Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 2

by Various Authors

  “Of course.” Ghost slides the sketch into its envelope. “So whereabouts is this thing anyway?”

  “If we knew that, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “I just mean, do you have a city? A country even?”

  “We do not.”

  “Okay.” Ghost gnaws on her lower lip. “You know I only find lost things, right? Not stolen, not given away and regretted, not belonging to someone else. The lost or forgotten, that’s my jam.”

  Ms Thurston pushes back her chair and stands. “Oh, it is definitely lost.”

  “By you?”

  The old woman laughs. “Do I seem so ancient?”

  “You might look, ah, younger than expected.”

  “Touché, Ghost.” She extends her hand for Ghost to shake. “Not lost by me, no. But the organisation I run has a claim.”

  The woman’s hand is dry and warm; her grip is firm. Ghost likes that, but still. “I don’t know if I can take the job,” she says. “There isn’t a lot here to work with.”

  “You might find there’s more than you think.”

  “I’ll let you know in a couple of days?”

  Ms Thurston nods. “Lavinia will escort you out.”

  As Ghost follows the woman past the bookshelves, she feels it. A faint, familiar twang in her belly, like an elastic band pulled tight. She pauses. There, somewhere there. She reaches out, runs her fingertips across several nearby spines. Twang. That one, the dark blue. Blue as the darkling sky, blue as the collar on a four-year-old’s first school uniform, blue as drowning.

  “Was there something else?” Ms Thurston calls.

  Ghost turns around, book in hand. “Maybe,” she says, returning to the woman still standing behind the desk. “Maybe something for you. In here, I think.”

  The older woman glances past Ghost, making a silent exchange with Lavinia, no doubt. Then she takes the book and flicks slowly through its pages. When she finds the piece of paper, loose and lined, clearly torn from a spiral-bound pad, her face comes close to crumpling. But only close. She turns the page around, so that Ghost can see the little boat drawn in a child’s hand, its sail a bold triangle coloured in blue ink. “My grandson’s work. We were taking him sailing that weekend.” Ms Thurston clears her throat. “Quite the party trick, you have there.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ghost says. “I didn’t mean—”

  “No.” Waving her hand in dismissal, even as she turns toward the window. “I’ve been missing it. Thank you.”

  Lavinia taps Ghost on the shoulder, ushers her wordlessly from the room and down the hall to the elevator. “Jesus,” she says once they’re inside. “You’re the real fucking deal.”

  “I guess I am,” Ghost replies, noting as she had when Lavinia had brought her up, the lack of names next to any of the buttons. Just floor numbers. Her mouth feels dry, but at least the pounding in her head seems to be retreating. “Tell me the truth, Lavinia. If I’d been…what’s the word she used? Covetous? If I’d been covetous back there, with the stone, I mean…would I even have been allowed to leave?”

  It’s an odd smile that quirks the tall woman’s mouth. Like a predator thwarted, yet somehow glad of it.

  “But you weren’t covetous,” Lavinia says. “So you needn’t worry about that.”

  In the lobby, she passes Ghost a business card. It’s white, with a capital L written in a fancy black script, along with a mobile number and—

  “A Gmail address?”

  “You don’t need to know who we are just yet.”

  “Okay.” Ghost takes the card, tucks it into her back pocket. She stares out at the busy, oblivious street, waiting just a few steps beyond those glass sliding doors. There’s a question she wants to ask, even though it already sounds stupid in her head. For some reason, she needs to ask it. “You’re the good guys in this, though, right?”

  Lavinia laughs. It would take a long time to get sick of a laugh like that, maybe even forever. “Seriously, Ghost? Who on earth doesn’t think they’re the good guys?”

  When 3am ticks over and she’s still wide awake, Ghost kicks off the blankets and rolls out of bed. Half a dozen steps carry her to the cabinet next to the sink where she keeps the Chartreuse, and she swigs a mouthful straight from the bottle. It’s ghastly stuff, but she trusts it to give insomnia a solid punch in the guts. She shouldn’t have taken the job. It’s too weird, even for her, and she doesn’t have the slightest lead about the creepy little statue. Not even a whiff of intuition. She told Cassidy as much that afternoon, calling in while she waited out a sulky London shower beneath an awning several blocks away from her meeting with Ms Thurston.

