Arkham Nights

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  Doctor West’s reaction to my news of a man inquiring about him was a bit of a shock. His already pale pallor became whiter and his eyes almost bugged out of his sockets. I knew of his concern but honestly believed it to be overblown. I mean people in medicine just don’t go around offing the competition. It would play hell with the Hippocratic Oath if nothing else.

  “Did that dolt at the grocer’s tell your Trevor Towers anything?”

  West’s tone irked me and I snapped back at him. “He ain’t my Trevor Towers. Let’s get that straight at the outset. You’re the one he’s looking for and no I don’t think he learned anything.”

  “Are you certain?” West asked, his fists clenched tightly.

  “As sure as a man can be hiding out behind the canned goods.”

  “Where did he go when he left there?” West continued.

  “Into his car and out on the road,” I answered.

  “And you don’t know where he went?”

  I looked at West in dismay. “With no car, he was sort of hard for me to track.”

  “Yes, a car,” West replied, crestfallen. “We’ll need to do something about that. There’s a serviceable one in the garage but I only drive it occasionally.”

  “And I don’t have a license if this state requires one.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” West replied.

  “There is something I’ve been wondering about,” I said.

  “Yes?” West asked warily.

  “Before I arrived, how did you run errands without the locals being wise to your presence?”

  “Oh, that,” he answered, looking uncomfortable.

  “Yes, that,” I replied.

  His face took on a faraway expression as he paused for several moments. It gave me the creeps in a strange sort of way.

  “There was an assistant before you,” West said. “He even assisted me in the laboratory and was damn near indispensable at times. He left shortly before your arrival, due to certain complications.”

  “What kind of complications?” I pressed. “I need to know what I’m involved in here.”

  “For Pete’s sake, man!” he exclaimed. “It was nothing illegal if you’re concerned about that.”

  “Then ease my mind,” I replied.

  West sighed. “Well, I guess you should know.” West sighed, pausing to dramatically dab at his eye with a hanky like a hammy theater reject.

  “Your predecessor was injured rather severely in a lab accident,” West said. “He suffered extensive injuries and was sent out west so his family could be near him during the recuperative period. In light of this tragedy, you can certainly understand my prior reluctance to give you a tour of my laboratory.”

  “Sure, I can see your point,” I answered, though I felt he was giving me a load of crap. Still, I let it drop and decided to go along with him. “So what would you like me to do next?”

  “We’ll continue as before, for the time being,” he answered. “Keep your eyes and ears open. Perhaps nothing will come of this.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed, though I had my doubts if Trevor Towers was involved.

  The following day I was introduced to Doctor West’s “serviceable” automobile. After taking a gander at it, I could understand why it was kept out of sight. West’s vehicle was a hearse, a beat-up 1920 Lorraine Twelve-Column carved-panel job.

  “What do you think?” West asked as I walked around the meat wagon.

  “It’s a hearse,” I said, stating the obvious.

  West frowned and said, “I can see you know your automobiles.”

  “Sorry, Doc,” I replied. “It’s not my idea of discreet.”

  “It runs superbly,” West beamed. “I inherited it from a dear friend.”

  “Some friend,” I muttered. “You drive around in this and you’re damn sure going to attract attention.”

  “I don’t believe anyone in Falmouth has seen it yet.”

  I walked around the macabre object and suddenly stopped. “There’s a goddamn coffin in the back!”

  “Calm yourself,” West chuckled. “It’s presently empty.”

  “Inherited as well?” I asked.

  He nodded and I clammed up about it.

  “It’s a stroke of genius really,” West stated. “If someone ever stops you, just show them the coffin and tell them you’re running late!”

  “That’s one hell of a stretch, Doc,” I replied doubtfully.

  “I just wanted you to see it,” West said. “I may well take it out for a drive late tonight. I do that from time to time... one of my little eccentricities.”

