As he watched, the woman raised her paddle. The bidding increased, and paddles bobbed to the surface of the crowd, flashing into sight like shark’s fins. The price continued to climb and the sharks kept circling. Including Clemmens, who was apparently willing to sink whatever money the auction had earned for the university into this last item. Nardi shook his head and wondered whether Cold was outside, waiting to arrest the highest bidder. If so, it wasn’t his problem.
But the Bera triplets kept catching his eye. The men shifted and fidgeted in their seats. The woman was calmer, but only just. Every time her paddle went up, her face grew tighter and tighter, like she was trying not to snarl in frustration. She looked like she wanted to rip Clemmens’ throat out, and the three muttered amongst themselves. Nardi glanced at the back of the room, where Sforza was sitting. The Count didn’t look happy either, considering how much his book was likely to go for.
“Something’s off,” he muttered. The tension in the room was going septic—cops, even ex-cops, had good noses for that sort of thing. Someone was going to try something, though how and where Nardi couldn’t say. But he could feel it coming. Was this what Cold had been trying to warn him about, in his own oblique fashion? He caught Berkenwald’s eye, and mimed scratching his ribs. Berkenwald nodded slightly, just enough to show he’d understood. Paddles went up, numbers flew, but Nardi had stopped paying attention to the auction. His eyes were on the crowd, and the Beras in particular.
“Sold! To our fine hosts from Miskatonic University,” the auctioneer said, rapping the podium. Clemmens rose to his feet as a wave of polite applause rippled through the crowd. But as it faded, he heard something else—a low, guttural noise, like a dog’s growl. Bera stood suddenly, and her—brothers? Lovers?—stood with her. One lunged suddenly, arms outstretched, and flung aside chairs and occupants like a bull gorilla tearing through undergrowth. Men and women screamed as they were knocked to the ground and trampled by the blond man as he stormed toward Clemmens.
“Take him down! Take him down,” Nardi barked as he shot to his feet, knocking his chair over as he did so. He clawed for the Glock holstered beneath his coat. As he drew it, he saw Bera and her other companion dart toward the stage, moving faster than anyone—anyone human, a treacherous part of his mind said—and turned to intercept them.
Bera leapt up onto the stage gracefully, her dress swirling about her. She spun as Nardi levelled his weapon, and hissed. Her lips peeled back from long teeth—oh God, her teeth!—and she squalled like a lioness straddling a dying gazelle. It was only now, up close that Nardi saw the lean muscle that lined her arms and noticed the width of her shoulders. “Frank, down!” he heard Berkenwald scream, and instinctively, he flung himself to the stage, just as Bera’s companion chucked the podium at him.
Bera snatched up the book and was gone in a flash, moving quicker than Nardi could follow. Her companion followed, bounding after her, using his hands as much as his feet. Nardi pushed himself to his feet, and saw Werner pelting after them, gun in hand. “Be careful, damn it,” Nardi snarled, hoping Werner had heard him. I knew it, I knew it, he thought, trying to control the urge to laugh. If he started now, he might not stop.
He heard a shout, and saw that Glaser had tackled the man who’d been heading for Clemmens. Glaser was a big guy, heavy, but he was being manhandled by his opponent. Even as Berkenwald got Clemmens clear, the man wrapped long arms—too long, Nardi thought—around Glaser’s head and neck and wrenched. Bones popped with a sound like gunshots, and then Glaser was falling to the floor, his head twisted all the way around, a stupefied expression on his face.
Nardi screamed hoarsely and fired. Glaser’s killer staggered. Berkenwald fired from the other side of the room, his face pale. Together, they emptied their weapons into the screeching thing dressed like a man, and it sank down, choking on its own blood.
As Nardi reloaded, he heard a scream from the back. “Werner,” he said. He leapt off the stage and hurried in the direction his other man had gone. Storeroom, he thought. Why would they go this way? It was a dead-end. There was only one way out of this part of the building, and that was through the front doors.
Unless … aw geez. The utility tunnels, he thought, as he hit the door to the storeroom and caromed off the wall. The hot stink of blood hit him like a fist. The storeroom was a claustrophobic cluster of steel racks and wooden shelves and an old brick cistern, leading down into the utility tunnels beneath the university. Nardi saw Werner struggling with the remaining blond, as Bera climbed down into the cistern, her hair unbound and whipping about her head like a lion’s mane. She hugged the book to her chest as she vanished from sight, but Nardi had no time to pursue her.