  You need to wrangle me out of this one.

  They already wired a down payment. For expenses.

  When Cassidy told her how much, as well as the additional finder’s fee she’d negotiated for successful completion, Ghost slumped back against the wall. It was more than she’d been paid for any job before, more than she’d been paid for a year of jobs. Cassidy had earned her cut on this one.

  Still there, G? Want me to bounce it back?

  Fuck, no. Tasting the folly in her words even as she spoke them. Tell them I’m in.

  Ghost takes a second swig of Chartreuse and grimaces. Across the room, stuck to the pinboard above her desk, the sketch from Ms Thurston mocks her. There’s enough moonlight coming in through the window to illuminate the pencilled outline of the creature squatting—

  —on the ground, head turned in her direction, tentacles writhing about a maw that opens—

  Ghost blinks and takes a lurching step toward her desk, then laughs. The sketch is unchanged, the octo-goyle-thing still perched on its pedestal, looking off to the left through wide lidless eyes. She’s tired, running a sleep deficit she feels like she’ll never pay off, seeing trouble where there isn’t any. Maybe after this job, she can rest. Go somewhere there’s lots of sun and no lost things begging to be found.

  go home

  The voice a whisper more in her head than her ears, and Ghost swivels around to see a shadowy figure sitting on the edge of her bed. No, not shadowy—dark, as if no light can touch it, though she can make out the sheets tangled around it well enough. The figure stands, fluid and sinuous, taller than a human should be and thinner, willowy, one too-long arm stretching out as it slides a pace in her direction and—

  go home

  Ghost hears again, feels again, and she stumbles back as the figure unfurls its elongated hand to reveal a sigil glowing so bright it hurts to look at: an eye cold and fathomless, reptilian almost but no, not reptilian, not anything that belongs on this earth. In a breath, the figure is right before her, that impossible hand on her chest now, pushing hard—

  go home

  —and now she is falling, icy water closing around her as she struggles to find the surface, but everything is dark now, an utter blackness that has never known the touch of light, and her throat clogs with mud and silt, and still she is falling

  —falling, awake with a jolt. Gasping for air, Ghost rolls over and promptly falls again, a short drop this time from couch to floor but the landing is hard enough to bruise. She lies there, blinking in the grey morning light for a few moments, before registering the liquid soaking into her shirt and the sickly-sharp smell of Chartreuse filling the room.

  “Fuck.” Ghost spots the bottle under the coffee table, most of its expensive green contents now spreading over the floorboards. She rescues it anyway, wondering where the hell the cap wound up, and gets to her feet. The eye sigil is scorched onto her retinas and not even a tentative sip of Chartreuse can wash the taste of river mud from her mouth.

  Go home.

  Ghost shudders. Her phone’s on charge by the bed but her hands are shaking so much it takes three attempts to send Cassidy a coherent message. Need flight to Melbourne, Aus, she finally taps out. ASAP.

  Biz or econ? Cassidy responds in less than a minute.

  Business, Ghost texts. Tell Thurston I have a lead.

  It’
s only been seven or eight years since she was last here, but the city has changed so much Ghost has trouble fighting the dislocation that seeps in every time she takes a walk. Her sister still lives nearby, nestled into an outer, outer suburban housing development with her husband and two little kids. Ghost has called her, once, without letting on that she’s home. Jem would’ve insisted she come and stay with them and Ghost has a feeling it wouldn’t be good to bring this particular job anywhere near people she cares about. They can catch up when it’s over—if it’s ever over.

  She’s been in Melbourne for nine days already, staked out in a hotel apartment just a tad more swank than she’s used to, and no closer to finding the artefact than when she left. It’s here, she knows it’s here, but really, Ghost is talking needles and haystacks with no electromagnet anywhere in sight. She’s been to the four addresses Ms Thurston supplied once the geography was narrowed down—places with some apparent connection back in the day, but all equally dead now. Three of them since demolished and replaced with new apartment buildings, the fourth a city shopfront housing a dumpling restaurant that Ghost has eaten at three times. Truly excellent gyoza, but nothing else of interest.

