Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy)

by Graham McNeill

  Indeed, were one to stretch the theory, might the destruction visited upon the island of the Yopasi be interpreted as a preemptive move in an imminent war? As opponents of this dread Cthulhu, had they been wiped from the face of the Earth in preparation for his great awakening?

  This was just the same paranoia that had eaten away at Laban Shrewsbury.

  But just because Shrewsbury sounded paranoid, didn’t mean he was wrong. Oliver’s skin chilled and he halted in the middle of the path, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. The fiendish text was making his imagination conjure the essence of Morley Dean’s rambling monologues from their time in Alaska to scare him with lunatic delusions of monstrous conspiracies and abhorrent things lurking in every shadow. Allowing his thoughts to run amok had almost destroyed Morley, and that was not a road Oliver wished to follow.

  Alexander’s book had opened up terrifying new vistas of understanding, though the creeping horror gnawing away at Oliver’s sanity made him wish he remained ignorant of these new horizons. It was a blessing to live in innocence, to feel the world was a benevolent place in which Man was preeminent. To know the truth of its bleak hostility stripped away any comforting notion of natural justice and exposed the nightmarish insignificance of his species.

  Oliver opened his eyes as a momentary dizziness threatened to overcome him.

  His eyes were drawn to a suspicious-looking man staring at him from the trees growing around the Copley Tower. Their eyes met and Oliver saw grim purpose in the other man’s face as he left the shadows and strode toward him. Unkempt and of obvious low character, he came at Oliver with a cloth-wrapped bundle held in front of him.

  Oliver swiftly retraced his route back to the Tyner Annex, but the disheveled man was quicker, grabbing his arm and turning him around.

  “I really need to talk to you,” said the man in a soft Irish brogue.

  * * *

  Finn gripped the professor’s arm, and the man’s expression was like a panicked deer. The professor pulled his briefcase away from Finn, as though it contained gold bullion instead of term papers and impenetrable books about physics and chemistry.

  “Relax, fella,” said Finn. “I ain’t here to rob you.”

  “What do you want?” the man asked. “I don’t have any money.”

  “I told you, I ain’t trying to rob you, and I ain’t begging,” said Finn. “I’m looking for some help. Science help.”

  “I don’t follow,” said the man. The professor’s eyes continued to dart between Finn and the briefcase. Whatever was in there, the man was scared to lose it.

  Or be caught with it.

  “What kind of help?” continued the professor, his voice high with pumped adrenaline.

  “I got something here I need to show someone with book smarts,” said Finn, holding the silver sphere out to the professor. “They tell me this place is full of smart people, so I figured I’d ask one of you fine professors. I need to know what this is, and I need to know pretty damn quickly.”

  “Ah, I see,” said the man, staring in confusion at the sphere. “You don’t want me at all, actually. I’m not a scientist. My name is Oliver Grayson. I’m an anthropologist.”

  “I don’t know what an anthropologist is, but I figure anyone with a job title that fancy has to be smart enough to help me.”

  “Really,” insisted Oliver, tapping the sphere. “I’m not a scientist. At least not one who deals in things like this.”

  “So how comes I find ye in a science building?” asked Finn.

  “I was looking for someone,” said Oliver, before the ridiculousness of the situation occurred to him. “Not that it’s any business of yours. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

  “Please,” said Finn, a measure of desperation entering his voice. “You gotta help me. I need to find out what this is or I’m a dead man.”

  That stopped the professor in his tracks, and he looked around him as though they were in the middle of a booze deal and the cops were lurking just around the corner. He looked at the sphere, as though only now really seeing it. His eyes narrowed as he took in its queer strangeness, and Finn saw fearful indecision war with dangerous curiosity.

  “Like I told you Mr.…”

  “Call me Finn.”

  “Like I told you, Mr. Finn: I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know what help I can be to you.”

  “Yeah, but you know scientists,” pleaded Finn. “Else you wouldn’t have been in there, eh? Please, I’m asking for help and I got nowhere else to turn.”

