Arkham Nights

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  “Weird cults and fan clubs and books with weird names,” he’d said, “That’s right up Justin Geoffrey’s street. He writes about that bushwa all the time.” Towers had met Geoffrey through his ex-wife, which didn’t come as too much of a shock; after all, the woman had been dead, reanimated and then killed again. Even so, he was all too eager to drive us up to our only solid lead.

  It was a typical hot-day road-trip, with the two of us baking in the car, counting bug-stains as they splattered across the windshield. Not a bad day to make a thousand bucks.

  One thing I had found out through our contacts was the client’s surname, Wallace. Towers brought it up as we drove through a patchwork world of fields and trees.

  “So, what we got on the guy? Besides half his name?”

  I looked back at him, saying, “They tied the knot up in Innsmouth.”

  Towers swore, shaking his head in disgust.

  “Innsmouth? That freak show town?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Makes sense,” Towers said, “Where the hell else would they find a priest damn fool enough to marry them?”

  Innsmouth was Arkham’s smaller, creepier, fish-infested suburb, a place that had given birth to half the bogeymen in Massachussets. Apparently, the place had been bombed halfway into dust by the Navy, with the majority of its inbred hick natives carted off to some government freak show, only to be replaced by more of the same.

  Towers continued on the same tact, “What about our stoolies, Blind Eddie, or Brown Jenkin; did you get anything from them?”

  “No more than what he told me,” I replied, “He got most of Big Boss’s rackets and everyone else got the shaft.”

  A truck filled with hay suddenly overtook us, leaving a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes in its wake; Towers gave it the finger before saying with a laugh, “Which lets our daddy-o hire two torpedoes like ourselves for an open-and-shut missing persons case.”

  “If we find her,” I said, spoiling the mood.

  “That’s one big if,” he said sourly, then added, a touch more giddy, “Spent any of our little wad yet?”

  “Got us a filing cabinet and a hat rack for the office. Soon as we get the rest, I was thinking we ought to hire a secretary too.” I said, staring back at the scenery.

  “Lemme guess: blonde with tits about...” Towers paused for a moment, before asking “... yay big?”

  “I was thinking scrawny and bald,” I replied, grinning. “You know, the working type.”

  “Hey,” he said, “As long as you don’t marry the bug-eyed Betty.”

  The Buick kept picking up speed as we went, making the fields speed as if running for their lives.

  Looking out of the windscreen, I finally noticed: Towers had caught up with the hay truck.

  He grinned wickedly and I guessed he was about to give the driver a crash course in polite motoring.

  Slamming his foot down on the gas, Towers said, in that creepy little tone of his, “Hold on to your hat.”

  I rolled my eyes, took hold of my hat, and muttered, “Here we go again!”

  After giving the truck driver hell for a while, I finally settled down. Besides, the truck had turned off in the direction of a nothing little village and we’d almost reached the outskirts of Boston. And man, did I like Boston.

  Riley, looking a bit green around the gills after my little show-off, looked relieved when I eased up on the gas. Unfortunately for us though, as we reached the city proper, we got bottlenecked something fierce. Still, I loved this town with its skyscrapers and bustling crowds, its crooneries its speakeasies, its commercial streets fit to burst with the ritziest things you could hope to find. If Arkham was a sullen old hag, this was a bearcat fresh out of Catholic School and dripping Greek fire.

  After the drive we were absolutely famished, so we decided we’d hit the first place that was close to Geoffrey’s. I knew his address by heart: 80 Bay State Road, just across the street from the Charles River Reservation and half a stone’s throw from Boston University. There were bound to be restaurants around there somewhere.

  As we wound our way through inner Boston, I noticed Barnes idling. Guess he was scouring though the crowds looking for potential secretaries. I decided to tell him just what I knew about Justin Geoffrey.

  “He’s a bit of an odd duck, this feller we’re about to meet,” I said, as I led the Buick through a jam on Brookline Street. “He looks screwy, I’ll give you that. He twitches and mumbles to himself but his brain’s as sharp as a razor.”

