Reanimatrix

by Pete Rawlik

  “We should go,” whispered Lavinia.

  We clambered up the bank and onto the North River Road heading east toward Dunwich village. The road followed the river, and as we fled along it we could see dark and flailing shapes float past, their cries not of fear or requests for help, but meant to terrorize us. I am not ashamed to say that such tactics worked, and more than once I felt myself on the verge of terrified panic. It was only the presence of Lavinia that kept me going, otherwise I would have succumbed to the irrationality of fear and collapsed early on.

  As we rounded a curve, our pace slowed by exhaustion, we came to a small road that led due north. There was a farmhouse with a light on and a barking dog. I went to move off the road and approach the farmhouse, but Lavinia stopped me. “They woan’t help.”

  I watched the light go dim and someone hushed the dog. “The village then,” I proposed.

  She shook her head and started walking north along the side road, which was little more than a dirt path. We were cold and wet and tired, shivering as we plodded forward. “Where are you going?”

  Lavinia didn’t even look back. “Home,” she said dejectedly.

  It was pitch dark by the time we reached the foot of Sentinel Hill and I first laid eyes on the Whateley farm. It had been a fine place once, you could see that, but time and neglect had taken their toll and more. It had been a great old house in the Georgian tradition, but that had been years ago; now the old lady was a pale shadow of what she once had been. Unpainted, dry rot had set in. The second story was all boarded up, presumably because the windows had been broken. Lavinia walked up the creaking steps and through the door with confidence, and with no other real options I followed, stumbling inside her home.

  Home was not a word that I would use to describe what I found inside. The furniture was ancient and threadbare, a broken chair stood in the corner by the fireplace, and huge piles of used lumber lay in stacks along the walls. Lavinia had already lit two oil lamps, but they did little to provide any relief from the gloom. I was still as frightened as I had been outside.

  Lavinia saw how terrified I was and did her best to comfort me. She sat me on a chair and knelt down before me. “I’m going to get sumthin for us to eat. You need to stay here, in this room. Yer safe in this room.”

  And then she left, and I was alone.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell. It wasn’t constant, but rather came in wafts or waves. It was a rotten smell, a dead smell, not unlike the smell of Kingsport Bay at low tide. I gagged as the stench filled my nose and mouth and retched when I couldn’t take it anymore. It was then that I heard the noise. I felt it really, in my bones, in my bladder, in the air inside my lungs. I felt a strange rhythm, a pulsing, that came and went and came again. It was as if I was listening to the breathing of some monstrous titan, and it was then that I realized the stench, that horrible eye-watering reek, came and went just as the subsonic pulse did. In fact it came in time with it, the two were linked, entwined, synchronized. Then I saw the ceiling bow out, it actually bowed out between two of the fat beams that were themselves visibly warped.

  I could feel the panic rising up inside me, the room was spinning, and I could feel my eyes darting back and forth around the space, jumping at each little whispering sound. My heart was pounding, my ears ringing, and I was hyperventilating, panting, on the verge of screaming. I opened my mouth and let a small noise pass through my lips. The window by the door exploded and glass shards flew across the room, tinkling down over the furniture.

  Lavinia came running back into the room and grabbed me by the hand. “They’re here!” She dragged me through the room to the stairs; I thought for certain we were going to go up, to go up to the rooms where something titanic heaved and shuddered. Instead, we went down into a root cellar carved out of the earth. Light from the room above leaked down through the floorboards, letting us watch as the front door was forced open and a dozen anthropoid figures stumbled in. They tore through the furniture, roaming wildly, aimlessly about, destroying everything they touched.

  They were making a strange mumbling sound, a gibbering; there were no words, but somehow they seemed to be communicating with each other. Somehow, and this I didn’t understand, I could feel what they were feeling, and had a vague concept of what they were going through. They were terrified. As terrified as I was of them, they were equally terrified of me. They felt vulnerable, exposed, and weak. They were afraid of me, of what I could do to them. Suddenly I felt very sorry for them.

