Reanimatrix

by Pete Rawlik

  It was in the wheel house, a chaotic maelstrom of broken glass, scattered charts, and shattered equipment, that I noticed something odd. I have commented at length on the decrepitude of the ship and its general state of clutter, including the broken railings. Even in the cabin the brass fittings seemed in disrepair, or were tarnished with age, which is why my eye was drawn to a piece of pipe that showed a ring of marks where an ill-fitted wrench had been taken to it. The patina had been scratched, and there were jagged edges where the teeth of the wrench had bit in. I tested it and found that it was loose. With a few quick turns, my eyes constantly casting about to see if I was being watched, I unscrewed the pipe from its fittings and turned it away from the wall. I slipped my finger inside the pipe, but found nothing. In my disappointment I almost forgot, but then as I was fitting the pipe back to the wall I searched the receiving end of the fitting, and was rewarded with the discovery of a significant blockage. Careful not to push it farther in, I gently dragged the item out of its hiding place and revealed a small spindle of papers torn from a notebook. Still fearful that I would be discovered, I slipped the pages inside my coat, replaced the pipe, and returned to the hold.

  The A to Z Club was still going through the inventory, but the doors to the hold had been opened and crates were being moved onto the dock. Most people, on finding something as I had, would have departed as quickly as possible, with the intent of finding a safe place to examine in detail the discovered treasure. This, however, tends to draw attention. The wiser course of action, one I had seen carried out by thieves and antique dealers, was to be more casual about things, to linger longer than necessary, and when possible conceal the item of worth amongst a clutter of other things. Once in New York, Vance had discovered a ratty copy of Tamerlane, credited to A. Bostonian, which he knew to be a pseudonym of Edgar Allen Poe. Inside, on the frontispiece, the author had inscribed it to a friend. The bookshop owner had marked the volume at only a quarter dollar. Rather than absconding with the volume by itself, he instead piled up several volumes of similar subject and condition, and thus when he approached the clerk nothing in particular existed to catch the man’s eye and negate the sale. Thus, I stood around with my friends as they carried out their business, and only an hour or so later took my leave of them. Even then I was careful not to dash down the docks and streets, but rather walked with care. I strolled through the streets of Kingsport as if I had nothing of import to do, making sure I was not followed or observed. It was the most circuitous of routes that brought me back to my sister’s house, but once there, I was sure that no one suspected anything was out of the ordinary.

  As I sat at the table I unfolded those stiff folded sheets and discovered almost immediately that they represented the first few pages of a log book, hastily torn out and then folded and spindled so as to fit inside the pipe. The handwriting was a scrawling, cramped script that was difficult to read, but as my eyes adjusted with time the contents became clear and I found myself in possession of what appeared to be the logbook of the Melindia’s first mate.

  CHAPTER 21

  “The Log of the Melindia”

  From the Files of the United States Coast Guard, Kingsport March 1928

  March 7

  As is traditional, I have bought myself a new logbook to mark the beginning of a new adventure, one that will finally take me home. Oh, how I have missed the verdant and welcoming hills of Massachusetts. It has been six years since I graduated from Miskatonic and joined that ill-fated expedition to Africa in search of Kor. We never even made it out of Zamunda, and it was only through the kindness of the royal family that we weren’t thrown into prison for our debts. If you had told me that my engineering degree would have proven useless, and instead my time spent working as a surveyor would lead me first to being a ship’s navigator, and then eventually to a helmsman plying the routes between Europe and North Africa, I would have called you mad. Life takes us strange places, and who would have thought that a dead-end trip to Britain’s Yorkshire would have led me to an opportunity to travel home.

