Arkham Horror- Ire of the Void

by Richard Lee Byers

  Sheriff Engle heaved a sigh. “Deputy, if you found anything funny, lay it out for us.”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied. He reached into the pocket of his brown uniform trousers, brought out a folded handkerchief, unwrapped the contents, and set the object on the table between the two men. It was a fingernail with a trace of dried blood encrusting the bottom.

  “You found it on the floor,” Norman said, “in the southwest corner of the barn.”

  The deputy frowned. “Yeah.”

  Norman turned back to the sheriff. “This proves what I told you! It’s Schmidt’s fingernail! It tore loose when he was clutching at the floor and the beast was dragging him backward!”

  “Come on, Professor. You’re supposed to be a scientist. You know damn well it isn’t proof of anything.”

  “It…” Norman faltered. It was maddening that the sheriff still doubted, but he made a valid point. By itself, the fingernail wasn’t enough to demonstrate the truth of the story. “Look. You know Professor Schmidt was with me in the barn. You know he’s gone now. What’s your explanation?”

  “You already heard it.”

  “He wandered off in an alcohol-induced delirium.”

  “If you don’t like that story, I can think of others.”

  Norman felt a pang of trepidation. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “If you two just got pie-eyed, that’s not so bad. Plenty of people drink, the Volstead Act be damned. But you don’t look lathered now, and you’re still telling the same story, so maybe that was never really the problem. Maybe you’re crackers.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? I made a couple calls, woke up a couple people from the university. Apparently you have a reputation for being strange. Maybe you’re strange enough that I should check you into the asylum for observation.”

  “There are no grounds! You wouldn’t dare!”

  “I might. I might also dare to consider you a suspect if your German friend doesn’t turn up. From what I understand, you were pretty damn eager to drive him around. And you were the last person to see him before he disappeared. A young fella already at the top of his profession when you’re getting on in years and something of a joke…” Sheriff Engle shrugged. “Who could blame you for being jealous?”

  “So I murdered him and then came straight to you with a wild story you were all too likely to disbelieve?”

  “If you’re insane, maybe you didn’t realize just how unbelievable it was. You thought you were giving yourself an alibi.”

  Norman looked the sheriff in the eye. “Whatever else you believe or don’t believe, you don’t really think I killed Professor Schmidt or need to be institutionalized. Why are you trying to intimidate me into retracting my story?”

  “Maybe I’m trying to protect you from what everyone else is likely to think.”

  “I’m not asking you to do that.”

  The sheriff settled back in his chair. “Okay, then let me tell you about a sheriff’s job. Mostly, it’s what you expect. If there’s a thief stealing people’s chickens, I catch him. If a landlord evicts a tenant who then refuses to leave, I boot him out. Straightforward problems with straightforward answers.”

  Norman scowled. “How is this relevant?”

  “Bear with me. I’m getting there. Once in a while, though, something comes up that’s bad or scary and doesn’t have an easy answer. In those situations, maybe the best a sheriff can do is keep a lid on what’s really happening. That way, people don’t panic.”

  “Are you saying you do believe me?”

  Sheriff Engle shook his head. “Don’t flatter yourself. But I know funny things happen once in a while, and I’ve been doing this job long enough to wonder if they don’t happen more often around here than in some other places. Anyway, what it all comes down to is this: My men and I will look for Professor Schmidt the same way we’d look for any missing person, but we’re not going to act like men from Mars kidnapped him or whatever it is you think happened. Because even if that was true, what the hell could we do about it?”

  Norman’s emotions—the urgency, the anger—crumpled into a kind of exhausted resignation. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  “First, forget you ever said this bullshit.” The sheriff picked up the pages of the statement and tore them in two. “Then give me something that will enable me to declare Schmidt missing and start a search without making it look like we’re both out of our minds. You were helping him do research. You don’t know what the point was because he’s a physicist and you’re an astronomer. He wanted to go to the farm, so you took him. The whiskey was there, but you didn’t see a bootlegger or anybody like that. You wandered off from Schmidt to take a look around the barn. When you came back he was gone. And that’s all you know.”

  “Got it,” Norman said.

  10

  As soon as he entered the classroom, Norman decided he had made a mistake.

  Given his ordeal, and the hours with the Sheriff’s Department that followed, lack of sleep alone would have provided him with a more than adequate excuse for taking the day off. But he knew he would not be able to rest, and the presence of others and the resumption of routine seemed as if they might protect him from the shuddering fits that could otherwise afflict him.

  The problem, though, was that every seat was filled, with more students standing along the back wall. In many cases, they were young men and women whose faces Norman had never seen before. Plainly, the majority of those present had come to gawk at the Science Department’s resident eccentric, now more than ever an object of curiosity by dint of his involvement in a celebrated colleague’s disappearance.

  Well, damn them all. This was an astronomy class, not a circus sideshow. To spite them, he launched into his discourse on Neptune, and Lowell’s unsuccessful search for planets beyond, more forcefully than he had delivered any lecture in years.

