Reanimatrix

by Pete Rawlik

  The title didn’t sound familiar. “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of it . . . a cookbook of some sort?”

  Suddenly Miss Griffith was chuckling. “You could say that. I wouldn’t, but you could.” Her hand grabbed something long and sharp. It flew through the air in a swift motion that set me stumbling back in fear. The dog yelped. Something hot and wet splashed onto my face. I fumbled with my holster and pulled my pistol out. The dog was kicking, its throat cut, kicking and gasping, desperate for life. The book on the table was suddenly pointed in my direction. I could see the picture that Amanda Griffith had been looking at. The image was centered about a primitive butcher shop, but one that could only have come from a nightmare. Human limbs and quarters hung on the walls while two naked women haggled, hoping to trade a string of pearls for a torso. At a table, two men flayed another, and a third held a severed head while gleefully sucking the meat off the fingers of a dismembered arm. In the foreground, a small child lay roasting on a grate over a fire pit.

  She looked at me with a gleam in her eye and the knife dripping blood. “They say meat makes blood and flesh, and gives you new life. Have you ever wondered what would happen if that meat was more like your own?” I was panicked, my eyes darting around, searching the root cellar for options. There in the corner I saw the net and the rope still wet from the river. She noticed that I had found what she was hiding. “Megan brought that home this morning. She’s always bringing home the strangest of things.” There was a sudden look of realization on her face. “Well, she won’t be doing that anymore.”

  She took a step forward and I panicked. I suppose in a way I had been threatened. She had the bloody knife in her hand, there was the book, with those awful pictures, and of course the suggestion that she had done something, something horrible with Megan’s body. Without even thinking I let thunder and lightning erupt from my hand, not once but multiple times. The room filled with the smell of gunpowder and death. Amanda Griffith was cackling as the first three bullets carried divine retribution into her body. The fourth one caught her in the head and spun her around, leaving a trail of blood and brain and bone arcing through the air, painting the walls. She hit the floor and blood spurted from the holes in her back where the bullets had passed through. I watched as she twitched violently and then went still.

  I dropped the gun to the floor, trying to separate myself from the action and the cause, but at the same time knowing that it was all over, or almost. On the table, the dog was still gasping, drowning in its own lifeblood, which was now running across the table and onto the floor where Amanda lay. It wasn’t right, what she had done to that poor animal, but at least I had avenged it. At least it had lived longer than her. I wrapped both hands around the dog’s head and snapped its neck, ending its suffering, ending its pain.

  Just as I had ended the madness of Amanda Griffith.

  CHAPTER 10

  “The Haunting of Griffith House”

  From the Journal of Robert Peaslee May 1 1928

  It was twelve days after I killed Amanda Griffith that I moved into her house, and just four days later that I realized the place was haunted.

  It was only minutes after I had fired my revolver, ending the life of Amanda Griffith, that a police car arrived to investigate, called no doubt by a neighbor startled by the sound of certain death breaking the quiet in the normally sleepy South Hill. They found me standing over the body, cradling the dead dog, blood running down my suit. For a brief second I had a gun pointed at my head, but thankfully somebody on the force recognized me, and cooler heads prevailed before another shot fired in panic ended my life. At first they thought me mad, but then they saw the dog and the book and the knife still clutched in her hand, and they knew that I was anything but.

  We spent three days going through the house and the garden, but besides the rope and nets we found no sign of Megan Halsey. Still there was no shortage of bodies. By some estimates we recovered more than three dozen skeletons of cats and dogs, and what appeared to be squirrels, raccoons, and even opossums. Interviews with the local butcher and grocer found that deliveries to the house had been repeatedly canceled by Amanda only to be reinitiated by Megan a few days or weeks later. I guessed that Amanda had been living off of neighborhood pets and wild animals off and on for several months.

  Her diet, however, could not account for what was found during the autopsy. The cause of death was without any doubt the bullets I put through her chest and head. However, as the coroner, Doctor Morton, assisted by the Griffith woman’s personal physician, Stuart Hartwell, discovered, I only hastened her death. Inside her skull they found that her brain had suffered some sort of organic degradation, and had shrunk or been diminished by almost half. So startled were the two physicians that they both took extensive samples and photographs and fully expected to collaborate on a publication detailing what they called an Arkham variant of something called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. I found the whole exchange between the two medical men extremely morbid.

  A brief hearing was held in which the District Attorney, supported by the Chief of Police, argued that Amanda Griffith had been responsible for the death of Megan Halsey and Officer Bacon. Judge Hand pinned the murder of Bacon on Griffith, but attorneys for the family argued that without the body it was hard to prove that Megan Halsey was dead, let alone that her aunt had murdered her. Three of us testified as to seeing the body and making a positive identification, but for Hand and the lawyers that didn’t matter. Megan Halsey was declared missing and her estate, including Griffith House, was turned over to the Saltonstall family firm to administer in her absence.

