Arkham Nights

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  I thought they were going to come at me. I froze, waiting for the inevitable, when they suddenly leapt on the satyr and started hacking at it as if it were a piece of meat.

  It screamed and giggled, dragged down to the floor even as it was hacked to pieces. I stepped back, looking away until its wavering voice had finally mewled away into nothing, trying my damnedest not to gag as the smell of shit and offal struck me. I thought about beating it, maybe running as far away from my captors as possible, when it hit me: Where would I run and where would I hide, in the city of the Yellow King?

  The scampering sound of hurried feet and shuffling bodies snapped me back into unreality.

  I felt about to upchuck and couldn’t hold it down. The satyr, its pathetic body torn to bits, seemed to glint in the pale mist as it lay in a pool of its own black blood.

  The leader of the guard and the rest were on their knees around the dead beast, dipping their fingers into its blood and entrails to paint symbols onto their chest pieces.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I sputtered.

  The leader approached me, another baldie taking his place beside the corpse.

  He said, “It’s a spell, to get us where we need to be.”

  The dark, dripping symbol on his chest was that of a dot surrounded by three twisted spokes.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I managed, even as I tried to wriggle away from him.

  “Behold, we have arrived,” he said.

  I turned, only to see the mist finally part to reveal a massive structure that I knew hadn’t been there before.

  A huge castle loomed before me, almost skeletal in design, its walls shaped out of ribbed columns and pointed arches that formed elegantly fluted windows and doors. The two corners facing me, a few hundred feet apart, were each topped by a slim, pointed turret.

  I backed up to take the place in, finally coming to face a gigantic lion’s effigy that had been hewn into the wall. A mane of stone serpents twisted around its triumphant, roaring face.

  “Just like that fruity little trinket,” I whispered.

  The leader of the guards waved his hand and my shackles clattered on the floor.

  “We were sent out to retrieve the man bearing the icon,” he said.

  “Great. Curiosity, nail files, and bobby pins,” I grumbled, rubbing my wrists. “The bane of my existence.”

  I let my captors lead me into the building.

  I was led up a wide stone staircase, through a double-wide black timber door, into a foyer walled with black granite and carpeted in tatty, stained, red material.

  Iron chandeliers lit the place. Trudging across the carpet, I found myself led through another door into a large room set up like a dining hall ripped right from a DeMille flick.

  The clatter of booted feet echoed through the hall as we made our way to the staircase at its rear.

  The staircase was wide and richly carpeted. Its gaudy gold banisters made the rest of the plain stone hall appear sparse by comparison.

  Slowly, it hit me. The place wasn’t just like something ripped from a storybook. It probably was a world in a storybook, a world ripped right out from the pages of The King In Yellow.

  Two guards, one male and one female, flanked me at the foot of the stairs. Three newcomers closed in from the right: a pale, raven-haired woman surrounded by two bald, dark-skinned men. Like the rest, they wore suits of armor under their black cloaks. Their chests held the same crooked sign as the soldiers, but painted in bright yellow. The woman gave me the once over before addressing my former guards in the usual gobbledygook.

  “Het hy gesien die geel teken?”

  “Keep going,” a voice said behind me. I did as I was told and we made our way up to a second floor balcony.

  Just the pair of guards flanked me as we walked up the stairs; apparently, they didn’t need the extra muscle, now that I was right where they wanted me.

  We halted at a door facing the top of the stairs. It was painted bright red, like two others lining the wall to either side of it.

  The guard knocked twice, without bothering to look at me.

  I twiddled my thumbs and stared at the floor, feeling like a schoolboy on the way to the headmaster’s office.

  I still had no idea what the King wanted with me and if I was honest, I didn’t want to know.

  There was a shuffling on the other side of the door. It opened and a woman in a stained white dress eyed me through the gap with a twitching left eye, her lolling head adorned with a small silver tiara clasped around a shock of lank, blonde hair.