  Whitby, where I came into yesterday via the Atlas, is a strange little town, quaint enough, I suppose. It was once a whaling village, and apparently was the source of much of the mourning jewelry fashioned from the nearby deposits of jet. These days it seems to be resting on its laurels and trying to make a go of it as a seaside resort, at least that’s what I have discerned as I tried to find decent lodgings. Thankfully, a local firm of solicitors, S. F. Billington and Son, were advertising for a crew for a cargo vessel by name of the Melindia. The regular crew and captain had all been discharged a week earlier for gross insubordination and dereliction of duty. Looking at the ship, which is in a right awful state, I can understand why they were discharged. The Melindia may be seaworthy, but she shan’t win any prizes for looks or cleanliness. I applied for a job as a navigator, and was surprised when they came back and offered me a berth as the first mate. This was apparently because, barring the captain, the rest of the crew were Scots and the captain, being a local man, could barely understand a word of what they said.

  That the ship was sailing from Whitby to Kingsport surprised me, for it seemed an odd destination. Billington, the son—the father having passed away some time ago—informed me that the ship had been specifically chartered for such a run by the voyage’s sole passenger, a stoic woman by the name of Eliza Hoag, who was also apparently the financial backer as well, and for whom Billington himself worked. She was, it seemed, returning home, not to Kingsport but to Arkham. She had been living in Europe for many years, and had accumulated a significant volume of possessions which she sought to take back to the States with her. Half the hold was full of her accumulation of antiques and oddities, and the other half had been taken up with local carvings and jewelry all comprised of the aforementioned jet. Some young entrepreneur had gotten it into his head that such dreary stuff would be the rage in New England and New York, and had bought crates of it to sell amongst the tycoons of Wall Street, or more specifically their mistresses.

  It may be a strange, roundabout way of doing it, but Raclaw Schablotski is finally going home.

  March 8

  Met the captain today, a surly warthog of a man named Barrows who epitomizes everything one thinks of when it comes to captains of garbage scows and tramps. I could smell the liquor on his breath. It is clear to me now that this voyage will be more challenging than I first thought. We leave tomorrow at first light.

  March 9

  Mrs. Hoag is an odd sort. She is, I suppose, what some people call beautiful, tall and willowy with hair that captures and dances in the sea wind. As we left port, steaming east, she was standing on the bow; the light from the morning sun made her into a kind of angel, a silhouetted figurehead come to life. For as beautiful as she is, she is just as melancholy. There is a great sadness about her, the way she looks out into the sea. I’ve seen that look before amongst men who go to sea and never reach their destination, and I told her so.

  “Suicide, Mr. Schablotski?” She looked at me with those large doe eyes. “No, I’m not considering taking my own life, I’ve seen too much death, lived with too much death.” She turned back to the sea. “In my experience death doesn’t solve anything, it merely makes things more . . . complicated.”

  I left her after that, and didn’t see her again until the cook rang the bell for supper. When she didn’t turn up the captain sent me to look for her. I caught her coming up from the hold. Her hair was out of place and she was cinching the belt on her dress. She was obviously flustered. If we had been on land I would say that I had just caught her leaving a man, but that cannot be: everyone was in the galley or attending to duties above deck. Odd, most odd; if she wasn’t meeting a man, what was she doing down there in the hold?

  March 10

  MacLean is missing. He was supposed to relieve me at the helm this morning but he never showed. His bunk hadn’t been slept in and no one had seen him since dinner the night before. We searched the whole ship fro
m bow to stern and found nothing, not a trace, not a thing out of place. Well, except for a few crates in the hold that had shifted, but that was to be expected given the rough weather we’ve encountered. Barrows blames the weather for MacLean’s loss, says the man probably fell overboard. It would be more convincing if Barrows wasn’t drunk. I’ve never seen someone drink so much; the farther out to sea we get, the more he drinks. I’ve tried to find where he hides his bottles but to no avail, not that I think it matters. I suspect that Barrows would be useless even if sober.

  March 11

  The cook has complained that some of his stores have gone missing. Barrows has locked himself in his cabin. Mrs. Hoag has said that this is my concern, and that I am in charge now. I’ve talked to the crew, tried to make things plain. I think they understood. Five days. By my calculations we’ll be in Kingsport in five days. It doesn’t seem that long, but out here, on the open ocean, far from land, surrounded by nothing but the rolling gray desert that is the North Atlantic, days seem to stretch to weeks. This far out, even the birds have abandoned us. I hope that God has not.

