Arkham Horror- Ire of the Void

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Arkham Horror- Ire of the Void Page 5

by Richard Lee Byers


  “Even so, you’re pretty good at it.”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Yeah, you do. Do you think you’ve delivered on your half of the bargain by peddling the same bunkum as before?”

  “I think,” Norman said, “that if you run an exclusive interview with the only witness to Professor Schmidt’s disappearance, it won’t matter if there’s actually any new information in it. It will sell papers and keep interest in a sensational story alive a little longer.”

  Doyle laughed. “I’d almost think you’d been in the newspaper game yourself.”

  “No, but over the years, I’ve read enough of the popular press to notice how it goes about its business.” Norman hesitated. “No offense.”

  “None taken, Professor. You’ve got us dead to rights. What information do you need?”

  Norman removed Schmidt’s list from his pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to the editor. “Whatever you can tell me about these places.”

  He had already decided he would be either revisiting the sites he had already seen, exploring ones he had not, or both. He had no other avenue of investigation. But before he did, he meant to learn everything he could about them. Although it seemed unlikely, there might be something that would shed light on how to reach Schmidt. Or at least, keep himself from suffering a similar fate.

  Norman had started with the Advertiser on the supposition that a newspaper might record lurid stories or trivial oddities that more staid and scholarly sources would neglect. But if Doyle and his resources failed him, he would move on to the Arkham Historical Society and the stacks of the university’s own Orne Library.

  Doyle frowned at the paper. “This is Schmidt’s list. The places you went together—including the farm—and the ones you hadn’t gotten to yet.”

  Norman saw no hope of persuasively denying it. “He’d want his work to continue.”

  “This would be the same work you claimed not to understand? I think you’re playing detective, Professor. Trying to find your friend. Does the sheriff have this list?”

  “No.” Sheriff Engle had not asked for it, nor had it occurred to Norman, still in shock from his ordeal, to offer the information.

  “Great! Then it’ll be just you and my photographer poking around like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.”

  For a moment, Norman felt a surge of excitement. It had never occurred to him that he might find a comrade to accompany him in his endeavors. To shore up his courage and share the danger—

  But no. It was impossible. Without experiencing what he had, any such companion would think him demented, and even if it were otherwise, Norman could not ask someone else to face a peril that, for all he knew, was beyond any man’s ability to withstand or even comprehend.

  “I have to do my searching alone,” he said, “but I promise you this. If I find Professor Schmidt, you’ll be the first journalist to hear about it.”

  Doyle snorted. “And while the story you two are telling will probably just be more bunkum, at least it will be the Advertiser’s exclusive bunkum?”

  “Well…yes.”

  “I guess that will have to do.” Doyle stood up. “Old editions are in the cellar, all the way back to when the Advertiser was the Gazette. Hope you don’t mind a little dust.”

  Norman didn’t, particularly, but the darkness and the shelving loaded with boxes reminded him of the dark barn and the stacks of whiskey crates. Dread knifed through him, and he paused on the creaking stairs.

  Sensing his hesitation, Doyle glanced over his shoulder. “You all right?”

  Norman took a breath. “Fine.” He resumed his descent.

  Over the years, someone had made an attempt to index the newspapers, but the results were sketchy at best. Still, this meager organization seemed to suffice for Doyle who, displaying an instinct for searching old documents that most academics would envy, unearthed the proper musty, yellowed newspapers with remarkable efficiency.

  The accounts of the various locations described the disappearances that had captured Schmidt’s interest, but, to Norman’s surprise, they outlined other unfortunate occurrences as well. For example, in a house on Pickman Street, a young man and woman had hanged themselves on their wedding night. Off the highway that led to Newburyport, a superstitious mob had dragged a suspected witch from her cottage and kicked the poor old woman to death. A man living on Boundary Street had suffered from a phobia of bats and had gone to extraordinary lengths to trap and kill the animals, until the night a black cloud of them reportedly descended on him and ripped him to pieces. The stories suggested the sites on the list were unlucky, dangerous places, but Norman knew that already.