Werner screamed as his guts spilled on the concrete floor. The blond man whirled about, and Nardi saw that he wasn’t holding a knife—instead, his hands were red to the elbow. His cheeks bulged, and his eyes were as feverish as an addict’s as he gave a wild-cat shriek and leapt over Werner’s body. Nardi fired, emptying the Glock’s clip. The man staggered, slumped, and then, impossibly, lurched upright. A guttural snarl burst from blood-flecked lips, and the dying man bulled into Nardi, carrying him backward. Teeth—too long to be human—snapped at Nardi’s throat as he struggled with Werner’s killer.
“Get … off,” he said, “Get off! ” He slugged the man—no, the thing—again and again, desperately. It was like punching a bag of cement. Then, suddenly, the weight was gone, as the thing’s head was jerked back. Something silver flashed, and the creature fell, clutching at his its throat. It gurgled and thrashed and then fell still.
“Are you all right?” Count Sforza asked, as he offered Nardi a hand.
“What the hell are you doing back here? It ain’t safe,” Nardi said, as he caught his breath. His hands and back and head hurt. The stink of blood—Werner’s blood—was thick in his nostrils, and his stomach lurched.
“No,” Sforza said, examining the body of the man he’d killed. He held a butterfly knife in one hand. “No, I’d say it’s not.” He folded his knife and put it away. He pressed the dead man’s jaws together, and Nardi’s next question sputtered into silence as he saw the teeth. They were long and thick and cruel, like those of a hunting cat or a wolf, rather than a man. Not human, he thought. He forced down the sudden, sour surge of fear; he’d seen worse, in his time, faced worse.
“… neither man nor woman, neither brute nor human, they are ghouls,” Sforza muttered. He caught Nardi’s look. “Poe,” he said.
“Fuck Poe,” Nardi said. “What is that thing?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Nardi thought about it. “No,” he said, hoarsely.
Sforza glanced at Werner’s body. “I’m sorry about your man. I didn’t intend for that to happen.” He was speaking quickly, trying to explain himself. “I needed to draw them out, you see. They’re remarkably good at hiding, these folk from below. I’ve been tracking this pack for months. I knew they wouldn’t be able to resist getting their hands on the book. I had to tempt them into the open, I—”
“You knew!” Nardi hissed, as what Sforza was saying penetrated. The bastard had known what was going to happen—he’d known! Nardi caught hold of the younger man’s lapels, jerked him to his feet and drove him back against the edge of the cistern. “I ought to gut you, you bastard!” For a moment, the fear was gone, burnt away by righteous anger.
Sforza caught his wrists. He was stronger than he looked. “You’ll have to get in line, Mr. Nardi. Right now, I’m on a schedule.”
Nardi hesitated, mind churning. It was all happening too fast. “Fine,” he said. He shook his head and looked at the brick cistern. “Down there?”
“I’m afraid so.” Sforza stripped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He was wearing an old-fashioned shoulder holster—British design, Nardi thought, and the jacket tailored to hide it. “You don’t happen to know where it goes, by chance?”
“Christchurch Cemetery,” Nardi said. “They used ’em to transp
ort and store bodies during the 1903 typhoid epidemic,” he said, peering down into the dark. “University converted ’em to utility tunnels in the Sixties.”
Sforza pulled his pistol, a big Webley revolver, and cracked it open. He snapped it shut a moment later, seemingly satisfied. “I have no doubt that that’s where she’s heading, then. Trust ghouls to know where the bodies are buried and where the exits are.”
Nardi looked down at Werner’s body. “You going down there?”
“Well, someone has to,” Sforza said. As he holstered the Webley, Nardi saw that it had a Star of Solomon picked out in ivory on the grip.
“Then I’m coming with you,” Nardi said. He poked Sforza in the chest. “One, that book is university property, and that means it’s my responsibility.” He held up two fingers. “And two, nobody, human or otherwise, kills my men and walks away clean.” The anger was burning steady now, and he hoped it would last. Anger was all he could count on, to keep him moving forward when everything else told him to run.
Sforza stared at him. Then, he nodded and swung a leg over the edge of the cistern. “Coming, Mr. Nardi?”
Nardi hesitated, just for a moment, and then followed Sforza down into the dark.
