by Byron Craft
“He ran unopposed,” I countered.
“Yeah; think that was a coincidence? Everyone that meets Mr. Ash eventually kicks the bucket. The word is eventually, it’s a slow death. There is no cure. Look at half the town, hell, look at me,” he whimpered. “The only problem, it was too slow of a way to bump off Peter Carter, his challenger in the race. We had to come up with a way that was quicker.”
“Are you saying that Peter Carter was murdered?” He had passed away shortly before the election. A murder rap would certainly get Astaroth the chair. But there was an autopsy, and there had been no evidence of foul play. Slackie Knolls’ illness was making him delusional.
“The coroner reported that Mr. Carter died from a brain tumor that hemorrhaged,” Officer Bell challenged.
“That’s exactly what Ash wants you all to believe,” Slackie’s voice was a pathetic resonance of one that once projected a persuasive vitality that could sweet-talk many into buying worthless oil well stocks, swamp land in Florida or shares to non-existent gold mines. “He had this stuff, I don’t know what it was called, but he said it was something that couldn’t be traced and would look like the person would have died of natural causes if only we could get him to swallow it. Only he didn’t use the word ‘swallow,’ he said ‘ingest.’ He got the recipe for the stuff out of an old book called the Necrocon.”
My heart skipped a beat. There was a bit of irony in the way Slackie Knolls mispronounced the name of the book, I had to smile, but I knew right off that he was referring to the Necronomicon. It was a textbook of magic consisting of spells, incantations and, without a doubt, potions. Only a few in the world existed. I had come across a copy during my investigation in Innsmouth the year before. It is said that the very act of studying the book is dangerous and those who have, generally meet terrible ends. “How did Corvus get him to ‘ingest’ it?”
“It was a cinch. Ash invited Carter over for a pow wow. He told him that he was going to run an issues-oriented campaign only, no mudslinging and hoped that Peter Carter would do the same. The stooge fell for it. They shook hands and had a drink to seal the deal. I gave Carter the glass that had the concoction in it.”
I moved within arm’s length of Slackie and eyed him critically, “Slackie are you telling me that you are an accessory to murder?”
“Yeah, I got nothin’ to lose. I’ll be dead in a day or two.”
I looked at Bell, and he shrugged. “We’ll have to take him downtown. Get his confession on record,” he suggested.
“And book him. Is that what you want Slackie?” turning to the accused.
“Can’t you take my confession here,” he pleaded sounding weaker by the moment. “We’re three flights up, and I can’t make those stairs.”
“We can carry him down,” offered Bell. And that’s what we did. We had Slackie Knolls downstairs and in the backseat of Bell’s squad car in less than five minutes.
***
I had Matthew Bell drop me off at my unmarked cruiser in the parking lot when we got back, and he and another officer took Knolls into Station House 13. At that moment, I had bigger fish to fry.
The Miskatonic University had a copy of that old moldy manuscript. Nobody can see it, though. They keep it under lock and key. It was time to break from tradition. That’s where my old buddy, Doc Armitage, came into play. We sat in what he called “the Forbidden Reading Room.” A middle-aged woman wearing thick glasses entered carrying a wood box. She placed it on the table between the Doc and me, looked at me suspiciously, turned, and walked out of the room locking the door behind her.
Henry Armitage rotated the box so that the hinged side of the lid was pointing away from us. There was a brass faceplate on the front. He was in a mood to give one of his lectures. “A half-crazed Arab by the name of Alhazred, who worshiped the entities Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu, is said to have been the author of the original known, then as Al Azif. In the year 950, it was translated from ancient Arabic into Greek and given the title Necronomicon by the scholar Theodorus Philetas.” Armitage unbuttoned his shirt revealing a thin gold chain around his neck. Removing the chain, I saw a tiny key dangling from it. “It was then,” he continued, “translated from Greek into Latin by another scholar named Olaus Wormius.” Inserting the key into a matching hole in the faceplate he turned it, and I heard a “click.” “Only known to a select few, here at the University, there was an additional translation done in the sixteenth-century by an Elizabethan doctor and magician, John Dee. His decipher was into English, but unfortunately, only fragments of it survive.” Raising the lid, the Doctor removed a package wrapped in sheepskin, pulling the folds of the swathing aside he revealed a stack of loose yellowed parchments several inches thick. The room started to stink. It was the smell of death. I know that stench all too well. It was as if the papers had laid amongst rotting corpses in a morgue. “And this is it!” he proclaimed. “You have been given a unique privilege Detective, the understanding that Miskatonic University has in its possession, not one, but two copies of the world’s rarest book. This is the only copy of Doctor Dee’s English translation known to exist. We acquired it from the Whateley estate.”
