Reanimatrix

by Pete Rawlik

  It was an hour later, and I was showered and shaved and slathering schmaltz over a thick chunk of bread from downstairs and savoring their fresh-ground coffee, when the knock came at the door. It was a sound I knew all too well; I think they teach it to beat cops on the first day of the job. It is a knock that says I’m not here on a social call, but neither am I here on business. It is a knock that conveys both a sense of trepidation and urgency, and fills the occupant with a sense of unavoidable dread. I have grown to hate that sound, the soft rap-rap-rap of bare knuckles on wood, for I more than anyone else know what it might bring. There are times when I would just like to ignore that dread beat and side with my paternal grandfather on the issue. He was a staunch old solicitor, fond of debates concerning what was legal, what was permissible, and what was polite, his favorite saying being, “There is no constitutional imperative to answer the door.”

  But he wasn’t a policeman.

  It was Roberts, and as he stood there, fidgeting in his wide size-10 shoes, I knew that the news was not good, that things had somehow gone from bad to worse and that somehow or another I was at fault. I shoved the pastry into my mouth and chased it with a gulp of perfectly brewed java. Like Copper and Bacon before him, Roberts was taciturn, barely saying hello as I grabbed my hat and coat. He had left the car running, and I barely had time to notice that the cold winds of the night had succumbed to the morning sun and it was turning into a rather fine spring day, before I was whisked away.

  I would like to say that I was surprised that we were retracing the route we took early that day, but I wasn’t. Nor was I surprised to see three police cars at the entry to Dock Twenty-Three. Even the presence of the ambulance and Chief Nichols’ Nash didn’t seem unusual. I was in it deep and was going to have to bat for the whole nine yards. The dock had been roped off and the coroner was there doing his job while Nichols was screaming at the coroner. The body at the end of the pier wasn’t wrapped in a net and rope, and it wasn’t a young girl anymore. Lying there on the salt-washed wood was the body of Officer Lyle Bacon, his head lolling off to one side in an entirely unnatural way. There was a bulge in his neck where his broken spine was pushing up from beneath the skin.

  The moment I caught Nichols’s eye his verbal assault of Copper ceased and he stalked toward me in a fury. “You’re supposed to be smarter than this, Peaslee! What the hell were you thinking?”

  I tried to stay calm. “I was thinking that Copper was only going to be gone a few minutes. I was thinking that Bacon was competent, that the scene was secure, and that no one could or would be coming down the dock to interfere with a veteran beat cop and a dead body.”

  A vein on Nichols’s neck was beating to its own high-speed drum. “Well, Copper stopped for coffee and to chat up some waitress. By the time he got back Bacon had been killed, his neck snapped by two very powerful hands. Looks like he got a shot off before he was killed, but the weird thing is he was shooting toward the end of the pier and down toward the deck. It’s possible that our suspect came out of the river, surprised Bacon, dodged the shot, snapped the man’s neck, grabbed the body, and disappeared back into the river, all without being seen by anyone.”

  “Hell of a thing, coming up on a cop like that, killing him, and losing the body. Very embarrassing to the department.”

  Nichols harrumphed. “No, not embarrassing, not at all, because no one’s ever going to find out. Officially, Bacon was killed when he and Copper came across some rum runner who had just raped and murdered the Halsey girl.” He eyed me, wondering if I would play ball. “You got that, Peaslee, or do I have to explain it again?”

  I nodded. “I got it. So whoever killed Megan Halsey killed Bacon as well. What about the two watermen who found her?”

  Nichols took a drag of his cigar. “I’m not looking for a goat here, son. It’s clear to me that whoever killed the girl was in the process of dumping the body when he was interrupted. After you left he came back, killed Bacon, and took the girl’s body to hide the evidence.” It made sense if you hadn’t seen the body, and the red clay that had been caked into it. What Nichols wanted, what he always wanted, was a nice tidy package that he could stamp Case Closed. It didn’t always matter if the truth got bent along the way. “This is your case, Peaslee. The press is going to be all over you. A killer of a beautiful, young society girl and a cop will make the front page. If I were you I would wrap it up as fast as possible.” I knew that meant I had a week before he started bellyaching about my performance.