  There have been no more dreams either, or visions, or whatever the hell it was that night in London, and no creepy voices in her head, and so she’s gone back to first principles. Grid-walking the city with a daypack slung over her shoulder, slow and methodical explorations punctuated with frequent pauses to press a hand against an old brick wall, or the lattices of frosted glass that served as pavement lights for the ancient basements below, all the while keeping herself open.

  Listening. Receptive.

  Of course, there are a million lost things bleating out their presence in a city of this size, most of them barely even missed, and none of them the precise thing she’s hunting.

  Ghost’s feet ache all the time. When she needs a break, like now, she grabs an extra-large coffee and finds a shady spot down by the Yarra River to scroll through Instagram hashtags for anything that might twang. She can’t decide which is more painful—the blisters developing on her blisters, or the kind of artfully curated, perfectly framed Insta-lives that she will never come close to knowing.

  #melbournelife #melbournestreets #melbourneyoufuckrightoff

  The last mouthful of coffee is cold but Ghost swallows it anyway, thumbing through a couple more screens as she gets up and shuffles over to the nearby bins. A kid on a skateboard jags her elbow going past and she almost drops her phone, scrabbles to keep hold of it before it hits the ground, and—oh. Oh, there.

  The girl in the photo is blonde and thin, gazing up in mock fright with one gloved hand over her open mouth, and hovering above her right shoulder is the sigil that Ghost remembers from her dream. That same quasi-reptilian eye, with rays or something fanning out around it—she can’t tell through the filter the girl has used if it’s a framed painting or mural or what. It seems to glow, but that might be the filter as well. The caption reads: Ever get the feeling your being watched?, along with #theeyeshaveit and a cascade of other hashtags, including the ubiquitous #melbournelife. The date is more than a year ago, but Ghost likes the photo anyway and shoots the girl a DM—hey, cool pic. where u take that? in melb now!!—before downloading the image and sending it off to Cassidy. Location needed, she tells her. ASAP.

  Surprisingly, it’s the Instagirl who gets back to her first.

  It’s a stained glass window, not a painting, a small semi-circle mounted above the door to what is now a rockabilly clothing shop in one of the city’s older arcades. And they’re not rays that surround the eye, but tentacles. Ghost is in the right place, almost. She can feel it in her belly, a faint but persistent tautness. She takes a photo of her own; straight shot, no filter. Flicks it to Cassidy along with the address. More info please.

  “Coolsville, hey?” The woman in the shop looks like she walked right off the set of early-season Madmen, except for the brightly coloured tattoos adorning her arms and collarbones. She’s wearing red lipstick and a broad, infectious smile.

  Ghost returns it, with interest, and steps inside. “I’m wondering if you can help me out.”

  “Sure thing, baby doll. Whatcha looking for?”

  “I’m researching a book, actually.” It’s a well-worn line but one that usually works. For reasons Ghost hasn’t been able to figure out, most people are super-keen to throw any number of minor favours in her direction if she tells them she’s a writer. “It’s about, ah, the weird side of Melbourne, the creepy stuff. A friend told me about this place.”

  “Oh, you meant the basement. They took it off the tour a while ago.”

  “The tour?”

  “The Ghost Tour, you know. After the thing with that guy…”

  “What happened?”

  “He refused to leave. Like, screaming and wailing and throwing-a-tantrum refused. They had to get the cops in. Wound up in a nuthouse, I heard, but that’s probably bullshit.”

  “Right.” She catches a nearby dress between finger and thumb, appreciating the satin texture. Black with large colourful flowers all over, a thin little belt above a voluminous skirt. Pretty, but not her thing. “So, you reckon I could see this basement?”

  The tattooed woman pauses for a moment before checking her watch. “What the hell, this place is a desert on Mondays anyway.” She opens a drawer beneath the counter and pulls out a sign, hanging it on the inside of the door before ushering Ghost out and locking it behind them. Back in 10, mother hen!

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Ghost says.

  “Yeah, because my boss is a total bitch.” Grinning, the woman stabs a thumb into her own chest. “Can’t get away from her.”

