Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy)

by Graham McNeill

  There were other, equally florid descriptions, but time and again, Oliver saw phrases and concepts that resonated with Amanda’s description of the sunken city she had seen. Not only that, but many of the descriptions of the sunken god matched what Kaula, the Yopasi shaman, had divulged to Oliver when drunk. It was all too fantastical to be real, yet with each correlation, Oliver began to despair of making any real progress. He couldn’t publish anything using Fitzgibbon as a reference; he’d be laughed all the way back to Baltimore.

  A shadow fell across him and he jumped, startled by this new arrival. Hastily Oliver closed Fitzgibbon’s book, lest he be taken for giving it scholarly weight, and looked up to see Alexander Templeton standing beside his table with a book under his arm.

  Templeton smiled. “Fitzgibbon? Really, Oliver?”

  Oliver let out a breath and nervously tapped the book’s vulgar cover. “Yes, well, I need to explore all avenues, eh? No matter how fanciful. It’s nonsense, of course, but it makes for interesting reading if nothing else.”

  “I’m glad you think that,” said Alexander, placing his curious volume of lore upon the desk. “May I?” he said, indicating the empty chair opposite Oliver.

  “By all means,” said Oliver, dismantling his wall of books so he could see Alexander. His friend wore a dark suit, as though preparing for an evening’s excursion, and though he was indoors, still wore his hat.

  “Passing through?” asked Oliver.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Alexander. “I have a dinner engagement with an old army colleague at six.”

  “How nice for you,” said Oliver, looking to the clock on the far wall. “It’s a quarter to six now; won’t you be late?”

  “I’ll be fine. I have a taxi waiting to take me to Anton’s.”

  “Anton’s,” said Oliver. “Very nice.”

  “So I am led to believe,” agreed Alexander. “Anyway, I have a book that might help with your research concerning Miss Sharpe’s dreams.” He tapped the book he’d brought and Oliver detected more than a hint of nervousness to Alexander’s demeanor, as though he were the bearer of bad news. “I called by your office, but they said you’d already left for the library.”

  “Very kind of you to bring it to me, Alexander. You could have just left it in my cubby hole you know.”

  Alexander shook his head. “Not this one, I’m afraid. It’s rather…specialized, old fellow. Not really for mass consumption, if you take my meaning. Some of its contents might be taken the wrong way.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  Alexander pulled his chair around until he was positioned adjacent to Oliver. With one hand resting on the cover of the book, Alexander said, “In my researches, I have in the past consulted some very ancient books, tomes containing lurid tales that are quite beyond the pale. They tell of quite fantastic things, horrible things, concerning the far distant past of this world and the…beings that lived before the time of man. This book is not for the faint-hearted, Oliver, so I warn you that you’ll need a stiff shot of whatever liquor you have stashed away beside you as you read it.”

  “Come on, man,” said Oliver. “You’re exaggerating,” but one look at Alexander’s face told him that his fellow professor was deadly serious. Alexander gripped his forearm, squeezed, and Oliver frowned at the earnestness he saw in his friend’s eyes.

  “I’m giving you this book because I think you have already seen a measure of what lies beyond the fragile veil of ignorance that shields mankind from utter oblivion.”

  Was it just Oliver’s imagination or did the glow of the streetlights outside dim slightly?

  “Alexander, I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about. And what’s all this talk of ignorance? We’re professors, damn it. It’s our job to fight ignorance. Isn’t that why we pursued this career?”

  Alexander gripped harder, desperate to impart the seriousness of what he was saying.

  “Would you teach a child of war or murder, Oliver? Would you let a babe in arms play with a razor?”

  “Of course not, don’t be foolish.”

  “Mankind is that child,” said Alexander. “And the full horror of this knowledge is that razor. Some things even the wisest of men are not meant to know, yet some things a poor unfortunate few must know.”

