Arkham Nights

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  “God, Christ, dammit!” I yelped, then reached down to pull out whatever was jabbing my knee. It was something out of West’s medical kit, a pair of shiny steel calipers embedded over an inch into my flesh. I tugged the damn things out of me and lined up my sights, when I suddenly felt a bullet zip past my ear followed by a loud hiss from behind me. Then I saw Barnes across the room waving and shouting. If it wasn’t for the ringing in my ears, I’d swear he was trying to warn me.

  Doctor West was gesturing at me too, laughing giddily. I was about to take my shot when he fell to his knees with a smoking hole in his chest. The wall behind him was spattered with black and yellow goo, his own twisted insides joining the mess.

  Seemed like Barnes was a better shot than I was after all.

  Realizing finally that West’s assistant was on the level came as no solace. Something big exploded behind me, peppering my back with white-hot chunks of shrapnel and setting my hair on fire. How I escaped the explosion in one piece I have no idea, but as the wall at my rear became a blazing sheet of fire I began crawling on my hands and knees towards the exit, dragging surgical scalpels, tools, and West’s black blood under me.

  The room was choked with smoke and the flames lapped at my ass by the time I reached the door, one aching eternity later. Turning round I spied West through the black clouds; he was on his knees, juddering like an erratic jack-in-the-box as the fire engulfed his prone form. At least my hearing had returned in time for me to realize the guy on the table had stopped his yammering. I found Murphy next to me as dead as Dillinger, his face and chest burning and adding more fumes to the already eye-watering smoke. I was about to take aim to finally finish West off when another explosion sent me scurrying away with my clothes on fire, like a fleeing rat.

  As I tumbled down the stairs, I saw my savior Barnes was nowhere to be found, so I had no chance to thank him as I doused the flames burning my head and backside up. God only knows where the big guy with the lovely scars had disappeared to either; maybe he’d gone to buy flowers for Father Murphy’s grave. Reaching the ground floor with my best suit a singed mess I hoped sincerely that West himself had departed to whatever kind of hell was reserved for croakers like him.

  Running from West’s collapsing house, I paused once to look back, wondering whether or not the doctor had well and truly gone.

  If I’d seen him being torn to shreds from a yard away I’d still have my doubts that evil creep was really dead. When more explosions wracked the top floor and the windows burst asunder I hoped the greasy black flames billowing up to the sky contained at least a little residue from his disintegrating corpse.

  I then wondered, soot-stained, bleeding and burned as I was, where I could find the nearest, cheapest bar. God, I could go for some brown.

  Epilogue 1: The Girl Hunter

  I’ve never claimed to be an optimist, but have always been the kind of dog that’s willing to learn new tricks. And two days after the ‘incident’ involving West I went to visit my employer, informing him that the guy who’d robbed Jayne from her grave was gone and he could finally put his mind to rest. I then tore his check up in his face and broke his jaw for good measure.

  I don’t think either of us saw that coming.

  Just like I’d not foreseen the possibility of my ex-wife coming back from the dead. But what good old Doctor West had done with the corpse in his laboratory had been a real eye opener, and if there was a chance of seeing her again I’d take it.

  That’s optimism for you; even though I know it’ll take a lot more than West’s creepy resurrection formula to win her back to me.

  So, with my car retrieved from the impound lot in Boston, my hair trimmed down to a buzz-cut to conceal the singes, and me wearing a brand new suit, I started my journey with more than enough bullets to deal with any unfortunate incidents that might come my way. Even now, after a month of dead ends and false leads, I’m still hunting for her, running down across my list of next of kin and old acquaintances.

  As long as there’s hope I’m going to keep on searching, and woe betide anyone who gets in my way.

  Epilogue 2: An Uneasy Reprieve

  I regained consciousness and cursed loudly as the pain of a twisted ankle shot through me. I vaguely remembered halfway choking to death on smoke and chemical fumes in West’s lab and making a split second decision to get the hell out through the second-floor window. When I came to, I felt heat and realized that the house was being consumed by fire.

  An explosion thundered from inside as I struggled to my feet and limped away. I looked over my shoulder but saw no sign of Towers, West, or his demented associates. My primary focus was to put as much distance between myself and the entire burning mess. I didn’t fancy a return to prison and there was no way I could make anyone believe what had occurred in that house of horror.

  I’m now working on the Frisco docks and say a silent prayer every night that West was lying about implicating me in his twisted schemes. I hope that the bastard is good and truly dead but I saw too many things while in his employ to rest easy on that score. It’s hell going through life looking over your shoulder but it’s a damn sight better than being dead. Or undead.

  Still, it sort of eats away at me, knowing that he might still be somewhere out there and in a position to blackmail me. That doesn’t sit well with me and I know it’s only a matter of time until I pull up stakes and go looking for the little bastard. He better hope like Hell that I don’t find him because he’s got a lot to answer for. I’m usually an easygoing sonofabitch but there are things to be said for the Trevor Towers approach to dealing with problems; not a whole lot of good things, but they get the job done.

