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

by C. J. Henderson

  “No, not at this point.”

  “Good,” responded Knight as he touched his lighter to his pipe’s freshly packed bowl. Taking a good, healthy drag, he exhaled a pleasant woody smelling cloud through a newborn half-smile, then said, “Well, we’ve still only got one chance at this. Shall we go for it?”

  Nardi paused, listening to the still-screeching alarm, watching the last of the others still conscious as they stampeded away in deranged panic. Sighing, checking the slide on his weapon, he gave the professor a forlorn smile, then answered, “Never let it be said that Frank Nardi ever chose good sense over a good time. Let’s do it.”

  And then, before either man could move or even speak, boiling its way directly through the wall next to them, the first of the shoggoths appeared.

  THREE WEEKS EARLIER

  “Ah, Mr. Nardi, come in. I have someone here I’d like you to meet.”

  Harold Clemmens was the president of Miskatonic University, final signer-off on all decisions, final arbiter of all disputes, final check on all balances. It had been his decision over a year earlier to bring in a private security firm to add another measure of safety in reference to the school’s library, a repository known far and wide for containing the largest collection of rare occult material in the western hemisphere.

  “Certainly, Mr. President …”

  Nardi was one of several New York City police officers who had, several years earlier, retired to the supposedly more tranquil surroundings of Arkham. There they had opened an agency specializing in searching out the strange and unique for those so inflicted. They had believed, of course, that they were merely engaging in a bit of humbuggery—de-ghosting homes, proofing the recently deceased against zombification—participating as it were in a type of medicine show dance over which they might chuckle on Friday evenings as they enjoyed cards and beer.

  Twenty-two months later, with one of them dead and his remaining partners frightened into a quiet sobriety, Nardi reached out his hand as Clemmens said, “Franklin Nardi, Arkham Security, Professor Piers Knight, curator at the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn in New York City, not Connecticut, of course.”

  The professor set aside his glass and stood to shake hands with the detective. A tad taller than Nardi, of a slighter build, looking perhaps a few years younger, Knight had a grip the detective found solid enough to grant him a few points, if not enough to allow the professor a complete pass. As the three men took seats, Knight pointed toward an elegantly tall, thin bottle, half filled with a clear liquid, and offered, “Absinthe, Mr. Nardi? A newer brand, Edward III, wonderful stuff. I brought the bottle up from my, and what I believe to be your own, home town. It’s a delightful artisanal, all organic ingredients, made by hand … simply marvelously light flavor—”

  “Sounds good,” admitted the detective, “but I’ve been cuttin’ back ever since … ah, you know … a man gets older—”

  “So I’ve heard,” responded Knight drily, nodding. As the professor settled back into his seat, lifting his glass for another sip, Clemmens said, “I’ve gone over most of the details of the university’s proposition with you both separately. You each seem in agreement … but, since you’ll be working in close quarters together, I thought it best you meet before departure. Rub elbows a touch, bit of the familiar—”

  “No offense, Mr. Clemmens, but the university’s offer is simply too generous for me to pass up,” interrupted Nardi. “Besides, considerin’ the contract my agency signed, you’d be within your rights to make such a request as part of our agreed-upon duties—”

  “Oh no,” sputtered the president, “I think it would take a rather brutal reading in between the lines to make a case for such an onerous interpretation—”

  “Obviously Mr. Clemmens hasn’t run into some of the lawyers from our homeland, eh, Mr. Nardi?”

  “Still,” countered the president, “we are talking about his accompanying you to the Antarctic as your bodyguard, for at least two, possibly three … maybe even four or more months—”

  “Yes, understood, Harold,” agreed Knight, “and excuse me while I ask, for Mr. Nardi’s edification if not my own, but why? This is a rather straightforward proposition, isn’t it? Not to cheat my fellow New Yorker out of what appears to him to be a generous situation, but why in Heaven’s name would I need a bodyguard?”

  Clemmens stared forward for a moment, nothing of the man moving except for his lower lip. Finally blinking as well, the president lowered his eyes, lifting his hands from his desk at the same time. Threading his fingers together, he said, “It’s been over seventy-five years since Miskatonic sent their expedition to the Antarctic. That you know about. You’ve read the paper I forwarded to you both, lunatic warnings about alien horrors, cyclopean cities, mountains of madness …”

  “Ah, yeah,” said Nardi with some hesitation. “I, ummm, I tried lookin’ up that mountain range, the one that report made such a big deal about … I mean, that guy, ah, Dyer, he talked about it havin’ all kinds of carved stuff on it, claimed it was bigger than Mount Everest. But I couldn’t find anything that—”

  “There isn’t anything to find, Mr. Nardi,” interrupted Clemmens. “The Himalayas are the highest peaks in the world. That one point alone is one of the main reasons the Starkweather/Moore expedition was sent down there, despite Dyer’s warnings, in the first place.”

  “That was the second group,” explained Knight with a bit of reserve, “the one which had poor Mr. Dyer in such a lather that he wrote his infamous ‘mountains of madness’ report. When the second expedition arrived, they went to the same position, but radioed that they could find no mountains, no towers, no external evidence whatsoever of what had been originally reported.”

