Arkham Detective Agency: A Lovecraftian-Noir Tribute to C. J. Henderson

by C. J. Henderson

  - - -

  Tisha Hewitt had never had a reason to pay much attention to the seventeenth-century dwellings scattered along the western fringes of the city south of the Miskatonic River. Beyond Boundary Street ran Hill Street, a poorly maintained asphalt road riddled with potholes and yawning cracks. The absence of streetlights and sidewalks kept this quarter from becoming an integral part of the Arkham Ghost Tour experience—though the stories associated with some of those old homes would provide ample source material.

  Beyond Hill Street meandered a narrow, steep-sided creek—what she and many other residents had taken to calling a “drainage canal” after county stormwater management services modified parts of Hangman’s Brook to alleviate uptown flooding. Much of the original tributary remained, augmented sporadically with concrete channels, riprap fill and outfalls.

  Of all the old estates along this corridor, only half a dozen had survived intact. Most had crumbled into ruin, long since deserted and reclaimed by the leafy chaos of forest. The woodland itself had been diminished over the centuries, vast swathes of trees felled to fuel New England industry and to make way for farmland. What survived gathered in dense stands of majestic foliage, the remnants of the primal wood that once spread unbroken across this region.

  As Hewitt crept along the pavement scanning the knotted thickets, she glanced occasionally at a street map she had printed. She had used a yellow highlighter to mark the location of each recorded disappearance. In some cases, the spot marked the person’s last known whereabouts; in other instances, it indicated the location where a piece of evidence had been discovered.

  At the epicenter, Hewitt found a weedy path that disappeared in a tangle of soaring pines, purple milkweed, climbing fern and iron-weed.

  She parked her car a half a block farther down the road, behind a block of townhomes on West Saltonstall Street. Crossing over a narrow bridge that spanned Hangman’s Brook, she spotted what appeared to be the outline of some ancient structure in a dense patch of wood. She followed a narrow path to the ruins of a stately mansion built in the Elizabethan style of architecture. Through the vandalized casement and dormer windows, Hewitt could see sunlight streaming through what must have been formidable gaps in the roof where moldered rafters had given way.

  Constructed of white oak, the home’s exterior panels had warped and split as vines clambered up its walls. Its once-grand entrance had been relieved of its double-leaf door and its front garden had been conquered by unrecognizable varieties of grotesque vegetation.

  As she approached the ruins, Hewitt consulted her smartphone, searching county property records for information about the land. Current zoning maps offered no leads. Even the website of the city’s historical society showed no record of a residence at this location.

  “Don’t know who sent you, but you got no business here, lady.” Hewitt practically tripped over her own feet as she tottered backward several steps at the sight of a frightful old woman shuffling out of the derelict dwelling. Clad in a tattered housecoat and ragged shawl, she screeched angrily at the trespasser. “No business! Be gone!”

  “I was supposed to meet a real estate agent,” Hewitt said, hoping the lie would buy her a few more minutes. “I thought your property was on the market. Are you the owner?”

  “No one can possess it,” the woman sputtered. The outline of her frail body seemed oddly unpredictable, like a wavering flicking candle flame. “It rejects those who try to lay claim to it. I am bound to it by blood—by blood! It abides my restless soul just as it accommodates shadows cast by horrors not of this world. Leave us,” she insisted. “Leave us alone!”

  “Do you live here by yourself?” Hewitt continued, her stubbornness likely to infuriate the disheveled woman. “Is there someone I can speak to about—”

  Before Hewitt could complete her inquiry, the world she understood subsided, leaving in its wake whirling eddies of dislocated histories.

  A sudden, inconceivable darkness blotted out the sky and conjured into midday a vast and starless firmament. Where ruins had slept amidst unbridled flora, a magnificent Elizabethan mansion now stood, its full former glory fully restored—or, more accurately, through some aberration of space and time, Hewitt beheld it in its original seventeenth-century milieu. Its façade adorned by an elaborate sculpture, lamplight gleamed through mullioned windows onto the porch where gathered a throng of cloaked callers carrying torches and chanting some imperceptible refrain—something that, to Hewitt’s ears, sounded like Ph’rhmui nhmu’obgi G’ugnanorh Ithacautl shuk’navl fhtagn. Their attention seemed pinned to a female figure attired in ceremonial garb and bearing a ponderous tome.

