Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy)

by Graham McNeill

  Stone went on to list the many unusual incidents that had occurred throughout the history of Arkham, a string of events that painted a grim tapestry of the macabre and inexplicable. It seemed absurd that a man new to town should be the one to point out the madness lurking beneath the surface of their home, but sometimes it takes an outsider to see what’s hiding in plain sight.

  Rex nodded when Stone recounted the decades-old case of the cannibal murderer who stalked the streets in the wake of the typhoid outbreak.

  “Yeah, I remember that,” said Rex. “Before my time, of course, but I remember the old guys that used to staff the office talking about it. Big news in its day, closest this town ever got to waking up from its morning coffee.”

  Alexander dismissed Stone’s theory that such a madman could still be on the loose.

  “If he were such a deranged maniac, then he would have kept killing until one of two things happened: either he would be caught again or you would have seen a consistent number of murders occurring since his escape from Sefton.”

  “Thing is, professor,” said Stone in rebuttal, “we have. If this guy escaped in 1921, then he might have been kept controlled or, I dunno, chained up in someone’s basement until now. The first disappearance I have is Mary Ellen Masters, last seen October 15, 1923. And then I got a steady flow of missing persons, murder victims, and runaways that ain’t runaways.”

  “True, but the murders we’re seeing here seem more planned,” said Alexander, “like the girls are being chosen, almost as though there’s something special about them. That doesn’t seem to fit how the Sefton killer hunted.”

  “There’s that,” admitted Stone, realizing the truth of Alexander’s words. “And killers don’t tend to curb their lusts, only develop them. I knew it was a long shot, but what else we got?”

  And so Oliver told them of Finn Edward’s curious silver sphere and Kate Winthrop’s belief that it was a key that would allow its bearer to open doors between worlds. The others looked at him strangely, but Oliver carried on regardless. He had no idea whether Finn’s object held any relevance to the murders, but they had declared that there would be no secrets between them, and Oliver intended to hold true to that intent.

  Minnie told him of Edward’s criminal past, and Oliver felt a little queasy at the thought of having dealt with such a violent member of society. A bootlegger and brawler—what else might Finn Edwards be mixed up in?

  Taking a moment to compose himself, Oliver went on to tell of how Amanda Sharpe had come to him with her dreams of a sunken city, a desolate undersea mausoleum that bore a striking resemblance to the one described in the myth cycles of the Yopasi tribe. He told the assembled group of the patterns he had discovered in the legends of other tribal groups scattered throughout the world. Some of these, explained Oliver, were actively worshipping the being said to be entombed within the submerged city, while others were engaged in some manner of warding duty.

  Though he was reluctant to voice the hideous name of the slumbering demon within the seaweed-encrusted city, he finally said it out loud.

  Cthulhu.

  The name was unknown to the others, yet its utterance had a profound effect on all three. Rex blanched at the name and Minnie’s eyes widened in fear. Stone’s fists clenched, and Oliver gave them a moment to recover before continuing. He told them of the tome Alexander had given him, the damnable work of Laban Shrewsbury, and in hesitant, halting words, he told them the gist of its fractured, incomplete contents.

  Though it was close to noon, the light from outside Lucy’s seemed to dim, as though the mere mention of such beings as the Great Old Ones was enough to affect some atmospheric change. Shadows appeared where no shadows should have been, and the five of them drew closer around the table. Minnie took Rex’s hand as Oliver spoke of these monstrous godlike beings who slumbered in the forgotten places of the world, and whose devotees worked in the shadows to hasten their return to the mortal realms.

  He could see skepticism on Stone’s face, but it was studied denial—the face of an investigator confronting a criminal’s truthful alibi: wanting it to be false, but knowing it wasn’t.

  Alexander spoke of how some people were more sensitive than others to the horrid dreams of the slumbering Cthulhu: how artists, sculptors, and poets might often be moved to loathsome bouts of creativity by some strange psychic vibrations from uncounted fathoms beneath the ocean.

