Arkham Nights

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  Herbert West and Falmouth were a part of my life I would never forget, try as I might. I still had nightmares about what happened there and if I were the praying type, I’d have chalked it up to being my first real encounter with evil. If what was happening in Arkham was even remotely like that—and I was beginning to suspect that it was—then I’d have no choice but to go all Alamo with Towers. Even if we were just a couple of amoral shits, we couldn’t let that kind of thing happen anywhere ever again.

  I’d pretty much covered the first floor of the building when I saw a battered door at the end of the hall, the word BASEMENT written on it in faded lettering. I didn’t like the idea of moving to the higher floors until I was certain that the place was good and covered. I tested the door and was surprised at how easy it opened.

  “Someone’s been here,” I mumbled.

  I shifted the flashlight to my left hand and took out my automatic.

  Somewhere in the half-dark of the space below, there was the glow of light. I padded cautiously down the steps and stopped. In the far corner, a man was nodding behind a wobbly desk, a bundle of newspapers at one corner barely keeping it from tipping over. He was the baby-faced punk I’d heard running his mouth back at Ciro’s. A nearly empty bottle of gin rocked on the desk and the girlie magazine he’d been perusing was spread out nearby. Steel canisters were stacked against one wall. The words H. West Formula #241 were stenciled across their sides.

  My blood ran cold as I made out the words.

  “No fucking way,” I whispered, as I made my way to the nodding punk.

  I guessed that explained why ‘Big Boss’ had picked a building so close to the cemetery but God only knew what a bunch of hoods planned to do with West’s resurrection juice. Nothing good, that was for damn sure.

  I was tempted to put a bullet through the punk’s brain but held back at the last second. A gunshot could screw everything up, but there were more than one ways to kill a sleeping man. I pocketed the automatic and stepped behind the snoring guard. Grinning viciously, I flicked the catch on my switchblade and kicked his chair legs from under him.

  He barely had time to realize just how royally he’d screwed up. I watched him frantically grope for his weapon before securing his head with my left arm and slitting his throat. The bastard grabbed his throat and thrashed around, spraying a gush of hot red blood all over the place as he went. When he was good and still, I let him lie in his own mess and went up the stairs to find Towers.

  The second floor seemed clear, almost eerily corpse-free, even though Trevor had probably just gone over it with a fine-toothed comb. Taking the stairs, I became grimly aware that things were too quiet, even under the circumstances. No blood, no gunsmoke lingering in the air. All too clean and easy for my taste. I wasn’t Trevor’s biggest fan but the man was a damn sight more agreeable than the thugs we were after.

  I treaded cautiously, making sure not to trip over furniture or debris. After reaching the third floor, I traipsed down toward the double doors at the end of its narrow corridor. Even behind the reinforced wooden panel, I could hear the rumble of angry voices, followed by a loud thud like someone being bounced off a wall.

  “This must be the place,” I chuckled, cocking my gun.

  I stepped to the double doors and kicked them wide open. Trevor was talking to Jayne, his gun trained on Big Boss. His speech was all hoarse. Something must have happened to his throat. I barely had the time to take it all in before a large, blood-spattered figure rose from the floor and pointed its machine gun at my partner.

  After we’d split up, my reunion with Riley soon led to nothing more than a dull search of the derelict hotel’s empty rooms. The floor I’d taken revealed nothing as I searched for Jayne and Big Boss.

  In the darkness, every part of the hotel was the same uniform shade of gray; I couldn’t imagine the place being that much different in the daylight. Walking slowly up the staircase and towards the next floor, with the threadbare carpet beneath my feet and the peeling wallpaper against my back, I sided myself against the musty wall. This was a place for the long-since dead, a dump for the old bones, when the cemetery got too packed for comfort.

  I arrived on the third floor landing as quietly as possible and noticed something different.

  Like the rest of the hotel, the staircase opened up on a corridor lined with doors. This floor however, bore a far shorter corridor, with a double door at its furthest end. A faded light filtered through the gap. I held the Tommy gun tightly, fighting back the shakes as I made my way across the corridor.

