Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy)

by Graham McNeill

  “You ready?” whispered Rita.

  “I guess so,” said Amanda.

  “You better be,” said Rita. “I’m counting on you.”

  “Thanks,” muttered Amanda. “Like I wasn’t scared enough already.”

  The hooded men reached the floor of the cave and the two girls backed up against the wall. As before, cowls wreathed the cultists’ faces in shadow, but Rita didn’t need to see a face to plunge home her sharpened weapon. She just hoped she had enough strength to take them both.

  “Have you come to a decision?” said the leftmost of the figures. Again, his country accent was at odds with what he was saying, and Rita couldn’t shake the image of some dungaree-wearing dirt farmer beneath those robes. “Will you tell the master what he wants to know?”

  “He can’t ask himself this time?” sneered Rita.

  There was a momentary pause, as though the two had no answer.

  “The master has finished with you,” said the other figure. “You are not worthy of his attentions anymore.”

  “Then we got nothing to say to you two chumps,” said Rita. “Do we, Mandy?”

  “No, nothing to say,” said Amanda, her voice choked with fear. That was good; they’d figure it was fear of what they were going to do to the girls, rather than fear of the coming bloodshed.

  “Then your friend dies,” said the first figure, drawing a set of keys from beneath his robes. The other robed cultist came toward Rita, who sagged as though in defeat. She let her legs give out beneath her and slumped to the floor of the cave with a groan of fear she hoped was convincing. The robed man reached down to lift her, and Rita surged upward. She thrust the sharpened thighbone out before her and rammed it home into the darkness beneath the cultist’s hood.

  Blood squirted, and the man shrieked in agony. He hurled himself away from Rita and wrenched the bone from her grip. His hood fell back and even though this man had been about to feed her to the ghouls, she winced at the damage she’d done to him. The thighbone jutted from the underside of his jaw, a steady stream of blood pumping around the makeshift weapon. His face was matted with crimson. He dropped to his knees, and every time he screamed, Rita saw the white of the thighbone in his mouth.

  The key-holder ran toward Rita, drawing a curved knife from a leather sheath on his belt.

  “I’ll kill you, you bitch!” he yelled.

  Rita was exposed. There was nothing she could do. The man had her cold.

  Then Amanda lashed out with her heel and caught the cultist on the side of the knee with force enough to make any football kicker proud. He fell with a strangled yelp and the knife fell from his hand as he landed on the stone floor of the cave.

  “The keys, Mandy!” screamed Rita as the man began to pick himself up.

  Instead of reaching for the keys, Amanda delivered another hefty kick to the man’s face. His neck snapped backward and he groaned as he rolled away, the hood falling to reveal his features. The keys dangled from his limp fingers.

  Across the pool, the ghouls were going wild, battering themselves at the bars of their cages as they caught the scent of blood. The beast the girls had come to know as Latimer hammered the door of his cell with massive hands and one of the bars came loose from the rock. The cultist Rita had stabbed was still squirming at the edge of the pool, his body flopping and jerking like a landed fish.

  “Quick!” cried Rita. “Get the damn keys!”

  Amanda knelt beside the dazed man and reached across him to his outstretched hand. She couldn’t quite reach the keys. She made one last desperate lunge, the metal of her manacles digging into the raw flesh of her wrists. She got a fingertip to the ring and strained to hook her broken nail around the nearest key.

  The man groaned and turned toward her in his daze. Amanda blinked as she realized his young face was one she had seen before. He had blond hair and wide-spaced features so common in the Midwest, but the name wouldn’t come to her. His eyes opened and focused on her just as she gained a purchase on the ring of keys.

  Amanda rammed her forehead into the boy’s nose and was rewarded by a sudden yelp of pain. She rolled off him and threw the keys to Rita as he sat up with a growl of anger.

  “Here!” shouted Amanda.

  Rita caught the keys and swiftly undid the lock on her chained wrist. Another of Latimer’s bars tore loose from the rock as the creature battered itself bloody in its attempts to reach her. Its clawed arms reached through the bars and its guttural barks of hunger echoed deafeningly around the chamber.

