Ghost closes the box and shoves it deep into her daypack. Her fingers have started to tremble and she drops the pick twice while convincing the deadlock to hoist a white flag.
“Focus,” she whispers. The colours have spread further; it’s like looking through a psychotic kaleidoscope. At last, the bolt slides across and she fumbles her way out of the room and down the corridor, keeping one hand on the wall as she climbs back up those narrow stairs. Slim peripheral vision is all she has when she reaches the top, but she manages to make out the tattooed woman striding towards her—or the flared shape of her rockabilly skirt, at least.
“Hey,” Ghost says. “Thanks.”
“How did you get…?”
The woman’s voice trails off as she backs away, backs right through the door of her shop as Ghost approaches, as Ghost shuffles past, down the arcade, touching two fingers to her temple and flicking a salute as she goes. “Don’t forget to lock up down there.”
On the street, the sun is too bright, the pain in her head throbbing, threatening to burst her skull into pieces. Trams rattle to a standstill at a nearby stop and Ghost makes her careful way onto the nearest in line. Any tram going north will take her close to the hotel, as long as she gets off in time. At least the colours are seeping away now, leaving in their wake the blurred and doubled vision that she knows will last an hour or two. She pulls out her phone and finds Cassidy’s number, which goes straight to voicemail as usual.
“Hey, it’s me. Tell Thurston I have it.” She swallows, a sudden surge of nausea rippling through her guts. “And book a flight to London tomorrow. I want this done and dusted.”
Fighting the urge to vomit, Ghost only registers the person who is sitting in the seat next to her when they make a grab for her daypack. She shouts, wrenching her shoulders around and trying the push the would-be thief away. He’s a skinny guy, but strong, and his breath smells of sour coffee as he leans his weight against her, rough hands tugging on the straps. Jerking up an elbow, she catches him somewhere soft and hopefully fucking painful, and he lets out a short grunt before punching her. Hard. In the stomach. Gasping, Ghost reaches out with fingers arched into claws, determined to do some serious fucking facial damage, but the guy isn’t there anymore.
“You okay?” someone asks and she nods, getting to her feet as the tram lurches to a stop. Her assailant is face-down on the floor, half-blocking the aisle with some dude’s knee in his back, and Ghost climbs past, slides through the other passengers who move aside to let her pass, even as they’re demanding to know what happened? and why? No one stops her, no one so much as touches her, and she goes as fast as her compromised vision will allow. Out of the tram, onto the street, squinting through the bleariness until finally she has her bearings.
Two blocks north, half a block west. The hotel. A quiet room. Ibuprofen.
Ghost shrugs her daypack higher on her shoulders, and hustles.
It’s cold under the water, a cold so deep, so biting, it’s almost tangible. Dark as well, but even so, she can see the slim, elongated figure swimming toward her. Swimming, or floating, she can’t tell. Can’t move either, can only wait, blood turning to ice, as it comes closer, closer, black against black, those long, long arms reaching out—
wake up
—and Ghost does.
Her head throbs and it takes several disoriented moments for her to realise the ringing she can hear isn’t just in her ears. Only one person has the permissions to bypass her phone’s Do Not Disturb mode, and Ghost’s stomach is already churning as she swipes to answer.
“Cassidy? This better be the end of the world.”
“Check your door, now. Via the peephole.”
Cassidy’s voice is clipped and strained. Ghost rolls out of bed and fumbles her way through the apartment. She pulled all the curtains before crashing but it’s still daytime outside to judge by the thin lines of brightness sneaking past their edges, which means she can’t have had more than a couple of hours’ sleep. No wonder she still feels like shit. Ghost presses an eye to the peephole.
“Cassidy?” she whispers into the phone. “Why is there a neighbourhood watch meeting outside my room?”
“How many?”
