Arkham Horror- Ire of the Void

by Richard Lee Byers

  Up close, the farmhouse and barn looked as abandoned as before. The barn had big doors on the front where wagons, traction engines, and such had presumably gone in and out. Schmidt ignored the large doors in favor of a smaller entrance around the side. He tried the knob, and the door opened.

  The dark space inside still smelled of hay, but it was not open and empty the way Norman expected. As he and Schmidt stepped inside, the flashlights’ circles of glow flowed across stacks of wooden crates on pallets. He was still trying to figure out exactly what they had stumbled across when a baritone voice barked, “Don’t move!”

  Norman turned toward the sound. A square-jawed young man in his shirtsleeves and braces was aiming a pistol at the intruders. Behind him, too far away for Norman to have noticed its light from outside, a hurricane lantern sat on a small table where it illuminated a pack of Lucky Strikes, an overflowing ashtray, and a facedown issue of Western Stories Weekly.

  “Don’t shoot!” Norman exclaimed. It was all he could think of to say.

  The gunman peered at them. “You don’t look like cops. Or hijackers, neither.”

  “We’re scientists,” Norman said, his pulse beating in his neck. “I’m Professor Norman from Miskatonic, and this is Professor Schmidt from the University of Berlin. We came here for purposes of research. We thought the property was abandoned.”

  “Well, it ain’t,” the guard replied. “And Old Sadie Sheldon don’t like others sniffin’ around his properties.” According to the Arkham Advertiser, Sheldon was a bootlegger, so the crates presumably held Canadian whiskey. “And now that you’ve seen that, what the hell am I supposed to do with you?”

  “Nothing?” Norman ventured.

  “Oh, yeah? How does that work?”

  “Why would we talk to the police?” Norman asked. “We enjoy a drink the same as anybody else, whereas we don’t care for the prospect of experiencing whatever it is that Mr. Sheldon does to informers.”

  The gangster grunted. “Okay, that’s smart. Scram. And remember, you told me your names.”

  Schmidt cleared his throat. “Actually, now that we’re here, may we proceed with our investigation? We won’t disturb the merchandise or do anything that would draw attention.”

  The bootlegger frowned. “I don’t know much about science, but ain’t the whole idea to tell people what you figure out?”

  “Yes,” Norman said, “but we might not find anything in this particular location. We may just check it and cross it off our list. If we do discover something of interest, we’ll still say nothing without Mr. Sheldon’s approval. You have my word.”

  The guard stood and pondered while scratching his cheek with the muzzle of his automatic. Finally he said, “Go on, then. But don’t take all night, and leave the brown alone. I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

  “Thank you,” Schmidt said, and then, in a softer voice, as he set down the valise, “Nice work double shuffling him, old boy. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  Norman smiled. “Maybe your bad example is rubbing off on me. I take it we’re following the usual procedure?”

  “Actually,” said Schmidt, “I hope to find a shortcut. The disappearance of Zachariah Mayhew—the son—differed from the others we’ve investigated in one respect. He left behind a pool of blood on the floor.”

  The satisfaction Norman had felt at persuading the hoodlum, and at Schmidt’s approval, gave way to a fresh pang of trepidation. Annoyed with himself and trying to resist the resurgence of his timidity, he said, “Then we look for a stain. If we find one, that’s the right area in which to start recording weights.”

  “Exactly,” Schmidt replied.

  Shining his flashlight on the floor, Norman headed down one of the aisles between the stacks of liquor crates. The edginess was trying to worm its way back into his head and he felt an urge to hurry, to be done with this task and away, but he made himself go slowly anyway. With the boxes blocking the yellow glow of the guard’s lantern, the barn was even darker than before. The bloodstain, if still present at all, was likely to be faded and difficult to distinguish from the general dust and grime. If he did not proceed carefully, he might very well miss it.

  From time to time, a shadow with a single luminous eye appeared at the end of an aisle to make him flinch and squint at the glare. It was the hoodlum, prowling with lantern in hand to make sure the scientists were not opening any of the whiskey crates. The bootlegger did not appear very often, however. Apparently, he had decided his uninvited guests truly were harmless, and he was enjoying the stories in his cowboy pulp.