  Rita started to move toward Amanda, but the cultist her friend had knocked down rolled to his knees. His face was awash with blood, twisted in a mask of fury. He recovered his long knife, and Rita knew that even if she had time to pull the sharpened bone from the other man’s face, there was no way she could win a fight with this guy.

  Amanda saw the same and shouted, “Go!”

  “I ain’t leaving you!” shouted Rita, backing away from the knife-wielding cultist.

  “You have to,” pleaded Amanda. “Just go, please! Find Grayson! Just get the hell out of here for heaven’s sake!”

  “I’ll be back,” said Rita, splashing into the pool. The bottom sloped sharply and the water got deep quickly. Rita threw herself forward and began swimming out toward the grate in the wall. The cultist with the knife followed her into the pool, but his robes slowed him down. He wasn’t going to catch her.

  Rita pressed herself against the grating and took a deep intake of breath. Its bars were spaced tight, but not so tight she couldn’t squeeze through. First her arm, then her head and chest pressed through. She rotated her hips, falling backward into the scummy froth on the surface, tasting the dreadful soup of decay and rotten meat the ghouls had discarded.

  “Get back here, you bitch!” shouted the cultist, slashing through the bars with his knife.

  “Not a chance in hell,” said Rita, turning and swimming away from the cave.

  * * *

  Oliver leapt from the bed, instinctively pushing Kate behind him as the creature hovered in the center of the room. Its loathsome body was insect-like and crustaceous, with dangling pincer arms and fluids dripping from strange orifices. Its form was unlike anything he had seen or read about, repulsive and unknown to any devotee of Darwin. Flickering wings that shimmered like light from a broken movie reel hummed at its back, but the supreme horror was the pulpy mass of peristaltic flesh crowning its segmented body. Unknown colors rippled across the surface of the brain-like organ, and Oliver’s limbs locked in fear.

  Finn dived across the room, rolling to his feet beside Kate with a revolver in his hand.

  The weapon boomed twice and the bullets struck the creature’s body with a wet meat smack. The monster appeared not to notice the impacts as Finn emptied the revolver with four thundering bangs.

  “Go!” yelled Finn. “Let’s get the Christ outta here!”

  The reports of Finn’s pistol shook Oliver from his paralysis, and he turned to push Kate toward the door. The girl was no longer at his side. While the terrible beast hovered on its impossible wings, she scooped the sphere up from the carpet. No sooner had her hands touched the object than the monster’s sensory organ flashed a vivid purple and its pincer arms snapped out like serrated shears. Oliver had no doubt those appendages would be able to snap through flesh and bone with horrid ease.

  “Kate!” he shouted. “For the love of God, get back!”

  Holding the sphere, she scrambled away from the creature as a pair of thready limbs extruded from its glossy flesh. Instead of bearing claws like the other limbs, Oliver saw a curious device at their termination. It resembled a tuning fork with an attached disc-like device at its base. Crackling sparks of electricity leapt between the tines.

  Finn threw open the door as a deafening whip-crack sound filled the room and lightning arced from the creature’s device. The air between them and the creature buckled explosively, and the door was enveloped in a wash of pellucid electrical fire. Finn yelped a
s his gun sparked and flared with heat, the red-hot metal falling from his grip. Oliver cried out in fear, pulling Kate to her feet and struggling from the room. Finn followed behind them onto the landing as the electrical flames reduced the remains of the door to powdered ash.

  Faces were poking through other doors along the length of the hallway, but they closed just as quickly at the sight of the three terrified people fleeing toward the stairs.

  “Come on!” shouted Finn. “We gotta get the shitting hell out of here. Doc, you got a car?”

  Oliver nodded and gestured down to the boarding house’s entrance hall. Finn set off down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Oliver and Kate, still gripping the sphere, followed behind as the horrible creature emerged from the room, the vile buzzing sound grating along his nerves and setting his teeth on edge.

  Oliver looked back and saw its bizarre electrical weapon aimed at them once again.

  “Down!” he shouted, dragging Kate to the floor.