  As Nichols pushed his way past me and marched back toward the street I looked at Bacon and the muddy handprints that had been left on his neck. They seemed small, too small to belong to a working man, and I wondered what kind of monster could take an innocent girl like Megan and kill her. Not the same kind that could kill a cop like Bacon. Nichols thought he was doing me a favor, tying the two cases together, making it clear that if I found one, I had both. The truth, per usual, was more complicated than that. Standing there on the dock I thought about how Lyle Bacon had lost his life, Megan Halsey had lost that and her innocence, and how Chief Nichols had somehow lost his moral compass. If I wasn’t careful, I might lose either my job or my need for the truth.

  I didn’t need to ponder which was more important.

  CHAPTER 9

  “The Madness of Amanda Griffith”

  From the Journal of Robert Peaslee April 9 1928

  Everyone said that Amanda Griffith was mad. She hadn’t always been that way. Once she had been quite respectable, but that had been before Megan had come home, before Elizabeth Halsey-Griffith had disappeared. If I were to meet Miss Griffith, tell her about Megan, and then proceed to investigate her family, I wanted to know more about her and them. Which meant I had my work cut out for me. From the docks I walked through the city, my collar turned up and my hat pulled down, mulling over what had happened and how I was going to pursue this particular case. I don’t consider myself a good detective, I’m not deductive like Sherlock Holmes, or intuitive like Father Brown, or even sly like the Belgian that Hadrian Vargr talks about. I’m not even manipulative and commanding like Vargr; if you gave me a room full of men to command I wouldn’t know what to do with them. I’m a bloodhound, pure and simple. You set me on the trail of somebody and I’ll lock onto that scent and follow it till the quarry is treed or I’m too bloody to go on, sometimes both. My methods aren’t pretty or fancy or even fast, but I get the job done, and the people in charge rarely complain, mostly because the cases I’m assigned are too dirty or dangerous or weird to give to anyone else.

  This means I’ve got to work at being smart, and when it comes to learning about the ins and outs of what goes on in Arkham there’s only one place to dig up the dirt. In other towns it would be the city newspaper, but here in Essex County I’ve found that the Historical Society tends to stick its nose where it doesn’t belong and keep files on the more prominent families. Consequently, after slipping the curator a dollar I spent a good part of the morning in the archives, reading the fragile pages and notes accumulated by men obsessed with Arkham’s past, familiarizing myself with the life of Megan Halsey. By all rights I should have been over at the Griffith House first thing, but I had chosen instead to learn a little more about the family I was about to devastate with the news that Megan was dead. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that through a series of unfortunate tragedies, the family had dwindled down to a single member.

  Those tragedies began long before Megan was born. Her grandfather, Doctor Augustus Hoag, had died in the summer of 1899 when his horse threw him and he tumbled down against the footings of the Garrison Street Bridge. Her grandmother, Honoria, was a daughter of the Kingsport Pikes, a family which had over the years dwindled from greatness to near-destitution, and through despair had reduced its numbers to a single female member. Honoria and Augustus had only one child, Elizabeth, born in 1885, who, shortly after her mother’s death in a 1904 Manhattan subway accident, married a friend of her father, the physician Doctor
Allan Halsey, a man several decades her senior.

  There was some talk about that, gossip mostly, particularly when they extended their honeymoon in New York, but all idle talk was snuffed out when they returned and were greeted by the start of the epidemic. Elizabeth was banished for her own safety, sent to Halsey’s cabin in the hills around Dunwich. Allan died, a victim of his fervor to save those who had succumbed to the plague. He was buried swiftly, like so many others, even before Elizabeth could return. She stayed in Arkham for a while, even volunteered at the asylum in Danvers, but then suddenly fled back to Dunwich. When Elizabeth Halsey returned in 1906, she brought with her the infant child that she named Megan, after Allan’s mother.