  Somewhat more frequently, a band of rain fell hard enough to rattle on the roof, or the wind gusted hard enough to make the old barn groan and creak. The former sounded like claws tapping. Rats—or something bigger than rats—scuttled nearby but out of sight. The latter made Norman imagine the unknown force of Schmidt’s hypothesis pulling apart the juncture of two walls to reveal a gash in the flesh of the world itself.

  Idiocy. Norman had to get hold of himself. He halted and took several deep breaths. His heartbeat slowed, and some of the tension shivered out of his limbs. Then someone screamed.

  Norman recognized the voice, although the wordless cry of terror was unlike anything he had heard it produce hitherto. “Schmidt?” he called.

  “Run!” the physicist wailed. The next instant, he shrieked again.

  “What the hell!” the bootlegger shouted. With that, he was presumably up and moving to discover the reason for the disturbance.

  Norman yearned to do as Schmidt had bade him and flee, but he couldn’t just abandon the German. Resisting the lure of possible escape as if it, too, were some sort of gravitational anomaly, he managed to take a step in a different direction, and then another after that.

  Due to the way sound echoed beneath the high roof and through the aisles of crates, he hadn’t been able to tell exactly where Schmidt’s cries originated, but he suspected it was somewhere near one of the far corners of the barn. Breathing in short little rasps, he crept toward the closer of the two. The pattering he’d heard before returned and now seemed to move with him, as though the phantom rat pack he’d imagined previously was stalking him.

  Amber light pushed at the gloom ahead. The guard stepped into the intersection of Norman’s aisle with his automatic leveled and his lantern held high.

  Norman drew breath to call out to the other man, but before he could, the guard let out a yelp. His eyes wide, he stretched out his shooting arm and fired three times.

  A moment later, he lowered the automatic, and Norman’s shoulders slumped in relief. The bootlegger’s behavior seemed to indicate the gunfire had killed the source of his cries or had at least alarmed it into retreat.

  Then wood crashed, and glass shattered. Startled, Norman peered about in an effort to find the source of the new disturbance. The bootlegger did the same, then hastily backpedaled out of sight. As he disappeared, he raised his pistol and fired upward.

  Ahead of Norman and to his right, stacks of crates swayed. Dark shapes leaped to the stacks on the left in what seemed to be a pursuit of the gunman. The forms were sufficiently high above Norman’s flashlight beam and departed so quickly that his eyes registered nothing more than a surge of movement. But their mass and the vigor of their springing dislodged the upper boxes, and the crates smashed to the floor.

  More shots rang out. Additional crates fell. Silence followed. Norman crept up to the intersection and peered around the corner.

  There was nothing to see but a splash of light where the bootlegger had tried to retreat down a different aisle. The glow wasn’t dimming however, which meant both the lantern, and the man who carried it, had stopped moving. Norman imagined the man lying torn and dead with something crouching over him.

  Surely poor Schmidt had been the first to die. Norman would be crazy to linger in this place a moment longer. Worried fear would make him clumsy, noisy, he gathered himself to sneak toward the exit. Then the physicist resumed his shrieki
ng.

  Convinced that whatever had killed the bootlegger would rush to silence Schmidt’s cries, and in so doing charge within arm’s reach of him, Norman flattened himself against the wall of crates. The cringing, reflexive action produced a thump, and the stack above him began to rock and sway, making his discovery seem all the more likely.

  But nothing came. Maybe the things were too eager to eat the bootlegger to react to Schmidt’s screams or, in this isolated location with rain falling, wind blowing, and thunder booming outside, didn’t regard the racket as cause for concern.

  Whatever the explanation, Schmidt was still alive, and perhaps Norman could help him to safety without the things being any the wiser. At least the ongoing cries now revealed the German’s approximate location. It was near one of the corners of the barn, precisely where Norman’s colleague had expected to find the source of the anomalies.