  Another whip-crack discharge, and the wall at the bottom of the stairs erupted in flames as the bolt struck it. A portrait of some long-dead tenant burned in the alien light and liquid blue fire dripped to a table clustered with ceramic ornaments.

  Finn was at the front door, wrestling with the handle and rattling it uselessly in his grip.

  “Bastard thing’s locked!” he yelled in anger.

  “Then kick it down!” shouted Kate.

  Oliver and Kate stumbled down the last few steps as Finn delivered a hefty boot to the lock. The door shook in its frame, but didn’t move.

  “Ah, Jaysus, Ma,” wailed Finn. “Everything else in this place is fallin’ to pieces, but you had to go and get yerself a bloody solid door, didn’t ye?”

  “Kick it again!” pleaded Oliver as the flying monster loomed overhead, not deigning to come down the stairs, but simply swooping over the landing balustrade to aim its hellish weapon at them once more. Though Oliver’s terror was close to overwhelming him, he saw that the creature’s weapon no longer coruscated with sparks and electricity. Did such a weapon require time to recharge?

  “Hurry, Finn,” he said, with a calmness he certainly didn’t feel. “Please hurry.”

  “I’m trying,” snorted Finn, thundering his boot into the door, once again with no effect.

  “Wait,” said Kate, dropping to her knees and twisting the surface of the sphere with a look of intense concentration.

  “What are you doing?” asked Oliver as the creature drifted down through the stairwell. Sparks began to writhe along the length of its lightning weapon. Oliver knew they didn’t have much time.

  “If this is a key,” said Kate. “Then let’s use it.”

  The sphere began to hum and vibrate in sudden agitation. Its surface began to move, its segmented pieces rotating and sliding over the spherical body like the mechanism of an engine. A greasy, thin sensation touched the center of Oliver’s bones and a powerful, keening whine built from the interlocking plates of the sphere as they shifted with ever-greater speed.

  Then, with a tortured ripping sound, the hallway around them seemed to rupture. Dark light spilled from a dozen cracks that now hovered impossibly in the air. A gibbering chorus of squeals, shrieks, and hisses issued from within them.

  The cracks spread wider, swiftly linking together to form a mystical window through which could be seen an inconceivable vision of a distant alien landscape. Geometric mountains, endless plains of writhing flesh, and horrifying vistas of nightmare-haunted wastelands shimmered between the lambent borders of this fantastical gateway. The scent of hot spices wafted through on alien winds and a hideous piping seemed to issue from beyond the incredible portal.

  “What have you done?” demanded Oliver, horrified by the apparition.

  “Do you want to die?” snapped Kate. “This is our only way out!”

  “The lass is right, Doc,” said Finn, finally giving up on the door of the boarding house. “If it’s goin’ through this or gettin’ fried by that bastard, I’ll take her way out anytime.”

  Kate took the lead, and leapt through the portal between worlds, crossing into another dimension in space and time. Finn followed her with a resigned shrug.

  Oliver took one more look at the hideous creature and its crackling weapon and decided that Finn might be right.

  “God help us all,” he said, and jumped through the portal.

  * * *

  Cold, red light shining in his eyes woke him. Oliver groaned in pain, feeling every muscle in his body ache. He felt strung out, like he’d been stretched on a medieval rack. A curious sense of dislocation spun in his belly, and the light beyond his eyelids felt wrong. He sat up, his entire body trembling like a terrified hound afraid of its master’s wrath.

  He opened his eyes slowly, letting the red light filter into his senses.

  His first thought was that he was dreaming. Somehow he had lost consciousness and was now staring out over some fantastical dreamscape. Had the creature pursuing them along the hallway of the boarding house managed to render him unconscious? Was he now lost in a fantasy?

  The landscape around him was soaring and craggy, like they’d landed in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. As colossal as the Rockies were, however, they were little more than hillocks compared to these towering escarpments that clawed the black vaults of the sky. Lightning arced between the titanic peaks, and the thunder of them was like the coming of the end of the world.