  “I noticed you stressed ‘no external evidence,’ sir.”

  “And that kind of attention to details,” said Clemmens to Knight, as a means of answering the detective, “is why we retain Mr. Nardi. No, Frank, they found nothing … nothing on the surface, that is. But, thanks to other of the coordinates provided, they did find the entrance to the world below … to everything else Dyer claimed that he and Danforth had discovered.”

  All three men sat quietly for a moment. It was, after all, the kind of information that most anyone required a moment to absorb. Taking another sip of his absinthe, the professor finally asked, “You’re saying that there actually is a vast underground city beneath the Antarctic, and people have known about it for close to a century?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “Those people being the government, right?” As both Clemmens and Knight turned toward him, Nardi added, “Hey, what else are you sayin’? I mean, these guys report that there’s this secret world down there, just when Europe is startin’ to crumble. My guess is, in the interests of ‘national security,’ or whatever they called it back then, the government moved in—took over. Built a base, pretended it was for scientific research, filled the place with weapons.”

  “And forbade any mention of its existence to anyone else,” suggested Knight. “Eh, Mr. President?” When Clemmens nodded his head in sad agreement, the professor asked, “Which prompts me to ask, why is it that now they’re willing to allow chatter to be spread freely hither and yon?”

  “Can’t say they are allowing much in the way of chatter at all,” answered the president. “After the second expedition started sending back reports, as you correctly deduced, Frank, the government slapped a silencing order on the operation.”

  “Much like they did in Roswell.” When the others looked at him blankly, Knight explained, “Roswell, New Mexico—from where all the rumors of downed spaceships and recovered alien bodies come. Back in the late forties, the public relations man at the air base near Roswell released a news flash that an alien space ship had been recovered, and then, within … I believe … less than an hour, the flash was recanted and the Air Force has been silent to hostile about the moment ever since.”

  “Quite,” agreed Clemmens. “Much the same thing happened in this
matter. The difference being that when Moore radioed back confirmation that the underground passages were confirmed, the wording wasn’t as sensational as all that. Before news could spread to the general population, the blanket was lowered.”

  “And now,” responded Nardi with a questioning tone, “it’s up again?”

  “We have received an invitation to send down a research team.” Clemmens lowered his eyes for a moment, then looked up again, saying, “A couple of fellows came around, proper I.D. and all … and they brought us these.”

  The president opened a folder and spread a wealth of color photographs across his desk. His visitors leaned forward, then began to quite eagerly flip through them, examining some in great detail, especially Knight. As they did so, Clemmens continued.

  “Didn’t leave anything electronic, didn’t want any images escaping out onto the Internet. We were warned quite strongly about making copies ourselves. As you can see, the sketches and murky black and white photos brought back by Dyer and Danforth are all verified quite extraordinarily here.”

  “Indeed,” mused the professor, staring hard at two photos of massive walls of intricate carvings.

  “They said that they’re ready to open the place to the world. Said they’ve gotten all they can out of it on their own, and that perhaps it is time to share the knowledge.”

  “And,” asked Nardi, “you believe them?”

  “My first instincts were toward mistrust, Frank,” admitted the president. “But, I asked myself over and over, the university was shut out of things three quarters of a century ago. No one had even thought to ask about it for fifty years. What would the government have to gain by bringing us in now … if, ah … they didn’t want us there?”

  “Yes,” asked Knight, echoing the detective’s instinctive mistrust, “what, indeed?”

  - - -

  Two days after their first meeting Piers Knight and Franklin Nardi were aboard a jet along with the rest of the Miskatonic team, headed for Argentina’s Buenos Aires—the furthest point south they could reach via a commercial airline with any speed. After that they were then all transported by a series of far smaller planes, hopping their way down the country until they crossed over into Chilean air space to land at Punta Arenas. There the ten of them were met by Air Force personnel who transported them the remainder of the way in a military helicopter.

  During their various flights and lay-overs, the two men did not find themselves with a great deal of time to spend simply chatting—with neither each other nor the other members of the team—not until the next-to-last stop on their journey. It was the one point where they did not find themselves arguing endlessly with customs officials, straining to hear over antiquated motors, or hustling from one aircraft to another at breakneck speed to catch the next plane or a nightmarishly ancient tour bus that would take them to the next deathtrap of an aircraft.

  That night their plane had barely been able to land due to an unexpected and unexplainable storm center that had risen up to hold the region prisoner. With all air traffic grounded for at least a day, the two men finally found themselves in each other’s company long enough to get past the awkward prohibitions of normal conversation. To where they might get at some of the things they had been wondering since they had first met. It had been Knight who had led them out of the ordinary when he had asked, “Well, Franklin, what do you think? What do you believe is the real reason Clemmens thought it a good idea to send you along?”

  “You gotta ask?” The detective had been stretched out on his bed in their double room, staring at the ceiling, absently maintaining his place in their chat. At that question, however, he had raised himself up on one elbow to add, “I mean, you read Dyer’s statement. You look old enough to know something about how the government works. Pardon me if you think I’m insultin’ you or the others, but our taxin’ lords and masters, they’ve got their own scientists, and I’m sure they could have found someone at the Smithsonian to fill in for you.”

