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

by C. J. Henderson

  “I tried the flashlight and it worked … more or less.” Following that feeble light and the little cries, I headed toward the only thing (or things, as there seemed to be more than one baby) that appeared to be alive and in some need of rescue. Did I mention I am a tad claustrophobic and afraid of the dark? Well, those little things in need of help kept me going. “At some point, I came out into a space with some dim light and the mewling I had heard earlier got louder. That was when I saw the altar. And a stone knife. And the nest of kittens on top of it.”

  He stops writing. “They were … what, now?”

  “Kittens. What, you expected human babies?” Okay, so did I, but I’m enjoying his surprise too much to admit it. “Somebody would have missed human babies, Mr. Nardi, even in 1986. Nobody misses a feral mama’s kittens.”

  “So, what did you do?”

  “I told you. My job.” Something living and helpless to focus on. Something to rescue, even as my knees were wobbling like a newborn colt’s and I was about ready to piss myself. “I picked them up and I put them in the trauma kit. Had to dump out some pads to do it, but they fit. I don’t think I’ve ever had more grateful patients as those poor little things. They clung to me like briars, lobsters on the edge of the pot, as I put them in. And then the witch showed up and clopped me right across the face.”

  His eyes are wide, now, and he’s scribbling away. You’d think he’d have a recorder, but I suppose former Officer Nardi is a traditionalist in witness interviewing.

  “She knocked me right into a corner, the prim and proper bitch. I got a good look at her as I was flying across the room and she was every bit as respectable as any Puritan matron. Not a hag at all. I bet she fooled all the preacher men. I lost the flashlight, which smashed, so I started fumbling around for the matches as she came at me with that big knife. But as soon as I lit one, I realized a bit late it wouldn’t do me much good. Those newspapers may have been dry before, but here, the rat piss was fresh and rank, and wet. Nothing to light.”

  “But you’re still here,” Nardi says, stating the obvious.

  “Yes, well, when somebody is laughing at me like that old witch was, I get a little angry on top of the Cowardly Lion shtick. So, as I was casting around, I saw this one, beat-up old piece of beeswax with a wick. I just picked it up. That’s when I heard the voice. A whisper in my ear over that cursed woman’s laughter. It said, ‘Light the candle, daughter. Burn the witch.’

  “So, I lit the candle. And the house burned down.” And I’ve been researching the possible owner of that little voice ever since. Still haven’t quite nailed her down. She must have really hated Keziah Mason, though, to hold on for so long in the dark in hopes of revenge.

  “So, it all vanished?” he asks. I blink in the light and sit back. For a moment, I was truly back in that house.

  “No, I wish! The old witch went up first, screaming, and then it all caught fire. I grabbed the trauma bag full of squealing kittens and I got out of there. Through the moldy old stacks that were going up around me, staying as low as I could under the choking smoke. But as lost as I was, wherever I went, the stacks seemed to open before me and I always seemed to find the tunnel with the lesser smoke, until I finally arrived at the stairs and crawled up them, dragging the trauma bag, thumping and squeaking, behind me, into the light.

  “And then, of course, it was all gone. I found myself on the grassy edge of an old hole. And nobody thought it the least bit strange when I arrived back at base with a bag full of terrified kittens and no team. It was shortly after that I got a call. I’m sure you know the kind of call I mean.”

  He nods. “I know what you mean.” I wonder what precipitated his call, but I’m too polite to ask.

  “Well, then, I don’t need to go into too much detail when I say they offered me a job evaluating older houses, problem houses. ‘Pest control,’ they called it. ‘Special vermin.’ And here we are, Mr. Nardi.”

  “Is the place safe now?” he asks, probably knowing the answer.

  “You know, she’s not just there,” I say. “She moves from house to house. I’ve been chasing after her, burning her out of her hidey-holes, sometimes literally, for almost thirty years. But I have to warn you that she’s especially fond of that one house and she’ll keep rebuilding it as long as she can, on the blood and bones of anyone stupid enough to build something there for her. Just like those women she got accused back in the day.”

  He nods. “I’ll … tell my client. He’ll insist on an exorcism.”

