The stench hit Joe before he ever saw the body. He stumbled back against the edge of the grave with a hand clamped over his mouth. It was not his first time dealing with the dead, but most of them hadn’t had as much time to ripen. This one was green and bloated, lying in a pool of its own leaked fluids.
Agnes flinched and muttered something in a language he didn’t recognize. Nadia was not so restrained; she whirled and staggered a few steps away to vomit noisily. Joe looked up to the dark sky, struggling not to join her. He swallowed hard a few times, trying to clear his mouth of nauseous saliva.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” he asked Agnes once he thought he had his stomach under control.
“Joe, I haven’t been sure of anything since I learned monsters were real,” she replied.
“Yeah, that’s fair,” he said. There were still mornings where he woke up and told himself that all these things were just nightmares. It was a nice illusion while it lasted.
Joe went to climb out. For a moment loose earth slid under his hands at the edge. All he could picture was toppling backwards into the sloppy mess in the coffin. The idea gave him a desperate strength that let him cling on and heave himself up and out. Agnes helped pull him the last bit.
“Hey!” Nadia called and pointed off into the distance, back towards the entrance to the graveyard.
Joe looked in that direction. Lights were approaching through the mist, the sweeping beams of flashlights. His shoulders tensed immediately. They’d hardly begun and already drawn attention. No matter who it was, that was bad news. They’d made too much noise along the way through Arkham. It would have been easy for someone to have followed them here. The question was who.
“Damn.” Agnes had obviously reached the same conclusion. “Do you think you can distract them?”
“Depends on who it is,” Joe said. He scrubbed a dirty hand over his face. “I’ll do my best. You and Nadia stay back. Try not to start chanting in the background, if you would.”
Agnes gave him a wry look. “I’ll do my best.”
She went to collect Nadia. Joe walked on ahead, stopping only to collect the shotgun. He kept the weapon low. Whoever it was could well be an innocent bystander, and he had no urge to frighten them.
He passed out of the edge of the potter’s field and back into the stone markers of the cemetery proper. The approaching figures resolved into the shape of people through the mist. A beam swept onto Joe, dazzling him momentarily. He raised a hand to shield his eyes.
“Hold up there,” one of them called.
Joe did as he was asked, stopping. He tried to adopt a relaxed posture. It was easier said than done. He knew he looked a frightful mess. He was battered, bruised, and covered in dirt. Not exactly a soothing portrait at the best of times, much less in the dark of a graveyard at night.
“Well, well. If it isn’t Joe Diamond.”
Joe recognized the voice now. Officer McClury, one of the policemen who patrolled the beats in Arkham. The light shifted down out of his eyes and he saw the man, confirming his guess. Middle-aged and redheaded, McClury was a bluff fellow with a remarkable mustache. His left hand held the flashlight, while his right was hooked into his belt. Not close enough to his gun to be a threat, but not too far away either. Another policeman stood a bit further back, though Joe didn’t recognize that one.
“Officers,” Joe said steadily. “Good evening to you. Can I help you somehow?”
“Funny thing, that,” McClury said. “I was about to ask you the same thing. Look like you’ve had a rough night, Joe.”
Joe mustered a smile. “Well, I am working a bit later than I’d like, I’ll be honest.”
“Working a bit late, he says!” McClury chuckled with what seemed like genuine good humor. He glanced back at the other officer. “Did you hear that?”
“I heard,” the other cop said flatly. No amusement there.
Something about that one’s voice was familiar, but Joe couldn’t place it. His skin crawled. He frowned.
McClury continued, “Been a busy night for us too, Joe. Would you believe someone was screeching around town in some jalopy, scaring all kinds of folk? A few people even thought they heard gunfire.”
“Is that so?” Joe asked.
He glanced off towards the gate. They had come from that direction and must have seen Ma’s car. McClury might be toying with him, or just trying to avoid a confrontational approach. Joe got along with most of the police in Arkham well enough, but some resented “freelancers” like him. McClury seemed relaxed enough, but his pal fidgeted with ill-concealed impatience.