  When they reached the stairs, Lavinia dug her fingers into my arm. She was whispering nonsense. “They mustn’t go upstairs, they mustn’t open the door, they mustn’t let it out. It’s too soon, it isn’t time.”

  I heard feet mount the stairs, shuffling, taking them one by one, the creaking boards letting us know exactly where they were. Step by step they rose up closer and closer to the second floor until at last they reached the landing. I could hear a hand on the doorknob, hear the mechanism turn and the latch slide away. I heard the door slide open, the hinges squealing in protest.

  There was a terrible, pregnant silence, and then the screaming started. I closed my eyes. A queer gurgling, bubbling sound filled the room as if some titanic pot had suddenly boiled over. It was all too much and I clamped my hands down over my ears to block out the screaming, that terrible inhuman screaming. I sat there rocking back and forth, and then I felt the warmness on my back, that damp heat that was dripping down onto my face and back. There was blood pouring through the floorboards in gouts. Blood, so much blood.

  Lavinia was pulling me, there was a door that led to the outside; we scrambled up and out into the night. You would think escaping from that house would have been a relief, and yet the night provided no comfort. The whole farm was full of the terrifying and incessant calling of thousands and thousands of whip-poor-wills. They flooded the fields with their small feathery bodies and that hauntingly slow and repeated call.

  We ran, ran around Sentinel Hill and through the sulfurous swamp and through the creek. We ran as if our lives depended on it. The Heron was waiting for us, and the car carried us through the winding roads of the backwoods until at last we came to the village of Dunwich and crossed the bridge that would lead us back to the main road. It was not until we reached Dean’s Corners that we stopped and caught our breath. Lavinia made a phone call and a half hour later the schoolteacher Nathan Vreeland arrived. Together, the three of us drove back to Arkham and took refuge in Griffith House, much to the chagrin of my aunt and household staff.

  The next morning we three sat around a table; we didn’t talk about what had happened, only about what was going to happen. Mr. Vreeland was going to send Lavinia to Europe, to family he still had in the Netherlands. She would be safe there, and would be free to travel about until he had finished preparing a home for her. He had property in the Pacific Northwest in a place called Sesqua Valley. It would be a fine place to raise the child she was carrying.

  I congratulated Mr. Vreeland, who just smiled and said nothing, as did Lavinia. It wasn’t until an hour later, when the cab arrived to take them to the train station, that Lavinia spoke once more.

  “The child isn’t Nathan’s, but he’ll love it just the same. He’ll love it just as I have loved it for the last thirteen years, just as he has loved me. All my children are special, Miss Halsey, in their own way. Didymus may not be as large or as intelligent as his siblings but he has his own talents, he just needs time, time to grow, time to be more than he is now.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks to you I think he’ll have that time.”

  The cab drove off and I just sat there, stunned, unable to do anything. Wondering what madness I had rescued from Dunwich and released onto the world. Wondering if there was anything I could do about it. I thought about the Colts, thought about going down to the train station and ending things. But honestly I was too stunned to do anything at all.

  In the end I went back inside and tried to figure out what had happened, wha
t I had seen, and what it all meant.

  CHAPTER 18

  Excerpts from the Diary of Megan Halsey

  November 1926—March 1928

  5 November 1926

  Of course I went back. Of course I didn’t go alone. I knew that if I were to go to the police, or any other official, I would have been laughed at and written off as a hysterical woman, so instead I turned to old friends. I met with Asenath Waite and Hannah Peaslee on Tuesday for lunch, and then after some discussion we came up with a plan. Ostensibly, we were going up to secure the cabin, but we would take a detour to the ancient necropolis and then stop in at Osborn’s to ask some questions.

  Asenath had a hired hand whom she could bring along; he was rather a dim-witted, lumbering man, but he was stout, fearless, and good with a gun. We left on Wednesday just after dawn, in the Heron, and reached the cabin just before noon.

