Arkham Horror- The Deep Gate

by Chris A. Jackson

  Emerging from the narrow alley onto River Street, Silas glanced back the way he’d come with the practiced vigilance of a world traveler. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he told Abigail that the waterfront spawned some rough characters, and he’d learned the hard way to watch his back after being shanghaied once in Montevideo. Silas was a big man, his arms and chest well-muscled with years of labor, and although he’d had a couple of drinks, he was far from drunk. If someone jumped him, they’d better be toting iron or they’d be in for a surprise.

  Back in the alley, the gleam of light on something silvery caught his eye. A car clattered by on the street, and the light of its headlamps swept into the alley for a moment. A hunch-shouldered figure stood there, its large eyes and a wide mouth illuminated for an instant. Silas blinked, shaking off a shiver of familiarity, and moved on. Probably just some rum-soaked old sot. But he hadn’t noticed anyone there when he’d left the speakeasy.

  Silas crossed River Street, striding east along the quay. He cast another covert glance over his shoulder. The stooped figure stood at the mouth of the alley he’d just left, cloaked in a slicker and hat, collar turned up against the rain, face in shadow. Following me? But the man just stood there as if waiting…or watching.

  Silas wasn’t sure whether his uneasiness was due to his encounter with Abigail, or his usual discomfort with dry land under his boots. He knew well how to cure that uneasiness, however, and shake off any ne’er-do-well trying to stalk him at the same time.

  Silas stepped aboard Sea Change, slipped her stern line, then ducked into the cabin and stowed his sodden shirt in the wet locker. Feeling better already with the motion of the river under his boots and cool air against his skin, he knelt, opened the engine room hatch, primed the carburetor, and hauled on the crank start. The engine sputtered to life. He closed the hatch and reached over to feel the belly of the stove. It was warm, but not hot, and he’d want coffee. A wad of newspaper, a few sticks of dry kindling, and a match quickly resurrected the flame. While the stove and the engine warmed up, he filled the percolator and secured the pot in the fiddles on the stove, then shoved a few more sticks of wood into the fire.

  Ready to go.

  Striding up to the pilot house, Silas jammed the shifter into forward and revved the engine up just enough to take the tension off the bow line. He flipped the switch that ignited the boat’s electric running lights and stepped out of the pilothouse door. Shielding his eye from the rain, he scanned the river for traffic and found it clear; apparently no one else was crazy enough to be on the water on such a foul night. Glancing up and down the quay, he saw no one. Either his stalker had given up, or he’d been imagining it. A flick unwound the bow line from the piling and he stepped back into the pilothouse. Silas freed up the wheel, eased her to port, and pulled Sea Change out into the turbulent waters of the Miskatonic, pointing her bow downriver. Glancing back at the quay again, he saw a few bargemen or longshoremen hurrying this way and that, bent against the rain, but no one watching him. Just my imagination.

  Silas squinted through the rain-streaked windows into the storm, silently cursing his lost eye. Navigating the Miskatonic in the dark was challenging enough, adding a nor’easter elevated the risk, and doing so without decent depth perception made it even worse. The tide should have slacked by now, but it was still ebbing hard.

  Sea Change shot under the Peabody Avenue Bridge like a bullet from a gun. As the lights of Arkham passed astern, his vision improved. Once he cleared the Rivertown bend, and trees lined the shore instead of houses, Silas turned the boat up current and eased her over to the northern shore into a familiar anchorage.

  Silas kicked Sea Change out of gear and strode up to the bow. The boat immediately drifted downriver, but the release of the brake on the windlass sent seventy pounds of anchor and thirty feet of heavy chain plunging to the bottom. He paid out another couple hundred feet of anchor rode, then secured it. The line came taut and the boat lurched around into the flow.

  Silas stood there in the rain awhile, watching the shore to make sure the anchor held. Rain trickled through his hair, down his shoulders and back, washing away his unease, the comforting roll of the deck beneath his boots massaging his soul. The Miskatonic wasn’t the sea, but at least he was on the water.