Ghosts counts seven people, men and women of various ages, some in office clothes, some dressed more casually, and two who look like they’ve just rushed over in the middle of a gym session. An eighth joins them, a woman wearing the hotel’s housekeeping uniform and brandishing a small card. A key, Ghost realises, as the handle turns and the door is pushed open.
“Hey,” she says, pushing back. “Do not fucking disturb!”
The door only opens a few inches before catching on the security latch, and a hand slides around, fingers scrabbling. Ghost thumps the intruder, hard, and they withdraw with a yelp. She slams the door. Leans against it.
“What the fuck is going on, Cassidy?”
“Hold on a sec, I’m patching someone through.”
“You’re what?”
There’s a click, and then that someone is on the line, their familiar British voice shouting over too much background noise. “Ghost, can you hear me?”
“Lavinia?”
“You need to leave now. Take the essentials and get out of there.”
The door is opened again and this time two arms force their way through the gap, frantically grasping at empty air, while others outside pound on the heavy wood. Down the hall, an ear-splitting siren begins to blare a strident warning.
Ghost heads back to the bedroom, pressing the phone close against her head. “Is that a fire alarm?”
“Get to the pool deck. Fast as possible.”
“Yeah, if there’s a fire, I don’t think the pool will help.” She wrenches opens a curtain, blinking against the sudden light, and looks around for her jeans, her shoes.
“There’s no fire, trust me. And the pool is on the roof. Stairs are down the corridor to your right as you leave your room.”
“There’s the small matter of the walking dead, Lavinia.”
“They’re not zombies, they’re covetous. Figure it out.”
The call cuts off. Fuck. Ghost dresses at breakneck speed. Snatches her daypack from the chair where she left it and makes a hasty check. Passport. Wallet. Box from the Watery Depths of Hell. As she jogs past the kitchenette, she grabs the small fire extinguisher from the wall near the stove. There are four different arms poking around the edge of the door now. She gives them all a bash with the base of the extinguisher until they retreat, then shuts the door so she can unhook the latch.
Ghost takes a deep breath.
Pulls the safety pin on the extinguisher.
And swings the door wide.
The chemical powder drives the milling hoard back far enough for her to make a run for it. She lets loose another lengthy backward spray as she sprints down the hall. Beneath the siren’s bellow, she can hear coughing and spluttering, a confusion of voices that, for now, don’t seem to be following her. Half way up the first flight of stairs—thank all the unknown gods that she took an apartment only three floors from the top—she bumps into a handful of bedraggled pool-siders coming down.
“You’re going the wrong way,” a guy, wide-eyed, yells in passing.
Ghost grins. “Forgot my towel!”
At the top, she pauses to get her bearings, and her breath. The fire stairs have brought her out at the end of the hall that leads to the pool deck, accessed through a pair of solid glass doors. She checked out the place on her first day and dismissed it as being of any interest. Out in the open with a spectacular view, but no shade sails or any other way to hide from the harsh summer sun, and full of people generally being people.
It’s deserted now, though hardly peaceful, what with the alarms still shrieking at high pitch. A pair of sunglasses left on one of the empty deckchairs sounds a small, terrified twang. They belong to Wrong Way Guy. Ghost hopes he gets them back. She finds a couple of damp towels and knots them together. Threads them through the D-sh
aped steel handles on the glass doors and ties off. They won’t last too long against a sustained effort to get through, but it’s the best she can do right now. At a loss, she slumps down in the slim shadow of a nearby potted palm, and pulls out her phone.
Cassidy answers on the first ring. “G, are you safe?”
“My poolside cocktail is missing but apart from that—what the fuck is going on?”
“You didn’t read any of my emails?”
“I’ve been sleeping off a migraine since I got back to the hotel.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Don’t start with me, Cassidy. I’ve had—”
“No, I mean, it really sounds right. That thing you found, it’s not…it’s not exactly what Thurston thought it was. It’s worse. Or stronger—they weren’t precisely clear.”
“Cassidy…”
“The problem was, you stayed in one place too long. It’s like a beacon, Lavinia said. It calls out, but it needs to be stationary for anyone to get a fix on it.”
