Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy)

by Graham McNeill

  A heavy crashing weight striking the door told Oliver the point was moot anyway. The timber bowed inward as the monsters threw themselves at the door once more. Oliver frantically scanned his office for a weapon. He had always eschewed firearms, believing that men of character should be able to resolve their differences without resorting to violence, but right now he would have sold his soul for a .45 automatic. His eyes alighted on a letter opener sitting on the corner of his desk, and he snatched it up.

  It was a pitiful weapon, with a moderately sharp tip and two dull edges along the length of the blade, but was better than nothing. Oliver already felt better having something, no matter how pathetic, to defend himself with.

  The timber panels of the door cracked, and splinters flew from the broken wood.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God…,” hissed Oliver, clutching the tiny weapon to his chest.

  A clawed hand punched through the door, tearing out the inner panel as it was withdrawn. A face appeared at the hole, red-eyed and hungry. A scar bisected its features and thick saliva drooled between its irregular teeth. It loosed a freakish bark, that Oliver thought for a mad second might have been the word meat.

  Oliver lunged forward and stabbed the letter opener at the snapping face. The tip plunged into the beast’s face, and it bellowed in pain. The screeching face withdrew, wrenching the letter opener from his grip. From the split second glance he’d had, Oliver thought he’d managed to put out one of its eyes.

  A petty act of defiance, but defiance nonetheless.

  Oliver backed away from the door, weaponless and bereft of stratagems to deny the beasts their prize. He turned to his window, frantic in his desire to escape. It offered no chance of survival, only a forty-foot drop to hard concrete. There was no way out.

  Oliver turned back to the door and sank to his haunches with his head buried in his hands.

  A booming report echoed from beyond the door, immediately followed by a scream of pain. Another deafening bang filled the hallway, surely a gunshot. Four more shots were fired in quick succession, each one drawing a cry of pain from the beasts.

  The assault on Oliver’s door ceased and he heard the rapid scraping tap-tap of their bare feet as they fled from the shooter. Moments later came the sound of shattering glass, followed by a blessed silence, punctuated only by his rapid breathing. Oliver raised his head, waiting to see what would happen next. He hardly dared to hope he had been rescued, but what other explanation could there be?

  Another face appeared at the shattered panel of his door, but this face was wonderfully human and unremarkable in its appearance. It was a man, his countenance deeply lined and stoic in the face of what he had just done. Oliver almost wept with relief to see a face as normal as the one now at his door.

  “Professor Grayson?” said the man. “Oliver Grayson?”

  “Yes,” gasped Oliver. “Yes, that’s me… Good Heavens, you saved my life!”

  “You can thank me later,” said the man. “Now open the door!”

  Oliver climbed to his feet, but hesitated before heading to comply. Having survived one attempt on his life, he didn’t want to take any chances.

  “How do I know you’re not going to shoot me?”

  “Shoot you? Jesus Christ, I just emptied my Colt saving your sorry ass. Now open the damn door, professor!”

  “Who are you?” asked Oliver. “At least tell me your name.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” said the man. “Open this door before I break it down. I need to reload, and I’d rather do it in there if that’s all the same to you. I don’t think those freaks will be back in a hurry, but I could just leave and let you find out for yourself.”

  “I take your point,” said Oliver, crossing his office and unlocking the door. His rational mind was taking over, compartmentalizing the horror he had just experienced and moving his body like an automaton. Shock and trauma would come later, he knew, but for now he was content to function on adrenaline.

  The man entered the office and broke open a matte black revolver, swiftly snapping home a speed loader to fill the chambers. The cylinder snapped back, and the man swung the pistol around to cover the door.

  “You okay?” asked the man. “You hurt?”

  “No, I’m not hurt,” said Oliver, unable to believe that fact. “Who are you? And not that I’m not grateful, but how did you know I’d need help?”

  “My name’s Gabriel Stone,” said the man. “And I didn’t know you’d need help. This just happens to be your luckiest damn night on Earth.”