  Unfortunately, neither his energy nor the intrinsic interest of his subject matter sufficed to divert his audience’s curiosity into the appropriate channels. When he turned his back to write on the blackboard, they whispered back and forth. The chatter was too soft for him to make out, but he did catch “nuts,” “crazy,” “did something,” and “involved somehow.”

  No doubt it would have been far worse had Sheriff Engle permitted his original statement to stand. As it was, the speculation and suspicion might fade in time. Still, teeth gritted, Norman bore down until the chalk snapped in two.

  He stretched out the lecture without acknowledging any of the waving hands that sought to interrupt him. Someone might want to ask a question that actually pertained to astronomy, but he was unwilling to chance it. The instant the bell rang, he slammed the textbook shut, snatched it off the lectern, and rushed for the door.

  Sadly, his haste merely served to fling him into the clutches of a smiling, apple-cheeked man in a polka-dot bow tie and homburg. Absurdly, a press pass stuck up from the hatband as though Arkham were a major city like Boston or New York.

  “Professor Withers,” the journalist said, “a moment of your time?”

  “Sorry,” Norman said, circling around the man, “I’m in a hurry.”

  The newspaperman scrambled to catch up and fell into step beside him. “Come on, Professor, be a sport. I’m Doyle Jeffries. I edit the Advertiser, and I came down here personally just to hear what you’ve got to say.”

  “Nothing. It’s all in the information the sheriff already released.”

  “You sure? It seemed to me there were lots of holes in that story.”

  “It’s everything I know. Please excuse me.” Norman quickened his pace, and this time Doyle allowed him to escape.

  He stamped onward into the Science Department offices, ignoring the stares and awkward greetings of secretaries and the other faculty. He entered his own cramped little sanctuary, with its overflowing bookshelves, stacks of journals, star charts and examples of astrophotography, and slammed the door. Copious torn-paper bookmarks and
Moore Push-Pins indicated the locations of data he had, at one time or another, believed might shed light on the puzzle that had consumed the past decade of his life.

  Two new items reposed front and center on his crowded desk. One was a note informing him the Dean wanted to see him. Yesterday, Norman, cranky recluse that he knew himself to be, would have responded expeditiously. But currently, it simply was not in him.

  The second item was the new issue of The Astronomical Journal. He opened it and, as was his habit, set out to read it cover to cover.

  He had spent countless hours engaged in such study, yet now, for the first time since adjusting to the finalization of his divorce, he had difficulty concentrating. He perused paragraphs or whole pages only to realize he had retained none of the information. The image of Schmidt wailing, scrabbling in vain for handholds, and vanishing kept appearing before his inner eye.

  But that was not the only thing distracting him. The office itself was not alarming, and his instincts did not warn of some invisible predator poised to spring. But the space seemed dusty and dingy. Oppressive to the point of claustrophobia. The odd thought came to him that if he heard of a convict sentenced to years of solitary confinement in a cell like this, he would feel sorry for the man.

  Still, it was more tolerable than being stared at. He stayed where he was until he heard the sounds of the rest of the department going home for the day, and for some time thereafter. When his pocket watch informed him night had fallen, he emerged from his hiding place and skulked from the Science building onto the quad. A few people were wandering around in the dark, but no one noticed him as he headed for the Administration building, at the top of which was his telescope.

  He entered to find the place empty of administrative staff, custodians, and anyone else for that matter, which was just as well.

  Norman threw himself into the process of operating the telescope. Here, behind the lens, was where he truly belonged. This was what his life was all about, not the nightmare Schmidt had led him into. If he immersed himself in it anew, surely he could purge himself of the emotions tearing at his insides.

  His preparations complete, he pressed his eye to the eyepiece. The portion of the sky that was his abiding preoccupation appeared, looking as it had always looked through years of repeated viewings. The six vanished stars had not returned. There was nothing to provide a clue as to what had become of them. God had not parted the black, spangled curtain of the firmament to expound on the question.

  Norman felt a sudden urge to pound on the telescope with his fists. He did not succumb to it, but he stepped away from the instrument for fear that he would. He was breathing heavily, and his chest and arms felt tight.

  Over the years, he had often been keenly aware others viewed him as a laughable or pathetic figure. He had told himself that when he finally made his great discovery, they would amend their opinions. Now it came to him that, doing the same things day after day and night, it was all but certain he never would solve the mystery. It also struck him that even if, by some extraordinary stroke of fortune, he did, his life would still look pitiful and in large measure misspent. Somehow, that thought was the worst of all.

  He assured himself it was merely fear provoking such dismal notions. Once he calmed down, his chosen path would seem as worthwhile as it always had.

  But truly, anxiety was not the problem. He was still afraid. For an aging academic who had never before faced any sort of danger, it could scarcely be otherwise. Yet, the occasional stab of dread notwithstanding, now that he had put miles and hours between himself and the barn, he actually felt more safe than not.

  No, when he took inventory of his tangled emotions, it came to him that his current wretchedness stemmed less from residual fear than from shame. He felt guilty that he had acquiesced to Sheriff Engle’s decision to suppress the truth, and guiltier still about what had happened to Schmidt.

