Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy)

by Graham McNeill

  Amanda and Rita screamed as it dragged itself toward them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A chill ran down Gabriel Stone’s spine for no reason he could adequately explain. He looked up from the spread pile of archived newspapers to check for anyone watching him. No one was, so he shook off the strange feeling. Muted streetlights, filtered through half-drawn blinds, kept the offices of the Arkham Advertiser dim, and Gabriel rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn.

  Trawling through seven years’ worth of articles, obituaries, appointments, and banal local news was tiring work, and the faded ink of the words had begun to blur together. Murphy had provided him with a key to the office, together with an admonishment that tried to be stern, but just made Gabriel want to laugh.

  “You better be out of there by seven a.m.,” Murphy had warned him. “Harvey’s always first in the office, and if he catches you there, first thing he’ll do is call the cops.”

  “He’ll never know I was there,” Gabriel had reassured the nervous reporter. “Remember—”

  “Yeah, I know, ‘you never sleep.’”

  Gabriel looked at his pocket watch. It was quarter to three in the morning, and the motto of the Pinkertons notwithstanding, he felt like he could sleep for a week. He’d watched the owner of the Advertiser leave the building just after six the night before, and after waiting twenty minutes to make sure he wasn’t going to come back, he’d slipped into the building.

  The paper didn’t have a morgue of old issues in the basement as he’d expected. Murphy had told him that there had been a great flood back in 1888, so perhaps that wasn’t so surprising. He found the collated back issues on the two walls behind a secretary’s desk, arranged chronologically, though he saw immediately that some were missing. Coincidence, or deliberate removal? Time would tell, and Gabriel knew you could learn a lot by knowing what was missing, as well as from what you found.

  Now, after almost eight hours of searching, he had filled dozens of pages in his notebook with scraps of information. Some were related to Professor Grayson, others to the missing girls who’d vanished from the university, and other notes contained copious amounts of unsettling information on the town’s above-average occurrences of unusual phenomenon. Of these latter tales, each on its own might have been dismissed with a convenient explanation, but when gathered together, they painted a frightening portrait of a town in denial of its macabre underbelly.

  Gabriel saw a faded picture from 1917 of a young boy from nearby Dunwich named Wilbur Whateley who was said to be four and a half years old, but who was clearly in his mid-teens with the faint outlines of stubble on his cheeks. At first Gabriel thought it a misprint, but when he came across the announcement of the child’s birth in February 1913, he knew it was not.

  Other tales concerned unusual rumblings, of fires atop the strangely rounded hill-tops surrounding Arkham and, most curiously, a meteorite that landed in fields belonging to a farmer named Nahum Gardner. It had borne an unknown contagion that blighted the land around it for miles, rendering it barren and dead, though no amount of scientific examination could determine its nature.

  But among all the strange and mysterious happenings to which the people of Arkham seemed able to turn a blind eye, none horrified Gabriel more than a sensational story from twenty-one years ago, the relevance of which was not lost upon him.

  After a typhoid outbreak that killed a multitude of people in 1905, a deranged murderer had struck Arkham, slaughtering fourteen people and devouring three corpses in his maniacal killing spree. A night watchman at Christchurch cemetery had been found with the dawn, mutilated so terribly that doubt was cast as to the humanity of his assailant. Portions of the man, the newspaper reported gleefully, had been eaten right off the bone.

  On the third night after the killer’s rampage had begun, a group of police and volunteers had wounded the hideous thing—a creature that had all the form of a monstrously malformed ape, but which was revealed to be a man, a man whose resemblance to the late Dr. Allan Halsey, dean of the School of Medicine at Miskatonic University, was uncanny.

  This abominable killer was beyond reason, and could only mindlessly roar and beat itself bloody. Its wounds were treated and a padded cell was prepared for it at Sefton Asylum. Upon checking later issues for this feral killer, Gabriel had been horrified to learn that it had escaped in 1921, though the tale of a waxen-headed liberator and his silent army was surely a falsehood invented by negligent orderlies to cover their ineptitude.

  Yet Gabriel could find no trace of the cannibal monster’s fate. Was it possible it had returned to its Arkham hunting grounds? With some base, animal instinct, might the creature have followed a hideous trail back to its former abode and hid itself away until now? Gabriel knew most murderers were homebodies: they didn’t like to stray from where they felt comfortable, but did that apply to such a horrific killer? Could any existing model of psychology be applied to the behavior of something so far removed from humanity as to be almost unrecognizable?

  He didn’t know the answer to that, but couldn’t ignore how the feasting horrors of this monster matched what had happened to his daughter. Lydia had been eaten, the very flesh chewed from her bones, and…and…

  Gabriel put his head in his hands, fatigue and grief welling up like Old Faithful and threatening to spill out in a raging fury of inchoate rage. His fists clenched the page, crumpling the paper. At that moment, Gabriel wanted nothing more than to rip the words and pictures before him to shreds, to tear every one of these damned newspapers to confetti.

  He took a breath, calming himself and letting his anger ebb to a level where he felt he wasn’t going to do something stupid. He’d promised that the owner of the Advertiser wouldn’t know he’d been there. That might be a tough promise to live up to if he wrecked the joint, and Gabriel Stone wasn’t a man who broke a promise once he’d given it.

