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

by C. J. Henderson

  “Hunting,” Cold said. He cocked his head. “Hello Anton. How is your aunt?”

  “Fine, thank you. I’ll let her know you asked after her,” Sforza said, picking at his ruined waistcoat. He looked nearly as rough as Nardi felt, and the ex-policeman allowed himself a brief surge of satisfaction, even as he wondered how they knew each other. “You were tracking them as well,” Sforza continued.

  “Yes,” Cold said, grinning. “Can’t have their sort setting up shop here. We have enough trouble with those in Boston.” He cocked his head. “The cemetery was the most obvious spot to concentrate our surveillance. Once you provoked them, as was inevitable, it was simply a matter of waiting until they sprang their trap.” He looked at Nardi.“You look ill, Mr. Nardi.”

  “Must be the company,” Nardi said.

  Cold laughed. “I did try and warn you, Mr. Nardi. But … it has all worked out for the best. The pests have been flushed out, their nest revealed. And now, they will be exterminated.” He picked up the book from where it lay, and flipped idly through it. “Dusseldorf edition. Very rare.”

  “It belongs to the university,” Nardi said. Cold glanced at him and then at Sforza.

  “So it does. Though I’m sure they’ll sell it back to you, Anton, for a sizeable donation. I should confiscate it, but … we’ll call it payment for services rendered, shall we?” Cold tossed the book to Nardi.

  “Services … what are you—?” Sforza began.

  Cold patted him on the shoulder as he stepped past. “Do remember me to your aunt. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there are some things that need to be taught that learning to walk does not entitle them to due process.” He went to the trapdoor, and with a last wave, dropped down into the tunnel below. His men followed suit.

  “Of all the bloody cheek … that bastard knew,” Sforza said. And as gunfire began to echo through the tunnels below, Frank Nardi began to laugh.

  SHE WORE A TRENCH COAT

  Don Webb

  I don’t know who will read this, maybe Sis. Sis, if you’re reading this—don’t worry, I’m not crazy. I can still take care of the horses and the orchard. I will still get up at dark-thirty and take the weather readings. If something has happened to me, mail this to the Arkham Police Department. If something strange has happened to me, make two copies—mail one to Arkham PD and the other to the Arkham Detective Agency, ATTN: Franklin Nardi.

  My name is Travis Mazoni. I live in Cove, Oregon on a horse farm owned by my brother-in-law. I help with the small cherry orchard, feed the horses, mend fences, and help my family get a little grant money from the state by reporting from a meteorological station every day—Christmas and July 4th included. I am bored out of my mind most days. I grew up in central Texas, a town called Doublesign. For ten years I worked as a cop in Austin, TX, then I met the love of my life, Nicole Smith, a grad student at UT. I married her and moved to her hometown of Arkham, Mass., and became a cop there. Then she found the love of her life, Suzy Matori, and I became a single cop. I had an uninteresting career until I busted the mayor’s son for selling speed. I stood my ground, but I did not talk to the media. The chief called me in. Said that he needed a man who was strong of character and could keep his mouth shut. And I have kept my mouth shut.

  I got a stupid assignment. I sat in an unmarked white van full of devices. For the most part I didn’t know what they measured. My job was to sit in the van on College Street about six blocks from the university. I was watching the Arkham Detective Agency every night from six in the evening to one in the morning. I was to covertly photograph everyone that came or went, note every car, and write down readings on the devices every hour. Once a month two suits came to talk to me—NSA, CIA—hell, AFL-CIO for all I knew. They would ask me about my stake-outs. They would then ask me if I had “sensed” anything. The local story was that the ADA was either a New Age scam or the damn X-Files. A couple of nights, a couple of the machines went crazy and I noted down their numbers. One night I thought I saw something fly overhead. Otherwise, deadly dull. It wasn’t like the place was open at night.

  After my third week, Franklin Nardi, one of the partners, knocked on the window of my van. I rolled it down. He said, “If you want to be discreet, park around the block.” I told him I didn’t know what he meant. He just chuckled—told me how long he had been a cop in the Big Apple. I shrugged. It all went into my report. After that, when Nardi or the other partner Berkenweld left at night, they would wave at me. What the hell, after six weeks I waved back.