  Oliver stared at him, seeing the real desperation in his eyes. Finn saw the decision to help him take shape in his features and let out a sigh of relief.

  “Very well, Mr. Finn,” said Oliver. “I think I know someone who can help you. Follow me, and for heaven’s sake, put that thing away. You never know who’s looking.”

  “Sure thing, Doc,” said Finn.

  “I’m a professor, Mr. Finn,” said Oliver. “Not a doctor.”

  “Sure thing, Prof,” replied Finn. “God love you, but I think you might just save me life.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  You should never go to places that are frequented at night during the day. That was one of Rex’s rules, but he was breaking it by coming to the Commercial at noon. He’d been to speakeasies more than a few times, but never this one and never while the sun was shining. It made him feel acutely vulnerable, knowing that this was an illegal drinking den and he was here in broad daylight. Anyone could be watching.

  A couple of days trawling the refectories and streets of the Miskatonic campus with pockets full of dollar bills had yielded the name of this speakeasy. The Commercial was apparently the place to go to listen to jazz and drink illegal liquor. If there was anywhere that Lydia Stone would have gone for a night on the town, it was here.

  “Something wrong, Rex?” asked Minnie, taking a photograph of the club’s exterior.

  “Hey!” said Rex. “Don’t take my picture in front of a damn speakeasy.”

  “Aw, but you had a cute look on your face,” said Minnie, winding the camera on.

  “Come on, this is serious,” said Rex.

  “Yeah, I know,” replied Minnie. “Twenty-four missing girls serious.”

  Rex shrugged and squinted at the nondescript door that led into the Commercial. There was nothing to pick it out from the dozens of other doors, if you didn’t count the extra locks and the screws sunk into the heavy wood at the top and bottom that indicated the presence of heavy deadbolts. And, of course, the letterbox located at eye height.

  “Inconvenient for postmen,” noted Minnie.

  “Yeah, but handy for anyone inside who wants to see who’s come to pay a call.”

  Rex lit a cigarette, sheltering the match from the brisk wind blowing down the street. He looked along its length in both directions, seeing no one moving down the sidewalks or going about their business. The town had a strange, hinky vibe to it lately. It was creepy.

  “This is creepy,” he said.

  “What?”

  “This,” said Rex. “All of it. I mean, how do we even know Stone’s on the level? He could be spinning us a line with all this talk of missing girls.”

  “He’s not,” insisted Minnie. “I sent a wire to a guy I know in the New York office. Says he knows Stone and says he’s on the up and up. Told me the man was like a bloodhound—one of their toughest agents. Broke the Crookback Red strike in ’21. Almost single-handedly, so he says.”

  Rex whistled, remembering the infamous labor union of the New York docks that had tried to resurrect the fearsome reputation of the Bowery Boys and the Plug Uglies: notorious gangs that had once filled the streets of New York with enormous riots and epidemics of violence.

  “He did that, really?”

  Minnie nodded. “And I looked in his eyes, Rex. I saw how bad he was hurting. He’s on the level, trust me.”

  “Okay, I’ll take your word for it, but wouldn’t we have heard at least something if that many girls had gon
e missing from the university? There’s few enough of them as it is.”

  “Rex, honey,” said Minnie, heading toward the door. “Shows what you know about being a woman.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I bet the deans of the university aren’t too bothered about women leaving their hallowed halls. I can’t say for sure, but I’d bet the farm they weren’t happy about letting them come to Miskatonic in the first place.”

  “You think they know these girls are going missing, but just don’t care? That’s pretty harsh, Minnie.”

  “It’s a harsh world,” said Minnie, knocking on the door. “Now are we going to do our job or what?”

  “Sure, and here’s me thinking I’m the reporter and you’re the photographer.”

  “I’m a woman—I can do lots of things at once.”

  “So I’m learning,” noted Rex as the letterbox creaked open and a hostile pair of eyes regarded them with rather less affection than a panhandling bum.

  “We’re closed,” said the eyes.

  “We’re not looking to drink,” said Rex, stepping up next to Minnie.