Wilbur Whateley was the hideous son of a deformed and unstable mother, father unknown, although some have speculated that the patriarch was not human. My partner back then was Jefferson Buck. We had been called to Miskatonic U in the middle of the night to investigate a break-in. Wilbur had burglarized the library, as evidence later revealed, to steal their copy of the Necronomicon. A guard dog had attacked and killed him with unusual ferocity, tearing his throat out. We got there just as Dr. Armitage and two other professors arrived on the scene. We observed Wilbur, a semi-human corpse, slowly melt before our eyes, leaving no evidence that he ever existed.
Doc Armitage slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves and gently leafed through several pages. “We are confident that Wilbur Whateley wanted to obtain our Olaus Wormius translation of the tome so he could compare it to his imperfect English version. His objective was to attain specific knowledge that would give him the ability to perform a certain ritual. What that ritual was and the purpose of it I am not allowed to discuss with you.”
I knew better than to ask. “Fair enough, but why this copy if it’s not complete?”
“The situation in town worsens with every beat of the heart. Time is truly of the essence. Dee’s English version of the text saves us from wading through ciphers and interpretation headaches. It is also quite wide-ranging and clear when it comes to defining a Night Gaunt.”
“Now you’ve got my attention,” I sat up straight in my chair and craned my neck to get a gander of a page he had turned. It smelled worse.
Armitage pointed to a hand-written passage. “Dee describes Night Gaunts as having a vaguely human shape, but thin, black, with demonic horns protruding from their skulls. Their skin is slick and rubbery. They sport a long-barbed tail and prehensile claws. He asserts that they feed on emotions, preferring despair, misery, and hopelessness above all other mental states. He writes that this emotional fodder, ‘gives the Gaunts great power to guard a mountain in the Dreamlands as the servants of their Lord of the Great Abyss.' They’re from Dreamland, Detective. Per Dee, Night Gaunts haunt the deepest and darkest chasms of our dreams. They are not of this earth or at least they shouldn’t be.”
“But I have seen him as clearly as I see you,” I challenged. “And I’m pretty sure everyone else does too.”
“Except when he shifts,” he speculated, scratching his chin. “I think what we have here, my friend is an anomaly. I think that the Corvus Astaroth we see is what he wants us to see. You said that when you first met him that he was short and stout?”
“Fat was the word.” Corvus has slimmed down over the months, and he and I were now of equal height.
“Precisely! If Mayor Astaroth is truly a Night Gaunt, then that is the abnormality. He belongs in the land of our dreams. He should not be in our sphere of existence. Something must have happened, someth
ing catastrophic that sent him over to our world and he wants to get back. That’s it!” he shouted. “Somehow, he got stranded here, and he is soaking up life-force energy, larger amounts than ever before, to send him back to the other side! Probably, in the past, he only needed enough to sustain himself. If he did not absorb a sufficient supply of his victims’ vitals, he would atrophy. Like when you first met him last spring he was probably in a degenerative state.”
“Yeah, short and fat.”
“However, something is different now. He’s consuming enormous amounts of life-force energy. Why, why?” he pounded the tabletop with a closed fist. The Doc’s face developed into a grim contortion, and then it suddenly brightened with a big smile. I think he was having one of those epiphanies. “We are experiencing a Tuvera right now, a planetary alignment that occurs only once every fifty years. The alignment and his current massive uptake of human energy may be what is needed to propel him to his dimension. It would give a new meaning to the term ‘mass into energy.’ That must be the solution!”
