by Pete Rawlik
This was my routine, our routine, except for Sunday, when the library was closed and Hannah’s day at the school was limited to making sure her pupils attended the chapel for morning services. It went on like this for ten days, and I saw no reason to make any change to it, and wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for a patch of bad weather one morning that trapped me in the library, along with several others. The sky had been threatening all morning, and I had hoped to beat any cloudburst to the diner, but instead found my exit blocked by a group of three men who ran inside to escape the sudden downpour and vicious biting wind that was blowing in off the bay. They were genial fellows, retirees by the look of things, and from their demeanor on a kind of working holiday, though what work they did together wasn’t clear.
Before I could settle into a chair and begin my book, the three men asked if I would join them in a friendly game, to pass the time. “My name is Zachariah Armitage, the man with the bushy hair is Arnold Zeck, and the gentleman in glasses is Alton Oz. Our friends call us the A to Z Club.” They were all about my age, and of average appearance with nothing that would distinguish them from the general public.
“Armitage? You aren’t related to Henry Armitage, the librarian at Miskatonic University?”
He nodded. “Guilty as charged. He’s my father; though don’t ask him about me, I’m afraid I’m a bit of a black sheep. He hasn’t spoken to me in years.”
I smiled. “I haven’t spoken to my father in years either. My name is Peaslee, Robert Peaslee.” I left off my credentials.
Armitage shook my hand vigorously. “We play Anagrams, Mr. Peaslee. Would you join us?”
I indicated my affirmation and the four of us sat down around a large, round table. Something was said to the librarian, and she stood up in a huff and departed for one of the back rooms.
As Armitage spread the lettered tiles out on the table he explained the rules they played by. “Seven bank tiles each. Four-letter words or more to play. You must draw a letter at the beginning of each turn. You can add what you draw to your bank, but you can only have seven letters in your bank at the end of your turn; any more tiles than that go into the pool. Words can be stolen from other players using your letters or pool letters to rearrange them into new words, or add prefixes or suffixes, but not simple plurals. Most tiles at the end wins.” Not dissimilar to how I had played before. “I warn you, Mr. Peaslee, we take the game seriously.”
As we drew our tiles Mr. Oz began a conversation. “Tell me, Mr. Peaslee, what brings you to Kingsport?”
I had no desire to tell these men the truth, but there was no need to lie either. “I’m taking some time off from the job, visiting family.”
“And what is it you do, Mr. Peaslee?” Arnold Zeck’s voice was gravelly but precise.
“I’m not exactly sure how to describe it.” I was stalling for time to think. “During the war I was in security, and afterward I sort of fell into a position doing the same kind of thing, only for civilian clients. Let’s just say I protect people from things they don’t even know they need protecting from.”
“Well, that’s rather vague,” commented Oz as he drew his last tile and indicated that it was Armitage’s turn. “What kind of people employ you?”
I opened my mouth to respond but was cut off by Armitage. “Whores,” he said, laying out his tiles.
My eyes grew wide. “I beg your pardon?”
He was arranging his tiles on the table. “H-O-R-S-E, horse, five letters.”
“Yes, of course. What do you gentlemen do, if I may ask?”
Armitage was gathering new tiles, while Zeck was pondering what to do with his own, leaving Oz to answer me. “I’m in shipping myself, exclusive clientele, all very secretive mind you. Armitage is in bookkeeping, and Zeck deals in insurance.”
“Lyre!” shouted Zeck, laying out the four tiles of his word. “I make sure that people can sleep comfortable at night, knowing that their most valued things are safe and secure.”
It was my turn; there was nothing in the pool and I looked down at my seven letters in despair:
F Z U W I T E
I had nothing to work with in my hand, but suddenly realized that I could steal a word, thanks to my mishearing what Armitage had said earlier. I reached across the table. “Horse becomes Whores, a simple plural yes, but the S was already in play.”
Zeck nodded. “Those are the rules.”
While I drew letters, Oz laid out two letters and stole LYRE by turning it into REALLY.
It went on like this for a good hour, during which the rain stopped and the sun burned through the clouds. They asked me to play a second game, but I declined. I had been entertained, but I was rather peckish and desperately needed something to fill my stomach. As I left, I paused and finally asked something that I had wanted to ask all morning. “You know why I’m here gentlemen, but I wonder what brings you three to Kingsport? It is a little early for the tourist season.”
Armitage smiled as he gathered the tiles up and dropped them back in the bag. “We’re here on business, Mr. Peaslee. You see, there was a ship and a cargo that never made it to port. We’ve heard rumors that it’s been sighted adrift off the coast. Some of the cargo belonged to Oz, and Mr. Zeck provided the insurance. I was the bookkeeper responsible for the inventory. We’ve come to see if we can find it. Sadly, the local coast guard hasn’t been much help.”
I nodded and made to leave, but then turned back. “Just to satisfy my own curiosity,” I was waving my arms, trying to appear casual. “What was the name of the ship?”
Armitage cinched the bag shut. “She was the Melindia, steaming from Great Britain. Do you know her?”
I nodded. “I’ve heard of her.” With that, I left and made my way back to Hannah’s house.