  Kill Big Boss, make Jayne face me. I repeated the plan like a mantra as I stepped down the corridor towards the light.

  Halfway there I could make out their voices: one as coarse as gravel, another mean and loud. The third one, an angel’s silken caress.

  My angel, Jayne.

  I reached the door and knelt in front of the dark wooden slabs. Through the cracks, I peered into a room filled with flickering glow of candlelight.

  It was a dining room, dark and grimy despite the glow of the candelabra arranged around the round tables. Near the center of the room, I found the sources of the voices. There were three of them, sat around a table covered in dog-eared ledgers.

  The huge black shape moved to sit directly across from me, obscuring most of my view. This had to be the giant goon I’d seen with Jayne earlier. She sat facing me, across from him to his left. She looked resplendent in the black dress I’d seen her in the night before.

  Sitting beside Jayne, almost completely hidden by the big man’s head and shoulders, was the man I assumed was Big Boss. All I could see was a pair of wide shoulders connected to the thick arms of a body clad in a too-tight gray suit. His voice resonated deeply as he spoke. He sounded like a big palooka, alright.

  “Eighteen cases to Kingsport, same to Rhode Island. On second thought, Wilbur, double that, you hear?” Big Boss said.

  The man called Wilbur opened his mouth, letting loose his thick swamp yank accent.

  “Ayuh, Boss,” he said. “I wuz just thinking.”

  Jayne’s voice chimed in like a tinkling bell. “He thinks we might have been followed, Boss.”

  Wilbur continued. “I swear it, there’s some peeper on our trail. I jus’ know it.”

  “How’s your ex, Jayne? All good and done with?” Big Boss said.

  She replied with, “He’ll stay out of our hair,” and it almost sounded like she was covering for me. Big Boss chuckled, a loud purring noise that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. “We turn make gold out of paper and soldiers out of dead men, come hell or high water. Isn’t that right?”

  Wilbur pushed his huge frame out of his seat before heading towards the right-hand side of the room, out of view.

  “Peepers, Boss,” he complained, “we need ta leave taown. I been havin’ too many bad dreams.”

  “We stay. In Arkham, we’ll drink deep of humanity’s suffering,” came Big Boss’s reply.

  Wilbur grunted something unintelligible and I heard a door open then slam shut.

  “Wilbur’s right, Boss,” Jayne said. I could see her clearly now. She seemed to be staring right at me. “We should move while the going’s good.”

  With Wilbur gone, I knew this would be as good a time as any to get to Jayne. With neither of them armed, I had the element of surprise.

  I stood up, and took a deep breath before kicking the door wide open.

  I got a quick look at Jayne’s surprised look and Big Boss’s face—oddly fuzzy and distant beneath his wide hat—just before I was lifted up by the throat and pushed against a wall, cracking the plaster as I went. The wind blew out of my lungs in one long gasp.

  So much for the element of surprise.

  Wilbur, his snarling mug pressed up against me, held me up in one hand and tore the gun from my hands with the other.

  Struggling against his grip, I heard Jayne say, “Oh, Trevor, why did you have to do that.”

  “It seems I owe you that je
rk soda after all, Wilbur,” said Big Boss.

  From up close, I took in Wilbur’s strange features. His pupils were wide, almost seeming to melt in the compound black of his eyes. His dirty, bushy beard was streaked with white. He smelled ripe, like wet roadkill. His mouth was a nightmare of pointed brown teeth.

  “Peepers, Boss,” he sneered. “Buzzing ’round us like horse-flies ’round dung.”

  I tried to suck in air, even as Wilbur clenched my windpipe shut. Even as my vision began to fade, I tried to look up at Jayne. Blood pounded in my ears and through it all I could hear Big Boss say, “We snuff him and then put him through the process, make him more amenable.”

  “Aw, kin’t I rip his bawls off an’ feed’ em to him?” Wilbur drawled.

  With my consciousness slipping away and my options running low, I knew I had to act now or forever hold my peace. From the looks of it, neither Jayne nor Riley Barnes were going to come to my rescue. Reaching into my waistband, I unstrapped my trusty butterfly knife.