  “Will you be needing me to come along?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “I would prefer you to remain at the house, especially in light of Mr. Tower’s recent appearance in town.”

  “Whatever you say, Doctor West.”

  West left the house around eleven ’o-clock that evening. It was a moonless night and I thought the entire thing was pretty screwy but hey, it was his eccentricity. I sprawled out on the downstairs sofa and relaxed to a whangdoodle show from New York on the radio with a couple of beers. Before long, I was so drowsy that I drifted off to sleep.

  Something woke me. I looked at the clock and saw it was three-thirty. West was still gone but I had the unsettling feeling that I wasn’t alone. I sat upright, with the hairs rising on the back of my neck.

  “Get a grip, Riley,” I mumbled. “Probably just had a nightmare.”

  I settled for this explanation and was feeling better when a loud thud came from upstairs. As quietly as I could, I hurried to the fireplace and grabbed the poker. I hefted it in my arm and crept toward the stairs. I’m usually a light sleeper and it unnerved me to think that someone went past me and upstairs without waking me.

  On a hunch, I walked to the front door and checked it. It was still locked. No one had gotten past me unless they had locked the door behind them. Another thud came from above rapidly followed by more. The hairs on my neck were standing again and I regretted not having the .38 that West kept in his possession. Deciding that I’d have to make do with the poker, I hurried up the stairs. I reached the top landing and held my breath. The silence was ominous as I stood in the dimly lit area.

  I finally exhaled and that was when the thuds started again. Someone was pounding on something hard enough to wake the dead and I determined that the noise was coming from West’s laboratory. Racing to the door, I stopped, realizing that the room was locked and only West had a key. “Shit,” I muttered, glaring at the wooden door. Having few options, I stepped away from the door and readied myself for what was to come.

  My shoulder crashed into the wooden obstacle and sent it crashing inward. I staggered after it, nearly losing my balance but managed to grab onto a steel table and steady myself.

  And then someone grabbed me.

  I yelled in surprise, instinctively pulling away from the icy grip on my wrist. Still half-blinded by the laboratory’s bright lights, I blinked and tried to get my bearings. It took a few seconds for me to realize what I was seeing, as I stared at the huge fist pounding on the cold steel slab. A large naked man was restrained on the table, his face and upper body terribly scarred from what appeared to be chemical burns. His face—if you could call it that—was a ruin, a mess of burnt and fused meat. Saliva foamed from his tattered lips and an eye socket was completely covered with shiny scar tissue. The pathetic wretch’s nose looked like a smashed lump of clay with only ragged slits to function as nostrils.

  “Holy Christ!” I raged. “West, what the hell have you been up to??”

  The thing kept pounding on the slab, causing my ears to ring. I spied the loose wrist restraint and decided to reapply it. The pounding alone was driving me crazy enough as it was. I grabbed the figure’s cold arm and gagged as a layer of putrid skin sloughed off in my hands. Pushing past my own terror, I finally managed to secure the offending arm after a hell of a struggle.

  I turned from the slab and found West smi
ling coldly at me. “You’ve done well,” he offered. “I now expect that you would like an explanation.”

  I started to charge the little bastard but quickly noticed the .38 he was pointing. In his left arm he clutched a cloth-wrapped object against his chest and shoulder. I stared closely at the bundle and then lost my supper.

  Clutched in West’s hellish embrace was a dead child, surely no more than four or five months old!

  4The Hellbound Heart

  Have you ever loved someone so much it physically hurts when you think of them? Such an awful aching of the heart and mind that you freeze up in the agony of lost love? That’s how I feel about her. Every time I see a woman who resembles her, even slightly, my heart aches for the love I once had. And trying to form a relationship with another woman has been as impossible with her as the yardstick to compare to.

  We were high-school sweethearts, and engaged and married soon after our graduation. Then the war came along, and I joined up to do my bit like all the other dumb, loyal Americans. After two awful years of blood and mud and death I came back only to find that things just weren’t the same between us. I wasn’t the same; the war and the things I’d seen having changed me to a different man from the one she married. There was just something inside of me, something bad that her love and tenderness couldn’t exorcise. Six months after that, the divorce went through.