  The ground and surrounding rocks were lit by a strange phosphorescence, as though the cliffs themselves glimmered in the dimness with their own internal light. A red sun shone in the glowering sky, but its radiance was dim, as though its energies were all but spent and its raging core was now winding down to death. Distant forms moved languidly in the sky, black shapes against the deeper dark of the sky. Oliver thought these shapes had vast wings, out-flung like enormous bats, but it was impossible to be certain.

  He climbed unsteadily to his feet, looking around for his companions, now that he had accepted this was no dream, but hideous reality. Kate and Finn lay nearby, both picking themselves up and looking around in wonder. Kate had opened a gateway through the gulfs of space and reality, but where had it led them?

  Looking around, Oliver saw that he stood at the top of a towering cliff, at the base of which a vast wasteland of turned earth spread for uncounted miles in all directions. Enormous stone monoliths, colossal tomb structures, and city-sized mausoleums—like the graveyard of an entire world—marked its rugged width and breadth.

  “Dear heavens,” said Oliver. “This is a world of the dead.”

  Crawling forms, humanoid but rendered minuscule by distance, scavenged in the ruins of the vast cemetery, worrying the flesh of uncounted corpses and sucking the marrow from the bones. Hundreds of carrion eaters dug the grave earth with bare hands, and hungry eyes turned in the direction of the cliff, as though aware they were being observed by warm beings of succulent meat. Packs of them loped toward the cliffs, and Oliver shrank back.

  Surely they were too high to reach?

  Finn came alongside him, his eyes wide and disbelieving. He wrung his hands like a guilty man and walked like a drunk, blinking furiously in the hideous reality of this dreadful place.

  “Holy Mary Mother of God!” exclaimed Finn. “Where in the name o’ the wee man are we, lass? Where have ye taken us to?”

  Kate shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” said Oliver. “You opened that…doorway and led us through, and you don’t even know where we are? Well, that’s just wonderful. Good job. Well done.”

  “Easy, Doc,” said Finn. “We’re still alive, aren’t we?”

  Finn turned to Kate. “We are alive aren’t we?”

  “Of course we are,” said Kate. “You’re breathing aren’t you?”

  “Aye, ye have a point there, lass,” agreed Finn. “And that’s a damn sight better than we’d be faring if we hadn’t gotten out of that place, eh?”

 
; “I suppose so,” agreed Oliver, massaging the back of his neck. The strange sense of dislocation still tingled the extremities of his limbs, and his mind struggled to accept the notion that they could have crossed over such incredible distances to this impossible place in a single step. “But we need to figure out where we are and get back to Arkham.”

  “Agreed,” said Kate. “I think I know how to reset the sphere to get us back home.”

  “Good,” said Oliver. “Then get to it, Miss Winthrop.”

  Kate gave him a sidelong look. “I don’t have it,” she said, “you were the last one through.”

  “Well I don’t have it either,” said Oliver.

  “You didn’t bring it with you?” cried Kate.

  “No one said I was to bring it!”

  “You really don’t have it?” said Kate. “But that was our only way home!”

  “Oh, and I was supposed to know that? You’re the damn scientist here.”

  Kate turned away, her hands planted on her hips and her face flushed at what she saw as his willful stupidity. Oliver bit back an angry comment, realizing how pointless it would be, and said, “Let’s think. There must be another way out of here, wherever here is. We found a way in, so it stands to reason there must be a way out.”

  “Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t,” snapped Kate. “We could be trapped here.”

  “Hey!” called Finn, moving to the edge of the shelf of rock upon which they stood. His neck craned to look back at the crags behind them. “Anyone got any idea what that place up there might be?”

  Oliver picked his way over the rocks to stand beside Finn, and followed his gaze up the mountainside. His jaw dropped open in amazement at the sight above.

  A colossal cityscape of blackened, soaring, cyclopean towers occupied the summits of the mountains. It was impossible to assign any kind of scale to the sprawling necropolis, for its funereal towers rivaled the mountains for their monumental size. Oliver’s eyes itched just looking at this towering city, for it appeared to be damnably close one moment and an unreachable distance away the next.