by CW Hawes
The OUP operatives had, with practiced precision, swept into the little village and rounded up over seventy of the inhabitants and had even succeeded in capturing eight of the monstrosities, which are now officially tagged as Unidentified Creatures, or UC for short.
The fire, before it was stopped, ended up destroying half the village. Over the past weeks the government moved in and erased Agate Bay from the map. Even Google maps shows the place as nothing but forest. All mention and record of the village is being put down the memory hole. The internet now has no mention of the place, at least the part ordinary people can access. Books will be more difficult to alter, but then not many read old musty volumes anymore. Perhaps that is an advantage. Maybe the digital age is in fact a wonderful thing.
The Coast Guard, in cooperation with the Navy, two weeks ago conducted training exercises off the shore of what was Agate Bay and Disaster Rock. Over three hundred depth charges were dropped into the deep water off the lake facing side of the Rock and over a hundred missiles were fired into the deepest part of Lake Superior.
Aside from the myriad of dead fish, Mostyn had no delusions about the supposed destruction of the Deep Ones and their city. Logically, given the amount of ordnance, they should have been destroyed. Unfortunately, the Deep Ones had a way of defying human logic.
There was a knock on his door. He sat up and set the coffee mug on his desk. “Come in.”
The door opened and Doctor Bardon walked in. His short, pot-shaped pipe perfuming the air with the sweet smell of a Virginia blend. He closed the door and took a seat across the desk from Mostyn.
“Well, Mostyn, how are you?” He pronounced the words in his precise and educated English accent.
“I’m fine, sir.”
“Good. Good. Don’t want my best agent out of commission for too long. Spoke with Doctor Kemper this morning by telephone. She seems to be doing quite well. I think Agate Bay has finally made a believer out of her.”
Mostyn didn’t say anything and Bardon went on. “Our new detainees will give us invaluable knowledge to add to the information the government got in Innsmouth. Science has made great strides since nineteen twenty-seven. We might actually be able to determine the origins of the Deep Ones. Too bad, though, we couldn’t capture the shoggoth. Would have made a fine prize. A mighty fine prize.”
Bardon had a smile on his face and a dreamy look in his eyes.
Mostyn let him enjoy his reverie for a few moments before clearing his throat and asking, “Have you ever seen a shoggoth, sir?”
The Director smiled and steepled his fingers. “Oh, yes, Mostyn, oh, yes. Indescribably hideous things, aren’t they?” He puffed on his pipe. “Antarctica. Nineteen sixty-five. Part of my doctoral research. Yes, indeed. No wonder Kemper got ASD, especially thinking the thing had gotten you. But then you know what it’s like facing a shoggoth, don’t you, my boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Say, I’m very sorry about Special Agent Patel. She’ll get a medal, of course, for her family’s sake. Some nonsense about an operation in Yemen, or some such. Make them feel good that their daughter died a hero. We just can’t tell the family the truth, now, can we?”
“No, sir.”
“By all accounts a brave young woman and that’s how she should be remembered.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ll tell the same thing to Doctor Templeton’s family. A brave search and rescue attempt, but unable to retrieve his body. A deep glacial crevasse or some such attempting to analyze bones or something on that order. I let the public relations folk do the creative work. I just sign off on it. And don’t blame yourself, Mostyn. You did the best you could in the situation with the information you had at hand. Devilish beings. Simply devilish.”
Bardon stood. “Christmas in another week, Mostyn. Knowing what we know, it gives a wholly different meaning to ‘Peace on earth; goodwill towards men’, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, it does.”
“Again, I’m sorry about Patel. I know how you feel about a fellow comrade in arms, so to speak. If I don’t see you before the big day, a happy Christmas to you, Mostyn.”
The Director stuck out his hand and Mostyn moved around the desk to take it and they shook hands.
“Thank you, sir, and the same to you.”
Bardon nodded at him and went to the door. With his hand on the knob, he paused, and turned back to look at Mostyn.
“Oh, before I forget, let Evelyn know where you want that Columbia Six delivered. Will you?”
“What? You mean…?”
Bardon chuckled. “I take care of my people, Mostyn. Happy Christmas.”
The director left and Mostyn returned to his chair. The Columbia Six. Just what he needed to take his mind off things.
“Nothing like restoring an antique,” he said out loud, “to occupy one’s mind. Just what the doctor ordered.” He chuckled at the joke.
