The Devil Came to Arkham
Page 4
“Yeah, she tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up.”
“She will show you the way out,” he answered pulling a woven bell-cord with a tassel at the bottom. I assumed that was used to summon Angel.
I picked up the glass and downed the scotch, “I know the way out.”
***
In less than a minute I was back in the foyer, and to my delight Angel was still there, waiting for me . . . I hoped.
“How did it go bad boy?” she asked with a soft, enticing smile on her kisser.
I said, "As bad as I am, I wasn’t as bad as I'm supposed to be. Your boss couldn’t tell though; I left him fuming.”
“Ask a lot of fool questions, did you?” she prodded.
"He wanted me to make a deal with a devil, but I gave him the brush off.”
"He's a self-important person who thrives on delusions of grandeur, but like I said copper, it's a job."
“It’s a job that you need to leave. Run along Angel, beat it, before it gets too hot around here.” I meant it. The guy was a real nut job, I didn’t care for his metamorphosis, and I was beginning to worry about her safety.
“I’m a big girl,” she answered with too much false bravado for my taste. “I can take care of myself and besides, the paycheck at the end of each month is too attractive for me to walk away.”
"You picked a nice sort of playmate, Angel. I have it from a reliable source that he likes to pull wings off flys." Then I did something stupid. Or it seemed that way in retrospect. Maybe it was the scotch. I took one of my business cards from the Arkham station house, wrote my home address and phone number on the back and handed it to her. “In case you change your mind,” I added.
***
Her name was Nora Bishop. That much I learned about Angel before I left her cockeyed place of employment. The dame had gotten my attention, big time. Before I could give our little tete-a-tete a second thought, the radio in the dash of my cruiser squawked, calling to me. “Go ahead,” I answered keying the mic.
“Dr. Henry Armitage called. He wants to see you right away.” The dispatcher’s voice rose above the airway static, “He said that it was urgent.”
Old Armitage was a resident professor at Miskatonic University. He and I had only one thing in common, and it wasn’t our educational status. He had a Ph.D., and I was a high school dropout. We did, however, share a mutual profession. I, of course, am the head of the Mythos Division at the Arkham Police Department which means that I investigate any and all things that go bump in the night while at the same time trying to discover their secret intent. In plain English, I chase after things that are sometimes misshapen, vague or unseen, and on other occasions material horrors, all of which usually leave blood trails wherever they go.
Dr. Henry Armitage, on a similar note, is the leader of a covert group within Miskatonic U known only to a few as the “Mythos Department.” The organization is manned by a select group of scholars that investigate supernatural occurrences around the globe. During some of these investigations, they have acted like vigilantes, taking the law into their own hands, passing out judgment where they see fit. You would think that their lawlessness should awaken an altruistic cop sense within me, not on your life. Their department and our division share valuable information from time to time, and their vigilantism is no concern of mine. After all, we are both after the same thing, and those results justify the means.
***
The marble halls of Miskatonic can be very intimidating. Vaulted ceilings supported by stone arches with sculpted gargoyles lurking at every turn. A fella in a white lab coat escorted me to Armitage’s “Test Center,” as he called it. Pulling out a ring of keys he unlocked a door that looked like it belonged in Fort Knox. I walked down a short hallway, and we came upon a second door that was a twin to the other. Lab coat unlocked it and bid me to enter. Leaving me inside, he closed the door, and I heard the lock being drawn. It was cold in the room, very cold, it had to be below fifty-degrees. It was refreshing at first, leaving the scorching heat of the early evening behind, but I soon started to shiver and regretted that I had left my jacket and trench coat on the back seat of the cruiser.
Lining three walls, in a room the size of a two-car garage were steel boxes six-feet high with a bunch of clock faces on them and blinking lights. To my left sat Dr. Henry Armitage. He was seated in a swivel chair and in front of him was the world’s largest typewriter. “Good evening Detective,” he declared with a bust-his-buttons look of pride on his muzzle. “I’m glad you could make it so soon.”
“You said it was urgent Doc. What’s all the fuss and what are all these gizmos?”
“This is ENIAC,” he indicated with a wave of a hand towards the metal boxes. “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer. Its 18,000 vacuum tubes and the elimination of moving parts allows it to calculate faster than any human on the planet. ENIAC can solve a large class of numerical problems through calibrating and does it in a matter of seconds. Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army, we were fortunate to acquire one for our probability studies.”
“What about the big typewriter?”
“It is a teletype. We use it to communicate with ENIAC. I like to call it my computer console,” pride was still oozing from his pores.
“This is all very impressive Professor but what does it have to do with me?” I questioned. “And why is it so damned cold in here?”
“I am sorry Detective, my immodesty over our achievement has blinded me to your discomfort as well as my purpose in asking you here. We must keep the arctic-like temperatures in the Test Center because ENIAC’s several thousand vacuum tubes generate so much heat that it would blow all its circuits if we didn’t. Please get the officer a coat Jerome,” he asked one of his attendants. Jerome helped me on with a white lab coat. I had to smile. Here I was, a lug with an eighth-grade education, looking like a mad scientist from one of those Universal horror pictures.