  “You’ve lost me,” said Oliver. “I don’t like this one bit, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Alexander. “When you and Professor Dean went to Alaska, you touched the very edges of a wider world. I read the paper you published at Brown. It came so very close to exposing that which should never be exposed. Truths mankind is not yet ready to face. Dean tried to shield you from all that you’d uncovered, but his mind couldn’t withstand the horrors of what he learned.”

  “Morley? I haven’t spoken to him in years.”

  “Of course you haven’t. He would have distanced himself from you,” said Alexander. “To spare you from the things he had learned. To protect you. Regrettably, I cannot do the same.”

  Alexander pushed the book toward Oliver, only reluctantly taking his hands off the faded leather of its cover. “I read this book upon its publication in 1915, and consulted it again after our conversation in the faculty lounge. God help me, but I wish I had not.”

  “Why?” demanded Oliver. “In heaven’s name why?”

  “Because you need to know what lies at the heart of this matter,” said Alexander. “Something terrible is coming, and only with the knowledge contained in this book can we face it.”

  Oliver tore his eyes from Alexander’s gaze and looked at the book before him. Bound in softest kid leather, with a spine edged in faded gold, it had the look of a Bible to it. It had the smell of dusty antiquity and the papery reek of incalculably old knowledge. Though it was unremarkable in almost every aspect, Oliver felt a great revulsion at the sight of it. Every sense he possessed was screaming at him to decline Alexander’s offer of the book. On some instinctual, animal level, Oliver knew it was a source of great evil, a tome that should be burned without ever being opened.

  The idea that a book could be evil was ridiculous, but the notion had taken hold in Oliver’s mind. Despite the warnings from some deeper parts of his psyche, Oliver reached down and opened the book. The inner page listed the author as Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, and the name was not unknown to Oliver. Dr. Shrewsbury had been an anthropologist and a noted professor of philosophy, one who had taught at Miskatonic University, but had mysteriously vanished over a decade ago. No one knew what had become of the professor, and few of his later works had survived him.

  The book’s title was unfamiliar to Oliver, and he traced his finger over the inked words until coming to the loathsome one near the end: An Investigation into the Myth Patterns of Latter-Day Primitives with Especial Reference to the R’lyeh Text.

  * * *

  Moonlight shone in through his curtainless window, and Henry Cartwright closed his eyes, willing the silver orb in the sky to turn its face from the world. He sat on his bed, knees drawn up to his chest and rocked back and forth. His arms were wrapped around his shins and the barest hints of faint whispers escaped his pressed lips.

  “Mustn’t let them in,” he murmured. “Mustn’t let them in.”

  Henry’s eyes cracked open a fraction, and the moon’s face was hideous and banal at the same time. Shadows danced on the walls of his cell, black lines of phantom tree branches that waved like undersea fronds in a frozen current deep beneath the waves. Henry pushed himself back against the wall, unreasoning terror clamping an icy hand in his guts.

  The black shapes on the wall drifted and slithered like snakes, coiling across the walls and over the ceiling. Henry saw they weren’t snakes at all, but tentacles, like the obscene gropings of some gelatinous octopus or squid.

  No, it could be none of them, for the black tentacles oozing over his walls were legion, not limited by some quirk of evolution to eight or ten. Henry waved the air, flapping his arms in a
sudden burst of motion. He leapt from the bed, taking hold of its iron frame and flipping it onto its side with lunatic strength to put it between him and the far wall.

  “You won’t take me!” he screamed. “Not again!”

  The wall across the cell from him was entirely black now, an inky void of abyssal darkness that stretched out to infinite gulfs of immensity between galaxies. Within that darkness, entities older than this fleeting world still lingered, forgotten in name, but not in malevolence. Within that howling emptiness lurked the things that gave all men nightmares and haunted the long watches of their imaginings when fear took hold of their hearts.

  This was the darkness at the beginning and end of the world.

  And Henry had seen it before.

  He’d heard the whisper of the abyss in the dusty catacombs of the ruined chateau and learned what it was in the writings of its long-dead master. Even then, he’d known it would be better for the advancing Germans to wipe this cursed place from the face of the Earth. Yet he had conspired to bring the writings of the despicable count back to the United States, had worked to translate the numerous texts they’d found behind the cracked tomb wall amid a host of rotting skeletons.