  It was only two years later that Elizabeth married the man whom she had hired to handle her financial affairs, the brother of Elizabeth’s childhood friend, Amanda; a former suitor by the name of David Griffith. David had a rather stained reputation in Arkham, but after Elizabeth and Megan moved into the Griffith home in South Hill all that changed. Within a few short years David Griffith, his wife, Elizabeth, and Amanda Griffith were central figures amongst the upper crust of Arkham. Sadly, it was not to last. Always a keen businessman, he left Arkham in late April bound for England. He had booked passage on the RMS Lusitania and on May 7, 1915, it was targeted by a German U-Boat, killing all on board.

  The loss of her second husband must have been too much for Elizabeth Halsey-Griffith, for in 1916 she bundled the ten-year-old Megan off to boarding school in Kingsport. By all accounts Megan was an exceptional student, though she was reported absent from the school on more than one occasion, and was once even picked up on the streets of Boston. This was about the time that Hannah came into her life and brought her to meet me. The papers called her behavior unladylike; I would have called it a result of boredom. Given what I knew of her, and The Hall School where she was enrolled, I found it hard to imagine that she found any satisfaction in the curriculum there. Still, it seemed a better home for her than the Griffith House.

  It was in May, five months after I saw Megan in Leffert’s Corners, that Elizabeth Halsey-Griffith vanished without a trace. The police in Arkham did what they could, searching the countryside for any trace of the woman, but to no avail. With little recourse, the courts assigned Amanda Griffith as Megan’s guardian, and the administrator of the combined Griffith and Halsey estates. One would have thought that Miss Griffith would have comforted her niece, but instead she left the girl enrolled at The Hall School and left for a tour of Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and Papua. Amanda Griffith did not return to Arkham until the fall of 1923, and did not rejoin society, but rather became isolated in that great house on South Hill, shunning all visitors and apparently roaming the streets at odd hours of the night.

  In May of 1924 Megan Halsey came of age, and with that came a reversal of roles. Suddenly Megan Halsey was in control of the estate and Amanda Griffith was relegated to the role of dependent. Unlike her aunt, Megan seemed to have some sense of the value of things. Certainly she had her fun, but she also made sure that the house was maintained and her social obligations were met. Once, she even took Aunt Amanda with her, but the woman had become such a doddering embarrassment that Megan made sure that she was never seen in polite society again. Even when she left town, which seemed to be often, old Aunt Amanda was left behind.

  That was the extent of what I could glean from the files: she had dead grandparents, a dead father, a dead stepfather, and a missing mother. The only person left to mourn for Megan Halsey was apparently her crazy Aunt Amanda.

  And it was my task to go tell Amanda that her niece was dead.

  The Griffith House, 507 West High Street, stood near the top of South Hill, a Victorian masterpiece from the middle of the last century surrounded by manicured lawns that separated it from the wide road, with the boughs of majestic elms casting shade over yard and house alike. It was a neighborhood I hadn’t been in for years, but I could recall being here as a child, when my father would bring me to faculty functions. A few blocks one way was the home of the university’s librarian, Henry Armitage, and down the hill I could make out the copper roof of the Wilmarth ancestral home, and in the other direction the sprawling Georgian mansion of the architect Daniel Upton. Just being on this street brought back memories of my childhood, my family, and my father; these were things I wasn’t yet ready to deal with, or perhaps had been dealing with all my life, just in a rather indirect fashion. I opened the gate to Griffith House, and as it closed behind me, I shut my mind to any further thoughts about my own family.

  As Victorian mansions go, the Griffith House was rather small. To one side, a long wing capped with a peaked roof jutted out from the front and joined the carriage house to the main structure, while off to the other side a squat tower of one and a half stories brought to mind storybook romances of princesses. Between the two a third tower clung to the structure like a small parasite, with a huge window looking out over the city and the river. This feature I knew to be a captain’s walk, and supposed it dated back to when the Griffiths were once involved in shipping. Up the flagstone stairs and onto the gray slate porch, I found a magnificently carved wooden door depicting the face of a sundial. With some trepidation I raised my hand and knocked on the door, using the ominous rat-a-tat I had come to loathe. I waited for a moment, but when there was no answer and I could detect no movement within, I rapped on the door again.