  With one weakened hand, I grabbed hold of Wilbur’s jacket for support, and drove the knife up to the hilt through his white shirted chest and with my last ounce of strength, I twisted. Wilbur fell to the floor, releasing me as he crumbled in agony. My Tommy gun clattered on the floor beside him. I let it lie there, for now.

  Hopped up on adrenaline, I tugged my necktie loose and sucked in a long breath of air before stepping over the dying hillbilly.

  Jayne stood almost ten feet away, with Big Boss beside her and I could swear that she almost looked like she was pleased to see me. In the blink of an eye, I had my pistol out and pointed at Big Boss. Jayne put up her hands and backed away, but the big palooka held his ground.

  “Jayne,” I croaked through my bruised voice box, “you’ve got yourself mixed up with some real rotten eggs.”

  “Says you,” she muttered sullenly.

  I glared at Big Boss and he stared right back at me, unflinching and there was something just so off about his face I can’t begin to explain what was wrong with it. Even close up it looked all jumbled and wrong but I’d been through too much shit to care; right now, all that mattered was that I had a gun and all the aces in the goddamn deck.

  “Guess you got me,” Big Boss muttered, his shifting pink face changing by the second. He raised his big hands into the air.

  I was a hair’s breadth from pulling the trigger when a loud voice called out behind me. I spun on my heels to face the fresh threat.

  “Towers, move!” Riley shouted. I dove as I saw Wilbur, shooting up on his feet, my machine gun pointed right at me. In a split second, Wilbur’s shoulder and then the side of his head exploded into a fine black mist. Riley, from his half-cover beyond the doorway, had saved my bacon once again.

  Wilbur staggered back a couple of steps but didn’t go down. I found myself ducking for cover as the machine gun spewed its chopper-fire in a wide arc above me before his huge, gangly form finally collapsed into a heap.

  Riley charged into the room but I ignored him as I heard Jayne moaning in pain. Even as I turned I knew that the worst had happened; Jayne was slumped on the floor, clutching at her chest and twitching in agony.

  Big Boss was laid out a few feet from her but I didn’t care; she was dying. I’d ran myself ragged and gone through hell to find her and now she was dying all over again.

  I fell down to my knees and pulled her up into my arms. It didn’t take a doctor to know what those tearing, seeping wounds across her chest meant. Even as she sagged into my arms I leaned into her. Her chest heaved, her lips moved but all that came out was a liquid gurgle. Her bright wet eyes looked up at me as she went.

  Jayne was going, going....

  From a hundred miles away, I heard Jayne’s voice. “I’m going, Trev. Please, let me go,” she gasped, struggling even as she choked on her own blood. “And make sure I stay that way.”

  Jayne gave me the kind of smile she knew I’d die for, just as the light left her eyes. “I love you hon,” I sobbed. After wiping my hand clean of her blood, I closed her eyes and eased her gently to the floor.

  All over again, Jayne was gone.

  I’d just nailed the big lummox called Wilbur when I noticed Towers cradling his ex-wife. The woman looked shot all to hell, long past gone. Everything stank of blood and cordite and something else, something utterly wrong. I moved past Wilbur’s corpse and made my way to the ‘Big Boss,’ killed by his dying henchman’s last machine gun burst. The .45 rounds had really done a number on him. ‘Big Boss’ had been finally put out of commission.

  “Two dead bogeys right here.” I said. Towers didn’t respond.

  Looking around the room, I noticed the ledgers piled up on the tabletop. “What have we here?” I said, as I flipped through the pages.

  Towers eased Jayne’s body to the floor and croaked, “What?”

  “Looks like registers,” I answered. “I bet the authorities would have a field day with these.”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “I bet the right people would.”

  “There’s more than just the ledgers here,” I said. “There are whole canisters of West’s zombie juice in the basement.”

  “What, just laying around?”

  I grinned. “No. There was a guard. He’s out of commission.”

  “Jayne’s gone,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Towers sighed, looking exhausted. “I need to make sure that she stays that way.”

  “We could blow this place to Hell,” I suggested. “Get rid of the zombie juice and...”

  “And Jayne, too,” he finished. “All right.”