  The black shadows, blindly questing over the walls toward him wavered in their approach. As though scenting the air, they hesitated, unsure of themselves. Henry’s fractured mind danced in a constantly spinning whirl of half-remembered memories and knowledge. Yet amid the ruin of his sanity, one thing still held true.

  He remembered the one thing that was anathema to them.

  Henry stood, and though terror threatened to overwhelm him, he wrenched open his shirt to reveal the horrific scarring burned into his chest. Years old and faded to the color of pale white, the ridges of scar tissue cut Henry’s chest in an angular pattern with the suggestion of five branching points. In the center of the strange design sat what, in a certain light, could have looked like a flaming eye.

  “You will not take me!” screamed Henry, feeling the blackness recoil at the image burned into his flesh. “I know you…I know you…,” he sobbed, dropping to his knees as the door to his cell crashed open and Monroe entered. The man threw his rollup away before entering the cell, lifting a hickory cosh from his belt.

  “You gotta shut up,” said Monroe, brandishing his cosh. “You’re disturbing the other patients.”

  “No!” screamed Henry, waving his arms at the walls. “Don’t you see it! The darkness at the end of all things! It’s coming. It’s coming here!”

  Monroe came at him, oblivious to the gelid darkness pressing in all around, or the ghostly silver light of the moon that bleached the world of life. The orderly dragged the weeping Henry from behind his bed and cracked the cosh against the side of his knee, driving him to the floor. Two more orderlies bundled into the room, one bearing a straitjacket, another a thick syringe filled with clear liquid.

  Henry thrashed on the ground as strong hands held his arms and legs.

  “No! Please! You can’t!” he shrieked in terror as he was flipped onto his front.

  A foot cracked against his jaw and he tasted blood. A sharp pain stabbed into the meat of his rump as the sedative was administered. He fought the orderlies as best he could, but his struggles only increased the speed at which the drug raced around his system.

  “Please…,” he whispered. A thin rope of red drool leaked from the corner of his mouth as his head lolled to the side.

  Henry found himself staring out his window as the hungry moon grinned down at him. His eyes widened in horror as he saw its chiseled canyons and cratered surface loom close to the Earth. Its tidal power drew the oceans to it with one breath and forced them back with another, devouring and revealing their secrets with uncaring impartiality.

  “Too late,” hissed Henry as chemical oblivion closed in on him. “It’s already here…”

  Part Two

  Ripples on the Surface, 1926

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Amanda’s heart raced as they descended the worn steps down from the heavy door on Armitage Street toward the interior of the Commercial. She could hear the loud buzz of conversations and music deeper in the building, and felt her skin flush with a delicious frisson of excitement. She linked arms with Rita and squeezed tightly.

  “Easy, hon,” said Rita with mock seriousness. She was as excited as Amanda.

  “I can’t help it,” said Amanda. “I’ve never been to a speakeasy before. I feel so bad.”

  “Oh yeah, you a real criminal now,” laughed Rita.

  Behind them, Spencer Osborne and Wilson Brewster followed like gentlemen, snappily dressed in short coats and their ubiquitous Oxford bags. Their trilbies were cocked at rakish angles and their shirts were undone at the neck like Chicago gangsters. Rita had balked at the idea of asking them along, but without male companions, they wouldn’t be allowed into the club. The Commercial had a strict policy of allowing no singles inside, and rather than chancing that they’d meet someone outside, as folks often did, they’d made a date of it. Though both girls had been careful to avoid that word in particular. This most certainly was not a date.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and found themselves in a long corridor lit by a single naked bulb. The walls were bare brick, with faded paint peeling between posters advertising Harlem jazz clubs, Detroit record labels, and New York swing clubs. The paper curled from the walls, plastered haphazardly like a patchwork quilt so that it was hard to make any sense of what was on them. The artists had showbiz names like Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Pigmeat Markham, or Nick LaRocca, and the clubs sounded like exotic wonderlands: The Blue Heaven Ballroom, Dreamland Café, Club el Rado, The “It” Club.