  “Yeah,” Doyle said, “I remember—” He sneezed. Apparently floating dust had tickled his nose.

  “Remember what?” Norman asked.

  “This fella. Jonathon Hobart Stane.”

  Norman frowned. “I’ve heard the name…”

  “Well, you’ve lived in Arkham long enough that you would have.” Doyle reached for a pocket handkerchief, remembered he was currently in vest and shirtsleeves, and settled for wiping his nose on his cuff. “But probably not for a while.”

  “Refresh my memory, please.”

  “A young man—well, young back when the paper was reporting on him and you were hearing about him—from one of those rich old families in French Hill that was hell-bent on giving away his inheritance. If you were collecting for a worthy cause, Stane was the soft touch you called on first.”

  Norman recalled seeing Stane’s name on plaques around the university honoring donors for their contributions. He thought he might even have met Stane back in the days when he and Bernadine sometimes attended the college’s social functions. But only a vague impression of a tall, good-looking young man escorting an equally attractive young lady remained.

  “What happened in the Stane house?”

  “In 1859, twin baby boys vanished from their cribs. The mother eventually threw herself out an upper-story window. In ’81, a family member had a breakdown, spent some time locked up in the asylum, and lived out the rest of his days as a hopeless drunk. All in all, over the years, the Stanes picked up a reputation for being peculiar or at least unlucky. Although for a while, it seemed like Jonathon would turn that around. He had everything—money, looks, brains—and he was such a nice young man that nobody begrudged it to him.” Doyle sighed. “Well, almost nobody.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After Congress declared war in ’17, Jonathon was one of the first Arkham men to enlist. He and his fiancée were spending a last night together before he was due to report. Someone broke into the house, killed her with a big knife, like a Bowie, and probably left believing he’d killed Jonathon, too. But Jonathon held on until the surgeons at St. Mary’s could patch him up. Later, he went to a private hospital in upstate New York for more operations. Obviously, he never made it to Europe.”

  “Did the police catch the culprit?”

  “No,” Doyle said. “It was an odd case. No forced entry, nothing stolen, no one with a motive. Just…savagery. The fact that no suspect was ever arrested may have helped to change Jonathon’s temperament, not that it necessarily needed help after everything else he’d suffered.”

  “How did it change?”

  “He came home from New York a recluse and something of a miser. So far as I know, he never gave another penny to charity. Not even to St. Mary’s, where they saved his life.”

  “That’s sad.” Albeit understandable. Norman could imagine himself slipping into a similar misanthropy were he in Jonathon’s place. “What finally became of him?”

  “As far as I know,” Doyle said, “he’s still there, shut away in the mansion on Powder Mill Street. Nobody sees him anymore, though. He long ago fired the staff and has his groceries delivered.”

  “In that case,” Norman said, “I know where to go next.”

  12

  In Arkham, new money lived in Uptown, and a number of wealthy
older families had moved there as well. With its imposing Huguenot, Georgian, and Colonial Revival houses, French Hill still proclaimed that in its day, it had been the city’s fashionable, affluent district. But many buildings were now in disrepair, in some cases manifestly derelict, with roofs half-denuded of shingles and lawns nearly as overgrown as the fields surrounding the barn where Schmidt had disappeared. A fair number of the yards were narrow enough that the old homes seemed to wall in the narrow cobbled streets. Or huddle together, as if conspiring.

  As he climbed out of the Bearcat under a sky mountainous with thunderheads, Norman saw that the Stane family home, a two-story Georgian Colonial with a roof balustrade and three small gables protruding below, was not one of the dilapidated ones. Hermit or not, the occupant must occasionally have someone cut the grass and possibly even slap on a new coat of paint. But every shutter was closed, which gave the astronomer the feeling that such cosmetic measures amounted to a mask intended to disguise a subtler form of decay.