  Content that the anchor was set, Silas ducked back into the cabin to the intoxicating scent of percolating coffee. He toweled off, cleaned up the wet floor, lit a kerosene anchor lamp, and shut off the boat’s running lights. The engine wheezed to silence as he shut it down, and the blustery howl of the nor’easter settled in. Kicking off his sodden boots and soaked pants, he hung them to drip in the wet locker, wrapped the towel around his waist, and poured himself a cup of java. From the cupboard beneath the table, he liberated a bottle labeled “Medicinal Spiritus Frumenti,” and topped off his cup. The scent of Canadian whiskey mingled with that of coffee. The first sip of the heady brew set his teeth on edge, just the tonic he needed to sharpen his mind for the task at hand.

  Sitting at the chart table, Silas pulled out his own tomes—The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac for 1926 and the current volume of declination tables. The almanac contained the positions of the sun, moon, planets, and certain stars for every hour of every day of the year, and tables for calculating adjustments down to the second. The declination tables gave him the ability to convert the angles of these sightings, with some laborious calculations, into angular distances from the celestial equator, and thence into latitude and longitude. Each fix had two sightings, which added accuracy by simple triangulation.

  For the author of Abigail’s prophecy in 1540 to give the stellar data for a position on Earth four hundred years in the future would have been impossible, which was why he didn’t expect the calculations to yield anything but gibberish. Silas copied Abigail’s data onto a sheet of paper and began the meticulous process that would transform the numbers into latitude and longitude. He was no mathematician, but long practice had made these calculations so familiar that he had little trouble. Still, they were involved, and he found his unease dwindling even further with the occupation of his mind.

  Silas’s brow furrowed as he finished the first fix. The result actually gave a meaningful location, and somewhere in the northwest Atlantic at that. Well, the accompanying stellar fix would certainly tell the tale. He ran through the calculations and stopped cold. For a moment, he thought he’d run the same fix twice, but when he rechecked, he found that wasn’t the case.

  Someone’s pulling a fast one, he thought, for the two locations he’d calculated weren’t just close, they were identical. Nobody took fixes that accurately, even in perfect conditions with modern equipment. This had to be some well-planned hoax. Well, we’ll see just how deep this hoax goes.

  Silas started on the second set of data. The time of the sighting was two days nearer than the first, and the third set was a day closer than that one. He smirked as he ran the numbers. It sure seemed like someone was trying to scare Abigail.

  The numbers resolved and again he stared in disbelief. “Well blow me down.” The position denoted was exactly the same as the first two, right down to the minute and second of longitude and latitude. He gritted his teeth and ran the next fix, knowing what he’d find. Sure enough, it came up the same.

  Now for the ones I watched her copy from the book.

  He ran the numbers meticulously, forcing himself to be careful. When they both came up exactly the same as the others, he sat back with a snort of disgust. “Impossible. It’s got to be a trick!” But why would anyone try to pull such a trick on a librarian?

  The position was somewhere near New England, north of Boston. Working up all the numbers from different times and sightings would have been a monumental task, and if someone were really trying to scare her, the location would have been someplace she knew, like her apartment or the library. He remembered her mentioning an astronomer at the university, but couldn’t think of any reason why someone like that would want to scare a
librarian?

  There was only one more thing to do: find that location on a chart.

  Downing his whiskey-spiked coffee and putting the cup aside, Silas rifled through his store of charts beneath the table’s hinged top. He chose two, one that displayed the coast from Boston to Cape Ann, and another from the Cape to the Merrimack River. Laying them flat and checking the latitude of his calculation, he knew instantly the spot would be north of Cape Ann. He picked a pair of dividers and parallel rulers from the rack of tools.

  “Forty-two, forty-two, point oh three…” He walked off the latitude on the chart’s sidebar and drew a line with his ruler. “Zero seven zero, forty-five, point nine.” Another line marked the longitude, and they crossed just east of the mouth of Plum Island Sound and the town of Innsmouth.

  Silas dropped his pencil, coffee roiling in his stomach. “Devil Reef.”