  Big Boss

  Like most stories in my life, it starts with a corpse. Except I hadn’t done the deed this time... not entirely. You see, the low-lid that’d been sent to snuff me made the second major mistake of knocking on my apartment door. His first mistake was making far too much noise as he walked down the corridor to my room.

  Also, he’d been dead once already; a zombie, if you will.

  I’d been watching him through the peephole as he approached my door, holding a shotgun one-handed like the stone-cold, hard man he thought he was.

  When he knocked, I edged myself to the side of the door, and pretended like I was fumbling around with the lock, just long enough to make him think I was behind it. A second later, he booted his way into the apartment, waving that cannon of his around, all locked and loaded. I noticed that his pasty-faced nose was dripping snot thick with cocaine.

  A dope zombie, if you will.

  I lingered just long enough for him to take me in before sticking my butterfly knife hilt-deep into his eye.

  My would-be killer fell flat on his face, killed outright as the impact forced the knife up into his brain. He still danced that awful death jig, leaving an ugly stain on the carpet. No way I was getting my security bond back now, or my knife, for that matter.

  My name is Trevor Towers; I’m a war veteran and all-round son of a bitch and I’d spent the past week in that hotel trying to get a bead on Arkham’s resident gangster, the man called ‘Big Boss.’

  Once my companion was good and still, I flipped his coke-snorting body onto its back and did a little poking of my own. I first broke his shotgun open and let the shells clatter all over the hardwood floor. After tearing his jacket and shirt open, I found a litter of bullet holes across his chest, most of them mortal. They looked way past raw and had scarred something fierce.

  This knuckle-dragger had been one of Big Boss’s boys, dragged out of the ground to bump me off just before I sent him right back to Hell. I started shifting through his pockets for some kind of identification or a clue that might get me closer to Big Boss, when a dark form blocked the doorway.

  It was just the hotel’s landlord, in all his shirtless glory, with a half-full colostomy bag strapped to his chest. He didn’t even blink twice as he caught me in the act of pillaging a fresh corpse.

  “Daw
h won’t be fixed till tomorrah,” he said, in his thick southern drawl and then trudged down the hall.

  Right then, I was certain that discretion was the better part of valor, and decided that I had better make a quick exit from his building. After all, someone had told the dead thug my room number.

  I packed my meager belongings and was out of my room and down that rattrap’s stairs in three minutes flat. I paid the rent for the entire week plus something extra to cover for my broken ‘dawh.’ The flour-lover at the desk gave me that vamp wink, which offered me a quick romp behind the counter for just a couple extra dollars.

  I let her down as gently as I could. She didn’t take it half as well as I’d thought, so I left the hotel with her snarling some pretty imaginative abuses behind me.

  The dump I’d been staying in was on French Hill, one of the older parts of Arkham—once a crumbling little town that was slowly but surely pulling itself out of oblivion and growing into a city.

  Before I came to town almost every gambling den, brothel, and speakeasy had been taken over by Big Boss in a quick and bloody coup. He hit them so hard and fast that it shook the entire underworld. Word on the street was, many of the men the Boss had had bumped off were soon seen walking around with the rest of his crew.

  You’d have to be off your nuts to buy that tall tale. Then again, the trail I’d been on—tracking down my ex-wife and love of my life—had gone completely cold. And believe it or not, she, like the bimbo I’d left in my room, had also been dead, before the good doctor Herbert West brought her back to life. Of course, the quack was dead; I and one of his disgruntled henchmen saw to that. But she was still out there somewhere and leaning on her friends and acquaintances had got me nowhere.

  So when I heard about Big Boss and his supposed army of men back from the dead, I just had to check it out. Maybe there was some kind of link between him and Herbert West’s only successful experiment: the one woman I’d never forget. My Jayne.

  If I wanted to get some answers, I had to get to Big Boss.

  He was a slippery little eel, out of sight and apparently out of reach. The only place I could find him would be Arkham, where he oversaw the bootlegging operations for the region. It was as good a lead as any.

  On my first crack at him, I tried to join his gang as muscle. I was turned away at the door, despite my glowing credentials and impressive background. Then again, who could blame him: why waste your dough on living, breathing rubes, when you could just bring all your deadbeat, dopeheaded futzes back to life for free?

  For my next attempt I decided to piss him off so much that he’d come and find me. I started by hanging around the bars in Arkham and badmouthing him and his crew. I figured that he’d be angry enough to break cover sooner or later. Sending out feelers and being loud around the right people in certain juice joints had obviously paid off.

  I finally had the sap’s attention.

  I had only been back on the East Coast a few days when I caught a glimpse of Trevor Towers. His stone-hard mug brought a flood of bad memories running back and I cursed the day I’d lollygagged myself into leaving my job in Frisco.

  The last time I’d seen Towers, he had taken a pot shot at me shortly before the explosion that nearly cost both our lives. To this day, I can’t be sure if he ever figured out who I was. I wasn’t looking forward to bumping into him again; the man was a tough mug and bad news all around. I once slugged it out with him to a fifteen-round draw in the prize ring and right then and there I knew that there had to be smarter ways to make a living. I had been in an Arkham gin mill—celebrating the job offer I’d gotten from a private dick named Wade Kearney—when I saw Towers lounging at the bar. He must have come in when I had staggered into the men’s room to make room for more beer. Slipping past him, I made my way to the exit and disappeared into the foggy streets of Arkham, eventually finding my way to the rattrap I’d been staying in.