  She scowled at me, then at the guard.

  “Demos,” she hissed, glaring at him.

  “This is the Queen’s daughter,” he whispered, then told the crone, “My lady, is the Queen indisposed? The Stranger has come to see her.”

  The hunched woman looked at me, her head bobbing.

  “Worse sins will lead you to worse Kings, one for each color of the rainbow,” she spat.

  “Can’t argue with that,” I said.

  She let us in and wandered to the balcony, muttering as she went.

  The man called Demos shook his head.

  “In you go,” he said, “I need to keep an eye out for the Princess. She tends to fall down the stairs.”

  More than a little relieved to have dodged the King In Yellow so far, I stepped inside. The door slid shut behind me.

  The wide square room was a little less sparse than the rest of the castle. Its floors were fashioned from hexagonal cream stone slabs, its walls draped with dark red tapestries smothered in embroidered signs and sigils.

  Before me stood a wide, red leather couch, its back toward me. The backs of two blonde heads were visible, but their owners didn’t seem to acknowledge me. They were facing a gap in the wall covered by a brown, fluttering curtain that appeared to lead either to an open window or a balcony.

  The only other furniture in the room, apart from the couch, was a pair of huge globes set on either side of the curtain, propped up on matching dark wood stands. Even from a distance I could see that the shape and curve of their worlds looked nothing like good old Earth.

  ”Hello?” I said. The presences in the couch didn’t seem to notice. From somewhere behind the curtain, rose a gentle, singing voice.

  “J’ai perdu mon amie

  Sans l’avoir mérité

  Pour un bouquet de roses

  Que je lui refusai

  Il y a longtemps que je t’aime

  Jamais je ne t’oublierai!”

  Before I knew it I was heading toward the source, mesmerized by the sound of the voice.

  I passed by the couch and found it occupied by a pair of shriveled, blond-haired corpses. Dressed in dusty black and gray pageboy livery, they looked as if they’d been left there to rot for decades.

  The curtain blew open as a draft of sea air rushed in to reveal the mysterious singer.

  She was a creature of wispy, blonde beauty with an angular, regal face. Her slim figure was wrapped in a burgundy satin gown, the skirt split at the middle to reveal a pair of shapely, pink-stockinged legs. Her stomach looked heavy with child.

  Her piercing blue eyes found my own, and her face broke into a pencil-thin smile. “I am Cassilda, your tyrant Queen,” she said in a musical, singsong voice. “What is your purpose in my realm?”

  I shook my head, still taken aback by her beauty. “What realm would that be?”

  “What nonsense! What other realm could it be, but Carcosa!” she said.

  I nodded and introduced myself, not bothering to bow or kiss her hand. Indicating her belly, I said, “Who’s the lucky rube? Is it the King?”

  “I’m not pregnant; not that the King didn’t have a hand in this,” she said, patting the bulge gently.

  I said, trying to look and sound as helpless as possible, “I’m almost afraid to ask, but what does he want me for?”

  She shook her head. “Something terrible, most likely.”

  I bit my
lip. “Now ain’t that another fine pickle!”

  Cassilda bridged the gap between us. She smelled strongly of some musky, sweet perfume.

  She said, “Please talk quietly; you’ll wake my sons.”

  I glanced at the corpses and was about to make a wisecrack when the Queen shrieked in agony. Turning back, I found her lying in a heap on the floor.

  I kneeled by her side and felt for a pulse. No dice. She was cold and limp already.

  I began to panic, as I realized that the Queen had probably flat out died on me.

  I lifted an eyelid. A blue iris, the pupil slitted like a cat’s, stared up blankly at the ceiling. I was about to call for help when her whole body began to shudder and convulse.

  I let her go quicker than a live wire. She was shaking like an epileptic, her pregnant belly taking blow after blow.

  Her stomach roiled and quivered, expanding suddenly before the mounting pressure ripped her dress wide open.