  I shrug. “It won’t work, but you’re welcome to try. It can’t hurt, either.”

  He smiles for the first time in the interview, so at least he’s taken the warning in the right spirit. “I’ll tell the Monsignor that, too, but I’m afraid he’s determined and probably a little arrogant. He thinks a church will do the trick.”

  I laugh right out loud at that one and Mr. Nardi even chuckles along with me. The cats just shake their heads and settle down around me like little clouds of fur. “Well, they do say Pride goeth before a fall.”

  “I still don’t understand why you say you didn’t lose your team,” he says. “They’re … what? In the light?” Gotta love the euphemisms for being eaten by a monster.

  “No,” I say. “My ancestors are in the light.” Or the “witches” of Arkham, as you will. “So it always burns, right there on my mantel.” I don’t even point. He just nods, having already marked and filed it as “unusual.” “It was waiting for me when I got back to base, even though I dropped it on my way out of that house. And I live in a new house now, so dear old Keziah can’t reach me.”

  He frowns. “So … where …?”

  I look at the cats, and they knead and purr. “Mr. Nardi, meet Angela, Josie and Sam.”

  IL SEGNO GIALLO

  David Dunwoody

  Nardi was a light sleeper. As such, he was quite certain that he’d heard the voice on the phone correctly. In fact, he was quite certain the woman was someone he knew.

  The vibrating cell on his nightstand woke him at 12:46 in the a.m. Though usually a night owl, Nardi had been fighting a losing battle with some kind of head cold and had ducked out of the office early. He reached for the phone, knocked it across the stand, and lunged to catch it before it went over the edge. The muscles in his arm and back groaned at the effort, but the mind was wide awake and he saw UNAVAILABLE flashing on the phone’s display. Mr. Unavailable seemed to be his most frequent contact nowadays, a regular drinking buddy. Nardi cleared his throat into the phone. “Yeah.”

  “Nardi? Frank?”

  He sat up and hung his legs off the side of the bed, stretching them. As he went upright the plumbing in his head lurched and began to drain. He fished a Kleenex off the table. Meanwhile his toes searched the floor for the socks he’d discarded earlier. “It’s me,” he rasped at last, then blew into the tissue.

  The voice on the phone—a female, in her thirties maybe, strained with agitation—spoke quickly. “Meet me at the Riverside Arms at quarter past the hour. Do you know it?”

  “The bar or the time?” Nardi caught a sock between two of his toes and lifted it to his hand.

  The voice tightened. “People have died, Frank. I’m afraid.”

  Nardi straightened. “Okay, okay. Let’s start with your name.” Voice sounded damn familiar, but he didn’t think he’d ever heard it before under duress. Couldn’t be a woman he knew very well, then.

  “Name? Oh, oh shit. I’m calling you from a pay phone so my name didn’t show. God. I’m not thinking straight. I didn’t want to use my own phone because—”

  “I got you,” Nardi said in a tone he hoped was equal parts gruff and reassuring. “Now what is your name?”

  A second ticked by, then another. He lowered the phone and saw that the call had terminated. While he pulled on his socks, ragged tissue dangling from one nostril, he considered his options.

  Riverside Arms, she’d said, in about thirty minutes’ time. More time than he’d need to get o
ver there. But for what?

  To know.

  That damn voice. He couldn’t shake off a call like that, nor pass the buck, even if he was sick as a dog. Sleep was already off the agenda. Curiosity was as good as a pot of black coffee in Frank Nardi’s system. He’d head over to the Arms, take a look inside and see if he recognized his caller. The fact that the call had sounded more like the precursor to a favor than a job didn’t trouble him. Not yet, anyway. He’d see just how much of a waste this might be, then he’d get annoyed.

  The Riverside Arms had been a fine little hotel in the early 1900s, then an upscale brothel. After a fire brought most of that down, the remains were cobbled together into a cozy pub; now it had bars on the windows and a blazing neon Coors display. Nardi was willing to bet there was a pay phone in there, too. A hole like this was one of the few places in Arkham that’d still contain such a relic.