His mind’s eye drifted back to the car and the garage and Templeton. At the thought of Templeton, the happiness faded away.
How could he not blame himself? He’d told the young anthropologist to wait with the SUV when he hadn’t wanted to do so. No amount of antique restoring was going to erase that mistake. None.
He sat staring off into space and then got up and walked over to the window. Through the one-way transparent armor he looked at the day. The sky was gray and the temperature was below freezing. He thought of the jovial director and smiled at the comment Bardon had made and that he’d taken the effort to rescue the old car for him. Specially for him. Then his mood once more grew serious.
The tree outside his window was naked. The leaves long gone. Yet, despite the look to the contrary, he knew it was very much alive and for that reason liked to share his thoughts with it. He liked to think on some level it could hear him. Unlike the painted walls surrounding him. He liked to think nature was like that.
“I wonder,” he said out loud, “how many families have been lied to because it wasn’t expedient to tell them the truth? How many are we, the government of the United States of America, lying to right now? How many horrors are we hiding from the American people? Horrors, that perhaps they need to know about?”
Were those snowflakes dancing in the air? He couldn’t be sure. The transparent armor wasn’t quite as clear as glass.
“Peace on earth and goodwill towards men. I wonder if we’ll ever see that.” After a moment’s reflection, he said, “Probably not.”
He paused and thought of Dotty and what she had wanted to tell him that night and how he’d cut her off. “Why?” he said to the tree. “Why was I afraid to hear what she might have confessed thinking we were going to die?”
Out on the street a car drove by. Traffic was light this afternoon. “No, we’ll probably never have peace on earth. However, I can try to spread a little peace and goodwill on my own this Christmas season.
He walked over to the hat and coat stand in the corner of his office and grabbed his hat and coat. “Ready or not, Dotty Kemper, here I come. I think we both can use a friend and just a little bit of peace on this old earth and some goodwill, at least towards each other.”
Author’s Note
If you’ve gotten this far, I’m assuming you’ve read through Nightmare in Agate Bay. I hope you enjoyed reading the book as much as I did writing it. And if you did, please consider leaving a review. It’s free advertising for authors. And we appreciate it very much.
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Fear is one of our most primal emotions. It’s a protective mechanism. It’s designed to keep us alive.
Horror literature. Tales of terror. Weird fiction. Stories of the macabre. Fairy tales. Whatever we call them, these warnings of the dark things, of the unknown, have been with us from the beginning. They are what parents told their children for millennia to curb unhealthy desires to venture too far from home. Unhealthy desires to change the status quo. Because home and the status quo is what is known — and the known is what’s safe.
I’ve always been drawn to horror literature. Not the hacker/slasher type. The slow burn, psychological tale that creeps up on you and leaves you feeling very uneasy — that leaves you once again afraid of the dark. Those classic tales of Poe, Victorian ghost stories, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar”, Howard’s “Pigeons from Hell”, and Lovecraft’s “Colour out of Space”.
Or TV shows such as The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Night Gallery, The X-Files, Dark Shadows, and Stranger Things. Shows that make you turn on the lights.
The Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation series came about as I wondered what a blend of The X-Files and Stranger Things would look like, with a dash of Charles Stross’s humor. I hope you’ve enjoyed the initial experiment.
Thank you for reading. I hope to see you on the other side. I’ll keep the light on for you. We don’t like the dark, do we?
CW Hawes
Other Books by CW Hawes
I’m a multi-genre author because I’m a multi-genre reader. You can check out my other books on my website’s My Books Page.
Dedication
This one is for my sister, with thanks, and in memory of John J. “Jack” Koblas: mentor, inspiration, and friend.
Copyright © 2018 CW Hawes. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Acknowledgements
No book is ever a solo project. There are all the folks who wrote the material an author draws upon for research. There are all the writers who are currently writing and who came before that the author has read. There are also all those who help on the technical end of things.
To name everyone who has helped me in the production of my books would be an impossible task. Consequently, for this book, I’m going to single out a few folks who helped make this book possible.
I want to thank Crispian Thurlborn for his kind words of encouragement and for producing the trailers to promote it, a superb job that.
Thanks also goes to Ben Willoughby for his great cover.
Many thanks go to my beta readers who provided valuable input to make the story better. They were my sister, Jodi; my daughter, Susannah; Ben Willoughby; and Andy Decker.
A special acknowledgement must go to HP Lovecraft, who’s imagination and writing got the ball rolling in the first place.