  Barnes laughed, saying, “So you guys clicked from the start, huh?”

  I ignored him and said “He’s probably the only person who could know anything about that thing Big Boss turned into; Hell, he’s the only one that might have an idea about that funny lobster thing we saw floating down the Miskatonic.”

  “I don’t think we ought to know, if you ask me,” Barnes said. I silently agreed.

  Mercifully, the traffic thinned out and before long, we were traveling down Brookline Street at a decent pace before crossing the bridge across the Charles River Reservation.

  From then on, we took a right turn on Storrow before another right at the university and into Bay State Road. With this done in what I could only describe as record time, I filled Barnes in on the rest I had on Geoffrey, giving him the juiciest tidbits I had about the man.

  “I remember Jayne telling me he was locked up in an asylum once,” I continued. “He’d been abroad, somewhere in Eastern Europe I think. Things got... weird over there.”

  Barnes said, “Ain’t that just peachy.”

  “Well, it seems he got it into his head that some cult or another was out to bump him off, because, at least that’s how I heard it, he apparently let some secret from one of their books out.”

  Having spied an eating-place just across from the University, I finished up my tale while pulling up at the nearest parking meter.

  “So when it comes to ghosties and ghoulies and witchcraft, the guy knows his stuff. When he isn’t lollygagging with four-flusher poetry, that is.”

  Bay State Road stretched out between two rows of tall but cramped apartment houses, each flanked by wide sidewalks with a sparse treeline. It didn’t seem like the kind of place a mad poet might live in.

  After stuffing our faces with Boston’s finest fare, me with a plate of ham and eggs, Towers tackling two plates of the same accompanied by a cheddar cheese apple pie, we decided to take a leisurely walk over to Geoffrey’s. Walking a few dozen yards along the side of the street, Towers soon led us to a tall, beat-up red-bricked house.

  “Nice haunt,” I said, but Towers didn’t answer.

  I followed his lead up the front steps to a wide green door. Towers banged at it without bothering with the greenish lion’s head brass knocker.

  Towers was about to say something when a half dozen latches rattled open to unlock the door. I guessed the owner was still keeping an eye out for cultists. It opened just enough to reveal a thin man in his glad rags: sleek black suit with a white shirt, a black bow tie and a look of complete contempt in his pinched, pink face. A thin layer of jet-black hair was slicked across his shiny head, complimenting his pencil-thin mustache.

  He gave us the once-over before saying in a clipped English accent, “I do believe you have the wrong address.”

  Towers, looking annoyed, said, “No, busboy, we don’t. Go tell Justin that Trevor Towers is here to see him.”

  The man leaned forward, scrunching up his nose. “Oh dear, it is you,” then added, “A moment, please,” and the door slammed shut at our faces.

  “Nice fella,” I said, before adding, “Still, next to Geoffrey, he’s almost normal.”

  A moment later the door opened again, and our sour-faced friend admitted us into a lobby of black and white marble floor tiles, flanked with high walls made from gilded wood planks. There were two small doors on either side of the lobby and a pair of wide, walnut double doors at the end. There weren’t any staircases, so I assum
ed that one of the doors led to one or hid a service elevator.

  The skinny little busboy led us across the lobby before halting at the double doors and turned to us with his trademark sneer.

  “Master Geoffrey will see you now,” he warbled as he opened the door with a flourish. I didn’t know whether to salute or curtsy.

  Towers led the way into the room, a long rectangular hall that looked like it had been ripped straight out of Buckingham and into the middle of Boston. Everything smelled of some strong, sharp incense that I couldn’t place for the life of me.

  The room had a thick red carpet, patterned in golden Inca designs, its nauseating design bleeding into the striped red and yellow wallpaper, obscured for the most part by the tall oak bookcases lining the walls. They seemed to reach all the way up to the pink ceiling, where a twinkling chandelier hung from its center.

  Now there was a room fit for a weirdo. Then again, Towers didn’t seem to mind; he just strode towards the man at the other end, sat behind a long wooden desk covered by books and a typewriter, a pair of thick red velvet curtains at his back.