“Hey, Doc if you ever want to quit this joint and come and work for us you’d make a helluva detective.”
“I will take that as a compliment,” he smiled. He turned another page. “That is all that John Dee translated about Night Gaunts.” There was something scrawled in blue ink on the back of the page.
“What’s that Doc,” I pointed out. It was a sentence written in longhand. It was faint, but bringing the individual page closer to the light, we could easily read what it said, “Iron is the Devil’s Enemy.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” he puzzled. “I believe it is an ancient biblical idiom. It was more than likely put there by the hand of Wilbur Whateley.”
“So much hokum,” I said sliding my chair back. “Doc how about that stuff I told you, about a recipe for some kind of potion that kills a guy but makes it look like he died of natural causes?”
“That will take some time I’m afraid. Nothing like that appears in the English translation. It will be in our Greek text. I will have our Necronomicon accredited scholars poring over it and will forward the information on to you if we find anything.”
“Thanks, you’ve been a big help.”
“Just one more thing Detective. Quite possibly Corvus Astaroth may be the slave and not the master of his situation. That means he will be desperate. A desperation that could be powerfully dangerous.”
“I’ll keep my guard up, Doc.”
***
It was late, and I went home. I knew that my little Allison would be at Mrs. Trumble’s. I let myself in and was greeted by what was rapidly becoming my family circle. Only this circle was sitting on the living room rug, Indian style. They were playing Pick-Up Sticks. All three of them: Allison, Mrs. Trumble and Nora Bishop, my Angel, were plopped down cross-legged, taking turns trying to remove a toothpick-thin stick from a pile of assorted colored sticks without disrupting the batch. The game was supposed to develop a child's motor skills. The box that it came in claimed that it was, “Suitable for all ages.” And it looked like Allison was getting the better of the two. She would squeal every time she’d remove one not disturbing the other sticks. “Look Daddy!” she shouted, “I’m winning, I’m winning.”
I scooped her up and hugged her close to me and whispered, “Hello Sweetheart.” She, in turn, squeezed me tightly around my neck with both arms just like the night I rescued her from that terror in Innsmouth. We cuddled in each other’s embrace. Looking down, I watched as Angel gazed up at me with those soft gray eyes. She was becoming part of our family, and I had fallen head over heels.
Not too long after I had given Angel my card she ended up on our doorstep. It unfolded that good old Astaroth had been getting stranger as the days went by. “He was changing,” she told me. “Both physically, getting taller, if you can believe it, his hair was getting darker along with his attitude. The number of visitors to the house kept growing, all of which eventually became sick. It was the Stain, and he was increasingly pleased with the results. I stopped going into work and refused to take his phone calls. If I picked up the phone and he was on the line, I’d hang up. Then I observed some of those with the sickness through my bedroom window watching. One of them, after sunset, looked black all over with no face. It was getting dark, and I’m not sure, but I thought it had wings.”
Mrs. Trumble was more than happy to add Angel to our group. She had rearranged her spare bedroom, aka Allison’s playroom, by adding a daybed at one end. I sent a couple of uniforms, the next day, over to Nora’s place to collect her things. Since then Allison has kept after me declaring that Angel should be her new mom.
I collected Allison, and we went back to our apartment. Upon leaving, I took a long hard gander at Mrs. Trumble. She is normally very energetic for a woman in her seventies, but right then she looked exceptionally tired. The color had gone out of her cheeks.
***
I had a crazy dream that night. I was having my usual Sunday afternoon brunch with Allison and Mrs. Trumble. I kept asking, “Where is Angel?” There was a place set for her and pancakes were steaming on her plate. The light in the room dimmed suddenly. The morning sky through my window became a darkening gloom. A charcoal-rubbery face and sulfurous eyes appeared. It had long black arms terminated by huge claws. It was holding Angel by her throat. She didn’t move; her skin was gray. There was a nameless purpose in the creature’s narrow yellow eyes, in the soundless moving of its lips; and my very soul recoiled with nausea and revulsion. Its glowing mouth and dripping fangs slavered over my breakfast table, or maybe, I feared, upon the pillow, I was resting. I woke with a start.