“Come over here detective, I want to show you something,” he beckoned me towards his “computer console.” Fastened to the wall, the only one without the steel boxes, clock faces, and the blinking lights, was a large glass tube the diameter of a grapefruit and a good four feet in length. Inside the glass thingamajig were some smaller tubes the size of soda straws and several red whirligigs. “That was once a Klystron amplifier; I modified it to be a Klystron frequency modulator. It measures energy levels within our atmosphere.” Turning and pointing to all of those clock faces and lights he started to lecture to me, “May I draw your attention to these gauges all around here? Their calibrations are set in decimal series each division recording exactly ten times as many amperes as the one preceding it. Ten times ten, times ten, times ten, times ten, times ten, on and on and on row after row, gauge after gauge. The number ten raised almost literally to the power of infinity.”
Feeling really stupid about then I asked the obvious, “You said that this thing measures energy in the air. What kind of energy?”
“Life-force energy,” he answered raising his voice.
A chill ran through me, and it wasn’t because of the reduced temperature in the Test Center. “I am sorry Doc, but that sounds screwy to me,” I managed to blurt out.
“Not at all my good boy. Obviously, all of this is classified top secret, and our discussion cannot leave this room. Nevertheless, our achievement in detecting life-force-energy is why the U.S. Army loaned the University ENIAC. With Hitler doing a lot of saber-rattling in Europe and the Japanese invading China, it is believed that it will not be long before our country is involved in a global conflict. We have developed several algorithms and ways of measuring low levels of radiation that we believe will, someday, be able to detect troop movements, at great distances, while being safe in the confines of a laboratory eliminating the need for military scouts or observation balloons.”
“Now I hope you are going to get to the part of why you asked me here?”
“How unusual?”
“Our readings are very accurate. We have even been able to develop a system wherein we can pinpoint the number of individuals living in each household. But as of late these energy sources, in certain parts of town, seem to be fading, as if someone or something is sucking the very life out of them. Oh, I know that you are going to say that it sounds crazy and there must be something wrong with our equipment but we have checked, double checked and even triple checked every part of the system, and there are no flaws. What confounds us, even more, is that the life-force energy levels in one particular area of town have been increasing exponentially over the past few months.”
What he was telling me bordered on incredulous. “In just one location?” I raised my hand, scratching my noggin.
“Positively, I can give you the precise location.”
“Your machine is that accurate?” I challenged.
“ENIAC’S calculations are infallible.”
“Then where is this stockpile of life-force energy located?”
“552 French Hill Street,” he countered.
It was a slap in the face. I was stunned and speechless. I knew the location well. It was the address of that ghastly manor belonging to Corvus Astaroth.
***
That was almost eight months ago when I walked out of the chilly Test Center at M.U. into the stifling heat of the evening. I have maintained communications with Doc Armitage since then and keep abreast of the “life-force energy levels” dwindling in different parts of town while always increasing around Corvus’ abode. It was mid-December; the days were short, and the weather should have been doing an imitation of Lapland, but it was still hotter than blazes.
Arkham was now becoming the skin for the ultimate predator. If I could only get a handle on Corvus Astaroth’s modus operandi maybe I could stop the madness that was fast approaching and then hopefully the scars would heal tougher than the skin they’d replace. But I can’t arrest a mug based on some nutty professor’s so-called energy readings, even if half the town was going looney.
Judgment Day, people were calling it, and sidewalk ‘preachers’ argued against any opposition to our new mayor with all the success of street corner lunatics. Corvus, not surprisingly, became mayor of Arkham, obviously, because he was the only one on the ballot last November. He should have been inaugurated after the first of the year but Alexander Q. Tower, the retiring incumbent, keeled over from a heart attack, the day after the election, putting an immediate period to his existence. The deputy mayor had blown town, never to return, with half the city’s treasury by then, so with the wisdom and blessings of our city council, Corvus Astaroth was sworn in on December one.
The town wants blood, but there is no divine intervention coming, and they will have to take what they can get . . . unless I can find the trail that will lead me to the arrest and conviction of Corvus Astaroth . . . if that’s what will stop this madness. What truly makes this the toughest case of my career is the sickness that has swept through Arkham. It’s a plague of malnourished deaths. Arkham General and its staff have been overwhelmed with the incoming through the doors of their emergency room. All the beds have been filled at the hospital and cots have been set up in hallways and storage rooms to handle the overflow of emaciated, skeletal patients begging to be cured. So far, the only thing that has slowed the surplus of the long-suffering are the fatalities that free up bed space.
All roads into the city were blocked by the U.S. Army. Arkham was in the news. Our searing heat wave in mid-December was reported everywhere. We learned that the summer temperatures we were experiencing ceased abruptly at the city’s boundaries. Beyond our borders, everything along the east coast was blanketed with snow. That, coupled with the knowledge of our raging epidemic, was reason enough for the military to quarantine Arkham from the rest of the USA. People could enter the city, but once in, no one was allowed out. A series of squalid tent cities sprung up in vacant lots west of town. A temporary hospital was set up at the Hoade Tavern & Inn on Phipps Street. A civil defense official brought up a Geiger counter. No matter how the guy shook it and rapped on it, it refused to click. He became one of our permanent residents as well when he learned that he wasn’t permitted to return home.