  I complained after two months. It was boring and I was getting fat on Miskatonic Mystik Pizza’s stromboli. The chief listened to me, raised my salary by five hundred a month and gave me three weeks of vacation a year. I clammed up. Spring fled, summer passed, fall came. Pumpkins and skeletons appeared in shop windows. Drunken frat boys partied. Rumors went around of strange cults on campus, or old stories of boogeyman Whatley. Same Arkham fall I’d known for six years. Then I got a call from Edward Sonia, the guy that sat in the van from one until seven. His kid was sick with the mumps, they were taking him to the ER, could I take his shift? I said yeah; after all, only my empty apartment on River Street waited for me. I kind of dozed off about three in the morning. I was re-reading Skeleton Crew for the tenth time and Mr. King gave me some nightmares with “The Jaunt”—also for the tenth time. One of the devices that measured EMF fluctuations began buzzing. Then that one in the black box lit up Green, Yellow, Red, RED.

  No one was near the ADA door, no cars parked in front—then I saw her. A woman with a big floppy black hat, black trench coat, long black boots weaving down the sidewalk. Clearly she had been at one of the pre-Halloween frat parties and had a few too many. In the old-style mercury-vapor lights the city keeps near the university I could see that she had long blonde hair and was probably a looker. Now my orders were to stay in the van, call in anything weird, and if threatened drive off. The equipment (as opposed to myself) was very valuable. So I jumped out of the van and ran to her. She collapsed on the sidewalk as I approached. She fell bonelessly, like a baby, and made no sound. Her hat fell off her head and rolled into the gutter. I noticed how cold it was. I hadn’t grabbed my coat. I knelt beside her. She was a looker, almost a model, with full red lips and creamy skin. The kind of woman who wouldn’t have given me the time of day twenty years ago when I was a trim, good-looking cop.

  She was muttering, “Arkham Detective Agency talk to Nardi about Phillips. Call Dr. Clemens. Arkham Detective Agency talk to Nardi, remember talk to Nardi.”

  Dr. Clemens was the president of the university, or the dean, or whatever. A man who avoided scandal at any cost.

  I tried to get her to respond to me. She was out of it, repeating the sentences she had no doubt heard. And then I noticed the creepy. Something was moving under her trench coat. Rats by the size of things, maybe two or three. One over her breasts and the others over her flat tummy. I began unbuttoning the coat. There were little lumps of darkness that vanished like smoke when the silvery light hit them. She moaned a little when this happened and shut up. Her eyes were open, but I could tell she was in shock. I didn’t think lying on the cold sidewalk that was just beginning to frost was a good idea, so I fireman-lifted her to my van. She was very light, I’m guessing under a hundred pounds. I laid her down, opened the back door and put her in. Three of the devices went crazy. I stepped in over her body and went to the radio. I was going to call for an ambulance, and was already processing what to say, when I heard a whirring in the back. The little darkness-creatures, black as night and impossible to focus on, were swarming all over her. It took about a minute, during which time I was shamefully doing nothing but watching. Then they were gone again and so was she. One knee length black boot and most of the front of her trench coat remained.

  I sat down in the driver’s seat. I needed to think. I couldn’t call an ambulance, no real need there. I had just seen one of the weird things that is whispered about here. Something a drunk will tell you near closing time, or
a crazed street person when you are locking them up. Stories that normal people don’t believe. I was hired to watch and not intervene in any crazy.

  I was not hired for this.

  I checked out the pocket of the trench coat. There was a business card for Dr. Sebastian E. Phillips, Church of the Transformations with a River Street address, phone, e-mail and FaceBook.

  I sat some more. If I became involved in this I would either be defending my sanity (while losing my job) or be in on something very dangerous. I pocketed the card, took the boot, the partial trench coat, and the hat and stuffed then in a dumpster behind Campus Jewelry. I noted in Sonia’s log that certain devices had gone wild at 3:18 until 3:33 in the morning. I assumed that there was an electronic log of their activity.

  A week passed. Then another. So I had had an adventure. A post-retirement weird tale.

  Then I read the Sunday edition of the Arkham Advertiser. I don’t normally read the paper; I just use Google News, but my neighbor in 3B was out of town and I was picking up copies. A Miss Constance Valetta had turned up missing. Yeah, you guessed, it was she. She was a caring, smart woman who had a large fortune that she was rapidly giving away, put in time in the soup kitchens, had a pit bull named Gargoyle, painted as a hobby. She seemed generally beloved, and her disappearance had created quite a stir.