  It took me a whole day to work up the nerve to go see Saltonstall. The Chief was busy patting me on the back, congratulating me on solving the case so quickly and cleanly. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t think the Griffith woman had been guilty of either crime. She may have been sick, and she may even have been a maniac, but I couldn’t see how a woman like that could have killed a strong girl like Megan, let alone a veteran cop like Bacon, and then dragged the body somewhere to conceal it. It didn’t make sense to me. There was a failure in the logic somewhere. Still, I never said any of this to the Chief.

  But I told it to Saltonstall.

  As an officer of the State Police there were things I couldn’t do. I certainly couldn’t be hired out as a private investigator to search for Megan Halsey and her killer; that would have been viewed by the Chief as undermining his authority. However, the law firm had just become responsible for the Halsey-Griffith properties and would need a caretaker for the house on High Street. I could live there rent free, as long as I maintained the place and didn’t do any damage. If I chose to go through the contents of the house, and those led me to Megan Halsey or her killer, so be it. It was an odd arrangement to be certain, and I would be regularly visited to make sure I was doing my part, but I could think of no better way to investigate what was essentially a closed case.

  It took me less than a morning to pack up my stuff and move out of the room above the bakery. I was going to miss the free stale pastries, but not the caterwauling arguments, and the pots and pans banging together in the sinks. I would also have to get accustomed to other differences. In my old neighborhood everything I wanted was just a few minutes away; now in South Hill I was faced with the fact that the grocer, the butcher, and any diners were blocks away. There were several merchants who made regular deliveries to the area, but the idea of planning a menu for meals several days in advance was entirely unfamiliar to me. I had fallen into the habit of a bachelor, eating whatever struck me as reasonable, depending on what was available and relatively inexpensive. Saltonstall had suggested I hire a housekeeper to handle my cleaning and meals, but this seemed a lavish expense. Surely, I reasoned, I could care for my own needs.

  I hadn’t realized the size of the house.

  The front door of the Griffith House opened to a foyer decorated in dark brown woods. To the right, a short set of stairs led up and into
the tower which housed the Griffith library. A little farther down the foyer, another door on the right provided access to a master suite, complete with a private bath and a large dressing room with stairs that led down into the cellar. Moving left out of the foyer was a wide hall that functioned as a gallery displaying portraits of the family, but also a wide variety of statuettes and wall hangings. To the left, with windows facing the street, was a tastefully appointed salon, while opposite, with French doors opening onto a balcony, was the formal dining room. Continuing down the gallery hall, there were stairs leading both up and down, and then a door leading to the carriage house. A large pantry and store room occupied the corner of the house, and also functioned as a tradesmen’s entrance. As the hall curved to the right it opened up into a large keeping room with worn but comfortable furnishings arranged around a central fireplace. Beyond the fireplace, with doors on either side, was a conservatory filled with tropical plants including fruit and spice trees. Opposite the fireplace, the back of the keeping room connected to the spacious kitchen, which included a small nook suitable for informal meals. A small butler’s pantry connected the kitchen to the dining room.

  Going up the stairs, at the first landing, a set of double doors led to a covered porch on the roof of the carriage house. Taking the stairs to the next landing placed one in the middle of a central hallway, at either end of which were large suites with private baths. Between them, overlooking the garden, were two smaller bedrooms which shared a bath. On the front of the house there was a comfortable office, and next to it a captain’s walk, which also doubled as an upstairs library.

  Down in the basement, the stairs offered two choices. To the left was a billiards room, complete with an ornate bar that would have been more at home in a speakeasy. A whole wall of spirits remained, but judging from the accumulated dust, hadn’t been touched in years. To the right was the sitting room with the large windows looking out over the garden. Near the door was the access way to the root cellar where Amanda Griffith and I had encountered each other. On the far side of the sitting room was a door that led to a small but quaint apartment, complete with bedroom, bath, and small kitchen that I assumed functioned as a quarters for a live-in domestic. Toward the back of the sitting room, set behind the stairs, was an alcove full of crates and spare chairs which concealed a set of glass-paned doors. Beyond these was a room with large tubs and running water that appeared to function as a private laundry. A door along the wall led to a large wardrobe with stairs leading up back to the dressing room of the master suite.

  While the layout of the house seemed straightforward, and I could discern the functions of most of the rooms quite easily, some things perplexed me. The master suite had clearly once been occupied by a man, and some photographs and papers suggested that it had been David Griffith, but he had been dead for eight years and in all that time it appeared no one had touched the room. More so, the furnishings and accoutrements of the room suggested that only David had lived in this room. It led to the question of why were none of Mrs. Griffith’s affects present. I found the clothes and personal items of Elizabeth Halsey-Griffith in one of the smaller bedrooms upstairs, the one that shared a bath with the other small bedroom, in which I found what assuredly were the belongings of Amanda Griffith. As for the two large upstairs suites, I determined that one had been used as a nursery for the young Megan Halsey, while the other had apparently been transformed for her use as an adult, once she had returned home and become master of the house. The sixth bedroom, the one in the basement apartment, had not been used for quite some time, and, while still furnished, showed no signs of any personal items that might identify a former occupant.