- - -
Christchurch wasn’t far. Only a few blocks, as Nardi figured it. The brickwork of the tunnel was old, and layered in patches of new plaster and bundled cables. Bricked-up apertures lined the walls, between flickering fluorescent tube lights. Copper pipes stretched overhead, warring for space with those of lead. Steam vents expelled warm, muggy air across their path at intervals, and Nardi was beginning to see why Sforza had taken off his coat. “Why do they even want the damn book?” he asked, as they moved swiftly down the tunnel. It was dimly lit—just enough to see by, but not by much.
“They’re a secretive folk, our downstairs neighbors,” Sforza said. He was moving quick, and Nardi was already breathing hard, trying to keep up. “Always have been. They like to maintain a low profile. So they destroy any record of their existence that they can get their grubby paws on and silence anyone who’s unfortunate enough to see them, unless they judge them to be no threat—Richard Shaver, for instance.”
“What, the rock-books guy?”
Sforza glanced back at him. “You know him?”
“I’m not illiterate,” Nardi said, annoyed. “If you’d told us this was a sting, we might’ve been able to help …” Or we could’ve pawned it off on Cold, and stayed out of it, he thought. If they’d done that, Werner and Glaser would still be alive. Neither had a family, which was a blessing in disguise. Like Nardi himself, the only ones who would mourn them were their co-workers. He tightened his grip on his weapon. Bullets hadn’t done much good before, but it made him feel better. Should have listened to Cold, he thought.
“If I’d told you, they might’ve known it was a trap,” Sforza said. “My plan was simply to follow them, once the bidding was done. I knew they’d either win, or track the winner down …” he trailed off. Nardi laughed harshly.
“They surprised you.”
“Well—yes,” Sforza said. He had the good grace to sound embarrassed. “I never thought they’d just up and attempt armed robbery right there.” He tilted his head, scanning the walls, taking it all in, looking—no, hunting. Like a cop, Nardi thought. The woman, or whatever she was, had a head start, but there were signs—bits of dress, a discarded shoe—marking her trail. Breadcrumbs, he thought. Did she want them to follow?
“So, you do this sort of thing often?” he asked, trying to distract himself.
“It’s a living,” Sforza said.
“Aren’t you rich?”
“As Croesus, or so my accountants tell me,” Sforza said. “I spend quite a bit on bullets, though.” He tapped his pistol in its shoulder holster. He paused. “Gone through quite a few cars as well.”
“Must be nice,” Nardi said sourly. He knew what Sforza was now—a goddamn amateur. He’d run into them once or twice, always looking for some mook to play Watson to their half-ass Holmes. Hell with that, he thought.
“God yes,” Sforza said. He stopped. “What ho,” he said. “As I suspected.” He pointed toward one of the apertures. The bricks had been torn loose and scattered across the ground. Cold, wet air flowed out of the dark beyond. Sforza looked around. “How far have we come, would you say?”
“Couple blocks … we’re near Christchurch,” Nardi said. He licked his lips. The anger that had been driving him to this point was starting to fade, and the fear was setting back in. He wanted to turn around, to go back, but he forced himself to say, “After you …”
Sforza stepped through the aperture. As he followed, Nardi fished out his cell phone and turned it on, illuminating the tunnel beyond. It was cramped, and coming apart. The bricks bulged, and he could see thick, tangled lengths of root spearing outward from the base of the wall and along the ceiling.
In places, the wall had come down … bricks and dirt scattered across the passage, and wet, leering holes dug in the soil beyond, some going up and some going down. Loose soil, bits of stone and other, less identifiable things covered the floor. “It helps to think of them like moles,” Sforza said, softly. “Or rats. Some sort of pest, at any rate.”
“Yeah, that’s not helping,” Nardi said, as he stepped on something long and white that crunched beneath his foot. Bone, he thought. He glanced at the nearest hole, and then quickly away. He thought he knew where they led, even if he wished he didn’t. “She knows we’re following her,” he said. They had come to the end of the tunnel, where a set of rotting, wooden steps led up to a rusty steel trapdoor set into the brick ceiling.
Sforza glanced down at him, as he climbed the steps. “Almost certainly. But she knows better than to stop. I’ve tracked Madame Bera and her brood across Europe. Now that they know I’m on their trail again, they’ll scarper … which is why we have to get to them first.” He drew his Webley and cocked it, as he took hold of the ring on the trapdoor. He looked down at Nardi. “Ready?”