“It was pretty damn stationary down in that basement all those years.”
“Did you break a containment ward?”
“What? No, I just…oh. Like a wax seal, maybe?”
“More than likely.”
“No one said anything about fucking wards. This is some kind of slippery bullshit—”
“Agreed. Though they did seem genuinely sorry about it all; we should be able to negotiate a bonus. Undisclosed risks, and so on.”
The fire alarm has finally been switched off. In the shiny new silence, Ghost can hear the squeak of heavy doors being rattled on their hinges. She peeks around the edge of the pot. Her stomach sinks. “Cassidy, my fan club has caught up. They might even have recruited a couple new members.”
“Lavinia is less than a minute away.”
“She’s in the hotel?”
“Not quite.”
And now Ghost can hear something else. A faint thwop-thwop-thwop in the air, growing louder and louder, closer and closer, a sound she can almost feel in her ribs. She gets to her feet, runs past the doors where a dozen or so people are pressing themselves against the glass, their mouths opening wide as they spot her, and around to the other side of the pool and the five foot concrete wall that surrounds the deck.
A helicopter rises up, bringing with it churning winds so strong they almost blow Ghost over. The side door is open, Lavinia crouched at its edge, dressed in tactical black. She waves, motioning for Ghost to move away, then drops down a ladder. Chains clatter against the wall. It doesn’t look in the least bit stable. Ghost steps even further away.
“Cassidy,” she yells into the phone. “You and me are gonna have words.”
If there’s an answer, she can’t hear it.
Lavinia is also shouting something. She gestures toward the ladder, then points over Ghost’s shoulder. Ghost turns to see that her unwanted entourage have worked enough slack into the knotted towels to make a sizeable gap between the doors. A lithe, lycra-clad cyclist is trying to push her way through. A man in a high-vis vest is sawing at the white fabric with a knife.
A big knife.
Ghost puts away her phone and reaches for the ladder.
The trick is not to remember that she’s thirty-odd storeys above the unforgiving bitumen and concrete of William Street.
The trick, when her foot slips for the second time and she clings to her current position with eyes squeezed shut and heart pounding even louder than her head, is not to think of how few seconds she’ll have to regret everything she’s done in the last twenty-four hours.
The trick is to want nothing more than the very next rung.
In the end, it happens quicker than a jump-cut action scene. Lavinia, grabbing her beneath the arms, hauling her up. Pulling off the daypack. Fastening her into a harness. Slamming a headset over her ears. Sliding the door shut as the helicopter banks away.
“It’s in there?” Lavinia points toward the pack. Her voice, through the headphones, sounds ridiculously far away.
Ghost nods. Her mouth feels too dry for words right now. The woman unzips the daypack with gloved hands and reaches gingerly inside, like she half-expects something to bite. She brings out the wooden box, more of the wax flaking off at her touch, and raises an eyebrow. Ghost nods again. Lavinia takes a folded cloth from one of her jacket’s many pockets—the same lush, impossibly black fabric that swallowed Ms Thurston’s paperweight—and uses it to slowly, methodically wrap up the box.
Almost immediately, Ghost feels her headache lessen, the pressure in her skull ease, if only slightly.
Lavinia places her newly wrapped package into a heavy-duty metal box by her feet and spins the combination that locks it. Then she calmly retrieves a paper bag from another pocket, flaps it open, and vomits inside.
“Sorry,” she says, once she’s done.
Ghost shrugs. “I’ve seen worse.”
“No, I mean—I’m sorry.” Lavinia kicks the metal box.
“Oh. Well. At least you managed to come through.” She swallows, wishing she had some water. “How did you manage it, though? A flight from London is well over twenty hours…” The tall woman is smiling. Ghost wonders if she should mention the smear of vomit on her cheek. Decides to leave it be. “You were in Melbourne the whole time. Spying on me?”