  Towers went to his car to retrieve the explosives, leaving me alone with the three stiffs. It’s not that I’m squeamish but I’d gone through too much crap to be at ease. I lit a gasper and motioned for Towers to move his ass. He might have lost everything in the end, but he’d hurt a whole lot of people on the way. I wondered if he’d stop, after this. Hell, I wondered if we would ever stop. I walked to the double doors and waited for him.

  He arrived not long after, with a crate stuffed to the gills with dynamite.

  I stepped back to give him room. “It was nice seeing you,” I said.

  He smirked. “Now there’s something I don’t hear every day.”

  Something bubbled and gurgled.

  “You need a soda or something?” he asked.

  “Not with my cast iron gut,” I replied.

  We turned and stared at the floor where Wilbur’s corpse lay. “Jesus Christ,” I mumbled, as I watched the bastard slowly dissolve in front of my eyes. His flesh bubbled and popped, releasing a cloud of noxious fumes into the room.

  “What the hell is that?” Towers asked.

  “Beats me. But I bet it ain’t good.” I said. Nice, Riley. At least it beats screaming your head off.

  “You think Big Boss...” Towers began.

  We turned to the big bastard, just in time to catch his eerie transformation.

  Somehow, the big dead man in the pinstriped suit had begun to squirm and bulge obscenely. Crunching like dry leaves, his body quickly ripped and split itself open from head to toe. We backed away as something long and glistening shot out of Big Boss’s bloody shell, a thousand beady red eyes blossoming across its sinewy form.

  “Holy shit,” I managed. Towers settled for a loud, gagging moan.

  Long, leathery wings exploded out of the thing’s back. It hissed at us, even as it writhed inside the bloody red roots that used to be Big Boss.

  “Bastards!” it screeched without a mouth, its eyes blazing with a brilliant flash.

  He’d got us there.

  “It looks pissed,” Towers said.

  “Yeah, well I am pissed,” I said, raising my pistol. I had just squeezed the trigger, when something wrapped around my ankle and threw me off balance. My shot went wide, the bullet smashing the fly-specked window of the room. I landed in a heap and stifled my scream as the soggy remains of Wilbur’s dissolving hand spilled into my pa
nt leg. I was scuttling backwards when Towers pulled his gun and drew a bead on the slithering horror. The creature flapped its massive wings, letting out a deafening squawk. In the blink of an eye, it had shot off the floor towards the broken window. I heard the gunshot ring out and saw a small hunk of flesh splatter against the wall as whatever the hell that creature was smashed its way through the lingering shards of glass and disappeared into the night.

  “Well ain’t that peachy!” Towers spat in disgust. “What the hell do we do now?”

  Towers was shaking, barely holding it together. I decided to comfort him best as I could.

  “Now,” I said. “We do what you do best.”

  “The hell is that supposed to mean?” he asked, staring at me.

  “We throw all caution to the wind,” I replied. “We turn down every sane bit of advice we ever get and go after the palookas—stomping any chump who gets in our way—until we’ve cornered the rats behind this and killed every last one of them.”

  Towers smiled. “You’ve been taking notes.”

  “I always was a fast learner,” I replied.

  “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” he asked.

  I extended my hand, saying, “Come hell or high water.”

  Towers grinned and shook my hand.

  “Let’s blow this place to kingdom come.”

  Unlike most stories about my life, this one ended with more corpses than I could ever care to count: Big Boss’s death instigated a domino effect of decimation that left every single one of his animated goons sent back into Hell, where they should have stayed in the first place.

  Arkham’s city hall made sure to cover up the incident. The sudden deaths of Big Boss’s grunts were chalked up as a freak outbreak of tuberculosis. The destruction of his property was written off as a disastrous gas main explosion.

  As for me and Barnes? We made a pact that day that put us on our path to thwarting and destroying every creeping, crawling thing that Big Boss had left behind no matter where or when we found it.

  Six months after our encounter with that inhuman bastard posing as a mob boss, our mission is still going strong. Jayne still lingers in my mind, her memory fading away in degrees every time that Barnes and I strike a blow at those slippery little bastards.