  Something dark and wet spilled out from the tear and started pooling down on the immaculate floor. Just like that, the Queen was deader than a doorknob.

  Her stomach began to stretch upward. It didn’t look like it was going to stop.

  I scrambled to my feet and made for the door, started pushing and tugging at the knob uselessly.

  It almost seemed to fight against my slippery grip. I turned back and saw the Queen’s stomach already stretched out over four feet high. I made for the balcony, giving her a wide berth as I did so.

  A moment later I’d torn through the curtains. I stopped dead in my tracks at the sight of the titanic horror hovering beyond the balcony.

  I ducked and looked away, hoping it hadn’t noticed me.

  A loud wet ‘pop’ sounded from Cassilda’s chamber. I went for it. It sure beat facing the thing above the lake of clouds.

  I crawled under the curtain on my hands and knees and found myself shuffling across something wet and sticky. I opened my eyes to a floor covered in blood.

  A man of pure fleshy gold towered over me. His face painfully handsome, he smiled at me with a mouth of sharp white teeth. A crown of golden spikes surrounded his bald scalp.

  The King in Yellow.

  He stood ankle deep in the Queen’s remains. Offering a long, taloned hand to me, he said, “I am here,” and smiled a smile brimming with razors.

  I hate to admit it, but I was horribly, awfully lost. There had been no gas stations or anything else that remotely reminded me of Arkham. Well, there was the fog but all it did was conceal a spidery creature that had been tailing me for a while.

  “I see you, you son of a bitch!” I yelled, as it scuttled into a dark alley.

  There had been other things in the fog during my short walk to the city but they had mostly kept to themselves, appearing as nothing more than amorphous shapes. Now there was a word to live by: ‘amorphous.’ Made most horrors we’d come across sound almost tolerable.

  It was pretty clear that a particular group of religious kooks was to blame. Seeing those copies of The King in Yellow at the pawnshop—just before getting knocked out—cinched it: we were in deep shit. We’d dealt with the yellow cultists before and knew that they meant business. In the past, we’d fought them on familiar terrain but now, I was probably stuck in a brave new world that worked according to their rules.

  I didn’t know if my partner was alive but it made sense that if so, he was most likely stuck here, just like me. Now all I had to do was find him without getting myself killed in the process.

  “Where is everybody?” I growled.

  I’d been walking for a long time and had yet to see anyone. Anyone even remotely human, that is. No vehicles seemed to be going through the cobble-strewn streets either, so calling a cab wasn’t an option.

  I stopped at the edge of a building and peered through the fog. The spider-like thing had been getting bolder by the second and it was about time I got some distance between us. I wasn’t one to ever run from a fight, but I wouldn’t go up against a beastie in an unknown world without my gun, either.

  I crossed my arms and tried my best to look bored. I silently counted to three and then sprinted to the back of the stone building, before darting down a narrow alley. I hoped to lose the thing that was after me, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I splashed through puddles as I ran down the alley, herded in by tall windowless buildings. The fog had settled thickly in the winding pathways between the towering structures and seemed to somehow muffle my footsteps. Gasping for breath, I stopped to get my second wind when I heard a roaring sound like rushing water from up ahead.

  I peered through the fog behind me, trying to see if the spidery figure was still after me. I briefly saw dark movement within the swirling mist and cursed my luck. The creature was still on my tail and there was nothing for me to do but press on.

  The roaring noise got louder as I continued on my way. I’d walked another fifty yards or so, when the fog grew thinner and I could make out a canal of rushing water that divided the blocks of buildings. The canal was roughly ten yards across and drained into a tunnel under the street. There was no way across the barrier from my vantage point, unless I headed back the way I’d come and cut across to the main street. That way was obviously out of the cards unless I could find a weapon.

  The alley was sparse, without any cover. After surveying the immediate area, I found that one of the buildings had a couple of jagged cracks running up its side. It was better than nothing so I cut loose with some kicks hoping I could dislodge a large enough stone chunk. One large shard broke loose but crumbled into pieces as it hit the ground.