  Minnie nodded at this and told of how, in March of last year, she had been moved to take some of the strangest photographs she had ever conceived. Though hesitant to talk of them openly, Minnie described how she had traveled in the depths of the night to the riverfront to take photographs of the Miskatonic River and the strange, blasted island nestling between the Garrison and West Street Bridges. Fires burned on that island, and the images she later developed in the Advertiser’s darkroom bore no relation to what she had believed she had captured on film: strange, phantom images of the water, the ripples forming vague suggestions of grasping tentacles reaching up from the bottom of the river; glimmering obelisks, hidden so deep as to be unreachable, wavering in the black water; shadowy suggestions of giant creatures capering in the ruins of a half-glimpsed city formed from titanic blocks of unimaginable scale.

  “What did you do with the photographs?” asked Oliver.

  “I burned them,” said Minnie, sheepishly. “I couldn’t keep them in the house. They gave me the creeps and I couldn’t sleep knowing they were there.”

  Rex too was moved by Minnie’s confession to nod and admit to a period of strange mood swings around the same time.

  “I was an okay reporter,” said Rex. “Nothing too sharp, though. I could spin a good yarn to keep your average Joe interested, but I was never going to win any prizes. Most of my stories had a habit of getting away from me at the last minute. A witness would forget what they saw, or some real juicy bit of proof would get lost in the post or something. It was a bad time for me. I was drinkin’ too much and I didn’t know from one day to the next whether I’d have a job. From the sounds of it, looks like it was around the time Minnie was taking those weird photographs that I started getting these hinky vibes whenever I saw a crime scene. Before, I’d just look at it and write what I saw, but then I started writing what I was feeling. I could look at a place where someone had died and I’d know, just know, what the emotion of the place was. I could write about the murder like I’d been there, like I’d felt what the victim had felt. I could write about death like I was Fitzgerald or Hemingway. All of a sudden folk wanted to read what I was writing, but it went just as quickly. I’ve been trying to get it back ever since, but so far it ain’t happening.”

  “So, we’re buying into this?” asked Stone. “Monsters beneath the sea?”

  “I’ve seen too much and read too much to take such matters lightly, Mr. Stone,” said Alexander. “Our very reluctance to believe in these creatures is their strongest ally. As we march into the modern world, with its glitz and glamour and so-called technological innovation, we forget the history the younger generation seems in such a rush to leave behind. All history becomes legend and myth with enough time. And even if you don’t accept what we are telling you, isn’t it enough to know that the people we are looking for believe it?”

  Stone shrugged. “I guess that’ll do for now. I don’t care whether they believe in some underwater squid monster or fairies in a garden. All I need to know is what they are and how we stop them.”

  “I think I can shed some light on what they are,” said Alexander. “But first I will need to tell you a little more of how I came to be in possession of the unholy knowledge of the Great Old Ones.”

  And Alexander told them of the Great War.

  * * *

  “I was a Marine captain in the 3rd Division during the war, part of the American Expeditionary Force,” said Alexander. “We were billeted in a little place called Pavont when the Germans attacked the western front in March of 1918. It was part of their spring offensive,
and they were hoping to push the British army back before the American forces were in place. But they didn’t figure on old Bundy, Major General of the US 2nd.”

  Alexander’s eyes lost their focus and Oliver knew he was back in the mud and horror of France, reliving the terror of those days of battle and bloodshed. He could only imagine how vile it must have been to take part in such slaughter.

  “The British 5th Army took a hell of a beating, and there wasn’t much left of them by the time the Germans were finished. I remember seeing the stragglers and wounded coming south in a never-ending convoy. I don’t mind telling you that it scared me to see so many men broken and bloodied in so short a time. What had we come to as a species when we could inflict such mayhem on one another? But I was a captain and I had a job to do. The brass threw us forward to Château-Thierry alongside the 2nd Army Division and we took up position in the shelled ruins of the castle, stretched out along the southern banks of the Marne. We were there for a few days before the Germans attacked, but before then, Henry Cartwright and I discovered a hidden library secreted in the catacombs of the castle.”

