrigglin’ and a-floppin’ with Junior’s mismatched ol’ yard-sale body layin’ that slime all across the grass that was witherin’ white where he laid hisself smack down acrost it …

  I looked down into that hole in the pond on our land, out front where we cornered him … all the way down, while we was a-chantin’ and whoopin’ and carryin’ on.

  Down through the half-hollow Earth, and out the other side, to sunken R’lyeh in the Bermuda Triangle, and the place where Great Ktulu-ili-mo’ku’s waited this whole time, laying under the waves and laughing at us all …”

  Then Daddy in the form of Junior just plain wasn’t there anymore, and neither was some of the boys and most of the swamp. At that point, light went out, and I was left to count up all them bodies, wait for the smoke to clear, and clean up Daddy’s mess

  Johnny hadn’t taken off his duster. Now I understood why. I got up to get my coat before Tons of Fun even barked it. “It’s just like the second-to-last one of these!” I roared as the door was flung wide. “Mr. Whateley, you said things were weird. Every one of those dead folks is now a possible votary to rule out, and the creature could be dormant anywhere … When is anyone ever going to learn ‘Do Not Try This At Home?’ I ask you. I hope your Daddy was loaded, sir.” My sidearm was already in its custom clutch.

  “Because we are now on Company Time …”

  LIGHT A CANDLE, CURSE THE DARKNESS

  Paula R. Stiles

  I am always back in that cellar. It feels like an attic because I can never even sense the ceiling above me, the floor to the rest of the house. The cellar is infinite in all directions; the hatchway, whether it is above or below, too far for me to escape. I stand on the ladder in the musty heat. The attic is not space, but instead, it feels as though I am surrounded by endless stacks of dried old newspaper. When I reach out, I feel nothing, except for the nearness of the stacks blocking my way. I can’t see them because it is pitch black, but I know the newspapers are there. They are not evil in themselves, but they smell like old rat piss and mold, and the skittering and the rustling noises of things just beyond my fingertips make me wrap my arms close around me and shiver.

  Somewhere, a baby cries.

  “Ms. Johnson, are you with me?”

  I blink and I am back in the room. The room and that cellar are always coexistent, but I have the ability to push one into the corners of my mind while I interact with the other. Nor do I let the rats come out to eat holes in my reality. This is why I have my career instead of a padded cell. I know it’s a nightmare. I also know it’s quite real. I can keep those in separate, many-sided containers.

  “Mr. Nardi,” I say, “I am always with you.”

  “You seemed far away for a moment there,” he says. He glances around and his gaze pauses momentarily at the small, rotten candle perpetually lit in the open terrarium on my mantlepiece. Where the urns of dead family members are wont to sit. The terrarium is labeled, “For the Ancestors.”

  “In light of our respective professions, Mr. Nardi,” I say, “I’m going to assume that you intended that question to be rhetorical.”

  “I was wondering if you could tell me more about the land,” he says. “For my client. He wants to develop it. We’ve been hired to clean it out before they build. Downtown property like that is rare in Arkham these days and expensive. It’s one of the few plots left.”

  “Well, you know our local developers. If they’re not scraping lead paint and hallucinogenic spores into the water supply, they’re busy messing around with Ouija boards. Any deaths, yet?”

  He is all deadpan city-cop-turned-occult-detective in retirement. “We’re hoping to avoid them, this time.”

  Oh, good luck with that. Expect your future boutiques to be well and truly haunted. The Historic Preservation folks always threw up their hands and skittered off like a bunch of screaming me-mes every time I’d bring the place up. Same with the old Historical Society. That place’ll run off any self-respecting archivist real quick.

  “Ah, you mean the house,” I say.

  He frowns. “You said that on the phone. You are aware, right, that there is no house currently there?”

  �
�Don’t insult my intelligence, Mr. Nardi. There wasn’t a house when we went there, either. And you know it, or you wouldn’t have bothered to call me before investigating it.”

  He waves a hand, his jowly, aging, New York Italian cop’s face turning red. He wasn’t expecting any pushback. “Let’s cut to the chase: Your ambulance crew answered a call to that residence on June 21, 1986, correct?”