“Sure is,” McClury replied. “Don’t suppose you’ve seen anything strange yourself?”
“Strange? In Arkham? Perish the thought,” Joe said.
“Righto, righto. Perhaps, just to set my mind at ease, you could explain what you’re doing in a graveyard late at night?”
Joe gave a humorless smile. “I already told you. Working.”
McClury gave him a wounded look. “Oh, come now, Joe. Don’t make this hard on me. I’m just doing my job.”
He might well be, Joe mused. McClury didn’t seem to be lying. Joe wasn’t sure he had it in him to draw down on a cop just doing his job. He resisted the urge to glance over his shoulder to where the two women and the exhumed body were. The most important thing was to keep Agnes’ work from being disturbed. If he could pull these policemen away somehow…
“It’s a gloomy place to have a conversation. If you’re concerned about my activities, I’d be happy to come down to the station and make a statement,” Joe offered.
McClury’s eyebrows went up. “Would you now?” He scratched at his jaw. “That’s kind of you to be so accommodat–”
“Where’s the girl?” growled his compatriot.
Joe tensed. It didn’t take a detective’s insight to see something off about that question. “What girl?”
McClury seemed almost as surprised as him. He frowned at the other cop. “There were reports of women involved in that car incident I spoke of–”
The other cop limped forward. Favoring his right leg, Joe noticed. The skin between his shoulder blades crawled.
“You know he’s involved, McClury. Probably kidnapped a woman. We have to find her.”
The familiar voice. It clicked into place, the last piece of the puzzle. He’d heard it before, alright. Tonight, in fact. There was a dark stain on the man’s uniform pants over the thigh. Blood, soaked through a bandage and clothing alike.
“Hurt your leg there, officer?” Joe asked.
The man’s face was still in shadow, but Joe could see his expression tighten. The realization that the cultist had said too much and given himself away. The false cop’s hand dropped to the butt of his service pistol.
“Easy does it there,” McClury said. “There’s no call–”
The second cop drew his pistol in the blink of an eye. Joe dove for a nearby tombstone as the gunfire rang out. Bullets impacted on the granite surface, chipping away at the stone. Joe hunched up and brought the shotgun around for a blind shot, forcing the two policemen to scatter into cover as well.
“What in the devil do you think you’re doing, Cooper?” roared McClury at the other cop. “Stand down!”
Cooper replied by shooting him. Joe blanched as McClury’s body sprawled out across the moist soil, dead before he hit the ground.
“You son of a bitch! You didn’t have to do that!”
“You’re all grist for the mill,” snarled the revealed cultist.
There was chanting in the distance now. Agnes was smart enough to have kicked off the ritual the moment she heard gunfire, Joe reasoned. No point in wasting time when things had obviously gone south.
Cooper clearly heard it too. “Give me the girl and I might let you walk away.”
Joe glowered and leaned out to tak
e another potshot by way of answer. The cop responded with a series of blasts that forced Joe to duck his head down.
“Besides, who’s to say I did it?” the cultist laughed coldly. “Who do you think they’ll blame? The decorated officer, horrified to see a fellow policeman gunned down? Or the shady detective always sticking his nose where he shouldn’t? I’ll be a hero for bringing you down.”
“You actually have to bring me down first,” Joe snapped. He was caught between anger and fear, and fell back on bravado to cover it.
He glanced down at his shotgun. There were three more rounds in the Winchester Model 12’s magazine. The cultist’s gun had looked like a Colt .38 Special. Six rounds to the cylinder, but Cooper had been more liberal with his shooting. He must be almost out.
Something shrieked in the distance, intruding on Joe’s thoughts. The inhuman sound chilled him to the core, an instinctive fear of a predator’s cry. More of the screeches responded from all directions. A whole pack of somethings were headed in this direction, and they didn’t sound friendly. His heart sank. Whatever edge he’d had evaporated in an instant.