  “Cartwright?” said Stone. “The guy in Arkham Asylum who set those fires back in 1923?”

  “The very same,” said Oliver sadly.

  “Yes, Henry and I served together in France, and may God forgive me, but what we found in that library is what set him on the road to his lunatic fire-starting. He and I descended into the library, a dusty, cobwebbed place filled with ancient books, scrolls, and collections of what looked like occult paraphernalia. Henry and I, together with a few Marines of a more academic bent perused the books, and not a day goes by where I wish I had not succumbed to my curiosity and thirst for knowledge. What I read in those books has haunted me ever since and my happy ignorance of the horrible truth of the universe was forever shattered. Yet as great an effect as those books had on me, it was nothing compared to the effect it had on Henry and the others. Most could not bear the horrors recounted in those books, and they took their own lives, but before we could learn much more, the Germans attacked.”

  Alexander paused, and such was the pregnant weight of expectation hanging on his words that no one dared press him to continue. This was a tale that would be told at its own pace.

  “We came under heavy shellfire at dawn, followed by wave after wave of German soldiers. The smoke was thick over the river and the rain was making it hard to see much of anything, but we were Marines and we train harder than anyone else. My men fought like damn heroes, even though we felt like we were in our own Alamo. But even Marines have their breaking point, and by the end of the afternoon, we’d reached ours. We’d taken heavy losses, but just when I thought we were going to be overrun, the damnedest thing happened. Huge fires erupted among the German forces, like living balls of flame that leapt from man to man, igniting everything they touched. I swear it was like the fire was alive. Like fireflies made of fire. A storm of embers engulfed the German soldiers and I reckon it would have gotten us too if we hadn’t taken shelter behind the walls. Inside of a minute, the battle was over. All that was left of the attackers were blackened corpses, burned so far beyond recognition it was hard to tell they’d once been human.”

  “What was it?” asked Minnie, still holding onto Rex’s hand. “What happened?”

  “At first we thought it was our artillery dropping incendiary rounds. Dropped hellishly close to us, it’s true, but we didn’t mind since they’d saved our bacon and no mistake. It was only later I found out we didn’t have any guns nearby with those kind of shells. You needed to be close to use incendiaries, as the phosphor burns up so quickly. There wasn’t a gun with that kind of shell within ten miles of us.”

  “So what was it?” said Rex.

  “It was Henry,” said Alexander. “The books we’d found contained all manner of arcane secrets, the names and histories of creatures so terrible as to defy explanation. They also contained the incantations, formulae, and vile words needed to summon aspects of their form to Earth. Henry had made use of one such rite to bring down a shred of a being known as Cthugha, an ancient Old One whose matter is said to be composed entirely of fire that burns with the intensity of a star.”

  Oliver listened with stoic intensity, now understanding a measure of the mysterious rants Henry had issued in the years since his incarceration. To hear of things that could only be described as spells was incredible, but what was even more incredible was the ease with which he could assimilate this into his new worldview.

  “Of course, I didn’t realize this at the time; it wasn’t until later I learned of what Henry was capable. In any case, we were obliged to fall back from the castle the following day, and despite my misgivings, Henry insisted we bear with us as many of the accursed books as we could before the Germans took Château-Thierry.”

  Alexander paused, allowing his audience a moment to process what he was telling them. After a mouthful of coffee, he continued.

  “The next time we fought the Germans was at a place called Belleau Wood. Fritz had punched through the French to our left, so our boys marched six miles through the night to take up positions along the Paris-Metz highway. It wasn’t pretty, but the pasting the French had taken didn’t leave us a lot of choice. We were told to hold where we stood, so we dug shallow fighting pits and when they came at us we gave them hell with volley after volley of gunfire. We sent them running with their tails between their legs. The Frenchies kept telling us to fall back, but we told them straight, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!” I have to give the Germans their due—they kept coming, but we held our positions. No way were we letting them through.