  “No insult found in any of that,” answered the professor wryly. “But, what about the fact that Miskatonic sponsored the first mission to the area, that if it weren’t for the university this whole site might never have been discovered at all. Don’t you feel that gives old M.U. first dibs, as it were?”

  “I can’t even believe we’re havin’ this conversation. What—were you born yesterday or something?”

  “No, Franklin,” answered the professor, pulling his tobacco pouch and pipe from his pocket, “but I wanted to check and see if you were.” As he stuffed the pipe’s bowl, he added, “Much as I’d like to flatter myself that the great and wonderful Piers Knight is so absolutely essential that his presence is needed every and anywhere, you’re absolutely correct. It doesn’t make sense for the government to not only throw open the doors in such a manner, but to welcome in a team such as ours without background checks, without a few hundred pages of restrictions.”

  The professor took several short, firing pulls on his pipe’s stem, releasing ever-increasing puffs of smoke, until finally he was able to exhale a good-sized cloud toward the open window and the steaming downpour beyond. He had, of course, already checked the idea of smoking inside their room with Nardi who, as an ex-smoker, might have objected. The detective, it turned out, welcomed any chance to take in a bit of a familiar aroma, and had given his roommate an anytime/anywhere go-ahead. After his second healthy drag, Knight said, “But, all that said, why do you suppose President Clemmens sent you along? I’m not discounting what abilities you might possess, but do you have any impression as to what he’s thinking we should be expecting?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” admitted the detective. Swinging his legs off his bed, Nardi sat up, adding, “Twenty years and I never saw anything out of the ordinary workin’ for the force back in New York. But, ever since I moved up to Arkham … it’s like the world got turned upside down … some of the shit I’ve seen … well, you know—”

  “I know?”

  “Don’t kid a kidder, Professor,” answered Nardi. “You don’t think I took this gig without checkin’ you out, do you? It just took a call back to my precinct to get the low-down on … what do they call you … the Indiana Jones of Brooklyn?”

  “Well, really …”

  The detective made a motion with his hand, cutting Knight off before he could say anything further. Giving the professor a hard look, one with just enough mercy in the corners of his eyes to reveal that he meant what he was about to say, he waited for an ominous roll of distant thunder to pass, then confided, “Look, what I’ve seen since I got hooked up with Miskatonic, from the rumors they have about you, my guess is you’ve been up to your neck in soup I’ve only had up to my knees. But … we both know—know—everything Dyer wrote could easily be true, ’cause we’ve both seen worse ourselves.”

  Knight moved his eyes sideways in a manner meant to be amusing, then allowed himself a half-smile as he admitted his roommate’s argument had merit.

  “Now, that in mind,” said Nardi, “I think Clemmens asked you to go down because where his physicists and archaeologists and the such might have the science stuff on the ball, he brought you in to be the ‘weird crap’ specialist. And he brought me in to try and make sure whatever the government is up to, your report gets back to his desk unedited and in one piece.”

  Knight allowed another thick cloud of smoke to escape his lips, then added dryly, “My, but we’re an optimistic pair, aren’t we?”

  “If you mean you’re startin’ to wonder if this whole thing might be even worse than you first figured, then yeah, you’re just as big an optimist as I am.”

  The movie-like timing that followed as the ebony sky was shattered by several lightning strikes at that moment, as well as a deafening blast of thunder, was not lost on either man.

  - - -

  “So, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Antarctic Station 12, the single strangest place on the planet.”

  “Oh, come now,” answered Knight, extend
ing his gloved hand to the heavily garbed man who had met them at the Antarctic landing field, “if you actually mean that, you’ve obviously never been in Greenwich Village on Halloween.”

  “I must admit I haven’t,” answered their guide, “but I’d give good odds that we’d have to come at least in a close second.” Waving the arriving group forward toward a nearby outcropping of rock and ice, the fellow added, “So, I’m Terrance Mekler, and I’ll be showing you around a bit today, getting you settled and the such. But for now, considering the temperature, let’s get inside, shall we?”

  No one argued. With a goodly supply of soldiers standing by to transport their luggage and equipment, the team members did not have to carry anything into the base they did not feel the need to transport personally.

  “So, enjoying yourselves?”

  Considering the cold, at most any other time, in any other place, Mekler’s question would have received all manner of derisive answers. Frigid as it was at that moment, the team’s thoughts should have been firmly rooted on reaching the doorway in the distance as quickly as possible. But the closer they drew to the wall before them, suddenly that was not the approach most of the team had in mind.

  Not then. Not there.

  The members of the Miskatonic expedition had all been picked for more than their various doctorates and expertise. They had, all of them at one time or the other, come up against the strange or the unusual. Some of them far more so than the average lay person could ever imagine. Tenure granted by their particular university meant almost certainly that at one time or the other the recipient had come up against something consciousness-expanding. Something world-view shattering.