“Watching. There’s a difference.”
“You’re gonna have to buy me a cider when we get back, and explain just what that difference is.”
Lavinia laughs and extends her right hand. “You have a deal, Ghost.” Her grip is strong. Safe. Ghost doesn’t want to ever let go.
This time, Ms Thurston is already behind her desk as Ghost follows Lavinia into the older woman’s office. Ghost has been in London for three days and has spent the greater part of those, as she had on the private flight over, sleeping the sleep of the jetlagged dead. Once the dregs of her migraine wore off, she skimmed through the curious, but now largely useless, info that Cassidy had sent her in Melbourne.
A secretive society of overly ambitious young men who, in the first half of the twentieth century, had headquartered themselves in the building where Ghost eventually located the statue.
Rumours of strange rituals. A sudden and unexplained death.
Elder gods. Elder gods?
At that point, too exhausted to countenance such long-dead conspiracies, Ghost stopped reading.
Ms Thurston gestures for her to take a seat. “We are so very grateful for what you accomplished, and so very sorry that we weren’t in a position to better prepare you. I trust the payment has come through by now?”
It had. Cassidy had texted her that morning about the unexpectedly higher sum. There had been several exclamation marks, and a dancing emoji.
“Lavinia still owes me a cider,” Ghost says.
“I’m sure she will make good on that.”
Lavinia doesn’t smile exactly, but the corner of her mouth does twitch. “I fully intend to, ma’am. Just been a bit busy of late.”
“Ah, yes.” Ms Thurston picks up the large cardboard tube that’s been sitting by her elbow and prises off one of the end caps. “As you know, the job you did for us wasn’t quite what we thought. Locating the artefact was merely intended to be a trial run, a test of your abilities…and your fortitude.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, fortitude wise.”
“Not at all, Ghost. The stone from which it was carved has a very particular origin. Some people desire it; others—like yourself, like our dear Lavinia—are repelled. Most are neutral, though able to be swung one way or the other, in the right circumstances. We suspected that the artefact, being an idol, would enhance these effects. We didn’t know that it had been amplified even further—a blessing of some kind, or a curse; we’re still investigating.”
Ghost folds her arms over her chest. “You don’t need to tell me any of this.”
“It’s only fair that you be given all pertinent information this time.” Ms Thurston extracts a yellowed r
oll of paper from the tube.
“This time?”
“There’s one more job we’d like you to do for us.”
“Is this one going to get me killed?”
“Possibly. But it’s for a very, very good cause.”
Carefully, the older woman unrolls the paper, which Ghost now sees is actually more like parchment, thick and creased and discoloured, and spreads it out on the desk. There are words in a language that Ghost doesn’t understand, that she doesn’t think anyone human is meant to understand, along with drawings that resemble the work of a deranged cartographer, and several scribbled annotations in English.
In the top right corner of page is one word: R’YLEH.
Ghost doesn’t feel so good. Her mouth tastes of salted water, cold and unfathomably deep. She glances at Lavinia, who offers a barely perceptible shrug.
Who on earth doesn’t think they’re the good guys?
Ms Thurston leans forward. “Tell me, Ghost. What are your feelings about finding a lost city?”
Time and Tide
Robert Hood
Edited from Searching for Cryptonbury, the cryptozoological blog of Douglas Oudemans Ormsham (searchingforcryptonbury.blogspot.com.au). The relevant entries have since been removed from public viewing on this site for unexplained reasons, but are reproduced here with permission of the original author.
January 10, 2018, Mollymook, NSW, Australia
It began innocuously enough, a mere taint on the crisp sea-air. Now, two days later, the stench has become so unpleasant some residents have taken to wearing bacterial masks, even indoors. Tourists stay away. Outrage that the local authorities seem unable to locate the source of the strange smell has become a common topic of conversation, as the putrescent foulness of it is beginning to affect business, not to mention its impact on the township’s oft-touted quality-of-life.
Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 2 Page 3