  Dislocated in time, Tisha Hewitt crouched in the garden, concealing herself from some of Arkham’s earliest settlers.

  She watched the procession as it ventured off into the eldritch wood, its objective as enigmatic as the source of her extended vision. Most individuals might solicit intellect to banish such a powerful phantasm and affect a return to a more palpable sphere of being, fearful that complete submission might equate to perpetual madness. Hewitt had already dismissed any notion that her sanity may have faltered. This was Arkham. Whatever was happening, no matter how unbelievable—it was real.

  Fortitude swallowed fear. With the same single-mindedness that had distinguished her career as an investigative reporter, Hewitt took off after the black-robed cultists. She felt confident that the surreal experience was something more concrete than dream—and that whatever unseen forces initiated it had played a role in Alex’s disappearance. She could not ignore an opportunity to bear out her theory. More importantly, she needed finality.

  Penetrating the spectral secrecy of the forest glade, she stepped carefully over gnarled roots that spread like watchful serpents across the trail. From somewhere in the murky depths came a strange, sinister drumming. As the pounding grew louder, the black void overhead coalesced into a provisional twilight, burdened with blighted green and yellow swirls of galactic clusters and illumed by naked, pyrrhous stars burning dim above the treetops. Though she could not see the arrangement of the constellations, Hewitt knew instinctively these heavens were not her own.

  Ph’rhmui nhmu’obgi G’ugnanorh Ithacautl shuk’navl fhtagn.

  She stopped at the edge of a ravine, lined with boulders and malformed trees. Below, the procession had formed a circle around an altar set at the center of twelve standing stones. Knowing that she would be discovered if she tried to scramble down into the gully, Hewitt positioned herself so that she could watch the unfolding ceremony. She had already surmised that their utterances formed some kind of sorcerous innovation; what manner of entity they sought to conjure she could not guess.

  Ph’rhmui nhmu’obgi G’ugnanorh Ithacautl shuk’navl fhtagn.

  Thick mist swathed the underwood as scrupulously as creeping vines mantled the steep walls enclosing the grotto. The priestess stepped forward, clutching the ponderous tome, and raised a hand in a mute directive that brought immediate silence.

  Hewitt believed she heard the echo of a distant scream at the very instant the chanting ceased and the drumming terminated. An awful, icy hush descended—a quietness as pervasive as that which must prevail at the unapproachable edges of the universe. As if from the silence and stillness gathering purpose and strength, the summoned creatures emerged, rising out of the mist in numbers far out of proportion with their assembled devotees. Swarming wildly, the massive translucent entities drifted with ghastly fluidity, their innumerable tentacles stroking their fervent worshippers as their spidery legs clicked against the ring of monolithic stones.

  Seeing the membranous horrors that had long haunted her nightmares, Hewitt fought to keep her fear in check. She had come this far. She needed to know. What happened to Alex? What happened to all of those people?

  As if in response to her unspoken questions, there appeared upon the altar a body—a man with sandy blond, wavy, short-cut hair and a mustache. For a moment, Hewitt could not bring herself to loo
k too closely. For a moment, she did not want to know.

  No. It was not Alex.

  The victim—not younger than twenty, not older than twenty-five—remained conscious, but strangely preoccupied and listless, as if sedated or enthralled. The clothing he wore appeared old-fashioned to Hewitt—his tweed overcoat, bowtie, gray striped trousers and button boots seemed more likely to belong to a man from the 1920s.

  When the priestess approached him, he stiffened. She held something indistinct, something glimmering in the torchlight. Leaning forward, she plunged the instrument into his lower abdomen and began a relentless assault—ripping and tearing and shredding until the red body fell open and the blood gushed dark and thick into a chalice.