The rain started up again just after Hannah returned, and just as my version of grilled steak and spring vegetables was hitting the table. Afterward, we sat in the parlor and talked. It was the first time we had had a simple conversation in a long time. I told her about my day, she dug out her bag of Anagram tiles and offered to play, but I declined. Instead, I decided to take an interest in her hobby, and asked to see her photograph albums.
Most of the work was of the people and buildings and landscapes, or I should say seascapes, of Kingsport. There was a magnificent shot from the top of a tower looking down onto the harbor and the boats that hugged the docks. She had a real penchant for capturing the mood of the village; whether that was in the play between light and shadows that permeated the streets, or in the lines and eyes of its inhabitants, didn’t seem to matter. Each photograph told a story, and Hannah seemed all too ready to help expound on those tales.
Eventually we left her artistic work behind and began leafing through her formal portraits of the students and teachers at The Hall School. At every page she would stop and talk about a particular student that she had grown to care about, what their dreams had been and what they eventually ended up doing. Sometimes their lives were exactly what they expected; others had lives filled with nothing but disappointment. Casually we flipped the page and there was a photograph of the school faculty from almost eight years earlier. Hannah had set it up on a timer. She looked so proud to be a member of the faculty, standing there surrounded by the stern faces of the other teachers.
Yet as I looked at those erudite scholars, the face of one seemed strangely familiar. He was a tall man, distinguished looking with a cravat and large decorative pin holding it in place. I had seen him before, I just didn’t know where. I asked Hannah about it, pointing at the stone-faced instructor.
“Oh yes, that’s Mr. Lydecker, I’ve talked to you about him before. He was a science instructor—well, still is, technically. He’s on sabbatical. Friendly enough man, I suppose, hard to talk to. He was wounded in the war and has a terrible time breathing on occasion.”
“Lydecker?”
“Yes, Roman LaChampele Lydecker, he’s Canadian, I think—well, French-Canadian.”
“Hmm.”
I didn’t know the name, but the face seemed so familiar. It gnawed at the back of my mind. I closed the book and let whatever was bothering me slip away. I was supposed to be relaxing, recovering, not obsessing over a man I had never met.
But I had met him, I was sure of it.
About nine that evening I decided to retire to my room and read. Hannah saw the novel I had borrowed from the library and frowned. “You won’t be happy with how that ends,” she told me. “I don’t know anyone who read Tamara and liked the ending. The new issue of Whispers is out with stories by Mother, Simon Jacobs, and Randolph Carter.”
I was fond of Carter’s fantasies so picked it up and flipped through, but I couldn’t find anything attributed to the author. “Hannah, there’s nothing in here by Carter.”
She laughed, “Not under his real name, he’s supposed to be missing you know, but he’s been publishing regularly under the pseudonym Howard Lovecraft—it’s a kind of anagram.”
I looked at the table of contents, and sure enough there was a story by an author named Lovecraft, but for the life of me I couldn’t see how Howard Lovecraft was even close to an anagram for Randolph Carter. “Are you sure they’re the same author?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, going to the cabinet and getting her bag full of Anagram tiles. It took her a moment, but eventually she had all the tiles she needed and spelled out the supposed pseudonym.
HOWARD LOVECRAFT
“Some of this is easy,” she said, and began to rearrange the letters. “Remember the accent, we don’t pronounce our Rs properly, we use an H sound.”
OWARD LOV F CARTEH
“Keep in mind that the PH sound is just an F, and we tend to draw out our Os.”
RAVDOOWLF CARTEH
“Hannah,” I said, “there’s a vague phonetics to it, I’ll admit, but you can’t replace an N with a V, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t make any sense in English, but Carter was an antiquarian, a classicist, he studied both Latin and Greek. In ancient Greek, the symbol for a lower case N is the letter V.”
I stared at the letters that she had rearranged on the table:
RAVDOOWLF CARTEH
“Who would have thought,” I said.
“Actually, Mother worked it out. I think she recognized that Carter and Lovecraft were writing in the same style and went to town proving it.”
I took the small digest of stories and wandered back into my room. I never did finish that story, or any of them, really. I was asleep before I was able to turn two pages.
The next morning Hannah was gone before I woke, and I found that she had not put away her photo albums, or put away the letters from the Anagram game. It was as I was picking them up that I saw that portrait again, the one that included the face of a man that looked so familiar, but whom I just couldn’t place, the man whom Hannah had called Moreland. His whole name was there on the page:
Roman LaChampele Lydecker
He looked so familiar.
It gnawed at me. It festered and boiled.
Why did he look so familiar?
I sat down at the table and began gathering up the Anagram letters. Then, just as I was about to put the last tile away, it hit me. I had a name. Was it possible, or was I just imagining things? I poured the letters back onto the table and quickly spelled out the name Hannah had attributed to the man in the picture.
ROMAN LACHAMPELE LYDEKER
I pulled a few letters to the side.
ROMAN LACHAMP LYDECKER LEE
I could see the letters moving in my mind even before I moved them with my hand.
ROMAN LYDEKER CLAPHAM LEE
It was coming faster now.