“No,” Nardi said. “Now open it, before I realize how stupid this plan is.”
“Ta,” Sforza said. He shoved on the trapdoor, forcing it open with barely a whisper. Freshly oiled, Nardi thought. No wonder they hadn’t heard Bera use it.
“I see the book,” Sforza said, as he climbed up and out.
Nardi followed quickly, suddenly conscious of the dark of the tunnel. God alone knew what might creep up on them, away from the light. “God, what is this?” he hissed, looking around. Solid stone walls rose around them, toward a peaked roof. A heavy iron-banded door occupied one wall, and narrow berths were set into the others. The caskets which had once occupied them were now strewn all over the floor, in various states of distress.
“A family vault,” Sforza said, kicking a brown, broken skull out of the way as he made his way toward the book, where it sat on a berth. “They’ve been using it as a hidey-hole.” Nardi swept his phone out, illuminating the shattered caskets and spilled bones, not all of them in one piece. His stomach lurched, as he took in the gnaw-marks on a femur. As he turned away, a flash of movement caught his eye. It was up on the narrow lip, where the roof met the wall. His blood turned to ice, as he saw a familiar face lean down out of the dark, her cat-like eyes shining.
As if from far away, he heard Sforza saying, “They’ve left the book. That doesn’t make sense. Why would they …?”
Bera shrieked, the sound filling the confined space and nearly deafening him. Shapes sprang from the shadows, cat-lean and lightning-quick.
“Down,” Nardi snarled. His pistol thundered, and something let out a scream as it fell backward. He jerked Sforza back as a second creature exploded out of a pile of caskets, eyes blazing. Claws tore through Sforza’s waistcoat as Nardi slung him backward. “It’s a trap, you stupid asshole—I knew it! I goddamn knew it!” Amateurs, goddamn amateurs, he thought, as his gun boomed.
The ghoul was on Nardi a moment later. Rank breath washed over him as sharp teeth s
napped together inches from his face. He fell backward, into a pile of bones. His gun clattered from his grip. Curved fangs snapped at him, as he clawed at the ghoul’s face. “Shoot it,” he screamed. “For the love of God, shoot it!”
Sforza booted the ghoul in the chest, knocking it sideways. His Webley roared, and the creature screamed and sank back, but more of them leapt down from where they’d been hiding. They’d set a trap of their own, Nardi realized, as he scrambled for his pistol. A tawny foot thudded down, nearly breaking his hand.
He looked up into the twisted features of Amina Bera, and she screeched unintelligibly as she dragged him to his feet. She was still beautiful, beneath the grime and feral rage, but it didn’t last. She dragged Nardi close, and opened her jaws.
“Lemme go,” Nardi snarled. His head whipped down, and he felt her nose go, as it connected with his brow. She slung him aside, and clutched at her face. Nardi crashed into a casket and fell, back and arm throbbing. Bera took an unsteady step toward him. Swiping at her bloody nose, she threw back her head and howled.
And from the tunnels below, something answered her. Nardi could hear things moving in the dark below, and thought of those holes. A pack, that was what Sforza had called them. We’re dead, he thought. He could see Sforza struggling with a ghoul, just out of the light of his fallen phone. Then, a new noise intruded—the squeal of hinges and the crash of gunfire. Muzzle flashes illuminated the tomb, as ghouls fell. Bera whirled, snarling.
“Bad doggie. No treat,” a harsh voice said. A familiar grinning face appeared, and Indrid Cold caught Bera’s head in his hands. He gave a sharp jerk, and her snarl was cut short, as her body spasmed and went limp. Cold let the body fall and turned his smile on Nardi. “Hello again, Mr. Nardi. What was that I said about being bold?”
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Nardi spluttered, as Sforza, hair mussed and face bloody, helped him to his feet. It hurt to breathe, but he was alive. More than I can say for Werner and Glaser, he thought. As he stood, he heard the muted thump of noise-suppressed gun fire nearby. Men in black combat gear shouldered their way into the tomb a moment later, curlicues of smoke rising from their weapons. If there had been any ghouls in the cemetery outside, Nardi was guessing that they weren’t there anymore.
Arkham Detective Agency: A Lovecraftian-Noir Tribute to C. J. Henderson Page 23