  Limp, the man’s head rolled to one side.

  Daylight washed over Hewitt in a sudden, dazzling flood. Her curious excursion to the distant past terminated, she found herself thankfully returned to modern-day Arkham and situated on a steep bluff overlooking Hangman’s Brook. Below, she saw a centuries-old storm tunnel channeling the flow of the creek beneath the narrow bridge she had crossed earlier that afternoon. Access to the brick-lined tunnel had been cut off by a network of fences and iron bars.

  “Where have you been?” On the opposite side of the brook, Arkham Detective Agency owner Franklin Nardi leaned against the hood of his four-door sedan. His tone conveyed frustration but his expression articulated his concern. “More importantly, where did you come from? I swear you weren’t over there a second ago.”

  “I’m not sure,” Hewitt said dazedly, her mind numb. She inched back from the rim of the creek, nearly losing her balance. “I don’t think you’d believe me if I tried to explain.”

  Hewitt made her way back across the bridge, only once glancing over her shoulder. She could no longer discern the outline of the ruined mansion disintegrating within the dense patch of wood.

  She smiled as she approached Nardi, glad to see a familiar face after her encounter. Though she had sent him a message reporting her findings and detailing her plans for the afternoon, she did not know if he would accept her invitation to investigate Hill Street.

  “I got your email,” Nardi said. “The list of names you provided—where did you get all those names? They’ve been expunged from public record. I had no idea this case went back so far—and that so many people had disappeared. The only reason I found out about your brother is because there’s a still an active bulletin in New York City. An old colleague on the force dug it up for me.”

  “In fact, I think it goes much further back than either of us realize.” Hewitt wondered if the man she had observed had also been purged from history, his sudden vanishing quickly forgotten and ignored by all but those closest to him. “What case are you working on?”

  “A month ago, three junkies went down into that ditch, probably looking for a place to shoot up,” Nardi said. “Somehow, they managed to get into the tunnel. Only two made it out. The third happened to be the son of a prominent attorney.”

  “And he hired you to find out what happened?”

  “He hired me to find out what happened and to make sure that whatever story reached the press didn’t embarrass him,” Nardi said, his face twisted by disgust. “Seemed like a quick and easy job at first. Except I find out that neither of the two witnesses is in any shape to be interviewed. One of them is screaming at shadows in a padded room; the other used a bed sheet to hang himself in his county jail cell. The only bit of information that one gave police led me here to this spot.”

  “Just like all the others,” Hewitt said.

  “I don’t really know how to explain this, Ms. Hewitt, but some cases can’t be resolved,” Nardi said. “I’ve been down there in that tunnel, and I’ll tell you something about it: it doesn’t much care for the laws of physics. I know this sounds crazy, but the fabric of time and space seems to have some significant gaps, particularly around this city.”

  “Believe it or not, I understand.”

  “I think the people who disappeared here accidentally wandered through a one-way portal,” Nardi added. “I’ve gone to the board of county commissioners and recommended that they create a bypass and seal this tunnel permanently.” He looked into her eyes and sensed her recent brush with the uncanny. “It bothers me, though—not knowing what happened to them all.”

  “If you really want to know, I have a feeling I could tell you where to find their bones, Mr. Nardi.” Hewitt was convinced the once stately Elizabethan mansion—oddly omitted from county property records—had been the center of worship for some old Arkham cult. She knew the grounds of the estate had likely swallowed the countless dead and that a solitary, ghostly occupant still haunted its halls, sheltering a terrible secret. “If you can get that tunnel sealed, put an end to all this—maybe it’s best to leave them in their graves. Maybe we should just leave them alone.”

  - - -

  ARKHAM – A team of researchers, led by forensic anthropologist Son Powers, has begun the task of removing skeletal remains from the Hangman’s Brook bypass project being conducted by county stormwater management services in the vicinity of Hill Street and West Washington.