  That’s life for you.

  Now I know I said I didn’t like talking about her, but this is relevant to the rest of my story, so hear me out.

  That love I was telling you about? I never did stop feeling it. I went off the rails when she left me, losing myself in blood and violence wherever and whenever I could find it. It’s like she’s haunting me, see? What’s made it worse is that every night, without fail, my dreams are filled with our lovemaking, our holding hands, and all the rest of that soppy stuff I don’t have time for anymore. And as a man who likes to be in control of every facet of his life it’s a real curse having to suffer these nightly confrontations of what can never be.

  Because she’s gone for good.

  When she died, it was the fifth time I’d lost her. The first being when I joined up to go to war, the second and third being when we separated and divorced. Her marrying her rich bozo of a boyfriend was the fourth, and her death in a car crash a year later was the fifth. I guess you could say there was no happy ending destined for us.

  Fuck destiny, my life is my own.

  I lost her a sixth time after that; taken from her tomb by some evil son of a bitch. Do I need to tell you his name?

  Doctor Herbert West, M.D.

  Her husband was horrified, of course, possibly even more so than I. And with a lot more dough than I could make in a lifetime, and a chip on his shoulder almost as big as mine (poor little rich boy didn’t like his toys taken away), he had enough cash to fling around to find out who’d taken her corpse and enough rage to want the guy stone dead.

  To add insult to injury, he contacted me to find that grave-robbing son of a bitch. He’d heard rumors I was a man that could get things done. What can I say, shed loads of cash from the man that stole my woman and a chance to get even with the sleazy pervert that robbed her from her grave? I signed up, lock, stock, and smoking barrel.

  Now there’s something to be said for a man that would rather die than give you the information you need; something more to be said for the one who could invoke such fear in another human being.

  Herbert West’s assistant felt that kind of fear towards his former boss and mentor. I’d had a hell of a time getting West’s whereabouts out of him, and by the time I finished, he was happy for me to end his miserable life with a bullet through the skull.

  Happy to die without the fear of Herbert West coming after him.

  I wish in retrospect I’d tortured that grave robbing scumbag for a little bit longer, but being a professional, I had a job to do and no time for distractions.

  What he told me before I ended his pitiful existence was that West had been lying low for a while. The man had been spending time in Falmouth, but also helping out in a church mission somewhere up in Boston. This was a good enough start for me, and would you believe that before he died he begged me to burn his body? Having never witnessed such a pleading expression in another man’s face, I gladly obliged him, setting the room alight before leaving quietly and hitting the fire alarm on my way out.

  I still have some morals left in me after all.

  My return visit to Falmouth didn’t prove helpful, but having the address of the Mission had me driving to Boston that same night. Before long, I found myself driving through the city’s early morning grayness, coasting along its streets in search of my destination. The place I was looking for was a dump called the Gill Street Mission of The Resurrected Father. Quite a mouthful. After driving round for an hour or so, I eventually located it through the directions of a newspaper stand setting up shop for the day.

  The Mission itself looked like a closed-down clothing store, enclosed behind a pair of big, dusty, flyspecked windows with a glass door between them. Above the door was a sign reading Free Soup, and there was already a row of bums queuing outside—probably with a sprinkling of war veterans like me filling their ranks. Well, like me if my life had turned out a little worse, anyway.

  Leaving my Ford parked down a nearby side street, I shoved past the line of human refuse and stepped inside the soup kitchen to look for the people running the joint.

  The inside of the place was your typical haven for down and outs, filled with cheap metal tables and old wooden church pews for chairs. As I walked in, the stink of boiled cabbage and sweat hit my nostrils, a sour mixture that smelled like loss and despair. A few bums were already lined up at a bench set up as a soup stand, adding their mingled stenches of piss and misery to the room’s rank atmosphere.