  The only promise he’d ever broken was the one to his daughter. He’d promised to always keep her safe. The aching emptiness in his heart swelled to encompass his entire body, a numbing grief that was impossible to process and would never leave him. His little girl was dead, and no matter what he did here, she would never come back. No matter who he punished, killed, or brought to justice, Lydia Stone would never again dance a Charleston or a Black Bottom.

  That thought alone brought him back to his senses. Lydia might be gone, but there were other girls out there who might be unlucky enough to run into whoever or whatever was killing with impunity in this town. To spare other mothers and fathers the horror that had risen up to engulf his life was reason enough to pursue this to the end. The idea that this killer might evade justice would not stand, and Gabriel knew then and there that he would not leave this town until he had seen justice done.

  Not vengeance, but justice.

  The line between the two was slender, and Gabriel hoped he would know the difference if he ever came face-to-face with Lydia’s killer.

  Putting that thought aside, he took a small hip flask from his coat pocket and took a shot of whiskey. It wasn’t the best hooch, but at least it wouldn’t blind you. Reinvigorated by the fiery liquor, Gabriel returned his attention to the back issues of the Advertiser. He changed tack, and began looking into the dealings and newsworthy articles concerning Miskatonic University, specifically any stories or announcements relating to Professor Oliver Grayson.

  There wasn’t much.

  The university, as reported in the Advertiser, was a pillar of the community, an upstanding institution of lauded academics and exceptional students. Many of its graduates had gone on to prosper in the world beyond higher education, especially in the last few years. Yet as much as the newspaper loudly trumpeted the university’s many achievements, it did not overlook the tragedies that plagued its staff with more regularity than might be expected.

  In 1908, a professor named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee collapsed during a class and suffered many years of amnesia, an affliction for which no physician could find a cause. Ano
ther professor, Laban Shrewsbury, had vanished in 1915 while walking down a country lane to the west of town. And in 1923, Henry Cartwright, a respected academic of the university had apparently gone mad and embarked upon an arson spree, burning down numerous buildings throughout Arkham before being incarcerated in the town’s asylum.

  But what of Oliver Grayson?

  The man had come to Arkham in the summer of 1919, a respected graduate of Brown University with a modest, but well-regarded, history of publications. The announcement of his appointment to the university was made with the typical pomposity common to all institutions of academia, but there was little to arouse Gabriel’s instincts save two fragile connections.

  Like Laban Shrewsbury, Grayson was an anthropologist, and he was a friend of Henry Cartwright. It seemed unlikely Grayson knew Peaslee (he would only have been seventeen at the time of Peaslee’s attack of amnesia) and, according to his potted biography, on his way to Brown University in Rhode Island. It seemed Grayson had earned a reputation as a scholar of esoteric cults while studying at Brown, having traveled extensively among the more devolved tribal groups of the world.

  Gabriel was no expert in such things, but he knew that men who got too close to the objects of their attention often became just like the things they were studying. He’d seen it plenty of times, where investigators going undercover in the labor unions began to sympathize with the very people they were trying to undermine. Even when they were pulled out of their operations, they were never quite the same.

  Could something similar happen to academics in the field?

  He didn’t know, but it was a lead worth following up on.

  Gabriel leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “What might you have learned from those cults?” he whispered. “What might you have brought back in that head of yours?”

  * * *

  The scar-faced thing hissed and spat, drooling like a dog at feeding time. Its flesh dripped water and the stench of it was like a festering cesspit. Amanda pressed herself back against the rough wall, holding tight to Rita as it swung its arms at them. Iron chains rattled and the metal collar bit into the meat of its scrawny neck. Its eyes were the eyes of a madman, delirious and raving, but Amanda thought she saw something desperately human in them, a glint of something once noble and now debased beyond all recognition.

  “It can’t get to us,” said Rita, weeping in relief. “It’s chained to the wall, too.”

  “What is it?” cried Amanda, pressing herself into a tight ball and trying not to look at the hideous thing as it hissed and clawed at the air. Its teeth were crooked blades, sharp and elongated so profoundly that its mouth could not fully close. Its gums wept blood and sprayed the air before it with gobbets of the stuff.

  “I ain’t exactly sure,” said Rita, moving to stand protectively in front of Amanda. The light was poor, but Amanda saw the chained collar pulled taut at the creature’s neck and the bolted plate in the wall where it was secured. Whatever this creature was, it was a prisoner, too.

  “Oh, Rita, what’s happened to us? What is this place?”

  “Damned if I know, Mandy,” said Rita, massaging the skin around her wrists. “Cave of some sort, but who the hell knows where?”

  “Who would do this to us?”

  “Listen, Mandy, you got to stop asking me questions I can’t answer,” said Rita. “Let’s just figure out a way outta here. Then we can start worrying about how, why, and where. Yeah?”

  Amanda swallowed hard, trying to clamp down on her panic. The chained monster had sunk to its haunches, walking crab-like at the extent of its iron leash, as though testing the limits of its hunting ground. It had stopped thrashing and trying to maul them, but its animal hunger was undimmed.