  He knew those waters well, having fished them in his youth. They were some of the best fishing grounds north of Cape Ann, and the main Marsh family did not suffer outsiders plying those waters. He’d heard stories aplenty about that reef, from ghost ships wrecked there in centuries past, to more recent reports during the war of strange lights beneath the water, and even figures dancing on the exposed reef at low tide when the moon was new.

  Sailors were a superstitious lot, and Silas had heard tales of ghosts and haunts from Singapore to Maine, but the locals of Innsmouth believed the tales about Devil Reef. He had always considered the stories nothing but superstitious drivel contrived to keep strangers away, but all the same, he took heed. Silas fished his old logbook from under the table and started flipping pages, looking for his notes on Devil Reef.

  But why would someone concoct such an elaborate hoax to fool a librarian into thinking the end of the world was going to take place there?

  Something thumped hard against the hull, and Sea Change lurched on her anchor, snapping Silas out of his musing. He was up in a heartbeat, dropping his logbook and reaching for his powerful electric lamp. The last thing I need is a floating stump to foul the anchor line or damage the rudder! Pulling on his sodden pants, he turned down the cabin lamp so the light wouldn’t ruin his view outside, and stepped out into the storm.

  Silas shone his light over each side and the stern but saw only turbid brown water. He went forward through the cabin and out the pilothouse door, checked the anchor line, and found it tight. Shielding his eye from the slashing rain and peering into the gloom, he noted that the few lights on the far shore weren’t changing position. At least the anchor’s not dragging. He relaxed a little. Sea Change wagged back and forth as the wind and current fought for control over the small boat, but the impact of something heavy hitting the hull had been unmistakable. Flotsam floated past: tree limbs, trash, even an old boot, but nothing large enough to cause that kind of lurch.

  Must have been a log or something, he resolved, squinting into the distance looking for larger floating debris. Something silvery flashed beneath the surface, a roil of water, then nothing. Sea Change lurched again, swinging hard on her anchor, but this time there was no thump against the hull.

  Just the current and wind playing hay with her now, he concluded, but something had hit the boat before. “Anchoring out in the river in a nor’easter, Silas? You’re lucky you weren’t hit by a barge broken loose!” The tide still seemed to be ebbing harder than it should. With this rain, the river would continue to run, but the shift of tide should have eased the flow by now. He had no option but to ride it out, as motoring back upriver to town and docking in the dark would be more dangerous than staying put. He scanned the dark river once again but saw nothing.

  Ducking back through the pilothouse to the main cabin, thinking of another whiskey-laced coffee, Silas reached up for the overhead lamp but then froze. His chart, logbook, the papers with his calculations, and the notes from Abigail were gone, and there was water all over the table.

  “Who the hell…” He whirled to shine his light down into the fo’c’sle, but there was nobody there. He’d just come through the pilothouse, and there was no place to hide there either. He turned back to direct the light out the aft door onto the deck. The cabin floor was wet. He’d walked through from the aft deck, and his wet footprints were clear, but there was a second set beside his that went to the chart table, then forward to the engine compartment hatch.

  Somebody came aboard, but there’s no other boat out here. Silas would have seen one when he was on the bow. How could anyone have gotten aboard? Then he realized the more pressing question: And are they still aboard?

  Silas stepped to the cabinet opposite the wet locker and pulled out the heavy knife he kept there, pausing to consider grabbing the double-barreled Remington secured to the bulkhead inside. Best not, he thought. He had to explore below and needed one hand to carry the lantern. Besides, firing a shotgun aboard a boat below the waterline was a great way to blow a hole in the hull. No, for the engine compartment and the fo’c’sle, the knife was better.

  Working his way forward, shining his light on the deck, he saw that the wet footprints were larger than his own and splayed wide at the toe. They stopped at the engine compartment hatch, but he couldn’t tell if they went back out the aft door. Someone standing there could see through the pilothouse windows to the foredeck, and they might have stood here watching him. Suppressing the urge to call out in an attempt to scare the intruder off, he slipped the knife through his belt and bent to grip the handle of the engine room hatch. Taking a deep breath, he jerked the hatch open and shone his light down into the compartment.