  There was no response.

  Undeterred by the lack of answer to my knocking, I cast furtive glances over each shoulder and then confidently proceeded to walk around the squat tower and head toward the backyard. As I did so, I took the opportunity to peek into the tower windows and discovered it contained a small but serviceable library. Once past the tower I found myself under the elm tree and moving along a straight wall with many windows, all of which had drawn curtains through which I could detect nothing. As I moved toward the back of the house the land sloped down, dropping away. This elevated the ground floor beyond my reach, but at the same time presented the cellar level for easy access. Facing the garden, the cellar boasted a large bay window through which I could see a quaint parlor with fine furniture all orientated to take advantage of the view. A door off to the right seemed to be the only access, but also served as a divider, for farther to the right the elegance of the bay window vanished to be replaced by dreary stone walls lacking any windows at all.

  Once more I sought entry to the Griffith House, and this time I rapped on the plain wooden door of the cellar. The ancient worn boards swung open with a long and ominous creak. It had not only been left unlocked, but also not even closed properly.

  Sheepishly, I peered inside and called out, “Hello, anyone home?” To my left, the parlor room sat unmoving in the dim light. To the right, an open door revealed a root cellar lined with canned produce, with a thick table in the center where, from the implements and fat cookbook that it bore, apparently most of the canning was done. In this room an oil lamp burned, providing some light, but also suggesting that someone had been about, and quite recently. Again I called out, hoping my voice was loud enough to penetrate the depths of the house.

  There came a response, but not from the direction I had expected. Instead there came from the garden a rustling in the hedgerow accompanied by the huffing and puffing sound of someone struggling through the brush. The woman who emerged from the overgrown garden was wearing a thick cotton dress and a pleated jacket that both had once been white, but with age and filth had turned gray with flecks of green and brown. Her hat was no longer even identifiable as to style and had faded into the same smear of color that her dress had become. I had thought, I had hoped, that this was merely some form of ancient overdress that had simply become the most comfortable thing to wear while out working in the yard, but it soon became apparent that this was not the case. As she moved out of the garden and into the sun, I saw that she wore nothing underneath and hadn’t changed out of this particular outfit in some time. The smell was p
alpable, and as she approached I had to suppress my desire to gag; how the small dog that she cradled in her arms could stand it I didn’t know.

  As she entered the clearing she looked up, and for an instant glanced in my direction. “David, dear, come help your sister, would you?”

  Despite her mistake I moved to comply and with a few steps was at her side, holding her arm. “I’m not David, Miss Griffith, my name is Robert Peaslee. I’m with the State Police. I need to speak to you about your niece.”

  “Megan?” The older woman’s voice broke. Closer up, she wasn’t that aged, not much older than me. “Megan’s away at The Hall School.”

  I shook my head as she shuffled around me through the back door. “She graduated years ago. She has been living here, hasn’t she?”

  Amanda Griffith paused to stare at me. “Megan? She comes and goes. She’s like her mother, never could stay comfortable in one place. Restless.”

  We passed to the right and she set the dog down on the table next to the book. It was a small thing, a spaniel of some sort, I thought, damp and shivering from the cold. She had the dog by the scruff of the neck with her left hand while she leafed through the book with her other. The pages were ancient and I could see that it had been printed in Latin with extensive woodcut illustrations. She caught me eyeing the volume and smiled.

  “This book has been in my family for generations. We thought it lost when my Great Uncle Cyrus’s house was struck by lightning back in ’86. No one had seen it, or Uncle Cyrus, for fifty years, then I’m cleaning up some old trunks in the attic and there it was, as if it were waiting for me. Of course, I had never seen it before, only heard stories, but I knew what it was right away; there are few books that could be confused with Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo.”