  “That’s just peachy,” I mumbled, turning to look at the dark shape that was getting closer.

  I ran back to the end of the alley and looked down at the rushing water. There was no way I’d be able to swim across and I wasn’t likely to survive a ride into the tunnel running beneath the street. It looked like I was stuck with trying to get by my pursuer and knew the outlook was grim.

  “Well, Riley, it’s been nice knowing you.”

  Every condemned man is entitled to one last butt so I reached into my pocket and fished out the crumpled pack. I set fire to the coffin nail and stared in horror at the monstrous thing that was peeking out of the fog.

  This wasn’t your garden-variety giant spider. It was a downright ugly bastard, with the head and torso of a man atop eight tree-trunk-sized legs. The head was as bald as a cue ball and dagger-like fangs stuck out from its downward slash of a mouth.

  The thing was almost upon me when it let out a series of screeching yelps, which I assumed was an attempt at communication.

  “Go tell it to Sweeney, why don’t you!” I shouted and gave the creature a one-fingered salute.

  The monster lunged at me. I crouched in a defensive position and prepared to make a desperate leap at it, hoping that I could punch out its lights before it managed to sink those fangs into me. As far as dumb plans go, this one took the cake.

  The creature was a few short feet in front of me as I got ready to leap. It was do or die, when a hail of lead went whizzing past my head and tore into the beast’s head and chest. I was stunned and half-deaf by the thunder of the guns but managed to roll away from the creature’s thrashing limbs. I did some scuttling of my own away from its death throes and stared at the uniformed figure on the other side of the canal.

  “Looked like you could use a hand, mate!”

  It was good to be out of the alley. It was even better when I realized I was in the company of Tommies who had been stranded here, just like I was. I had been trying my damnedest to get them to clue me in on just where I was but they wouldn’t spill it until a Captain Jacobi had a chance to talk to me. I waited impatiently, smoking one butt after another and trying to find out if anyone had even seen Trevor, but no dice. Apparently I was the only human they’d seen in ages.

  Jacobi eventually arrived on the scene. He was of average height and seemed to be in good shape. Most of his graying hair was pul
led back under his officer’s hat and there was a twinkle in his dark blue eyes that belied the grimness of his situation. He gripped my hand in a firm handshake and asked me to come to a small building that he was using as a makeshift command post. Inside, a couple of soldiers were poring over some documents, ignoring us as we made our way to a smaller, barely furnished room.

  He motioned for me to take a seat and offered a drink from a silver flask.

  “I imagine you could use this,” he said, extending the container.

  I grinned and said, “You have no idea.”

  Jacobi barked out a short laugh.

  “What do you know? About your situation, that is?” he asked.

  “Not a hell of a lot,” I replied, handing back the flask. “I know I’m not in Arkham and doubt that I’m even in America... unless you Brits are having another crack at the colonies.”

  He smiled. “Nothing like that, old boy.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Have you ever heard of Carcosa, Mr. Barnes?”

  “Not really,” I said, lighting a smoke.

  “What of the King in Yellow?”

  I frowned. “Don’t know much about the book itself but my partner and I ran into some cultists. Also, this bogeyman that we thought had to be the King.”

  “That could explain why you’re here then,” he said. “I’m part of an organization known as The Yellow Cross. We have been tasked to eradicate all things aligned with this King in Yellow.”

  “How come I’ve never heard of you then?”

  “You’re not supposed to,” he answered. “It’s all need to know but what’s the harm. After all, we’re in the same boat together, what?”

  “I appreciate it,” I answered. “You mentioned Carcosa. Is that where we are?”

  “Quite so, yes.”

  “And I don’t suppose it’s on any map, is it?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Afraid not; it’s in another dimension entirely.”

  “I’d really like to find my partner and get the hell out of here,” I said. “Is that even possible?”