  March 12

  Barrows is still locked in his cabin, and has been for the last two days. There is a horrible stench leaking out from the vent to his room. The crew is nervous. McNeely says that he saw Mrs. Hoag go into the hold and when he followed a minute later there was no trace of her. He says she must be a ghost. Mrs. Hoag denies this, of course, and accuses McNeely of being as drunk as Barrows. Not unexpectedly, the rest of the crew has sided with McNeely. I’ve told them to stay away from her, and reminded them that she is paying their wages. I need them to focus on their jobs. We are two men short and from the look of that sky there is a storm on the way.

  March 13

  The storm came up on us just before dawn with sustained winds of at least thirty knots whipping through the wires. I’ve tried to keep her pointed into the wind, but even so the waves are breaking over the bow and we are being driven east. Barrows is out of his cabin, but not of his own accord. Someone forced the door and dragged him out, I know that much at least. We can’t find him. Not that we’ve been able to conduct a thorough search, the storm has made sure of that. He’ll turn up when he gets hungry, when the danger has passed and the work is all done and he’s sobered up. Drunks have a habit of doing that.

  March 14

  McIntyre is missing. He was on duty early this morning, but when we went to relieve him he simply wasn’t there. Both Barrows and MacLean are still missing. We’ve searched through the whole ship twice and can’t find a trace of any of them. The storm has weakened, but it’s still pushing us east. We haven’t seen the sun, let alone the sky, in days, no telling where we are. As far as I know we could be dead, and this, this could be hell.

  March 15

  The Morning

  I found Barrows’s head. It was in the meat locker behind a slab of salted pork. The back of the skull had been cracked open and the contents fished out. The edges of the hole looked gnawed on. I didn’t show it to the others; I threw it overboard and watched it sink into the dark abyss of the sea.

  The Afternoon

  Besides myself, there’s only two of the crew left. The rest, I assume, are dead victims of whatever force has possessed this ship. I thought perhaps Mrs. Hoag would be immune, but even she has vanished. I don’t understand, where are they? Where have they all gone? What is happening here?

  The Evening

  The crew is gone. I’m alone in the wheel room. There’s a flock of seagulls off the portside. We can’t be far from shore. The storm has broken, but it must have pushed us miles off course. The sun is setting in the west, beyond the bow. Mrs. Hoag is there, out on the pulpit. On the deck there are dozens of shadows moving about, kneeling beneath her. Worshipping her. I can hear them, they sound as if they are in pain. There’s so many of them. The way they move, it’s unnatural. They’re coming up the stairs . . . coming for me.

  Guess I won’t be getting home after all.

  CHAPTER 22

  “A Rainy Day in Dunwich”

  From the Journal of Robert Peaslee June 8 1928

  Chief Nichols let me come back to Arkham in early June. There was the obligatory dressing down. They had no proof that I had killed Mary Czanek, but my explanation about why I was there and what I had done was flimsy, and too many people had seen me there. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Killing Czanek was the exact kind of thing Nichols wanted me around for. I got dirty, he and his boys stayed clean. Between the lines I could see the truth. He was mad that I had gotten caught. He had sent me away to let time and some well-placed cash distract those who might make a stink. It had worked, but officially I was still being reprimanded, and that meant I wasn’t going to get back to work until June 11th, which gave me nearly a week to work on the Halsey-Griffith case. I couldn’t do anything official, but I figured there was plenty of investigating that I could pull off, if not in Arkham then in Dunwich. I wanted to see Megan’s cabin, and the lost graveyard, and if there was time, stop in at the Whateley farm.