  Suddenly she wasn’t a weird tale anymore. She was a person, a worthwhile young person that I had failed to save. And like the Grinch in the story, my heart grew three times as large. I was the young man that my mother and father had been so proud of. I was in my first uniform ready to go get some bad guys.

  But I was not stupid. I knew if I reported the situation I would lose my job, as well as any resources that came with my job. All I had was a business card for a church near where I lived. Well, hell, it was Sunday. I put on my funeral suit and walked four blocks. It didn’t look like a church. It was a suite in a low-rise office building. The receptionist was a bored-looking woman past middle age.

  No, there weren’t regular services.

  No, she wasn’t a member.

  She wasn’t rich enough to be a member.

  Have a flyer.

  The flyer covered the stuff on the webpage. It had three parts. Some pop-science stuff about time-dilation in muons, some esoterica about time from J.G. Bennett, Ouspensky, and Franklyn, and some not-too-subtle remarks that suggested that wealthy people were simply better and deserved immortality. It screamed scam dressed as religion. The basic notion was twofold: A) as a rich person you have affected the world more than a poor person and B) certain forces could use the momentum you’ve created in the world to make a new, more perfect, and more permanent version of you. Apparently a large enough donation to the Church could put you in touch with that Force.

  This didn’t offer much light on the situation. So I decided to visit the Arkham Detective Agency. I waited with the receptionist for fifteen minutes and then Nardi opened the door to his office.

  “Welcome, Officer Manzoni, I wondered if you might drop by.” He said. I wasn’t surprised. I’d been watching his place for eight months; of course they would have investigated me.

  “Thank you for seeing me. Why were you expecting me?”

  I took a seat. Nardi smiled. “We have cameras, of course. For eight months you open your van door to the Miskatonic Mystik Pizza guy when you get your Stromboli supreme. You leave at midnight. You make your report to the NSA every week. On October 27th you jumped out of your van at 3:19 in the morning and carried something heavy—maybe a body back to your van. At 3:45 you carried something light out of your van. Your weekly report showed that three indicators in your van registered anomalies—the muon detector, gavometric flux detector, and the big black box we can’t figure out. Your report did not mention carrying anything into or out of your van. Are you ready to tell me about it?”

  I was silent for about a minute. I said, “No. Not yet. You probably think …”

  “I don’t think anything. When something weird crosses a human’s path, they either tell everybody, or they shut up.”

  “I can’t talk about it yet.”

  “But you came here. Now, on your salary you can’t afford us. You don’t have a clue about finding out what you want to find out, or you would be hitting up the library down the street, but you hope in some vague way we’ll help you out. We don’t read minds here; at least I don’t.”

  “I want some advice. What does this look like to you?”

  I handed him the flyer. He took three minutes to read it.

  He said, “On the surface it looks like a way to remove excess from the rich and narcissistic. No different than cryogenics. But this is Arkham.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Travis … can I call you Travis? Meaning you’re in a bad neighborhood. You’re a cop. You know every neighborhood can have criminal activity. But you’ll have less crime in University Oaks than east Arkham, right? Well there are good and bad neighborhoods in a cosmic sense. Some places, like your hometown of Doublesign, (yes we are thorough) or the Sesqua Valley or this damn place aren’t too hot on cosmic laws. You can write certain Names on the ground, or build an attic with certain pitch to the roof, or even play some rock-n-roll music from a certain era—and things happen here. All the legitimate occult groups: the OTO, the Temple of Set, etc. flourish here.”

  “So you know something about the Church of Transformations?”

  “Not a clue. But think about this—if you were going after human sacrifices, it might be better to kill rich people that pay you for your trouble than homeless people with a dime in their pockets.”

  “So you think?” I began.

  “I don’t think nothing. If you want to share what happened outside of my business in the wee hours of the morning, we can talk. Here’s my advice, don’t be by yourself in the midst of them, whoever they are. Have an escape plan, always. Stay in the mundane world while you do your investigations—stay sober, don’t watch science fiction, don’t try occultism. Come talk to us when you can. And I tell you what, Travis, if this group shows up on our radar I’ll call you.”