  The man, whom I thought had to be Justin Geoffrey, was a testament to poor taste.

  The stick-thin man was dressed in a double-breasted powder blue suit. He waited for Towers to get near before nervously shooting out from behind his desk toward him. He took us in with jerky, bird-like glances, staring at us through those deeply gray pools he had for eyes, set in his gaunt handsome face. His hair was a shock of ginger, and, together with the light dusting of freckles on his nose, made him appear far younger than he probably was.

  Tiptoeing across the carpet towards us, he stopped before Towers and cleared his throat before saying in his quiet voice.

  “Towers, the years haven’t been kind, have they?”

  Towers crossed his arms, sneering. “You’re looking as spiffy as ever.”

  Geoffrey quickly retorted with, “There is a portrait of me, up in the attic, that would beg to differ.”

  Towers shrugged as he followed Geoffrey’s remark with, “What the hell are you even talking about?”

  Geoffrey said, “Never mind,” before getting straight down to business, “Who is your friend?”

  Introductions were made all around and Geoffrey offered us drinks which we had to decline before heading back to his desk. There were a few empty seats scattered here and there; carved ebony framed affairs padded with green fabric and covered in a gold-thread urn-and-griffin pattern.

  We watched Geoffrey retrieve a small silver box from the desk drawer, opening it to remove a thin black smoke.

  He offered us one of the same, which we again turned down, before he lit his from a ritzy-looking desk lighter, puffing at it as if his life depended on it. This seemed to ease his jitters and we watched as he trailed the smoke on its way up to the ceiling, before snapping his head down toward Towers.

  He said, “We both know you’re always bad news, Mr. Towers.”

  Towers shrugged and said, leaning into the cluttered desk: “You won’t turn down an old friend, right Geoffrey? Not without squaring your debt first.”

  Geoffrey gave me a quick, nervous glance before saying, “What, that’s it? Just this and we’re done?”

  Towers shot him a grin that was all teeth, his big hands arching up into steeples as he went on. “I’ll be on the road and out of your hair for good, Geoffrey,” he said.

  Geoffrey positively beamed. He continued with, “Your request is my command, gentlemen,” and I began telling him the score.

  Geoffrey listened quietly as we went over the finer details of the case. In the five-odd minutes it took us to go through it, he went through two more smokes that blanketed even the sickly incense smell. Geoffrey went all bug-eyed when I finally mentioned The King in Yellow.

  He puffed away at another smoke, but that didn’t seem to help; his free hand kept rapping at the desk the entire way through.

  When we finished, he began with, “Well, The King in Yellow is a play dating back to the 18th century, and as far as I know, it is a story merely of political and royal intrigue set within some mythical city.” He paused to light another smoke, then, “According to legend, it’s cursed.”

  Towers interrupted him, “Cursed how?”

  “Cursed as in, literally,” Geoffrey said, “haunted, blighted, blasted and voodooed, worse than the Wandering Jew.”

  Towers and I shared a disbelieving look. Geoffrey quickly added, “Some who read it go insane; others are haunted by the supernatural entities that the play describes. The lucky ones just die outright.”

  “Who the hell would go after it then?” Towers asked.

  “Nobody, of course” Geoffrey said, “The book just... seduces them.”

  Even in light of everything else we’d gone through it sounded like a load of bushwa, but I pressed on. “Okay, so where does that leave us? How does this help us find the crackpots that got the girl?”

  He was eager to continue. “Every cult, like every religion, has its own gods and focal points of worship. If they worship the play, that means that they need to enact it, every now and again; acts, put on during Sunday Mass. If your damsel in distress has been whisked away by these types, then her days are well and truly numbered. So are theirs, if they keep poking at the unknown the way that they have been.”

  “They sound more like a bunch of kooky two-bit actors to me,” Towers said, not caring too much about Geoffrey’s phonus balonus.

  But I’d seen the thing that had burst out of Big Boss; I’d seen West making the dead walk, and the thing that floated down the Miskatonic, and I knew that there was something awfully wrong about the case. Justin Geoffrey might look like a dewdropping futz, but he looked like he knew his stuff.