  * * *

  They went to a late night speakeasy Stone knew and Oliver let him lead the way, too numb and horrified by what had just happened to take any active part in the proceedings. His hands were shaking by the time Stone placed a tumbler of whiskey in his hands. He’d begun to feel quite sick. Whiskey was the last thing he wanted.

  “Drink it,” commanded Stone. “It’ll help.”

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” said Oliver.

  “You won’t,” said Stone. “It’s just shock. You had a rough time there, professor. I’ve seen my share of gunplay and trouble. I know how it affects you, so drink the whiskey and then have another. Trust me.”

  “I don’t even know you.”

  “But I know a lot about you,” said Stone, knocking back his own shot and giving the bartender a wave. The man went to pour, but Stone tapped the bar. “Leave the bottle,” he said.

  “How do you know a lot about me?” said Oliver, drinking the whiskey in one go. It was cheap stuff and burned like flaming gasoline, but its kick doused the queasiness in his gut. He realized the man had neatly deflected the opportunity to be more forthcoming with his identity and purpose. He studied Stone as another shot was poured.

  Tall and broadly built beneath his brown duster and battered fedora, Stone was clearly a man to whom violence was no stranger. That would normally have made him threatening to Oliver, but since he owed this man his life, the least he could do was hear him out.

  “I’ve been reading up on you recently,” said Stone. “I wanted to know who you were, what made you tick before I came to see you.”

  “You picked a strange time to come and see me,” said Oliver. “Though I’m glad you did.”

  “I wasn’t coming to see you,” said Stone. “I was coming to break into your office.”

  Oliver was startled at the honesty of so criminal an admission and gave Stone a wary look. He knew nothing of this man and here he was confessing to a crime. He didn’t know quite what to make of that.

  “Might I ask why? I don’t keep anything of value in there. At least, not to anyone other than a collector of Jules Verne.”

  “I wasn’t going to rob you,” said Stone, taking a gleaming badge from his coat pocket and sliding it over. Oliver read the inscription on it and his eyes narrowed.

  “Why would a Pinkerton agent want to break into my office?” he asked.

  “I wanted to see if you were hiding anything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like about the murders of all those girls,” said Stone. “About the murder of my daughter.”

  Oliver nearly choked on his drink and struggled to keep the liquor in his belly at Stone’s inference. He looked at the man to see if he was joking, but the coldness in Stone’s eyes told Oliver that he was not a man to whom humor came naturally.

  He took a deep breath and said, “Why would you think I would know anything about that?”

  “Just a hunch,” said Stone. “Like I said, I’ve been reading up on you, and I know you know a lot about some real messed up stuff: blood rituals, cannibal murders—that sort of thing.”

  Oliver stared at Stone, horrified that the man thought he could possibly be responsible for such reprehensible crimes. His anger flared briefly, then abated as the content of Stone’s previous utterance struck him.

  “Your daughter was killed?”

  Stone nodded.

  “What was her name?” asked Oliver.

&n
bsp; “Lydia Stone. They found her body on the athletics field.”

  Oliver let out a pent up breath. “Ah, yes, I read the story in the Advertiser. I can only offer my condolences for your loss and assure you I had nothing to do with her death.”

  “I think I know that now,” said Stone. “Tonight convinced me of that.”

  Stone contemplated his whiskey and spoke in the halting tones of a man holding on tight to his grief, but who didn’t know how much longer he could keep it in check.

  “She used to write me back in New York,” began Stone. “Told me you were one of her tutors and that she liked your class. A lot of it went over my head, but she was always the smart one. Even as a kid, she used to run rings around me, asking questions I couldn’t even understand, never mind answer. I figured her coming to Arkham was a bad thing, but the longer she stayed here, the smarter she got, and I relaxed. Figured she didn’t need her dumb old man crowding her on her way to the top, you know? I was so proud of her, professor. She was my baby.”

  Oliver struggled to think of something to say to Stone that wouldn’t come out as pedestrian or insultingly trite. Instead of anything too emotional, he settled for something academic.