  With a scowl, he pushed trepidation away. He already knew the mansion, like the other sites on Schmidt’s list, was unsafe. There was no use fretting over that. What mattered was that an ally might await him inside. He dropped the butt of his Chesterfield, crushed it under his brown Oxford, marched up to the door, and banged the knocker clasped in a brass lion’s mouth.

  No one answered. Perhaps, given that Jonathon Hobart Stane preferred solitude, Norman should have expected as much. He switched to knocking with his fist, then switched back when his knuckles started feeling tender. A housemaid came out onto the porch of a Victorian house across the street, peered at him, shook her head, and went back inside as though abandoning him to his folly.

  “I didn’t order anything,” came a bass voice on the other side of the door, startling Norman even though it was exactly what he was trying to evoke with his repeated knocking.

  “I’m not a delivery man,” the scientist replied. “My name is Norman Withers. I’m an astronomy professor at Miskatonic, and I need to talk to you, Mr. Stane.”

  “Find another sucker. I don’t give handouts anymore.”

  “So I’ve heard. But it’s not about that, either. I know about corners and the creatures that come out of them.”

  Stane hesitated a tick. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do. I think it was really one of the beasts that attacked you and your fiancée. You just couldn’t say so for fear of being thought insane. I believe it because I survived such an encounter, too. Only I never actually saw one of the brutes. If you did, you have information I need.”

  “I don’t care what you need.”

  “Please. It’s urgent. So much so that I’m prepared to stand out here and knock all day if need be.”

  Stane barked a shrill, truncated little laugh. “You are, are you? Well, why not? The memories fester in a man’s mind. It might do me good to lance the boil. Wait here.”

  Soft footsteps retreated and after a minute or so returned. The door swung open.

  Stane was still a tall man, but above the waist, his body crooked to the left, presumably the result of his injuries. He wore slippers, pajamas, a silk dressing gown, and, over his head, a sack-like hood of dark red cloth. A blue eye gleamed behind the single hole on the right.

  Norman offered his hand. Stane did not shake it.

  “Come in if you’re coming.”

  The interior of the house was every bit as gloomy as the closed shutters might have led one to expect. The air was close and stale, and every surface was dusty. Evidently Stane cared about keeping up appearances outside, but not within.

  It was clear what he truly did care about. Strips of molding filled every space where wall met wall, floor, or ceiling, turning what would otherwise have been right angles into curves.

  Similarly, every entry had a door, and each of those doors was shut, changing open rectangles into filled space. Stane opened one long enough to show his guest into a parlor sparsely furnished with Art Nouveau pieces made all of curves. The walls here, like those in the foyer, were devoid of picture frames.

  “All of it, steps in the right direction,” said Stane. Evidently he had noticed Norman taking in the details. “None of it sufficient. No one can eliminate every right or acute angle in a big old pile like this. Still, if I make it difficult enough for the creatures to find their way through, maybe I delay the inevitable. Sit.”

  Norman lowered himself onto one of the chairs. Insofar as he had ever thought about furniture at all, he liked the sturdy simple forms of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, but the somewhat flimsy-looking seat proved comfortable enough.

  “It seems you’ve been rather hard at work trying to avoid another encounter with the beasts. What can you tell me about them?”

  “You first,” the hooded man replied.

  Given that he was the one seeking assistance, Norman supposed that was fair. He told the story of Schmidt’s disappearance and of his intent to rescue him.

  At the end, Stane laughed. “You can’t possibly believe the German’s still alive.”

  “Can you be certain he isn’t?”

  Stane hesitated. “Well, not absolutely certain, I suppose. But the creatures are devils. The enemies of humanity in every sense.”

  “You say that because you’ve actually seen one?”

  Stane laughed another sharp, short laugh. “Well, I have, and the slightest glimpse would be enough to convince a person of their maleficence, wouldn’t it? To say nothing of watching the sweet, wonderful woman you love ripped apart by one of them and then feeling its claws tear into you. But I have more than firsthand experience to draw on. I’ve made a study of them.”