YKER MORELAND CLAPHAM LEE
It was there, I just needed to stretch one letter.
ERYK MORELAND CLAPHAM LEE
Or, as I knew him, Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee—the man whom Doctor Herbert West had resurrected in the trenches, whom I had met in Averoigne, and whose own head he had grasped with one hand and lifted up from his neck. Seeing his name brought his words to mind. “And one day, the Undead shall outnumber the living and they shall rule the world.”
I collapsed back into a chair, stunned by the undeniable truth of my revelation. Clapham-Lee was here, had been here in Kingsport for years. Megan had seen him in Dunwich just before she and Lavinia had been chased by slathering things hiding in the cemetery. It couldn’t be coincidence. Somehow or another Clapham-Lee was connected to the murder of Megan Halsey, to the monstrous things that had been hiding in that forgotten necropolis. It was all coming together. The only problem was that Megan had seen Clapham-Lee more than a year ago, but Hannah said he was on sabbatical, visiting England. Where was he now? Had he returned, and if so, how and when? Did his arrival result in a confrontation with Megan that had turned fatal?
I needed to get to Dunwich, to find that lost graveyard and see if there were any clues as to where Clapham-Lee and his monstrous brethren had gone. They had shipped out, that was obvious, and according to Megan’s notes they had returned on the Melindia, the very ship that the A to Z Club was hoping to find and recover their cargo from. I was suddenly frantic, I needed to get back to work and trace Clapham-Lee’s movements. Roman Lydecker had to have left some kind of trail—after all, he wasn’t trying to hide.
I planned on packing, on catching a bus back to Arkham, on resigning from the force, and then heading to Arkham. That was the plan. If it hadn’t been for that damn library book, I would have done just that. I felt guilty leaving it for Hannah to return, and it would only take me a few minutes to walk to the library and back. It would be no time at all. Besides, I was going to disappoint her in a variety of other ways; returning a book was simple.
I saw them before they saw me; they were huddled together, talking feverishly to one another about something I couldn’t quite make out. The A to Z Club was walking down the street, heading in the opposite direction. I bid them good morning as we passed each other. If I hadn’t done that I might have been ignored, that is how intent and oblivious they were. But I did, and in doing so, caught Armitage’s eye.
“Ehh? Oh, Mr. Peaslee. Good morning. Sorry, can’t stop.” He didn’t break his stride. “We’re on our way to the Coast Guard Station. The ship’s come in.”
I waved and took two steps before stopping in my tracks. I turned and called out, “What ship?”
“Our ship,” he yelled back. “The one we told you about, the Melindia.” With each step he was moving farther away from me.
I turned on my heel and dashed after the chattering trio, catching them as fast as I could. “Gentlemen, I think I would like to see this ship of yours, if you don’t mind?”
Zeck caught my eye. “Not at all, Peaslee, you might be useful. You don’t mind getting a little dirty, do you?”
I thought about what he said, and I may have taken it the wrong way. “Mr. Zeck, I may have been too clean for too long.” There was something ironic in my voice. “If I’m going to get where I need to I might have to get more than a little dirty.”
The ship that sat in the Kingsport harbor, berthed in the protected area reserved for the Coast Guard, was best described as unfit. That this had been the Melindia there was no doubt, for there on her bow, faded and rusted, you could still see the faint outline where her name had once been painted. She had suffered from lack of maintenance and the failure to do any proper upkeep had not only contributed to her rust, but to rivets and bolts being missing, to her ropes being tangled, and for large pieces of her railing having gone missing. Many of her portholes had cracked glass, and the wheel room itself looked as if the windows had not been tended to in years. Worst of all was the great gash on her port side, below the bow, just above the water line. It was a fresh cut, and appeared to have been made when she ran aground, or collided with some unforgiving rock as she approached the mainland.
According to the manifest, more than half the cargo was missing. However, those boxes belonging to and so keen to be recov
ered by the A to Z Club were still present, and this elicited in Armitage and his colleagues much elation. That elation turned suspect when we actually entered the ship’s hold and found the place filled with such a reeking stench that we nearly retched. It was not the remaining cargo that reeked, but rather an odd accumulation of decomposing food and bodily waste that had accumulated in one of the side compartments. It appeared that someone had been using the area as a midden, though why that should occur on a ship where waste could be dumped overboard was perplexing. With handkerchiefs dowsed in cologne wrapped around their faces, the three members of the A to Z Club went about double-checking the status of the cargo while an officer of the Coast Guard looked on, and several dockworkers began preparations for moving what remained.
Being wholly uninterested in the disposition of the remaining cargo, I instead slipped away and began searching casually for any clue as to what had happened aboard the Melindia. While my acquaintances were thrilled that their cargo remained in the hold and was salvageable, the implication that the rest of the cargo had been removed did not escape me. Likewise, it seemed apparent that the wound to the hull had likely occurred after the majority of the cargo had been taken off, suggesting that someone wanted no record of the ship reaching port and disgorging whatever it was she held inside. To this end, it seemed likely that not only was the ship considered an acceptable loss, but so was the crew. It was evidence of violence that I was searching for, that and some hint that tied all this back to the murder of Megan Halsey.