  With the smells of gun smoke and spilled whiskey now hanging in the air, Norman skulked across the intersection. Just get there, he told himself, just get there. It’s only a few more steps.

  That was true, but unfortunately, the walls of crates would make it impossible to catch even a glimpse of what awaited until he was quite close indeed. As he approached the end of an aisle, vapor, invisible except for where it tainted the white beam of the flashlight, swirled through the air. For an instant, he imagined it was smoke, but he didn’t know what would have started a fire. The hoodlum and his hurricane lantern were behind him, not ahead.

  An instant later, he caught a whiff of the vapor and all but gagged in revulsion. The stench was also suggestive of smoke in that it called to mind the incineration of a rotting corpse. Norman had never smelled such a thing, but had he attempted to imagine it, he might have hit on something foul and acrid like this.

  Holding his breath, he peeked around the end of the stacks of crates and spied Schmidt at last.

  Or rather, Norman spied most of him.

  Still screaming despite growing hoarse and short of breath, Schmidt lay on his belly in the corner with his upper body pointed outward. His hands clutched and scrabbled at the floor. From points midway down the calves, his legs were simply absent, as if sticking out a hole in the wall of the barn. But there was no such opening, merely denser twists of the malodorous fog.

  Schmidt hitched backward, gradually losing the struggle to anchor himself as something pulled him into nothingness. Breaking cover, Norman dashed forward to grab his colleague’s hand and haul him free.

  As though Schmidt’s unseen captor had been only toying with him hitherto—or as if it had waited for Norman’s arrival to tease and frustrate him—the German’s body shot backward faster than the older man could close the distance. The corner swallowed Schmidt’s torso, head, arms, clawing hands, and then nothing at all remained.

  8

  Off balance as he was, Norman couldn’t stop in time to avoid banging into the juncture of the two walls. The impact jolted him and bounced him reeling backward, as a collision with solid matter should.

  He stepped forward again and, hands shaking, stooped to examine the base of the walls, which was to say, the exact spot through which Schmidt had disappeared. It was as solid as the walls that surrounded it.

  An instant later, a sense of malevolent attention pierced him through. As though, having dealt with Schmidt to its satisfaction, the physicist’s abductor had swung its head back toward the camouflage behind which it hid like a trapdoor spider. Then it howled.

  Partly, the cry hurt Norman’s ears as any loud noise would. But there was also a component of it that seemed to rip directly into the mind itself.

  Other howls answered. The things still in the barn were signaling their readiness to deal with him. He bolted.

  After several strides, he realized his flashlight was likely to help his pursuers find him. Fumbling, he clicked it off and could see nothing. He continued in what he thought was the right direction and banged face first into what must be a stack of crates. He gasped, less at the jolt of pain than at the telltale noise.

  Blundering onward, he ran the fingertips of one hand over the rough wood of the crates. It helped him avoid another collision but didn’t avert the moment when a panicky sense of disorientation suddenly overwhelmed him. Exactly where was he in the barn? Was he still moving toward an exit? And where were the creatures? Their howling was hideous, terrifying, but at least it had provided some vague sense of their location. Now he could hear nothing but the clatter of rain on the roof.

  His fingers slipped from splintery wood to empty air. He’d reached the end of a wall of crates. He groped forward and pushed against a barrier. Believing it to be a barn wall, he started to turn away, then realized it had given ever so slightly under the pressure of his hands.

  He reached lower and found a bar in brackets. He’d blundered his way to the big double doors and, thank the Lord, only this simple mechanism secured them. He was going to get away!

  He grabbed hold of the bar, shoved it, and it stuck. Either it, the brackets, or both were warped and swollen.

  The creatures howled anew. They had spotted him, and they were coming.

  Screaming, he pushed with all his might, and, scraping and squealing, the bar slid sideways. He threw himself at the door on the left, knocked it open, stumbled through, and sprinted toward the road.