  For several reasons I decided that I would occupy the master suite on the ground level. While such a decision might seem straightforward, it being the largest of the rooms, this actually did not factor into my decision. David Griffith had been dead for years, and was unlikely to be a player in my investigation into Megan’s death, thus I could safely pack up and move his belongings without rigorously going through them. Additionally, I could move those belongings down into the basement quite easily by using the private stairs in the dressing room. This also allowed me to close off the upper level and limit the amount of area I had to routinely clean and heat. Finally, as I was going to go through the effects of all the women who had dwelled in Griffith House, Megan, Amanda, and Elizabeth, it would be easy to use the office and the captain’s walk as a place to organize materials that I either wanted to examine, or had finished doing so. All the actual work could be done in the library on the main floor. In this manner the clutter of my work would be contained and kept from the eyes of any visitors. Thus, my first day was spent cleaning out the rooms that had once belonged to David Griffith.

  It had been my plan to use a number of trunks from the basement, mostly steamer and cabin trunks made by the Seward Company, but some from Leatheroid Manufacturing, to store all of David’s clothes. However, as I began to pack these things away I realized that not only had he and I been of similar builds, we also had the same taste in styles, and much of what had once been fashionable dress a decade ago, was still in common use in 1928. So as where I only had brought with me a handful of shirts and pants, and a single jacket, by using David Griffith’s wardrobe I suddenly had more than a dozen options of each. There was, however, the problem that the clothes had not been cleaned in some time, and I went about organizing them for delivery to a laundry. This proved somewhat enlightening about Mr. Griffith as his pockets were full of the most unusual items, including betting stubs, IOU markers both in his name and others, and a number of matchbooks, often from restaurants or clubs, and often with a woman’s name and number written on the inside. This itself was not damning, but I knew several of the locations from which the matchbooks originated and also knew that they had not been in existence before David and Elizabeth had been married. All of this set my mind in motion and I quickly concluded that David Griffith had not only been a frequent gambler, but was also likely a philanderer.

  As I moved the materials about I noticed the inevitable: I was not the sole resident of the house. Behind crates and trunks, in the back of drawers, and in forgotten corners there was the telltale sign of mice, something that I had fully expected. Not content to share my home with such vermin, I found a box full of traps in the cellar and set them about in key locations, most in the basement, but others in the kitchen and pantry, and one in my bedroom, under a dresser. Thankfully, the linens had been properly stored, and I found David’s oversized bed joyously comfortable.

  Everything was tidy by early evening and just after six I put on my coat and walked down the hill into the next neighborhood to a little Italian restaurant that I knew. Not a particularly fancy place, but they make meatballs with a touch of sausage, Parmesan cheese, and a liberal amount of oregano. They also had, available to select customers, some very fine Calabrian wines, which they served in a back room, far from the prying eyes of the other diners. I will admit that on that night I may have overindulged, both on the food and the wine, but I had reason to celebrate, even if it was just moving into a new home. I cannot recall exactly, but I may have finished off an entire bottle, perhaps even two. It was near midnight when I finally stumbled out of the restaurant and back onto the streets of Arkham. The night air was cool, but it felt good as I climbed the dark and empty streets of South Hill.

  This part of Arkham was so different from the tenements of French Hill, or the university, or even the merchant district of Northside. The slope let me look out over the city and the river that ran through it and for a moment the rows of streetlights and the bridges and the dark empty stretch that marked the Miskatonic reminded me of Paris and the Seine. It had been a decade since I had first seen that wondrous metropolis, and I could still remember walking through the winding labyrinth of its rues and avenues in the company of my fellow agents. Our guide that first night had been a local detective, Frederic Belot, an affable man who was rather annoyed at be
ing assigned to chaperone a party of foreigners. Thankfully, Chan, always the most empathic of our coterie, noticed the distress of our host and was able to steer the conversation toward police work, and thus put Inspector Belot at ease. That night, like this one, I consumed too much wine, and in our revels ended up in a strange little club where we indulged in a brandy tinted with extracts of stygian black lotus. It was a powerful narcotic and hallucinogen, and the visions I and the others endured that night were both wondrous and terrifying. The liquor had heightened our senses and altered our perceptions of the world and our place in it. The effects lasted only for a few hours, but the resulting understanding of certain esoteric mysteries lingered for days; even now it seemed that I could see more, understand more, and conceive of more than the average person. Whether that was a result of my tragic upbringing, the tainted brandy, or of the experiences that I had endured through the years I could not say, but I recalled that I still had a small flask of that tainted brandy, hidden inside a hollowed-out copy of De Sade’s Justine, secreted away in case I ever needed it again. It was something I hadn’t thought of for years, and I was suddenly struck with an ominous feeling that I might soon have no choice but to partake in a few drams of that mysterious liquor.

  As I made my way down High Street all such woolgathering suddenly vanished, as what I saw set my heart beating at an anxious pace. There, just above the surrounding trees, I could see the upper story of Griffith House, including the prominently octagonal window that marked the captain’s walk. It was there in that weird cyclopean aperture that I saw an unmistakable flickering light moving back and forth in the room. Despite my elubriation my mind jumped to the obvious conclusion: someone was in my house, in the very rooms where the clues to Elizabeth’s disappearance and Megan’s death were possibly hidden. My hand instinctively went to the holster that I wore beneath my jacket and I broke into an unfettered run.