  Nothing but a wave of heat and a greasy old engine greeted him. A quick visual check revealed no intruder, no wet footprints, and nothing obviously tampered with, so he closed the compartment and continued his search. There were no more wet footprints forward except his own, but he checked the pilothouse and the fo’c’sle as well. Finding nothing out of place, and no more signs anyone had been there, he returned to the main cabin. The water on the table and missing papers confirmed that this wasn’t some hallucination induced by bad hooch, but who would steal a bunch of papers?

  “And how the hell did you get aboard?”

  Silas went back over his departure from the Arkham quay in his mind. Could someone have gotten aboard and hidden someplace while he started the engine? It was possible someone could have leapt from the quay to the cabin roof, although he would have heard the thump or felt the boat lurch. He looked up, as if he could see through the cabin roof. Could they have climbed back up there?

  Now’s the time for some firepower. He traded his knife for the Remington, checked the loads, and worked out how to hold both the gun and the lamp. He shone the light across the aft deck from the door, saw nothing, then readied the shotgun and backed out with the twin barrels aimed up at the roof. The powerful lamp shone over the edge of the roof, but there was nothing up there but the stays securing the mast, the overhead boom, the stove’s smokestack trailing a streamer of wood smoke, and sheets of slashing rain. Lastly, he checked the fish hold, but that, too, was empty. He scanned the river once again. Even if the intruder had stowed away somehow, they couldn’t have gotten away. He would have heard another boat, even with the howling wind. That left only one possibility: someone had slipped over the side to swim away, fighting the current, the rain, and the storm.

  “Crazy…”

  Back inside the cabin, Silas wiped the Remington down with an oilcloth, secured it, and bolted the aft cabin door. He secured the pilothouse door as well, then turned up the cabin lamp and put away his electric light. After toweling dry, he wiped up the water on the cabin sole and table as well, stowing his books and tools. Lastly, he checked the anchor lamp to make sure it had enough kerosene, then took his lantern and the heavy knife forward to the fo’c’sle and lay down in his bunk. Turning down the lamp, he settled in, listening to the howling wind and the burble of water flowing past the hull. The haft of the heavy knife in his hand felt solid and comforting.

  No more bumps o
r unusual lurches rocked Sea Change, just the roll of the boat swaying on her anchor, and the mournful moan of the strengthening nor’easter overhead. For Silas, this was as soothing as any lullaby, and he soon found his tension easing and his eyes drooping closed.

  As sleep took him, however, nightmare faces loomed out of the darkness, bulbous eyes and wide mouths grinning with needle teeth, but he didn’t know if he was dreaming or being plagued by visions of the illustrations in Abigail Foreman’s book.

  Chapter Three

  The Orne Library

  Silas stepped up onto the Arkham quay feeling a strange sense of deja vu; the nor’easter still roared, the river still ran like a millrace, Sea Change was docked in exactly the same spot, and he was again going to talk with Abigail Foreman. If not for the fact that his chart, logbook, and Abigail’s notes were still missing, he might have convinced himself that he’d dreamed yesterday’s odd events.

  He crossed River Street and started for the university, splashing through the rain-soaked streets. One block up, he turned onto Main Street and started west. There weren’t many people out, and those who were shot him curious looks from under umbrellas or hunkered in raincoats. The damp didn’t bother him, long used to working days at sea soaked to the bone, but city folk probably thought he was daft.

  Abigail had told him to ask for her at the main information desk of Orne Library. Silas had been to the library only once before and didn’t relish visiting again. The librarians hadn’t been very friendly. Maybe they’d be less prickly this time since he was just there to see Abigail, not touch any of their priceless treasures. What would Abigail’s reaction be when he told her someone had stolen his charts, pages of calculations, logbook, and her notes. Would she even believe him? Regardless, she would positively flip her lid when he told her all three sets of celestial fixes had pointed to the same spot.