  The place was just as I had left it. Lunch and the pretense of packing took about an hour and half. As we were leaving I cast an eye to the south and caught sight of a lone figure walking up on Sentinel Hill. Even from a distance I could tell that it was a large man, larger than any man I had ever seen, and from his direction I could hear a strange wailing, a keening, a kind of lonely cry that echoed through the hills and stirred up the birds, sending them into the sky. I shuddered as that murmuration turned and reeled, casting queer shadows over the hills like the hand of some giant god, blocking out the sun.

  We had to pass through the village to cross the Miskatonic and make our way back along winding dirt roads and around the low mountains. We drove to within a half mile of where I thought the necropolis was. The spot was marked for us. There were the tracks of at least three heavy trucks that had parked and then turned around in the mud and brush. There was a trail as well, one that had been freshly trampled by the lock of the still-green brush and broken saplings. It didn’t take long for us to reach the ancient graveyard, but the trek was essentially useless. There was evidence that a great number of people had been residing amongst the tombs and in the mausoleums, but they had left little of use behind, and nothing that pointed to where they had gone. We must have looked the sight, though; three women and a lumbering man, armed to the teeth, stalking through the crumbling headstones of a long-forgotten cemetery, the wind blowing through our hair and winter coats.

  The tracks led back the way we had come, and even as the road improved we could still on occasion see a track with the same tire pattern. It wasn’t till we nearly reached the bridge that the road improved enough to obliterate any trace of the trucks. The Heron clambered over the aging wooden bridge and parked in front of Osborn’s store. We left Asenath’s man with the car while the three of us girls went inside. Even without our guns we must have been something to look at, three young women dressed in city clothes, their makeup and hair done, with fair skin, soft hands, and still in possession of all their own teeth. As we walked in the old men playing checkers in the corner turned their heads and one of them whistled.

  “Yew be polite, Jed, or yer missus’ll be wonderin why yer not’alloed in the store no more,” said the proprietor, the eponymous Joe Osborn. “Now, ladies, what can I do fer yew?”

  I smiled and stepped forward but Asenath cut me off. “We were looking for some friends of ours, we were supposed to meet them up the road a ways but it looks like we got the dates wrong. They would have been traveling in a couple of trucks. Have you seen them?”

  “A few trucks came through baout two days ago. Big things came in from the pike, went back that way a day later.”

  “Ayuhh,” said one of the old-timers. “Big trucks with an address down in Arkham, seen em ouat here befoare.”

  “Was there a name on the trucks?” I sputtered my question out before I had a chance to think about what I was saying. Asenath gave me a look as if I was an idiot.

  While Osborn realized we were being deceitful, the old man didn’t have a clue. “Course they had a name, trucks always have a name now, don’t they. Big letters like on the buses that come throuwgh.” He mumbled a little, rummaging around in his memory, “Griffinson Trucking, that was it, that was the name on the trucks—Griffinson.”

  The look that Osborn gave us made it clear that we were suddenly unwelcome, and we all but ran to the car. We were all quiet until we made it back to the pike and the road noise settled down to a dull hum of the tires on the asphalt.

  It was Hannah that spoke first. “Well, that was easy.”

  “Indeed,” responded Asenath, “all we need to do is find this Griffinson Trucking Company.”

  “And convince them to tell us who their client was, and where they were going.” I added.

  Hannah was simply agog, staring at us as if we had suddenly said the most stupid of all things. “You won’t have to convince them to do anything, they’ll tell you anything that you want. All you have to do is ask.”

  “What are you talking about?” I must have been an idiot not to have seen what Hannah had.

  “Griffinson,” said Hannah. “Griffith and Son. You don’t have to find the trucking company, you own it.”

  We drove back, laughing at our good fortune and the ease at which this mystery, or at least this piece of it, was going to be solved.