  I left Arkham on the morning of June 6th, taking the Aylesbury Pike. The drive to Dunwich was slow and tedious, and I found myself lost in the slowly changing vista outside the dusty window. When you leave Arkham, heading west and north along the Aylesbury Pike, following the Miskatonic River, there is a dramatic and abrupt change in the landscape. Less than a mile outside and the farms and small homesteads fade away, the wild and overgrown expanses become more dominant, until at last Billington’sWood—that dark and unwholesome forest that creeps and claws at the road—is all that exists on the western side of the pike. On the other side, the waters of the Miskatonic roil slowly, forming a kind of psychological barrier to whatever lies on the farther shore. It was as if the Miskatonic River was an impassable barrier, an invisible wall that allowed the small farms and hamlets dotting the other side to be seen, but never reached. As I passed the stony remnants of great bridges that had once existed, but had long since been lost to time, the idea that I was someplace else became prevalent. A dark foreboding forest on one side, and a seemingly impenetrable barrier on the other, the Aylesbury Pike was like a long-forgotten trade route through a phantasmal land and the car a lone horse and rider cast out into the wilderness in search of a place to call one’s own. I thought of myself as Orpheus, descending into the hell of Dunwich, metaphorically trying to rescue my bride from the clutches of the dead—but Megan was dead, and nothing I did was going to bring her back. The least I could do was find the men or monsters that had killed her and bring them to justice, whatever that meant.

  Beyond Billington’s Wood, the Miskatonic and the lands around grow wilder, and the pike becomes a ribbon of asphalt, the only sign that civilization even exists in the weed- and briar-choked wilderness. I knew that there were people, ones who lived out here, and on occasion I caught sight of a dirt road, or two sets of grass-choked ruts, or even a footpath that led off into the thicket, but these provided no sense of security. For all I knew, those who lived here were little better than savages. There had been stories, cases I had read about, in which unsuspecting travelers had vanished, or encountered madmen, or cannibals, or even worse. The files on this country were thick with murders and disappearances, presumably linked to moonshiners and smugglers bringing in booze from Canada through the backwoods of Vermont. That was the official theory. Unofficially, there were rumors that something more sinister was going on, that the killing was associated with the various crones, wise-women, and witches who lived in the hills. The whispers went back for generations, and mostly had to do with the various descendants of the three Mason sisters, the women who gave Arkham the epithet witch-haunted. M. M. Bartlett, a student of Professor Albert N. Wilmarth, had been through the area a few years back and put together a dissertation on the hill religions of the region entitled The Witch-Cults of Western Massachusetts, a volume few people bothered to read, but more should have.

  Of all the villages Bartlett had visited, Dunwich had been the one most ri
fe with hill tales and eerie folklore. Bartlett had called the place backward, and as the car rattled into the village I had no reason to doubt the man’s opinion. The town center appeared as if it hadn’t seen a can of paint in decades, and the clapboards of various buildings had been dislodged and left in disrepair. What had once been a church was now a general store with only the last vestiges of a bell tower collapsing into obscurity. The road had long since turned to dirt and weeds and debris lined the ditches that ran along the side. I hadn’t really needed to stop in Dunwich—the route to either of my primary destinations didn’t require it—but I wanted to see the place, to get a sense of what it was like, and put Megan’s observations into perspective. It was worse than I had thought possible, and rather than engage any of the toothless and unkempt residents I drove off toward the Halsey cabin. I didn’t even bother to get out of the car.

  The rain started as soon as I pulled up into the dirt patch that served the cabin as a parking space. It was really a nondescript little building, aged, but you could see where work had been done to fix issues. There were branches in the yard and the weeds had grown up in places, but a fine layer of pine needles kept most of the yard clear of vegetation. I used the key that the lawyers had given me when they agreed to let me look into Megan’s death. The inside was a little musty, but clean and dry. If anyone had been there since Megan had fled the area there was no sign of it. I spent the next few hours rummaging around the place, going through drawers and closets, checking for secret doors or compartments, but there was nothing to be found except dust and quiet. That was what I noticed most about the cabin: the quiet was pervasive. Unlike Arkham or Paris or any of the other places I had lived, this area was devoid of the sounds of human habitation. It was so removed from humanity that I might as well have been lost at sea or in a desert. If I ever needed a place to hide, this cabin would do quite nicely.