“Doesn’t sound like I’ll have to worry about you at all, detective,” Cooper laughed.
“Hell’s bells,” swore Joe.
Agnes had warned him, he recalled. Umôrdhoth would feel the ritual once it began and dispatch its minions to collect what it considered its due. He desperately wished she’d been wrong for once. He sighed. He couldn’t stay pinned down here. The priority now had to be getting back there and protecting the waitress until the ritual was finished.
The time for subtlety was past. He reached for a dynamite stick and froze. They were in his trench coat, back at the grave. His options narrowed rapidly.
“Hell of a thing,” he muttered.
Joe took a deep breath and bolted from cover. Cooper rose and took his shot. Joe heard the hiss of the bullet and staggered. A bleeding line had been drawn on the outside of his thigh. He stumbled into a gravestone and nearly fell.
He came around to see the service revolver pointed dead center at him. Cooper had a murderer’s grin on his face. He pulled the trigger. It clicked down on a spent cylinder. Caught up in celebration of his victory, it took a second for the cultist to realize nothing had happened. His eyebrows went up.
That moment was everything. Joe brought the shotgun to his shoulder, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. It was a series of smooth, practiced movements. The blast caught Cooper in the chest. He pitched backwards in a spray of blood.
Joe wavered. He didn’t feel much triumph, only a weariness. This hadn’t been a slavering monster, just a human. It wasn’t the first life Joe had been forced to take. It probably wouldn’t be the last either. More of those wavering howls sounded, closer now. He set off again, limping, towards the grave-turned-ritual-site.
An auroral glow was building there. It wasn’t bright, but it hurt Joe’s eyes if he looked directly at it. That wasn’t the only sign that strange energies were afoot. There was a vibration to it. He couldn’t hear it, but he could feel it in his bones, like the deep tolling of an unseen bell. As if in response, the ground rumbled beneath his feet.
A mausoleum door burst open to his left. A snarling figure loped out of it, at once human and animalistic. Its limbs were elongated and ended in broad claws, suitable for digging and tearing. Red eyes gleamed in a canine face. Joe didn’t hesitate. He shot the thing before it could close with him. It fell away with a shriek, and he caught a glimpse of the open crypt behind it. There was a mouth of a tunnel within.
Either they were digging their way out, or they had such passages prearranged. There was no telling. For a dizzying moment he imagined Arkham as nothing but a thin rind on a termite’s mound of tunnels, all of it crawling with monsters. All Joe could do was wonder how many of them would be coming, and how long it would take him and his friends to be overrun. He shoved the thoughts aside. None of that changed what he had to do.
He was within sight of the grave. He carefully avoided looking at the growing maelstrom of aetheric energies and instead focused on a blur of activity nearby. Nadia was fighting fiercely with one of the monsters, bludgeoning it with her shovel. Each blow drove it back only briefly. For a heartbeat he cursed his own lack of foresight. He should have left her with a gun.
Another was coming up behind her. Joe blew it away with the last of his shotgun shells. Then he lunged for the one that the student was battling, bringing the butt of the shotgun around to strike it between its twisted shoulders. The blow knocked it to its knees. It came around towards him, snarling. Hot breath blew in his face, stinking of carrion.
Nadia seized the opportunity to smash it directly in the back of the skull with the shovel. It slumped to the ground with a squelch.
“You’re alive!” she said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Joe said. “Know how to use a gun?”
“I’m Greek,” she said simply.
Joe considered that for a heartbeat. “Fair.” He pulled one of his 1911s from a holster and tossed it to her, then drew the other for his own use.
The ground was shaking constantly now. Both staggered against the force of the earthquake. Cracks erupted in the dirt, and pure darkness vented from them like steam. To Joe’s dizzied gaze, the shadows seemed to form great tendrils. They reached for the boiling light in the grave with a mindless hunger, primordial and terrible.