  There were four vehicles out front: a battered compact, a nondescript green van and two muddy pickups. Seated across the street in his car, Nardi looked over each set of wheels and tried to place his mystery caller inside one of them. Didn’t feel right.

  So maybe she wasn’t here yet? Nardi scanned the other vehicles along the curb. The bar faced a line of dumpy rental homes. Not a great neighborhood in which to be a stranger. “Riverfront” didn’t translate to high property values in this area. It meant mudslides, mold and rats and nastier things, some of them on two legs. Some not.

  All the cars along the street appeared vacant and none looked out of place. He felt like his girl was most definitely out of place here. So then, why had she picked the Arms for their meeting?

  People have died.

  Best to head inside and have a look.

  He got out of the car and strode across the road. The smell of the black, muddy river, somewhere out behind the diner, penetrated his stuffy nose and clogged his sinuses. Remarkable how the river itself seemed to wear different faces; it was clean and clear in the historic Arkham, the thriving university town where old hotels still stood. But around here it seemed to slow and congeal into a sluggish, stagnant artery of ruin. Was the neighborhood infecting the river, or the other way around?

  Nardi entered the Arms and saw her immediately; there was no mistaking her, for, as his hunch had suggested, she was woefully out of place, like an exotic butterfly lying helpless in the corner of a bird’s nest. The nest itself was papered with juvenile frescoes of women and orchards and cast in a dull red hue by the veiled lamps which dotted the tables. The bar was lined with sad sacks. Nardi hadn’t expected it to be quite so busy at this hour. Last call had to be just around the corner. He supposed they were storing up, like camels about to be cast into the wilderness.

  Not her, though. As Nardi approached her table he could already tell she was nursing a club soda. Probably to settle her nerves, and boy did she look nervous—not only had he never heard her in such distress, he’d never seen her in such disarray. When he’d known her in New York, Isabella Andora had been nothing but polished in every aspect. In her presence, he admitted to himself, he’d always felt a bit like a boy standing before the Venus de Milo: her tunic slipping over her hips in a way a boy couldn’t help but find suggestive, and broken arms framing the slope of her breast while the vision herself looked casually away from him. Isa didn’t belong in a place like this, but—

  She’d picked it because she’d figured he’d know it. Nardi grimaced at the sting of the realization, smoothed the grimace into a thin smile and said to her, “Hey.”

  She pushed her auburn hair—blood-red in the light of the Arms—from her eyes and said, “Thank you. You didn’t have to come. You didn’t even know it was me.”

  “Wouldn’t have if I hadn’t come.” He took a seat across from her. In spite of the room’s warmth, Isa pulled her overcoat tight and stared into her drink. She shivered and said, “I didn’t know where else to go. I’ve heard about what you do out here. The kind of … work you do now.”

  “Sure.” Nardi rested a palm on the table. Her eyes moved to it, and he said, “You think your problem is my kind of problem?”

  She nodded, eyes still down.

  “Okay. Let’s start with what you said on the phone. About what happened to these other people. And who they were.”

  She nodded again, sitting up and relaxing a little. “That’s what I always liked about you, Frank. Right down to business. Makes it easier to tell a story as crazy as this.”

  At the bar, a tinny speaker whispered some Bob Seger country cover. Apart from the radio, all was silent. The backs of the eight men seated there were cast in muted crimson. Looking back at Isa, who had reached into her coat, Nardi spotted what looked like a pink dress. Yellow, maybe, given the lighting. Looked like a fancy number. Where had she been before the Arms?

  Isa pulled a folder from inside her coat. “Do you read music?”

  Nardi sniffed. “I listen to books.”

  She gave him an annoyed look and he said, “I thought we were going to talk about the people who’ve died.”

  “We are.” She pushed the folder over to him. He thumbed it open and saw several pages of sheet music.

  “Il Torrente Forte,” he read aloud. “The Long Torrent. Gio Pastore.” That was the end of what he could decipher. The music within the pages was described by a storm of notes, some of which he didn’t recognize at all. In fact, as he leafed through the final pages, he didn’t recognize any of the notes. They looked like rune symbols, only he was sure they weren’t. Nardi’s head, already foggy, began to feel foggier and he instinctively closed the folder.