I was up early the next morning. Allison was sitting at the breakfast table having a bowl of cornflakes. Alongside of her was Angel having a cup of Java. After my screwy nightmare, it was a great relief to see them both. “What brings you to our neck of the woods at this hour,” I asked Angel.
“Good morning to you too,” she blew me a kiss. “Mrs. Trumble was tired; I let her sleep in.”
“Does she seem bushed to you, more than usual?”
“Could be. It started a couple of days ago when she went out to get groceries. She told me she got caught up in a crowd. It was one of those rallies that Corvus puts on. Mrs. Trumble said that rather than struggle against the rabble she decided to stay and listen to his silly speech.”
“Anything happen?”
“Don’t think so,” she said brushing a strand of blond hair away from her left eye. “Mrs. Trumble told me that when it was over they dispersed and she came home.”
That had me troubled. Old lady Trumble may have become another victim of Corus Astaroth. I hoped to God that she hadn’t contracted the Arkham Stain. I used to wonder why Astaroth put on all those rallies when he ran unopposed and even after he was inaugurated. They should have been unnecessary, but in the cold light of day, it became uncomfortably obvious. If he was desperately intent on recharging his batteries, getting prepared for his big event, then what better way to soak up gobs of human vitality than amongst a crowd of people. Maybe it wasn’t their life energy he was after, perhaps it was their souls. I didn’t want to say anything more about it in front of the kid. She loved our landlady dearly, and I didn’t want to worry her needlessly if I was wrong.
Matt Bell called and gave me the lowdown on Slackie. He had signed a confession and kicked the bucket that morning in his jail cell. Before parting he let Bell know that there was a small amount of that potion leftover and he had hidden it in his apartment. Bell got a search warrant, it didn’t take long for a couple of our guys to find it, and Vincent Broadhead was, at that very moment, analyzing the stuff. Vinnie was our coroner, however, due to budget restraints he also doubled as our police chemist. “There may be a delay,” I was told. Vincent Broadhead was muddled because, so far, the stuff was evading all his known tests for common poisons.
Delay or no delay I told Bell to stay put, get on the horn and find out where J
udge Spicer was hanging out that morning. If Vinnie came up with the right dope, we were going to need another warrant. This one for the arrest of you know who?
I put on my hat and jacket and bent over to give Allison a kiss goodbye. I wanted to kiss Angel as well, but not in front of the kid.
“Where are you going Daddy?” she implored. “Can’t you stay home. I don’t have school today.”
“Sorry Sweetheart but I have work to do.”
Allison turned and smiled at Angel. “Daddy is going to shoot some perp in the ass.”
“Don’t talk like that honey; it is not lady like,” Angel cautioned.
“Do as Miss Nora says Sweetheart, father is off to find a murderer.”
***
Doc Armitage came through again. When I arrived at Station House 13, I learned that he had called and found what he believed to be the recipe we were searching for in that old book. The potion could be a powder made from the bark of what was called the Belephegor tree. Never heard of it, they had to spell it for me, but Vinnie was on the ball. He knew of it, and that told him where to look. An hour went by and Vinnie, our resident egotist, kindled by an evident discovery, strutted into my office with a test tube in one hand and a written report in the other. He didn’t wait for me to say, “Hi Vinnie.”
“It’s from the Belephegor tree all right!” he declared.
“You’re certain?” I challenged.
“Absolutely! The Belephegor tree is very rare. It is only known to exist on a group of islands off the Malabar Coast.”
“Cut the geography lesson, Vinnie, will it kill you?”
“Most certainly,” pretending to be insulted. “It takes several days for it to become effective, but with the right dosage, it can cause hemorrhaging, internal bleeding, at the very least permanent brain damage.”