A ring of the beasts was closing in all around them. They approached at a lupine lope, calling back and forth to each other with their uncanny cries. Their eyes glowed crimson in the mist. The shimmering energies of Agnes’ ritual illuminated them all too well, every gaunt rib and slavering fang. The two humans pressed back-to-back against this tide. Joe shot the closest one and it spun away. There were two more to take its place.
He fired again and again. The bullets were well placed, but all they could do was buy seconds. He could hear the thunder of the other gun behind him as Nadia fought too, but he couldn’t spare her more than a thought. A red-eyed horror climbed over a tombstone, and he shot it in the face. The gun clicked empty, and he ejected the magazine to replace it with his last reload.
As suddenly as it had begun, the chanting stopped. The light in the grave died. Without it the graveyard plunged into preternatural darkness. Blind, Joe could only listen. What he heard burned into his brain with a hateful indelibility.
Down there in the grave, something that shouldn’t be alive took a deep, shuddering breath. It was a noisome sound, thick with mucus. It coughed, trying to clear lungs that scarcely existed anymore. Then, impossibly, it screamed. A wail caught between a newborn’s innocence and the howl of the damned. He clapped his hands over his ears to try to shut it out. It wasn’t enough.
A great wind blew, and the earth roared. They fell to their knees. There was a moist slurping. In Joe’s fevered imagination he saw those tentacles of darkness grasping into the grave, seeking the morsel laid out for them. Nadia was screaming, he realized, and clutching at him. He screamed too, and they huddled together in that tenebrous hell, human contact the only comfort available to them.
The world blurred. It took Joe several seconds to realize the sounds had stopped. The darkness was gone. He was shaking uncontrollably, laid out on the ground. Nadia was curled against his side, trembling. He looked around. A few red-eyed shadows were fleeing back to the deep places. Whatever drove them on in their attack had withdrawn.
“Agnes,” he rasped.
Joe staggered to his feet and limped to the grave. The waitress-turned-sorceress was slumped against the side of the hole. At her feet was a pit. It opened down into unfathomable darkness. A glimpse into impossible depths. She slid towards it, inch by inch, as the earth crumbled. Joe tore his eyes from it and grabbed the other investigator by the shoulders. He pulled her from the grave with a last surge of strength.
When he looked back, the grave was
just a grave. The terrible pit was gone, and only splinters remained of the coffin and its occupant. He looked down at the waitress. She was terribly pale, as though the efforts of the ritual had drained something vital from her.
“Agnes,” he whispered, and patted her cheek.
Her eyes blinked open. For a moment they were lost, staring into nothingness. Then she focused on him and took a deep breath.
“Joe.”
Nadia had found her feet. She looked around, clearly dazed. “Did we make it?”
Joe coughed. “Seems that way.”
“Hell of a thing,” the student said.
•••
They dropped her off at the university in the mangled Model T. Agnes and Joe watched as she limped off towards her dorm. She painted a rather horrifying picture of grime and misery. He supposed that all of them did.
“Will you be able to get in?” Agnes called. “You’re past curfew.”
Nadia glanced back with a lopsided smile. “I’ll manage.” She held up the hairpin she had used at City Hall.
The waitress laughed quietly and sat back.
“Did it work?” Joe asked as she continued on.
Agnes nodded slowly. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure it did.”
Joe managed a tired laugh at that. “‘Pretty sure.’ Well, I’ll take what I can get.”
The waitress turned to look at him. “This is twice now, you know. That night with the zealot, and now this. These terrible things, they’re going to keep happening. This isn’t the end, and we aren’t always going to get lucky like this.”
Joe thought that over. Lucky. Worst part was he knew she was right in that description. Nadia was safe, and both of them were still alive. It could have been a lot worse. For a moment he imagined these events continuing on, time after time. Always desperate, always scared. He sighed deeply.
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