  “Then get lost.”

  “Here,” said Minnie, shoving a ten dollar bill into the letterbox. It was snatched in by a pair of grubby fingers. “We just want to talk. A few minutes of your time, that’s all.”

  “You ain’t cops are you?”

  Rex laughed. “Do we look like cops? Hell, I’ll take a drink inside if you want me to prove how much of a cop I’m not.”

  Minnie shot him a look and said, “We work for the Advertiser.”

  “Reporters? What the hell you want with this place?”

  “We heard that a lot of the girls from Miskatonic come here,” said Rex. “That right?”

  “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that,” said the invisible speaker. “Rufus might, though.”

  “Rufus?” asked Minnie. “Does he own this joint?”

  The unseen doorman laughed and hacked out a consumptive cough. “No, he don’t own the joint, but if anyone knows what goes on in here it’s him.”

  “Can we speak to him?” said Rex.

  “Maybe.”

  “Would another ten dollars get us a yes?” said Minnie, gesturing to Rex.

  “You could try and find out,” said the voice.

  Rex sighed and took a ten dollar bill from his wallet. He passed it through the door. The letterbox snapped shut, leaving them standing on the street like a couple of schmucks. They stood in silence for a few minutes until Rex scratched his chin.

  “Well, that was a waste of money,” he said.

  Just then the sound of bolts drawing back sounded in tandem with a heavy lock being turned. The door opened and a waft of stagnant air breathed outward from the hallway, laced with the acrid reek of old booze and stale sweat.

  “Get inside,” said the doorman, a hunched figure in a dirty shirt and stinking canvas trousers. He had bad skin and thinning wisps of greasy hair that hung over his collar. Rex imagined him as some deformed assistant to a mad professor. “Rufus is downstairs.”

  Rex crushed his cigarette beneath his heel and tipped his hat to the repulsive doorman as he descended into the depths.

  “I wonder what level of Hell this is,” said Rex.

  “I’d say the bottom one,” replied Minnie.

  * * *

  Oliver led the way through the halls of the Tyner Annex, trying not to notice the odd looks his newly acquired companion was attracting. Students looked at Finn with barely disguised loathing, while the members of the faculty gave Oliver looks that suggested the dean was going to hear of this latest faux pas.

  “This where you work?” asked Finn.

  “Me? No, I work in the Liberal Arts building on the other side of the square.”

  “Right you are,” said Finn, as though he knew where that was.

  They made their way along a bare corridor, walled with gleaming ceramic tiles and punctuated by heavy doors of iron labeled with strange symbols warning of all manner of potential hazards. Oliver smiled as he wondered if these symbols were simply mankind’s latest attempt at magical scribbling. Didn’t these warning symbols have the same power to warn off the unwary as did a bloody handprint or a mystical sigil scratched on the wall of a cave?

  “So where did you get that thing, Mr. Finn?” asked Oliver. “Whatever it is.”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Oliver felt an unexpected touch of kinship with the man, as though they were both privy to knowledge neither was intended to possess. He glanced over at Finn, seeing the lurking fear behind the Irishman’s studied calm. Whatever that device was, however he had come by it, it was clearly a source of some discomfiture to the man.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised what I believe these days,” said Oliver.

  Finn looked at him like he was trying to determine if Oliver was making fun of him.

  “Aye, well, it’s been a strange couple of days,” said Finn.” Buy me a hot coffee and I might be persuaded to tell ye.”

  Oliver nodded and pushed on a large button outside a heavy metal door of painted white iron. A yellow light flashed above the door and a heavy lock disengaged from the frame.

  “Jaysus,” said Finn, stepping back. “What sort of place is this?”

  “This is one of the electrical engineering labs,” explained Oliver, pushing open the door with his shoulder. It was heavy, but once moving it swung smoothly open on greased hinges. “Lots of big machines in here, high voltages and the like, so it can be quite dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” said Finn, shaking his head, but following Oliver inside.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Finn. Dr. Hayes is a very competent individual. Right now he’s developing a new kind of battery for the university’s proposed expedition to the Antarctic. He’s a heck of a clever fellow, so if there’s anyone that can tell what that…object is, it’ll be him.”