  “How?” Norman asked. “They aren’t merely a species unknown to science. They normally exist in a place or a condition science can’t even observe.”

  “You only think that because you don’t realize the ancients knew truths modern scientists have yet to rediscover. Einstein, and his disciples like your friend Schmidt, are just starting to walk the paths others trod before them.” Stane yipped his hyena laugh. “And now you know where those paths lead.”

  Norman sighed. “It sounds like you’re talking about mysticism.”

  “And you sound like you’ve just decided I can’t possibly have anything worthwhile to tell you. Open your mind, Professor. Rutherford proved the things we perceive as solid are mere ghosts, empty space with a haze of tiny particles suspended in the void. Hubble demonstrated the universe is vast beyond comprehension, with the Milky Way only one of countless galaxies. Einstein taught us time and space are one, and malleable to boot. In each case, the ancients—well, a few of the ancients—were there before them. More to the point, they recorded their observations of the particular phenomena that now concern you.”

  It was the final comment that gave Norman pause. Although he remained skeptical that Stane’s “ancients” truly had anything to teach the twentieth century about theoretical physics or astronomy, it was not beyond the realm of possibility that some philosopher had observed something about the creatures or the opening and closing of breaches that might prove of practical use. In any case, if he needed to listen to a load of mumbo jumbo to hear what Stane himself had experienced, so be it.

  “Please excuse me,” Norman said. “I’m eager to learn whatever you can tell me. If my manner seemed to indicate otherwise, it’s because this is all very new and strange.”

  Stane laughed. “You have no idea how strange. The creatures that took your friend are Hounds of Tindalos.”

  “Hounds?”

  “Sometimes they hunt in packs like hounds. They howl like hounds. But of course they aren’t really. We don’t have a word for what they are. We probably aren’t even capable of seeing them as they truly are. So ‘Hounds’ is as good a name as any.”

  “And ‘Tindalos’?”

  “That might be the name—” Stane turned his head from side to side. He seemed to be listening. Stiff with alar
m, Norman did the same but heard nothing.

  The hooded man relaxed. “Sorry. I jump at shadows sometimes. As I was saying, Tindalos might be the name of the place they come from. Or the god they serve. Or maybe the place and the god are somehow one and the same.”

  Norman grunted. “Your ancients don’t appear to have been certain of much.”

  “Naturally not. How easy do you think it was to study something that spends most of its time removed from the world as we experience it and kills whomever’s around when it does come through? Still, they discovered a few facts and built some interesting hypotheses around them. They conjectured that the Hounds’ home is so far in the past that time itself takes on a different aspect. In our age, it’s curved, just as Einstein proclaims. In theirs, it’s angular.”

  Norman frowned. “I’m not sure what that would mean.”

  “Nor am I. Nor, quite possibly, were they. But let’s suppose they were right. Your hero Einstein tells us time and space are ultimately the same thing. Then maybe right and acute angles provide trails and doorways for the Hounds to reach us here in our reality.”

  Norman mulled that over. “If everything you’re suggesting is true, and if Schmidt’s ideas are also true, a disproportionate number of those trails lead to Arkham. Do you have any idea why that would be?”

  “I can only guess. Perhaps once a Hound opens a ‘breach,’ as you call them, its pack mates can sense the path and the doorway. That makes it somewhat more likely that a second creature will eventually push through somewhere nearby. And if your luck is running bad enough that you get to the point where there’s a whole spider web of entry points…” Stane shrugged his crooked shoulders.

  Norman realized that, despite himself, he was starting to take these notions seriously. Perhaps, when one encountered a phenomenon utterly beyond the realm of normal human experience, one grasped at any explanation, no matter how dubious the source.

  “But why do they come here?” he asked. “Can’t they catch prey in their own time?”

  “Perhaps not the right sort of prey.” Once again, Stane stopped abruptly, then sniffed with sufficient force to indent the fabric of his hood. Norman took a wary sniff of his own without detecting any trace of the putrid vapor from the barn.

 

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