  “I knew Lydia reasonably well, Mr. Stone. She came to a number of my classes on the spread of language and technology throughout the ancient world. She was a fine student: very bright, and always eager to learn. She had a real drive to succeed, and I believe she would have gone on to achieve great things.”

  “That’s my girl,” said Stone, raising his glass.

  Oliver clinked glasses, and they drank to the memory of Lydia Stone.

  “Are you helping the police to catch whoever killed her?” asked Oliver.

  “Hardly,” grunted Stone. “Cops here are decent enough, but they’re not used to this kind of savagery. I’m here to find out who killed her, and if you can help me, then I’d sure appreciate it, professor.”

  The noise in the speakeasy swelled briefly as a pair of drunks argued bitterly about sports, politics, or something else that felt ridiculously mundane in the face of what Oliver and Stone were discussing. In a town where horrors stalked the streets and the machinations of those who served beings older than the Earth were played out in its shadows, it seemed impossible that people could care about such transient things.

  “So, professor,” said Stone, touching on the elephant in the room and shaking Oliver from his dark reverie, “what were those things outside your office tonight?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  “Some kind of animal?” suggested Stone.

  “No, there was something horribly human about them,” said Oliver. “I don’t know what they were, but they weren’t animals. More like feral humans, hill folk, or a pack of children raised to adulthood in the wild by beasts. Like Kipling’s Mowgli, but without the humanity.”

  “Where the hell could something like that happen in America?”

  “Admittedly, I’ve only lived in Arkham for seven years, but I’ve heard my fair share of strange stories of things that would make your head spin. The backwoods of the country hereabouts is replete with incredible strangeness and quiet corners that haven’t seen the tread of civilized men in hundreds of years. Though it would be incredible, I could well believe something like this might take root here.”

  “You believe things like that pretty easy then?”

  Oliver poured another drink of whiskey. “If you’d asked me that a week ago, I’d have said no, but now? Now I’m not sure of anything. So much has happened that I’m questioning everything. Amanda and Rita going missing. Henry’s ravings. Finn’s sphere. And now, on top of everything, monsters are trying to kill me. I don’t know if I can take much more.”

  Stone’s head snapped up. “Who are Amanda and Rita?”

  “What? Oh, they’re students at Miskatonic. Amanda came to me with some strange dreams that correlated with some work I’d been doing, but now she and her roommate have gone missing. I had been trying to help Amanda get to the root of her dreams, but she vanished before I could make much progress.”

  “What happened to her?” said Stone. The urgency in his voice was alarming.

  “I don’t know for sure. I heard they went to a jazz club one night and didn’t come back, but that’s all I know.”

  “Was it the Commercial Club?”

  Oliver nodded. “Yes, I think that was the name.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Stone, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips. “That’s the hunting ground. That’s where they’re taking them from.”

  “Hunting ground? What are you talking about?”

  “Whoever’s taking these girls is using the Commercial to choose their victims,” said Stone. He paused, then looked like he’d come to some internal decision he wasn’t sure was too smart, but had realized was his only play. “Listen, I’ve been working with a couple of word-slingers from the Advertiser, a guy and a gal. He’s kinda hangdog, but he’s got good insight. She’s the smart one of the operation, though she tries to keep that quiet. I reckon if we all pool our resources, we might be able to do some good here, maybe even find those two gals before it’s too late for them. We’ve done some digging and found out a bunch of crazy stuff. Listen, you know this place and what’s going on better than me, so what do you say, professor? You want to step up and do some good?”

  Oliver took another shot of whiskey, feeling the heat in his belly fending off the horror of the night’s events. Though he knew it was booze-bravery, he took heart from Stone’s appeal to his altruism and nodded.

  “Yes, Mr. Stone, I think I do,” he said. “And I have a friend who might be of invaluable help. He knows far more of the rum and uncanny than I.”

  “Get him along. The more heads we can bring together the better,” said Stone. “We’ve been using Aunt Lucy’s as a base of operations. You know it?”