  8 November 1926

  Finally Young and his cronies have been able to figure out who ordered the trucks and where they went. The account was one registered to a small subsidiary company, nearly forgotten by the administration. It was mostly used to manage and store furniture for some of the properties that we owned around Arkham and Kingsport. It was rarely used, because it was rare that we needed to move furniture from one property to the other, but the work order was valid and had worked its way through the system and assigned trucks to three drivers who had shown up at the right place and the right time.

  The trucks weren’t the only thing that had been requisitioned. There was a ship, a freighter, the Melindia—she had been commissioned for two years, not an unusual amount of time, but what had been unusual was the fact that all the itinerary papers were missing. Griffith and Son had leased a vessel to an unknown group for an unknown destination to carry an unknown cargo. It was slipshod management and Young knew it. He had no excuse, save one, and it was perhaps the only reason that would have excused the lack of safeguarding our corporate property.

  All of the documents, the requisitions, the insurances, and the checks, they were all completed and signed by a familiar hand, one that I knew as soon as I saw it. All of this had been signed, sealed, and delivered by my mother!

  5 December 1926

  Molly is dead. She fell down the stairs and cracked open her skull while carrying laundry. Julia is simply devastated, and Amanda is doing her best to console her. I always thought of them as nothing more than servants, it had never occurred to me that there might be something more between them. I apparently have been less than observant concerning the relationships in this house.

  4 January 1927

  Amanda is taking Julia on a trip; they’ve decided on the Pacific. The itinerary includes San Francisco, Hawaii, Australia, Fiji, and some of the surrounding islands. They leave in two weeks and will be gone almost nine months.

  7 October 1927

  Aunt Amanda has returned, alone. She seems strange, stranger than usual. She will not speak of where Julia is or what has happened. When I press for details she gets this faraway look and begins to sing this dreadfully horrid song. I’ve heard it before, and I know the words by heart,

  Ain’t she sweet

  See her walking down the street

  Now I ask you very confidentially

  Ain’t she sweet?

  It’s a nonsense song really, but when Amanda sings it I just shudder and want to run away.

  5 November 1927

  Amanda has demanded that I replace the butcher. She claims that what the man is bringing is not fresh, and is making her sick. It’s not true, of course. Since she has returned, her eating habits are abhorrent, as is her hygiene. I
may have to ask Doctor Hartwell to intervene.

  10 January 1928

  Word from Young, the Melindia was seen by one of the other ships in our fleet. She was in London, and by the look of her she’s been there some time. Our captain hired a local man to keep an eye on her, and let us know if she leaves port.

  27 February 1928

  The Melindia has apparently left London, bound for Boston. I’ve asked Young to alert our ships and those of our friends to keep a look out.

  23 March 1928

  She’s returned! Not to Boston but farther north. A longshoreman saw her moored off the coast near Crabapple Cove. Young wants me to wait till morning but I simply can’t, they could be gone by then. I’ve packed the Heron and left word for Hannah but I can’t reach either her or Asenath, who is probably out with that milksop, Derby. I’m leaving a note for Aunt Amanda. If I drive fast enough I can be there before dawn.

  The race is on!

  PART FOUR

  Robert Peaslee

  May–September 1928

  CHAPTER 19

  “A Promise to Mary Czanek”

  From the Journal of Robert Peaslee May 3 1928

  It was just after dawn on the first of May that the phone rang and my self-imposed sabbatical was brought to an end. I had spent weeks going through the papers and belongings of Megan Halsey-Griffith, though she preferred to leave off the hyphenated surname of her stepfather. I had found much to give me an idea of what she had been involved in, and the terrifying truth of her origin, but I was still collating facts in the case of her death. I had meant to spend those first few days in May retracing some of her steps, particularly in Dunwich, where she had encountered those terrifying semi-human things that had chased her from a long-forgotten necropolis to the Whateley home, where something else, something monstrous, had dealt with those ghoulish pursuers. Megan Halsey had not described the thing that had come down the stairs, but for some reason a nerve had been touched. A road trip to Dunwich and then a visit to Griffith and Son were in order.