  “Yep.”

  “And it was 4:15 in the afternoon?”

  “Yep.”

  He raises an eyebrow. I raise an eyebrow back at him. If he wants to waste his time confirming names and dates he could easily get from microfilm in the library with me, that’s his problem.

  One of my cats busts in from the back porch, banging the door against the froggy door stop that keeps it from opening too wide and blowing hot summer air into the house. A little tortoiseshell, she jumps up on the back of the couch and stares Frank Nardi, private dick, right in the eye. He recoils. I don’t think he likes cats. You would have thought that he would’ve been prepared for some of my little house denizens. The crazy-cat-lady-mug of tea sitting in front of me should have been a clue. I like cats. They eat rats.

  At least I don’t have to hand-hold him over the spiders slowly swimming underneath the shellac on my coffee table. He keeps frowning and making little Elder Signs at them. I’ll admit—it would be quite mentally unmanning for the amateur. Good thing he’s not.

  “Now, your crew was you, Angela Barrett, Josie Kittredge, and Sam Lee, correct?”

  We get to the interesting part: the stuff he won’t be able to find in the newspaper because it’s been disappeared. And I don’t mean by Men in Black.

  “Yep. But I bet you’re not quite sure how you know that, right?”

  “I do have their names on the report that you all filed, but I can’t seem to find any record of them afterward. Nobody seems to miss them, but it is if they are just gone.” He looks puzzled. “Now, I’ll tell you something, honey. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen people erased from existence. What I don’t get is why there’s a report.”

  “Well,” I say, “that might have something to do with how the blood I spilled on it anchored it, you could say.” It’s so nice to interact with a fellow occult professional. They don’t waste your time with stupid questions about the alleged solidness of reality.

  “I see. Did you lose them in the house?”

  In a manner of speaking. “Yeah. I lost them. I was outside.”

  The cellar seems very close for a moment. I dismiss it almost impatiently. Piss off, you old witch.

  He looks surprised. “How did you end up outside? I was under the impression this was before you received vocational training.”

  Oh. Is that what we’re calling it now? “I was driving the ambulance that day. Everybody else ran in while I parked the rig. We’d heard it was a code, you see, a cardiac arrest, so they were in a hurry to assess the scene and start CPR. Then I got out to go round the back and grab the stretcher and bring it in. It wasn’t until I was halfway up the walk that I realized the house wasn’t there.”

  A flash of memory, like a shard of obsidian in a black sun: me swinging the stretcher back and forth behind me, practically whistling, enjoying the afternoon and the fact that I am not the one stuck working the code. All I have to do is drive the ambulance. I don’t have to listen to Angela and Josie try to put me in the middle of going at each other’s throats because they’re two very different women stuck in close quarters. I don’t have to dodge hardass misogynist Sam’s half-assed attempts to humiliate me for being female, yet not pretty. Then another shard within a shard, which is me getting an image of myself and how it would look from the outside. My shoulders slump and I stop skipping, like a scolded child. And that’s when I see there is no house, just a hole where there used to be a house, a very old house, a very small house. A dry, grassy, long-empty hole. And no team anywhere.

  I get a trickling inkling, like cold water down the back, that driving the rig will be the least of my problems that day.

  “I lost them,” I say in the present. “I’m sorry.” Two rules: Never make two patients; never lose your team. Or, to paraphrase a wise man, when you lose your team, you’re supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t matter if you liked them or not. It’s bad for business to let that sort of thing go.

  “And that’s why you decided to go inside?” he says, in that tone we all use when discussing the other person’s first contact with the occult, which they generally survive by sheer dumb luck rather than any skill they don’t yet have. I know I did.

  “Well, even at the idiot age of nineteen, I knew enough to evaluate the scene first. Rescue training, you know. Assess the dangers before going in. They hardwired that into you back in the day, in EMT class.”

  “And?”

  “And I saw a big hole. With a set of stairs going down into it like you get when you’re entering a root cellar. And I started thinking about how that would fly when I arrived back at the garage, saying I’d lost my team or some such cockamamie story, and I didn’t like that so much. And very, very cautiously, I pushed the stretcher forward. And it vanished to mist in my hands.”