  She leads the way down a narrow flight of stairs and into a dim corridor. After a couple of steps, a light flickers on to reveal a large wooden door, its timber dark with age but fitted with a what looks like a fairly recent deadlock. Ghost takes a moment to orientate herself.

  “So, your shop’s right above here?” she asks.

  “Yeppers.” The woman unlocks the door and reaches inside to turn on the light. “The landlord lets me use some of it for storage, since I’m not allowed to do much fitting out upstairs.” She rolls her eyes as she steps back, sweeping an arm in invitation. “Heritage issues.”

  The room isn’t much brighter than the corridor outside, but it’s three times the size of the shop above, cluttered with old furniture and stacks of boxes. Ghost feels the twang as soon as she crosses the threshold. She bites her lip, clenching her fists so hard, her nails dig painfully into her palms. It’s here, the damn thing is here.

  “You sense it, don’t you?”

  “Huh?” Ghost turns around, on guard.

  “It’s wrong, this room. No one likes to be down here for long.”

  “Except that one guy.”

  “Except him.” The women opens a nearby carton and starts pulling out shoe boxes. “Have a gander while I grab some stock.”

  Ghost doesn’t need to go far. There’s a line of four filing cabinets on the far wall, drawing her in. She picks her way over and places her hand on top of the nearest, disturbing many years’ worth of dust. But it’s the next one along that really pings; her knees almost buckle as she leans against it, and the taste of muddy water coats her mouth. The statue was in the river at some stage, she can feel that, thrown into the silty depths only to be dredged up again by sheer stroke of luck—or perhaps not luck at all; perhaps it called out to be found back then, as it’s calling to Ghost now, here in this forgotten old cabinet with merely a thin sheet of metal between them. She tests one of the drawers. Locked.

  “Careful, hon, you might get tetanus. All that crap’s been down here for God knows how long.” The woman jangles her keyring. “Seen enough? I should get back upstairs.”

  “Actually, do you think I could stay here a bit? Soak in the atmosphere, jot down some observations.” Ghost flashes what she hopes is a shy-but-winning smile. “You know, for th
e book.”

  “Yeah, maybe not. I shouldn’t really leave this room unlocked.”

  “So, lock me in.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’ve been in worse places. Half an hour?” She switches her smile up a gear, places her hand over her heart. “You can search me before I leave, if you need to; I swear not to take anything except notes.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t implying…” The woman looks flustered now, caught in a possible faux pas. “Half an hour, okay?”

  Ghost waits for a minute or so after the deadbolt thunks home before slipping off her daypack and searching through it for the small leather case she keeps her lockpick tools in. The filing cabinet dates back several decades and likely hasn’t been used in nearly as long, so it takes her more time than usual, and a lot more force, to work the mechanism open. Wishing she had some WD-40, Ghost finally coaxes it into turning. The first three drawers yield nothing of interest but there in the fourth, tucked behind some empty suspension files, she finds a small wooden box.

  twang

  Its edges are sealed with dribbled wax, once black, now crazing to grey in places, and about as heavy as you’d expect if it contained a small figure carved from mottled green stone. Ghost knows the thing is inside, knows it as much as she’s ever known anything in her life—but still. The thought of lugging it all the way back to London, only to have Ms Thurston shake her head: this isn’t what we asked for; did you even look?

  Ghost takes out her folding knife. “Bad idea,” she whispers, even as she digs through the wax around the slightly curved lid. “Bad, bad idea.” She clears enough to wedge in the blade and lever it back and forth until—

  “Fuck!”

  The migraine hits without warning. Colours fracture and pulse in the centre of her vision, spreading rapidly. Her temples throb; a dull ache moves along her jawline. She needs to get out of here. Now.

  The box is on the floor where she dropped it, and thankfully it isn’t empty. She stares sidelong at the contents, peering through the edges of the aura that will pretty soon be all she can see for a while, and breathes a shaky sigh of relief. The statue is nestled into a velvety cushion, and seems intact. Ghost has no desire whatsoever to take it out and check. Sure, it’s only her migraine that makes the tentacles around the creature’s face look like they’re writhing, that makes the symbols carved into its base appear to glow, but that doesn’t mean she wants to touch the damn thing.