  Every instant of the way, he expected a thing to overtake him and rip him apart, or drag him shrieking through a hole in the world. It was only when he had the Bearcat speeding as fast as the sixteen-valve, four cylinder engine could manage that he decided that, for whatever reason, the creatures had abandoned the chase. Then tears blurred the darkened road and the lights of Arkham ahead. He pulled over and broke down sobbing.

  9

  Seated across the table from Norman, the pages of the astronomer’s typed and signed statement lying between them, Sheriff Engle took another drink of coffee. As Norman had previously discovered, the stuff tasted awful, but with his bloodshot eyes, puffy lids, and unshaven jowls, the lawman looked like he needed it, and that was understandable. Some subordinate had woken him in the middle of the night to report that one of the professors from the university had turned up raving about a vanished German, a harrowing chase, and the Lord only knew what else.

  In truth, Norman lived and worked in Arkham and had automatically run to the Arkham Police Department in Easttown. There, however, the man on the night desk, one Officer Galeas, determined the “incident” had occurred beyond the city limits and, radiating a certain mischievous relish, handed him off to the Sheriff’s Department, who conveniently shared the same building.

  Lanky, with a thatch of straw-colored hair, Deputy Dingby looked as dyspeptic as his superior and with an arguably better reason: the sheriff had tasked him with visiting the barn where Schmidt had disappeared. As a result, he was now as rain-soaked and disheveled as he was tired.

  “Well,” the sheriff said, addressing Norman, “you’ve had some time to think.” He didn’t add or sober up, but Norman suspected the latter possibility was in his thoughts. “Do you want to change your story?”

  “No,” Norman answered. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that his account was unbelievable. But when a man was abducted before one’s eyes, by whatever and to wherever, what was there to do but report it to the authorities?

  “You sure?” the sheriff persisted. “Because I can imagine it happening this way. You and this German fella drank some bad coffin varnish and went a little crazy. Started seeing things. He got scared and ran off through the fields. Once he comes to his senses, he’ll likely turn up. If not, we can track him down in the daylight.”

  Norman shook his head. “It all happened just the way I told you.”

  “With holes in the world.”

  “Yes.”

  “And monsters.”

  “Yes.”

  “Although you didn’t really ever see either of those things.”

  Norman hesitated. “I saw Professor Schmidt slide thro
ugh the discontinuity. Apparently a person can’t see the breach itself.”

  “You saw him go through. But when you felt around the spot just a second later, the walls were solid.”

  “Yes. Still, there has to be some kind of evidence.” Norman turned to Deputy Dingby. “You searched. What did you find?”

  Sheriff Engle waved a hand in a gesture of acquiescence. “Sure, why not? Run it down for us, Deputy.”

  “Well,” the deputy said, “the black case with the scale and such was there. So were umbrellas, flashlights, a lantern, a pulp cowboy magazine, and all that whiskey, some of the crates fallen and broken open.” He smiled a crooked smile. “The Prohibition Agents are going to be happy.”

  The sheriff made a spitting sound. “That’s wonderful, Deputy. I live to make the prohis happy. But what’s important here and now is that we can be fairly sure the two professors really were there like our witness claims. Maybe the bootlegger guard, too. Now let’s hear the things you didn’t find. My guess is that bodies are at the top of the list.”

  The deputy took a breath. “That’s right, sir. There were no bodies.”

  “There wouldn’t have been,” Norman said, “if the creatures dragged them back through the breaches.”

  “Any big pools and splashes of blood,” the sheriff asked, “where it looked like somebody got mauled? Like by a bear or a rabid dog or something?”

  Deputy Dingby swallowed. “No.”

  “What about the mysterious holes? Did you tap around in the corners like I told you to?”

  “Yes, sir. Everything was solid.”

  The sheriff looked at Norman and spread his hands palms up. “There you have it.”

  Norman fixed his gaze on the deputy. “When Sheriff Engle asked about bodies, you hesitated. When he asked about pools of blood, you did it again. I don’t accuse you of lying outright, but I believe you held back something.”

  The deputy hesitated once more, obviously torn between the inclination to be honest and the desire to please his boss by helping to speed the importunate crackpot academic on his way.