  The previously unrecorded burial site was discovered during recent excavations. Researchers believe the mass grave may date back to the late 17th century. The bodies appear to have been buried without coffins. According to Roman Sambins, professor of American history at Miskatonic University, those buried at the site may have been victims of an epidemic.

  “It isn’t uncommon to see mass graves throughout the colonies,” Sambins said. “When disease struck, early settlements disposed of the dead quite quickly.” Sambins explained that prompt burials had nothing to do with science. “They weren’t necessarily trying to prevent the spread of disease. They were hoping to rid the community of the evil spirits that called down the pestilence.”

  Originally, the county reported that no more than a dozen bodies had been cataloged. Powers’ team suspects that number will climb as they begin work. On Monday, members of the team set up a sieve for screening soil for bone fragments while others marked visible bone fragments found in the soil.

  “From what we’ve seen so far, it would not be surprising to find hundreds of bodies at this site,” Powers said. “Other artifacts we have recovered suggest the burial ground was in use for quite some time—perhaps centuries.”

  Work on the drainage bypass has been indefinitely delayed.

  CLOSURE

  Glynn Owen Barrass

  How many nights have I turned my collar up against the east wind? How many times have I walked these streets, hidden behind a mask of humanity?

  Listen to you. Just who, or what, do you think you are? the voice mocked. And look at you: all gussied up, dressed like a man, with that gun in your jacket, pretending you have balls enough to use it.

  “Shut up,” I said, and a couple approaching me, young, hipster student types, stared at me then quickly looked away.

  They saw that beautiful face of yours and shuddered. You saw that, right?

  I snarled, spat a gob of spit toward the Miskatonic River, and said, “Fuck you.”

  The voice was right, of course, I had no right, walking the Earth alongside these pure, untouched people. But those were the cards I’d been dealt. And this was my routine, my life, walking up East then West River Street by night, feeling the cold leach through to my bones whilst arguing with the voice in my head.

  I passed waterfront houses, nice, expensive-looking buildings, and wondered how the tenants managed to live with the rank smell issuing from that filthy river.

  Damn I hated water, always had, so maybe I was prejudiced.

  I waited for the voice to appear, to say something mean and sarcastic, but it remained silent. Good, and stay that way, I thought, pretending I had some control over my fragmented psyche.

  Tonight was the night. The man I’d returned for, the man I’d discovered had gone away for a month to locales unknown, had finally returned.

 
Franklin Nardi, the ex-New York Cop, used-up, jaded, and probably still paranoid someone was hunting him down, even after all these years.

  “Nardi,” I said, “you’re right.”

  I saw the North West Street Bridge up ahead, and braced myself to cross that foul river. There was something else I had to attend to before finding Nardi, something I’d been holding back since my return to Arkham. I turned left, stepping onto the path that would take me across the river, and hugged myself, not from the chill below, but from my disdain of the water.

  Fool, the voice said. I ignored it.

  A car appeared on the opposite side of the bridge, and seeing it was a police cruiser, I let my arms fall to my sides, pretending to relax just in case they chose to pull over and search me. My gun, the wad of cash I’d taken in a local bank robbery a week earlier, my … appearance, all would get me in some stick, and what if the cops recognized me?

  The cruiser slowed down as it neared me, curious faces within staring out from behind the windshield. Fear bubbled up in my gut, but the car drove on, and I released a sigh of relief.

  Worse hurdles to come, the voice said, and I nodded, smiling sadly. A few minutes of brisk walking had me off the bridge and heading toward my destination, High Lane and the appointment I’d made a day earlier. I dug my hand into my jacket pocket, retrieved my cellphone, and flicked a finger across the black screen to illuminate it.

  6:45, plenty of time, and now I was off the bridge I slowed down, passing the wire fences of the old railroad yard to my right and continuing down North West Street until I reached a turnoff that turned into High Lane. Small office buildings lined each side of the narrow street, angular, four-story structures crammed side by side with the only differentiation between them being the color. White, gray, white … the second one along to the left was my destination.

  I crossed the street to reach it, and the voice said, Ready to bottle out yet?