  Idiocy! If there was anything he should have learned from the way his life had unfolded, it was the folly of espousing a truth no one would believe. He clearly wasn’t to blame for the physicist’s fate. He’d tried to rescue Schmidt but had simply been no match for the thing that took him.

  True. But he was not trying anymore, was he?

  More idiocy! Schmidt was surely dead.

  Well, no, not surely. Norman lacked evidence to confirm any such conclusion. He did not know why the German had been taken. If the breaches were a manifestation of twisted space-time, he could not even know how much subjective time had passed for Schmidt since his captor yanked him through. Perhaps it had only been an instant.

  Which, although an interesting speculation, shed no light whatsoever on how to go about retrieving him. Norman hauled the long-legged chair out from under the telescope, lit a Chesterfield, and climbed up into the seat to ponder what he knew.

  He quickly decided that was almost nothing. Schmidt had come looking for holes in ordinary reality and, tragically, found them. But nothing in the physicist’s rudimentary hypothesis explained why the breaches seemed to occur only in the corners of man-made structures, why they opened and closed like doors at the behest of creatures lurking on the other side, or what those entities were. A man would have to understand such things to have any hope of rescuing someone who had been taken, and Norman had no idea where to look for the requisite information.

  Or did he? He still had the list of locations Schmidt had given him at the start of their time together. The majority remained to be explored, although the prospect of doing so made a chill slide up his spine.

  Intuition told him he had somehow escaped the things. Was he really contemplating offering them another crack at him? What had befallen Schmidt was horrible, but it was not his responsibility to fix it. He had his own life to think about.

  Except that he had already examined that life and found it wanting, certainly when compared to that of a brilliant, exuberant young man with many years of “glorious adventure” still before him. If unclouded by fear or selfishness, any rational mind would put a bitter old failure like Norman at hazard if there was the slightest chance of winning the German back thereby. Indeed, he had a sense that turning away would be tantamount to throwing away the final chance for his own life to mean something.

  Dear Lord, he thought, astonished by his own audacity, I’m going to do it. He opened his notebook and wrote a note explaining he was taking a leave of absence. For the moment, the dean could be content with that.

  Part Two

  The House of Powder Mill Street

  11

  Somewhat to Norman’s dismay, it proved impossible to find a parking spot right in front of the offices of the Arkham Advertiser. He had to pull up to the curb outside a gray box of a shoe factory a block away. Norman climbed out of the Bearcat feeling somewhat like a man condemned to run the gantlet.

  But to his relief, in contrast to the unwelcome attention he had attracted at the university, no one on the street looked twice at him. With its factories, warehouses, and tenements with clotheslines hanging above the alleys that sliced between them, Northside was too busy with commerce to take note of a stray academic. Even one linked to a mysterious disappearance. Besides, Schmidt likely did not seem like such a celebrity hereabouts as he did to his fellow scholars.

  Still, the receptionist at the newspaper recognized Norman, or at least his name, and made haste to summon Doyle Jeffries. Clad in a green eyeshade, vest, and shirtsleeves with garters holding them up, the editor ushered his caller back through a crowded space where machinery rumbled and vibrations shivered through the floor.

  “The presses,” Doyle said, raising his voice to make certain of being understood. “We print next door.”

  Norman had noticed the factory building attached to this one. “Is it time for a new edition already?”

  “The advertising inserts you print ahead of time.” Doyle waved his hand. “Here we are.”

  The editor’s office proved to be a modest space partitioned to afford a measure of status
and privacy. As he squeezed around behind the desk, Doyle said, “So, you decided to give me an interview after all?”

  “Actually,” Norman said, sitting down opposite the journalist, “I came to ask for help.”

  Doyle raised an eyebrow. “We reported the facts to the best of our ability. The way Sheriff Engle gave them to us and you supposedly gave them to him. If people think they don’t add up, if they’re looking at you funny, that’s not the paper’s fault.”

  Norman sighed. “I don’t want you to run an editorial asserting my innocence or anything like that. This is something else. I need information. Facts about the history of Arkham.”

  As Doyle started to answer, someone screamed. Norman jerked in his chair and then realized the noise wasn’t Schmidt—or any human being any human being at all. It was a train whistle sounding from the station to the south.

  There was no chance Doyle had failed to notice his jumpiness, but the newspaperman did not see fit to remark on it. Instead, he said, “Well, in that case, let’s make it tit for tat. You give me my interview, and afterward we can rummage through the morgue together.”

  Norman frowned in momentary perplexity, then realized the morgue in question was the newspaper’s archives.

  He did not want to be interviewed and repeat the falsehoods he and the sheriff had agreed upon, but he had come to Doyle recognizing that it might be necessary to secure the editor’s cooperation. So he repeated the gist of his statement and answered questions as required.

  They were shrewd, skeptical questions. Despite Doyle’s genial manner, the inquisition made Norman feel as if his story were a balloon and each query a needle likely to pop it. He struggled against the impulse to try to make it more plausible via embellishment and over-explanation. He suspected such tactics might well result in non-sequiturs and inconsistencies.

  Finally Doyle gave him a grin. “You hate lying, and you haven’t had a lot of practice.”

  Norman tried to wrap himself in stiff scholarly dignity. “Naturally not.”