  “Ooh,” Nardi says. Not quite so hardened to have lost his sensawunda. “And then what?”

  “Then I realized I was well and truly screwed.”

  He leans forward. Yes, these first-contact stories are always exciting, due to the element of unpredictable plans made in panic that remarkably turned out to be successful. After all, if you’d struck out, you wouldn’t be around to tell the tale. I don’t mention that my knees were shaking and my palms were so sweaty they kept slipping off the chrome railing on the stretcher. Looking back from now, I always feel a twinge of sympathy for that freaked-out kid of thirty years ago that I no longer am.

  “So, what did you do?” he asks.

  “I went back to the rig. I radioed in that my team was missing. The dispatcher seemed confused, which should have been a clue, but I was too rushed for that. Then I grabbed the big duffle sack we had for a trauma kit, our hefty Maglite, and a box of matches.”

  He frowns. “Why the matches?”

  I peer down at the shellacked spiders, mulling that over. “Instinct? I guess I didn’t entirely trust the flashlight. And then I went back to the hole and I put a foot on the first step.”

  “I take it that’s when you found the house,” he says.

  “Oh, yeah.” At that point, my tortoiseshell loses interest in him and comes over to see if she can get some sugar from Mama. I scratch her back. She purrs. It pushes the cellar further away. The black one also comes in from the porch, followed by the third, a cute orange tiger. That one was always cute. Got all the boys.

  “So, how did you escape what happened to your team?”

  Another good question I’ve never quite been able to figure out. “It was different for me. I think.”

  “Different in what way? You went into the house, too. Did you just get lucky?”

  I’d like to say yes. It would be easier. But Mr. Nardi is not interviewing me for free. And it only seems fair to give good information to another professional like him, who is going to have to deal with that damned patch of land and might actually have a prayer of coming back out. Plus, the last thing I want is to give that snotty old witch any satisfaction in the form of new victims. I’m sure she gets enough from unwary tourists and passersby. “You know the history of the house, right?”

  “I know it’s supposed to be a witch house. I’m not quite sure what a witch house was supposed to be in that context, but the original building dated to the 17th century.”

  “Yes. The story goes that it burned down during the Salem trials, though whether the owners did it or a mob is pretty unclear. I didn’t know that at the time. When we got the call, I just thought it was a house and somebody lived in it. I mean, that somebody lived in it in 1986.”

  I lean forward, clasping hands on my knees. They get a little sweaty from this story
, even now. “But there’s another story—it’s that a very upright and Christian Puritan lady lived there who had made it her solemn duty to root out the witches of Arkham. This was another town that was involved in the Salem trials. The witches of Arkham got off, they say, because they burned her house down. With the poor woman in it.”

  “Huh.” He actually takes the time to write that down. News to him, then. “What was her name?”

  “Keziah. Keziah Mason.” I add, almost as an afterthought, “You know, I grew up down the road and my parents are from other points of New England. But I have ancestors who were in the Trials. Accused ancestors.”

  His eyebrow sure is getting a workout today.

  “You don’t strike me as very corrupted in the blood,” he has the courtesy to say.

  I take a sip of tea as the other two cats station themselves next to the third and stare at Mr. Nardi. “I’m not.”

  Some rustling with the notebook and throat-clearing and time-wasting to get his bearings back. “So, tell me how you got out.”

  “I had to get my team back.”

  “But you lost your team.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said they disappeared from the records.”

  “All right.” He’s annoyed by the cats. I can tell. “What happened?”

  “I heard someone—something—crying. Like a baby. So, I tried to move toward it. I figured, well, if it was a baby, it was in trouble and needed rescuing. And if my team had heard it, they’d have headed that way, too. Mind you, it wasn’t easy.” I describe to him my dream and how the stacks of newspaper were almost impossible to get through from the ladder. “So, I had to crawl. The rats. There were rats. They kept biting me.”

  I show him my hands, which have little pincushion bites all over the fingers, still white and raised after thirty years. He whistles, long and slow.