  Inside, the laboratory was a steel vaulted chamber of bare brick and metal. Heavy benches bore the weight of enormous machines of green iron and looped coils of brass cabling. Things on the tables were strewn about: complex blueprints, boxes of tools, crackling battery packs, and disassembled machinery. A couple of student assistants tinkered in the guts of a machine that looked like it was some kind of generator.

  A pretty girl with bobbed brown hair peered through a microscope at an arrangement of wires. A crackling hiss of soldering fizzed from the work at her fingertips. She looked up as they approached, blinking as her eyes refocused from the magnifications of the microscope.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice timid and quiet. “Can I help you?”

  “I certainly hope so,” said Oliver. “I’m Professor Grayson, and I’m looking for Dr. Hayes. Is he here?”

  She shook her head, eyes downcast as though it was her fault the doctor was absent. “No, I’m afraid he’s not. He and Professor Pabodie are off testing his latest battery design with the new drill.”

  “Ah, I see,” said Oliver. “Do you happen to know when they might be back?”

  “Sorry, professor, I don’t,” she said. “Perhaps I can help you? I work closely with Dr. Hayes. I mean to say that he’s a great teacher and I, well, I might be able to help you if it’s nothing too complex.”

  Finn transferred his bundle into the crook of his arm and stepped forward to take her hand, shaking it enthusiastically with a roguish glint in his eye.

  “That’d be grand, lass,” said Finn. “Finn Edwards at your service. And who might you be?”

  “Kate Winthrop,” said the girl with a shy smile. She was pretty, with a stylish haircut and the demeanor of a girl who liked the latest fashions, but would never dare to wear them beyond the confines of her bedroom. She wore a lab coat over a shapely figure of subtle curves. Oliver saw Finn taking in every one of them.

  “Mr. Finn, I mean, Mr. Edwards,” corrected Oliver with a discreet cough, “has a strange device he’d like Dr. Hayes to have a look at if he get
s a moment. I know he’s busy with getting everything ready for the Antarctic proposal, but if he could spare an hour or so, Mr. Edwards would be very grateful. Wouldn’t you, Finn?”

  “Aye, very grateful,” agreed Finn, placing the sphere on the table and unwrapping it.

  Once again, Oliver was struck by the sheer strangeness of the object. There shouldn’t have been any perturbation—it was just a sphere of polished metal—but there was some indefinable queerness to it that disturbed Oliver.

  “Goodness,” said Kate, bending down to take a closer look.

  Finn grabbed her arm and said, “Careful now, Miss Winthrop, that thing’s not quite…”

  “Not quite what?” asked Kate when Finn didn’t proceed.

  Finn struggled for the right word, before finally settling on one that seemed to fit the bill.

  “It’s not quite stable,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I ain’t exactly sure now,” said Finn, sounding embarrassed. “I was movin’ the pieces on the surface around and my room at Ma’s started to go all screwy. It was like the world got, I dunno, thin or something. The walls were shifting and moving like I’d been on a three day bender with a gallon of bathtub gin. Which, I might add, wasn’t the case. I was sober as a priest on Ash Wednesday, I swear. Hungover maybe, but not drunk, no way.”

  Oliver listened to Finn’s words, now beginning to regret his decision to allow him within the university buildings. The man reeked of cheap whiskey and had obviously not had a wash today. Clearly Oliver’s readings of Laban Shrewsbury’s book had left him open to believing all manner of outlandish nonsense.

  “Ach, I see the way you’se are lookin’ at me,” said Finn. “You’ll be thinking I’m a crazy gobshite, I can tell. Well, to hell with you two, I ain’t crazy. I’ll figure this out on me own.”

  Finn made to retrieve the sphere, but Kate stepped in front of him with a strange look in her eyes. Oliver had taken her for timid and shy, but her body language spoke of a fierce determination. How easy it was to misjudge people!