  “Anyway, we had them stuck fast, and before they could plan something else we took the initiative and hit them first. The French attacked to our left and we launched an assault on Hill 142 to stop them getting torn up by flanking fire.”

  Oliver’s breath caught in his throat.

  “142!” he exclaimed. “Henry keeps raving about 142! Sometimes it’s all he can scream before they have to sedate him. What happened on that hill?”

  “It’s where Henry lost all sense of reason and humanity,” said Alexander. “It gives me no pleasure to relate this, Oliver, but I suspect it will give you some insight as to the nature of Henry’s madness. It was a hell of a fight, and we lost a lot of good men getting up that hill, but we damn well took it and began our advance into Belleau Wood. We were taking heavy fire, and heavy machine guns were cutting men down all around me. I was utterly terrified, expecting a bullet to hit me with every step I took. We pushed into the south end of the wood and ran into a nightmarish assembly of machine gun nests, barbed wire, and snipers. You could hardly see anything for the smoke, but we got in among the Germans and it was the most terrible thing. The fighting was hand-to-hand, men tearing at each other with bayonets, knives, entrenching tools, pistols, and grenades. It was hideous, seeing men that were grade school teachers, accountants, mechanics, or cooks reduced to the level of animals, fighting and killing like beasts. I suppose we were all beasts that day.

  “We couldn’t go forward and the Germans were on the verge of pushing us out of the woods, when Henry came to me and told me what he wanted to do. He told me that what he had done at the Château was the tip of the iceberg, that the fires he had summoned were the servants of Cthugha. Today he would summon the essence of Cthugha himself! I tried to talk Henry out of it, to tell him how dangerous it was, but he would have none of it. He even called me a coward for shrinking from such power. The following morning, the forest was all but destroyed.

  “The brass later said it was a coordinated barrage, but it was nothing of the sort. I watched as the sky tore open with a hellish red light, as though the clouds themselves had ignited. It was like watching a vast ocean of fire fall from the heavens. We pulled back as lashing tendrils of flame and ruin slammed into the earth and destroyed everything they touched. The noise of it was the most terrible thunder, and by the middle of the afternoon, there was nothing left of
the forest but a devastation of shattered trees. We could only look at this burned wasteland like it was the surface of the moon. Almost the entire wood was gone, wiped off the face of the Earth along with every living thing inside it. That wasn’t the end of the battle; it took six attacks before we pushed the Germans out of there, but that firestorm broke them and sucked the fight right out of them. We’d taken the woods and held the German offensive, but Belleau Wood turned out to be the bloodiest, most hard-won battle our boys fought in the whole of the war.

  “I sought Henry out at the end of the fighting, for I had lost contact with him since he had enacted his mad plan to bring a fragment of Cthugha’s essence to Earth. I found him weeping among the wounded, a broken man. He begged my forgiveness for what he’d done, for the thousands of lives he had ended, but I couldn’t help him. I was too horrified by what he had done to grant him any kind of absolution. He cursed me and I didn’t see him again until I came to Arkham.”

  “Sheesh,” said Minnie.

  “That’s a hell of a story,” added Rex.

  “Yeah,” said Stone, “but it doesn’t answer my question. What are these things hunting the girls of Arkham?”

  “I haven’t finished yet,” said Alexander, taking a deep breath, as though the telling of the terrible fighting against the Germans had exhausted him. “After the battle, I was promoted and transferred up the chain of command, but I heard rumors from my old company, vile tales of mutilations and torture done under the cover of darkness. I dismissed these stories at first, thinking they were nothing more than the product of some soldier’s over-active imagination that had spread through the ranks like dysentery. But then I thought back to the books we found in Château-Thierry, and I realized there might be more to what I was hearing than just rumor.”