Dr. Henry Armitage hired Billy Lydig to fly him in his Curtiss Jenny biplane over the town. Lydig piloted the plane from the rear seat, and Armitage sat up front balancing that Klystron whatchamacallit on his lap. When I asked him, what the hell he was doing with that thing up there, he said he was, “collecting datum.” The next day that typewriter teletype of his printed an outline of the town’s borders using a bunch of ones and zeros. In the middle of the chart was a drawing of a great big ice cream cone shape taking a bite out of the town. The pointy bottom of the funnel cone was directly over Corvus Astaroth’s neighborhood.
The whole debacle eerily mirrored Harry Crowcroft’s story in his journal, with one exception. Crowcroft wrote that his Edgar, the Night Gaunt Devil, Hobs only preyed upon middle-aged women. Where our Arkham plague has befallen the citizens of both sexes and all ages. If Corvus Astaroth is truly the cause of this epidemic, which I believe he is, then it appears that he has expanded, in addition to accelerating, the process. Why I don’t know. Maybe Astaroth has a mystical and bizarre deadline he craves to undergo.
I have presented my suspicions to our Chief at Station House 13, and he thinks I’m cracked. He does, however, let me pursue my hunches. The Chief is as baffled as everyone else and, even though he deems me daffy, his choices are limited. More so, I could take Matthew Bell with me on my investigation as backup. It was against my better judgment to let him tag along, but by then the kid had stuck to me like glue, and I was beginning to tolerate his company.
***
I had a hunch and decided that we should pay a visit to a couple of lobos named Piccadilly Slim and Slackie Knolls. Slim, an ex-bootlegger, sold his distillery for a fortune but still had the hum in his blood. Thus, he set up a speakeasy in a tumbledown apartment building next door to a brothel in the north district of Arkham Commons, the Devil's Playground. It had become a living symbol of everything that was wrong with Arkham. Piccadilly Slim now bought his illegal hooch from the mob he sold his bottling works to and resold it to the down-and-out that frequented the district.
I hadn’t journeyed to that foul neighborhood to see Slim. I wanted to question Slackie Knolls. Slackie, at present, worked for Piccadilly Slim tending bar. Slackie was a huckster, a con man that had talked his way into being Corvus Astaroth’s campaign manager. An arrangement, per word on the street, that was beneficial for both him and Mayor Astaroth, at the time. I feel like shooting myself in the foot every time I refer to Corvus by that honorable title! With the election over Slackie had found himself between engagements, hence his employment with Slim.
Bell and I walked up three flights of stairs. The desolation of the building was almost complete; it looked abandoned. Echoes responded to our footsteps on the bare-worn treads. I knocked on the door of one of the dingiest tenements I had ever smelled. The place reeked of cigarettes and stale beer. It hadn't been swept out in a day or a week, maybe a month. They had knocked out a wall between two apartments doubling the size of the place. They did little to disguise their rugged carpentry work. Dingy drapes had been nailed up to partially conceal the ragged wood lathe and plaster exposed by the demolition. Pieces of what looked like soiled discarded carpeting had been thrown over the uneven threshold where once stood the barrier between two dwellings. An odd assortment of ch
airs shoved under makeshift tables that appeared to be made from used lumber dotted the rough-and-ready saloon. I prayed that Officer Bell would have control over his stomach on this call.
It was three in the afternoon, and the joint was deserted but for Slackie and Slim. They were sitting at a table drinking up their profits. Slim, a nickname he had acquired as a gag, was his usual fat plus balding self. Slackie, on the other hand, did not look well. His skin lacked the intensity of color, his cheeks were sunken, almost cavernous, and although normally as rotund as Slim he had turned into a skeletal shadow of his former self. Flesh hung off his arms in loose folds. He had the sickness that people in town started calling "the Arkham Stain."
“I couldn’t be more surprised if Hitler turned out to be a Jew!” Slim shouted in an inebriated slur. “The Arkham Constabulary in my joint. I am honored. How about a drink fellas? On the house.”
“No thanks Slim, we’re on duty,” I stretched the truth a little. I certainly wasn’t opposed to having a snort or two while on the job. However, I had no idea what bathtub Slim and Slackie got their booze out of, and I had never acquired a taste for wood alcohol. I quickly changed the subject, “Slackie you look terrible.”
“Occupational hazard,” he answered, not sounding sloshed, on the contrary, deathly ill.
“Too much liquor in the system?”
He made with a weak laugh, “too much Ash in the system.”
“You’re referring to Corvus, our beloved mayor?” he just stared at me. I hoped he would be forthcoming, and I prodded, “word is you’ve got a beef with him?”
“Yeah,” he responded feebly. “I’m dying, copper. That’s what I got for doing an outstanding job.” He had been contemplating several fingers of dark colored spirits in a dirty glass. Surprisingly swift for a person that was knocking on death’s door he downed the contents in one gulp. “He couldn’t have gotten elected to dog catcher if it hadn’t had been for me.”