  A heavyset man in a long coat sat on a stool at the end of the corridor, smoking a thick cigarette beneath the brim of a black fedora. His skin was coal dark and he wore a thick pair of shaded glasses. Amanda wondered how he was able to see in the dim lighting.

  Rita marched confidently toward the man, who held up a meaty hand as they approached.

  “You want in, you gotta pay the piper,” he said.

  “Yeah, how much he want?” asked Rita.

  The man laughed. “For a voodoo child like you, a dollar fifty.”

  “What about a Maryland girl?” asked Amanda. “How much do I pay?”

  The man turned his head, not quite looking at her. Amanda realized the man was blind, noticing faint scar lines at the edges of his glasses. He took a deep draw of his cigarette and blew a series of perfect smoke rings toward the ceiling. The smell was deeply scented, and Amanda smelled herbs and strange spices from far off lands.

  “I figure ‘bout the same, pretty girl,” he said. “But I don’t reckon neither of you dames oughta be dippin’ into you purses. Not when you got such handsome beaus to pay this old man.”

  “How did you know we had two boys with us?” asked Amanda.

  “Man got eyes don’t he?” said Rita, giving her a look that said shut up.

  “Maryland here’s right to ask,” said the man, removing his glasses to reveal two puckered cavities where his eyes had once sat. The skin around them was like gristly burnt tissue, gnarled and pale against the black of his smallpox-scarred cheeks. “Blind Rufus may not have the sight the good Lord gave him, but he got his ways, oh yes he do. Eyes ain’t the only way to see, pretty girl—not in this town.”

  Before Rita or Amanda could say any more, Spencer came forward and pressed a ten dollar bill into Rufus’s hand. “Here you go, old-timer,” he said.

  Rufus pocketed the bill, but made no attempt to reach for change. To his credit, Spencer didn’t demand it, and simply nodded as Rufus laughed and pushed open the door to the club.

  A wall of noise hit them: music, talking, stamping feet, and clinking glasses.

  “Go on in, folks,” said Rufus. “This is jazz, baby!”

  * * *

  The assault on the senses was total. Everyone in the club was smoking, and a fog of their exhalations clung to the low c
eiling. Set out in a wide horseshoe around a central stage and dance floor, the Commercial was filled with men and women of all descriptions—young and old, black and white, American and immigrant.

  A band played on the stage: five black men in matching suits who filled the club with furious jazz licks, the sound bouncing from the walls like a living thing, and lifting hearts with its vital vibe. Dancers spun each other in tight spirals, twisting back and forth and leaning into one another like lovers.

  Amanda had listened to Rita’s jazz records, but this was something else entirely. The sheer dynamism of the music filled the room with its passion and energy, feeding the hunger of the audience and reflecting back to the players. There was no separation between the musicians and the dancers; each thrived on the others’ energy, driving each other to fresh heights of enjoyment.

  Amanda tore her gaze from the band and followed Rita through the press of bodies toward the bar where a vested man with a towel over one shoulder poured drinks from unmarked bottles and ceramic jugs painted with various kinds of fruit. As they moved through the club, Amanda tried to take in every detail. Perhaps forty tables were packed into the basement, so close that revelers jostled elbows as they drank and shouted good-natured jibes at one another.

  The lighting was deliberately dim, like no one needed or wanted too much illumination shed on their dealings. Amanda saw women laughing at jokes, smoking, and drinking cocktails with men who lounged with their ties undone while sipping from squat glasses of whiskey. The women wore short dresses of black and purple, red and green, with low cuts and high hems that exposed swathes of bare flesh. Their glitzy shoes had heels that looked positively dangerous, and how they danced in such precarious footwear was a mystery. Amanda had done her best with her sewing kit, but her own dress looked woefully Middle America in comparison to these urban sophisticates.