  What the hell is he doing in Arkham? I wondered, flopping down on the halfway clean bedspread. The man had gotten in a hell of a lather over Herbert West, the quack I mentioned earlier. Hopefully, Towers had calmed down some, since West got blown to smithereens. I sure wasn’t losing too much sleep over it, aside from the occasional nightmare of his ever-smoldering corpse coming after me. But who the hell has time for bogeymen, when you’re knee deep in witch-haunted Arkham?

  “Witch-haunted my ass,” I mumbled, as I rummaged for a bottle.

  I’d asked Kearney about it. He was more than happy to oblige with an explanation.

  “Hey,” he’d answered, “It’s great public relations. Do you know how many Dumb Doras flock to a place like this, looking for ghosts and ghoulies and two-bit horror?”

  What the hell for? Hell, the real world was bad enough without trying to dig up something worse. It was only much later that I learned that Kearney was feeding me a whole lot of bull. If his cases were anything to go by, he’d had his fill of things that went bump in the night. Enough to fill a book, maybe.

  I took a swig of the bottled panther piss and winced. Kearney had found me through a mutual friend back from our time in the service, who’d put in a good enough word when the dick dug up my checkered past. He had given me an advance on my salary and a few days to get used to the town before getting on to the real legwork. Kearney had also seen my bout with Towers a few years earlier so he knew I wouldn’t go yellow on him if the going got tough.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. How ironic, that the bruiser I wanted to have nothing to do with had helped to get me this job. I wasn’t scared of Towers but I’d damn sure avoid a rematch, unless there was some dough to be made.

  After my encounter with Big Boss’s zombie goon I moved right into the next flea-pit motel. It was a place on Crane Street, set between Miskatonic University, Hangman’s Hill and the hospital. Now there was one hell of a view. Atop Hangman’s Hill, directly facing my window, stood a dilapidated little graveyard. I suppose that if I was a local I could’ve lived out my days in Arkham without ever having to step out of my neighborhood. Then again, this dead-end town seemed to work out pretty well, if the locals were anything to go by.

  After settling into my new place, I decided I would continue kicking at the hornet’s nest in every nearby speakeasy, making sure I kept well away from the prom-trotter or Mick joints. The bars that sold the cheapest, crummiest coffin varnish were the ones I’d shoot my mouth off in, letting anyone that’d listen know that I’d just whacked one of Big Boss’ dumbest, hardest boys and if the man took issue to that, he should take it up with me.

  Was that the most hair-brained scheme I’ve ever come up with? Yes. Did I want to get a lead on Jayne even if it killed me?

  Yes. A thousand times, yes.

  I slept in late after my first night in town. It wasn’t something I did often. I decided that I could get used to this life of idle luxury, if I ever made it. Pull the other one while you’re at it! After a hot shower and a shave, I left my place on Crane Street, sauntered past the Miskatonic campus and ate breakfast at a diner on Church Street. The cook could fix up a mean plate of bacon and eggs but the dame behind the counter was a textbook chunk of lead. She weighed about two-fifty, with buck teeth up to here. Prison doesn’t quite rub out all your standards. I polished my plate and left a generous tip on the counter to make up for disappointing the doll. She took a gander at the tip and gave me a grin all teeth and gums. I decided it might be best to find another eatery, just in case.

  The morning fog was beginning to lift as I retraced my steps and casually made my way down to West and Saltonstall Streets. I decided to drop in on my new boss and see if he had any work for me. I went up to the battered desk, but there was no one in the small waiting area. I approached Kearney’s office door, peeked through the frosted glass panel and knocked.

  “It’s open!” he growled.

  Someone woke up in the wrong side of the bed.

  I entered his office, grinning like a moron.

  “Morning, Barnes,” he said, look
ing up. “Have a seat.”

  I parked my keister in a poorly upholstered chair and took out a pack of smokes.

  “Your head cold?” Kearney asked.

  “Sorry, boss,” I said, removing my hat.

  “Never mind,” he laughed. “You look better with it on.”

  I lit up a gasper and took a long drag.

  “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by. Just in case you needed me.”

  “What I need is sleep,” he replied. “That and a miracle cure to this hangover from hell.”

  “One of those nights, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was paid to baby-sit some college dewdropper by his rich daddy. The kid’s off to Europe to see the sights before next semester and ‘Pop’ wanted to make sure he didn’t miss his boat this morning... or pass out and drown in the Miskatonic.”

  “Sounds like a barrel of laughs.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Between groping barmaids, he and his pals tried to impress me with their wit and erudition. If I never hear another debate about the Platonic ideal it’ll be too soon.”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “Never mind.”

  “So you’re copasetic?” I asked. “I’ll be around if you need me.”

  “No,” Kearney replied, lighting a gasper of his own. “There’s nothing doing right now and I plan to go home and count sheep. I know where you’re staying if something important comes up before Monday. Still, I appreciate you asking.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I appreciate you giving an ex-con a break.”