  “I bet that’s what killed that girl you found,” said Amanda.

  “I expect you’re right, but it ain’t gonna kill us.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because I’m not about to let anyone treat me like this,” snapped Rita. “I worked too damn hard to get where I am, and I ain’t about to let anyone take it away from me!”

  Rita cupped her hands and shouted toward the stairs. “You hear me, you bastards! This girl is gonna fight you every step of the way, and if you think you’re gonna throw me to that monster, you best believe I’m dragging you with me! Come on down here and see if I’m lying! I dare you, you damn cowards!”

  Rita’s anger was infectious, and Amanda’s terror dropped to a level where she didn’t feel the world was collapsing in on her. Something terrible had happened to them; they had been kidnapped and tossed in this dank, lightless cave with a monster that ate people. They were chained up, but so too was the monster, which begged the question…

  “Who lets it out?” said Amanda.

  “What?” replied Rita, turning from her raging tirade.

  “That…thing,” pointed Amanda. “It’s chained up, just like us. But someone let it in here, and someone lets it out. If it did kill that girl, someone let it kill her, and someone got it back here after it had done it.”

  “Or she was killed here and just dumped at the athletics field,” said Rita.

  “Oh,” said Amanda. “Yes, that does sound more likely.”

  “But I see where you’re going,” said Rita. “If there’s someone here who tells that thing what to do, then they gotta come down here sometime. And when they do…”

  “When they do, what?” said Amanda when Rita didn’t continue.

  “Then we smack them on the head and get the hell outta here.”

  “You think we can?”

  “I know we can,” promised Rita.

  High above them, a heavy door opened and a faint light spilled into the cave, finally illuminating their cavern prison. Amanda saw it was around fifty feet in diameter, with numerous iron rings set into the wall around its circumference. Only the rings binding her, Rita, and the monster were looped with iron fetters. A pool of oil-dark water lapped at one wall of the cave, where a filth-clogged culvert drained to some far distant reservoir. The reek from beyond was indescribable, a mixture of rancid eggs, decaying plant matter, and the sulfurous exhalations of a noxious swamp.

  A dozen or so alcoves punctuated the wall opposite them, each secured with iron bars and a heavy padlock like a jail cell. Within each alcove a pale shape hauled itself to the bars, grunting and snuffling like a stray dog hungry for scraps. Elongated fingers tipped with filth and blood-encrusted nails gripped bars. Fanged maws worked up and down in blind hunger as the things within caught their scent.

  The monster chained to the wall had come from one of those alcoves, the floor of which was littered with straw and gnawed bones. The terror in Amanda’s heart began to rise once more. They were going to be eaten by this monster and its pack!

  The glow from above grew stronger, and the monster looked away from the light, shielding its eyes with one clawed hand and mewling like a whipped beast. It slunk away from the edge of the water and climbed back into its wretched abode. Despite her terror, Amanda couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pity for the thing. The others withdrew from the light, backing into their damnable cells as the light descended into the cave.

  Two figures marched downward, each robed in flowing greenish robes and bearing an oil-burning lantern. No trace of their features could be discerned, for both wore deep hoods that veiled their faces in the blackest shadows. Amanda took Rita’s hand and felt the clammy wetness of her friend’s palm.

  “Who the hell are you?” demanded Rita. “Hoods? I might have known! You damn cowards always cover your faces. You’re just like the damn Klan, always too scared to let people see who you are, because you know you’re bad men doing bad things. You think just because I can’t see your face means it’s all right to do this?”

  Neither of the two figures answered her, descending each step in perfect unison as a pervasive smell, like the docks at low tide in summer, filled the cavern.

  “You can’t even speak, can you?” shouted Rit
a, her belligerence giving her strength. “Answer me, damn you!”

  The figures reached the bottom of the stairs and still their faces were shrouded in blackness. The soft light from their lanterns seemed unable to penetrate the gloom beneath their hoods, as they began to chant a meaningless doggerel.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

  Amanda couldn’t tell what language it was, or even if it was a language. The hideous syllables seemed to run together with liquid evil, like a curse of the blackest nature, or a threat of the most unimaginable peril. Again they said it, more insistent this time, as though they expected a response from the two girls.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” cried Rita. “Speak English, you bastards!”

  “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,” said the first figure, in a voice that was pure Midwest corn country. She didn’t know the voice, but its homespun American roots were at odds with the fear it engendered.

  “You know what, go back to what you was saying before, cause I reckon it made more sense than that.”

  “Who are you?” asked Amanda. “What do you want with us?”

  “Just you,” said the second figure with an identical accent. “We don’t care about her.”

  “Oh, you’re gonna care about me, you bastard!” shouted Rita, struggling at her chains and drawing more blood from her torn skin. “You’ll care about me when I tear that hood off and jam my thumbs in your eyes!”

  “You have seen the face of the Great Old One,” said the first voice, and Amanda caught a hint of jealousy and fear. “You dreamed of his sunken city. You profaned his temple by speaking of it to others. You will tell us everything you saw in your dreams.”