  “So what can we expect? If they do have her, I mean,” I asked, not too keen to hear the answer.

  “Anything,” he said, staring me in the eye with a clear, intense look. His twitching hand finally went still as he continued, “... that lies beyond the ken of man.”

  Our interview with Geoffrey had gone better than either of us anticipated. Barnes and I knew all there was to know about the underworld but that prissy futz had tread far deeper than either of us would dare to go.

  As a parting gift, he gave us a lead on a troupe of King in Yellow worshipers that lived in a mansion in the woods just north of Boston, run by some big cheese by the name of Errin Fox. “It takes money to organize and madness to maintain the worship of the Yellow King,” he said, “Errin Fox has both in abominable abundance.”

  Guess it was about time that fruit got new house guests.

  Driving back through the choked streets of Boston, I kept myself from bashing my horn into the steering wheel by going over what we’d learned with Barnes.

  “So what do you think? Did your pal just sell us a load of hokum or what?”

  “He’s not my pal,” I snorted. “He’s just a fruity little table-rapper with too much free time on his hands and if we keep at it the way we are, we’ll end up just like him.”

  Barnes laughed, and then his voice turned grim.

  “Let’s just hope this King in Yellow is a lot of hooey,” he said, his tone uncertain. “Then again, you never know, what with our luck so far...”

  He was referring to the Big Boss case, an experience I was desperately trying to forget.

  “Well, if we find her all chewed up by creepie-crawlies, we can always refund Wallace’s payment,” I grumbled, getting madder still. The car in front of me, a dark red Ford Convertible, wasn’t letting up an inch.

  If I hadn’t been in such good company, I would’ve gotten out and had a word with the driver with my trusty crowbar in hand. I checked for any traffic bulls and found none. Good old Boston, never a cop around when you don’t need one.

  Barnes began to speak. I shushed him, putting the Buick into reverse. After making sure I had the space to leave our lane, I whipped the car to the left, taking a U turn back to the way we came.

  Car horns blast
ed and brakes squealed; Barnes started cussing up a storm but I didn’t care. Trevor Towers was well and done with Boston’s traffic.

  I’d decided to drive back towards Boston University, onto the Massachusetts Turnpike and toward wider, open pastures.

  “You crazy palooka,” Barnes said. “Are you trying to get us both killed?”

  The Massachusetts Turnpike opened up into a wide motorway, out into the sparse countryside that surrounded Boston.

  Barnes said, after a while, “If we end up stumbling on something that’s out of our league, we could always contact Wallace, get him to send us some extra manpower.”

  I didn’t like how spooked he sounded. Riley Barnes just wasn’t the kind of man to show he was afraid; then again, I couldn’t blame him, seeing the kind of things we’d gone up against.

  I said, “It’s either a group of rich nuts worshipping a stupid play, or it’s a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool crazies. Either way, we can blow them all the way to kingdom come.” I wasn’t joking. I had dynamite in the trunk.

  That seemed to lighten Barnes up a bit. “Dyed-in-the-wool, huh? Did you pick that up from a girlie magazine?”

  “Skimmed the editorial while I was on the crapper.” I said. “This is gonna be open-and-shut, Barnes, just you wait.’’

  I reached to knock wood, just in case, barely missing a piece of roadkill on the way. As far as omens go, that one didn’t look too promising.

  We followed the Turnpike to East Boston, getting through it without getting into too many jams, all the way through Chelsea and onto the Salem Turnpike.

  Soon enough, we’d be in the patch of woods that Geoffrey had mentioned, located in the shadow of a lovely little town called Salem.

  If Arkham was Witch Central, then Salem had to be the genuine, grade-A, primo deal.

  The Turnpike took us straight into Chamber Woods, a thick wad of greenery lurking below a steep embankment on the right. I found it hard to believe that a mansion could ever have been built there. Everything looked so wild and pristine but Geoffrey wasn’t one for red herrings, despite all his outright kookiness.