  “On Armitage?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” said Stone. “How about I get you home and you meet us there tomorrow morning, say around eleven?”

  “I can do that,” said Oliver. “But let me tell you this, Mr. Stone: so much is going on that I don’t know if there is anything we can do against what’s happening. It’s so unbelievable that I think I will have a hell of a job convincing your reporter friends that I’m not completely mad. I believe that what is happening in Arkham is bigger than all of us.”

  “I knew it,” said Stone with a rueful shake of his head. “I’m not going to like it, am I?”

  “No, I’m afraid you’re not.”

  “I knew it,” repeated Stone. “I just damn well knew it…”

  * * *

  Finn counted out the few remaining coins in his pocket with a heavy heart. With every last cent he had scraped together, and a dime he’d been lucky enough to find on the sidewalk, Finn’s entire wealth amounted to a dollar fifty, which was pathetic in anyone’s book. He could afford to spend one more night here at Ma’s, before he’d have to descend to the level of a hobo. That meant finding a bed in the railroad yards or swallowing his pride and heading to The Beacon of Hope on River Street.

  He wasn’t too keen on that last idea; the cops sometimes came through the Baptist charity house to see who was new and pick up wanted felons who’d chosen to hide out there. But if he got there early enough, he’d get a bed, some supper, and prayers for his soul from the well-wishing volunteers that worked there. Supper would be welcome, as would the bed, though the prayers he could do without. If his mam found out he’d taken charity from Baptists, she’d skin him alive.

  The thought of his mam brought a smile to Finn’s face, imagining what she’d do to the men who were no doubt still seeking him through the seedier streets of Arkham. Though it had been risky, Finn had taken daily walks through the town while he’d waited for Professor Grayson and that pretty science gal to get back to him about the silver sphere. Touring his old haunts was out of the question. The gangsters looking for him would have eyes on ev
ery street corner, so he stuck to the neighborhoods where the swells lived in their marble-fronted brownstones and fancy townhouses. This too was a risk, as rich folk tended to take a dim view of scruffy characters like Finn walking around their neighborhoods. Quite rightly, they thought he looked like a burglar or worse, so he kept his pace quick and his route twisting.

  Though Finn had lived in Arkham for a few years now, he felt like he didn’t even know the place anymore. He saw areas of Arkham he hadn’t known existed: dark winding passages through cobbled streets that seemed to wind back on themselves and spiral into areas of threatening garrets, and gambrel-roofed tenements that leaned crazily upon stones laid down when the first pilgrims had come ashore and set down their roots.

  Blackstone churches and graveyards fenced in rusted iron appeared from the shadows. Shuttered houses with creaking doors and smoke-stained eaves ended streets that he would have sworn led to well-trafficked thoroughfares. It was ridiculous, but Finn felt like Arkham had somehow shifted, turned itself inside out or reoriented its geography in the last few days.

  Of course he could still find his way around the town, but any time his attention wandered, he would find himself in streets he didn’t recognize: weed-strewn squares in the cold shadow of a crooked steeple, or a dead end surrounded on three sides by leering windows from which issued hacking coughs, child’s cries, or the cackling laughter of crones.

  On the streets he did recognize, the sidewalks were quiet and empty of people, which was bad for him, since it made him easier to spot. But it was more than just the quiet of emptiness; it was the silence of abandonment. He’d seen a good many stores with concertinaed gratings over the windows and boards hammered over their doors. From the Georgian and Colonial Houses of Northside, to the tumbledown warrens of lower Southside and everything in-between, he’d seen the same expression on every face.

  Fear.

  He’d seen something similar a few years back in Boston, during the height of the Spanish Flu epidemic, when anyone could be infected and you were scared to shake a friendly hand for fear of the invisible contagion. Thousands had died in the space of a few months, and the deadly terror that had spread in the wake of the disease had isolated whole swathes of the population as people became too afraid to travel. A siege mentality had pervaded the city, with the very lowest of Boston’s inhabitants bearing the brunt of the deadly plague.