  We chatted for a few minutes about our favorite pizzas, the Miskatonic vs. Yale game that was a week away on Thanksgiving, our irritation at the slowness of the city to fix potholes, and so forth. I gave him the flyer. He asked if I was going to the game. He said he had an extra ticket, but I told him I was flying out west to see my sister at her cherry orchard/horse farm. I really liked the guy—he had stared into an abyss that I had only guessed at, and his answer was football.

  I got a pal in Missing Persons, a steel-haired lesbian with the bluest eyes of any human being I’ve ever known. We bowled together when there was a police league. So I asked about missing people. Many rich folks going missing these days. She gave me the what-the-hell are you doing look, but told me three of Arkham’s wealthiest citizens had gone missing. One of them was Constance Valetta. I thanked her. She reminded me that cops that play detective become cops that collect unemployment.

  I did some minor research on the other two names, an investment banker and a retired plastic surgeon. The surgeon lived by himself. They had money. No signs of a struggle, just plain gone. I called up the banker’s wife.

  “Hello Mrs. Van Kemp, this is Reverend Phillips from the Church of Transformations.”

  “I told you the last time we talked. I don’t want to hear from you.”

  “Mrs. Van Kemp I’m sure we got off on the wrong foot.”

  “I know you people are behind Jeff’s disappearance and now you want my money as well. He said he was coming back—well, he hasn’t come back. I don’t know if you killed him or just helped him escape. But if you call me again I’ll go to the police.”

  I told her to go the police, what did I care? After she had hung up on me, I wished I had sent her to the Arkham Detective Agency; she could have added some gold to Nardi’s pockets.

  I left a contact e-mail at the Church’s website. I got a questionnaire—some questi
ons were self-praise questions: “Do you consider yourself more sensitive than other people?” “Do your friends consider you a good source of advice?” but near the end they asked how much money your household made annually. I gave my yearly wage—times ten. The Reverend Phillips wrote me back personally. Services were Tuesday night. He gave me a code for the front door—2333318. I don’t know if that was full of occult significance, but Constance had begun to disappear at 3:18 and was gone by 3:33. I dressed casually, because the very rich always dress casually. I showed up at seven-thirty and let myself in the low-rise. A couple of others rode the elevator up with me. I recognized the woman, a blue-hair that always gave a shitload of money to the local PBS station every year, and frankly looked like a blue-haired version of Maggie Smith. The dude was young—I couldn’t place him at first, but then I remembered he was in the paper. He had invented some new search engine as his Masters at Miskatonic last year and had gotten over three million dollars in seed money to introduce/develop it.

  A dark-haired, big-breasted young woman in a getup that would look more at home in classic Star Trek than November Arkham stood outside the Church offices and showed us into a tiny theater. Twenty guests, three folks serving punch in white uniforms, the aforementioned eye candy and Dr. Phillips made up the crowd. He put some soothing New Age music on, dimmed the lights a little, and led us through a couple of exercises. For the first one, we pictured a pleasant experience. I pictured taking Nicole to Galveston. Then we opened our eyes and looked at our wrist watches. We were supposed to make the second hand slow down. I tried, I even got it to seem to stop for a subjective second. Then he talked about the subjective nature of time. The second experience was watching a little video. We saw pictures of famous dead people—Lincoln, King Tut, Leonardo Da Vinci, Helen Keller and so on. Each one seemed to go by a little faster than the rest. Just before the end, I saw myself. Judging from the surprised grunts of my fellow audience members, they had a similar experience. A fairly easy trick; we could have our pictures made when watching the hostess. We heard a spiel about the illusion of time—if we were standing outside the frame of space-time we would see everything at once—no “past/present/future”—we could see how our lives affected so many others. Then we listened to some (Tibetan??) monks chanting a “Hymn to Eihort”—some trans-temporal being that could see our past/present/future. We were told to close our eyes. I almost instantly had a dream I was living in the University Oaks part of Arkham, Nicole was by my side. My son was playing with the golden retriever. Dr. Phillips asked us to open our eyes. I felt so happy. We tried staring at our watches again. I made the second hand stop for a very long time. He talked a good deal more about “probability mists” and “angular time”—but I paid no attention. The dream was a possible world, one where I was very happy. We drank punch, we went home. Some of the people in the room were calm and serene, others were openly weeping. Dr. Phillips came over to me.