  Pushing past the derelicts and receiving half-hearted threats and pokes for my trouble, I asked the man behind the bench where I could find whoever ran the place.

  No such luck.

  The man behind the counter, standing rigid while he mechanically poured thin, greenish soup into a chipped bowl, was the biggest guy I’d ever seen in my life. He was black, at least six foot nine, and towered over me and the other little people lurking in the soup kitchen. Now there was a big and ugly bastard, his dull expression adorned with two bullet-hole scars. One of these was embedded across his left eye and stitched in such a manner that the upper eyelid was permanently pulled down over the lower. The other scar formed a gouge in the center of his dark forehead. How anyone could survive such injuries and function was completely beyond me.

  His prizefighter arms, each as wide as my head, were knotted tree trunks. I could tell by the knuckles on his huge scarred hands that he’d been a boxer at some point in his life.

  Asking who ran the place, and if he’d ever heard of West, evinced no response from his big expressionless face. Whether he was deaf, reticent, or just a bit backwards I had no idea. So I just stood there, like a moron, until one of the bums being served paid enough attention to my plight to help me.

  The guy, his face pockmarked and dirty, flashed me a genuine smile, and spoke in a mellow Irish accent.

  “It’s the Fadder you want,” his smile widening to reveal chipped brown teeth, “Fadder Murphy’s up the stairs.”

  The polite, disheveled Irishman then pointed towards a wide staircase at the rear of the room, a staircase that had probably looked regal once upon a time, before the dust and the woodworms took over. I thanked him and left the soup stand, and saw the place steadily filling up with bums of all creeds, colors, and sizes as I climbed the stairs. Apparently, everyone is equal at the bottom.

  As I’d suspected, the building had been a clothing store in its more prosperous past. The cavernous upstairs room was filled with empty clothing racks, naked mannequins, and other miscellaneous trash.

  “Hello... Father Murphy?” I said, clearing my throat within the congealed atmosphere of dust and decr
epitude. Silence greeted me from the maze of junk and plaster bodies, and after twiddling my thumbs for a minute, I was about to give up when a noise to my right made me turn around.

  “Over here,” the voice said, a strong Texas accent betraying the small-framed man who hopped towards me. Father Murphy hobbled forward, in his black outfit and white collar, a crutch tucked under his right arm. His right leg was missing above the knee. “So what can I do for someone so obviously not in need of soup?”

  The small, thin, gray-haired man was unshaven, with bright blue, intelligent eyes. He approached me with a smile on his face and joviality in his voice.

  “Sorry, young man, I was just in the john. I have a bit of trouble sometimes.” He indicated his trouble by banging the base of his crutch heavily on the floor.

  “I’m here about a doctor that used to work here, a Doctor West, do you know him?”

  As soon as I spoke the bastard’s name, the Father hobbled closer, raising dust from the floorboards as he slammed his crutch down again, the sound vibrating through the floor. When he got closer I noticed a strange smell about him, an odor like mold and something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  “Looking for the good doctor, are we?” he said, nodding his head in smiling contemplation, “a fine man and a great aid in the Lord’s work.”

  “I was told that if I came here, I might find out where he is.” I was starting to feel a little creeped out by the way he stared at me.

  “You should be careful what you wish for, my son,” the Father replied, and backed away without elaborating.

  A second later a pair of huge, thick-fingered hands wrapped around my throat. They lifted me up, making my feet dangle about a foot over the floor. It didn’t take a genius to realize the Father had used his crutch to signal the prizefighter downstairs. But me, I was too dumb to realize it until I felt his big brown paws throttling me. As I hung there choking, struggling uselessly to free myself from the iron grip, the last thing I saw was the holy man limping off through the mannequins. From the corner of my eye, I noticed that the back of his head was caved in as if from massive blunt force trauma. Then, everything went black.