  “Who is Gio Pastore?” he asked Isabella.

  “A young composer. A genius, some say. He’s missing now, probably dead like the others.”

  Isabella was a cellist. Nardi said, “You performed this piece?”

  “Once. At an exclusive recital in Manhattan,” she told him. “Nine of us in total, including Pastore as conductor. Like I said, he’s missing. The other players are dead.”

  “When and how?” Nardi’s mental recorder was running and the hairs on the backs of his hands stood. His eyes went to the closed folder. She’d been right to come to him. Whether that boded well for Frank Nardi remained to be seen.

  “Over the last month or so. Suicide.”

  He raised his brow at her. “All of them?”

  “That’s how it looks.” Isabella crossed her arms and shivered. It was warm in the Arms. The red lighting and the faint murmur of that cheap radio made it feel like a waiting room in Hell.

  Nardi thumbed the folder. “This all happened after the performance?”

  Isabella caught his hand. “Don’t open it again,” she said.

  “What the hell kind of music was that?”

  “Those notes in the final movement … I don’t know,” Isabella said. “I don’t even remember playing the third movement. Not in rehearsal, not in Manhattan. And that, for some reason, didn’t trouble me at all. Not until the deaths started. It’s so odd … I just felt enraptured, never questioned why I couldn’t recall …”

  She sighed, her breath stilted as she shivered again. Nardi realized it was the memory—or absence thereof—of that alien melody that was chilling her. He pulled the folder to himself, telling her, “I’m not opening it,” and slipped it into his coat. “I just need to consult a couple of people. I can do it in the morning. Are you staying in town, or …?”

  “I drove here tonight,” Isabella said. “Frank, I don’t know if I have until morning.”

  “Tell me what you know about these suicides.”

  “Three in a tub with a razor. Two hangings. Two jumpers. Not in that order.” She stared intently at him. “I don’t know what this is, a curse? Did we summon something, is that it? Something that makes people hurt themselves … makes them want to?” Her eyes were big and dark and terrified. Her hands were both closed into tight fists. “Do you think that’s what happened? I can’t be alone, Frank. Not for one second. Not if I’m going to lose my will to li
ve at some random moment.”

  So she wasn’t just here to bust the hex, or whatever it was—she wanted Frank’s protection, and from herself, no less.

  He nodded. “Not my place. We’ll get you a room uptown. I’ll watch you, all right? And we’ll stay in that room until we have this sorted.” He’d take pictures of the music with his phone and send it to his contacts. Preceded by a warning—he couldn’t be sure whether viewing the music was safe. He tried to picture the symbols from the suite’s final movement, thinking maybe he could describe them instead, but found only a blank wall in his memory. That can’t be good.

  With Isabella’s permission and understanding, Frank did his best to suicide-proof her hotel room. All items were unplugged, cords wound up and outlets covered. He situated his chair in front of the one window and placed the clock and lamps beside it. The bathroom was its own potential abattoir. There were certain things he could do nothing about—the mirror over the sink, for example, was stuck fast to the wall—so he removed the knob from the door. At least that would prevent him from being locked out. He took the plugs from the sink and tub, along with anything else that wasn’t bolted down. Isabella watched from the doorway.

  Frank eyeballed the light fixture above the mirror. “I’m gonna pull the wiring from the light switch.”

  “What will we use to see? Candles?”

  “Hell no. Flashlight.” One large enough not to be a choking hazard but small enough not to be a bludgeon. Frank’s mind was racing. He was sure he was overlooking a dozen little things that could be used to take one’s life. He’d just have to watch her like he’d promised.

  She shed her coat and lay atop the bedcovers. The dress was yellow indeed. Frank settled in his chair. “What time is it?” she asked.

  He checked his phone. “Quarter ’til three.”

  “Like I can sleep anyway.” She harrumphed. “Let’s talk.”

  “First …” With an apologetic look, Frank took the coat from her. He searched the pockets, taking out her phone, keys, and a few mints, then folded the coat and set it on the floor.