Arkham Horror- Ire of the Void

by Richard Lee Byers

  “One source claims,” Stane continued, “that we humans have something special inside us that the Hounds either hunger for or lust to destroy, and so they kill us to get at it.”

  “And Schmidt attracted their attention by repeatedly poking around at the discontinuity points.”

  “Possibly. It seems like it.”

  Norman pondered his next question. So much remained unknown, so much that he needed to understand, that it was difficult to pursue an organized line of inquiry.

  “When the bootlegger fired his pistol,” he said, “it seemed to stop the Hound that was stalking him, at least momentarily. I hope that means they can be hurt.”

  Stane laughed. “I haven’t discouraged you yet? Heaven knows, I’m trying. I think they can be startled. Disconcerted by fleeting twinges of pain. I doubt they can truly be crippled or killed.”

  “What’s your basis for thinking that?”

  “The pistol didn’t save the bootlegger, did it? And on the night I was attacked, I’d hauled out my father’s old revolver and cavalry saber from his Rough Rider days. I suppose I thought looking at them would put me in a military state of mind for the AEF.” Stane laughed.

  “When the Hound lunged out of the shadows and pounced on Barbara,” the crooked man continued, “I grabbed the sword. By the time I turned back around, the creature was springing at me. It bore me down and savaged me, and I stabbed it as best I could. Eventually it broke off and disappeared.”

  “Isn’t that reason to think you did hurt it?”

  “I don’t think so. It retreated too quickly. Too nimbly. It seems more likely that it had fed well enough to satisfy it and had grown tired of the repeated pinpricks.”

  “Well, making the creatures slow down and with luck even turn away is better than nothing, I suppose. Now tell me this. How do they open and close the holes, and is there a way for a human being to do the same?”

  “They don’t need to ‘open and close’ anything. For them, corners are always passages into our time and place. They simply have to find their way to them.”

  Norman waited for more. When Stane failed to offer anything further, he said, “You didn’t answer the second half of my question.”

  “You can’t still be thinking of trying to rescue Professor Schmidt. The man is dead!”

  “You conceded we don’t know that.”

  “Even if he were alive, you couldn’t do anything for him. You’d only throw away your own life and risk stirring up the Hounds. Imagine the slaughter if they started hunting in Arkham every day instead of once every several years.”

  That was a ghastly thought, but Norman hoped it was also pure speculation. “The fact that you’re working so hard to dissuade me makes me think there must be a way for people to go through.”

  “Well, there isn’t. So go home and forget all this.”

  “If I can’t open a discontinuity myself, the other option is to station myself at a breach point and wait for a Hound to notice me. Perhaps if I’m prepared…” Norman realized Stane was no longer paying attention.

  Rather, the hooded man was jumping up from his seat and casting about more wildly than before. “They’re here!” he screamed. “They’re here!”

  Norman looked around just as frantically. He saw, heard, smelled, and felt nothing that would lead him to believe the Hounds were coming.

  Taking a ragged breath, his heartbeat slowing, he decided that even if some of Stane’s information was accurate, the poor man’s ordeal had left him with a nervous disorder from which he had never recovered. Perhaps a well-wisher could calm him down, at least temporarily. He turned to try, then froze when he saw the little revolver in the hooded man’s hand. It was pointed at his torso.

  Stane must have taken advantage of Norman’s distraction to whisk the weapon from the pocket of his dressing gown or from under a cushion. Now he laughed and laughed at what was no doubt the stupefaction on the older man’s face.

  13

  “There’s no reason for this,” Norman said, his voice tremulous. “I’m not your enemy.”

  “Maybe not on purpose,” Stane replied, “but it’s clear you aren’t going to leave this matter alone, and I really don’t want a fool stirring things up. Who knows where it would lead?” He shifted the barrel of the revolver to indicate the door that opened on the foyer, then shifted it back. “Out, then right, then down the hall to the left.”

  As he approached the door, Norman wondered if he could lunge through, slam it behind him, and dash outside the house, all so quickly the hooded man wouldn’t be able to shoot him in the back. To say the least, it seemed improbable, and the moment passed without him finding the boldness to make the attempt.

  Instead, he said, “People know I’m here. My car is parked right outside.”

  “That complicates things,” Stane replied, “but it’s not all that difficult. I can call a man who’ll drive your car away, no questions asked. And the police aren’t likely to pry into the affairs of a wealthy invalid all that aggressively. Should worst come to worst, I have a firm of excellent attorneys on retainer.”

  “Look,” Norman said, “I see now that I was on the verge of making a terrible mistake. If there’s nothing a human being can do against the Hounds, then of course I should leave them alone. Just let me go, and I swear I won’t say anything about this…” He groped for an inoffensive word, a word that wouldn’t incite a lunatic to instant violence. “Misunderstanding.”

  Stane laughed. “Nice try, Professor. Truly. But I’m afraid there’s another side to it, too.”

  “What other side?”

  “I’ll tell you once you’re through that door straight ahead.”

  The door in question looked like it belonged in a prison or asylum for the criminally insane, not in a mansion like this. An oversize steel deadbolt latch held it shut, and a round, barred window not much bigger than a fist provided a glimpse of the darkness waiting on the other side.

  Norman opened the door. He didn’t realize Stane had stepped up close behind him until the hooded man shoved him through. Norman stumbled, nearly fell, and the door slammed behind him. The latch clanged as Stane twisted it down to secure it to the strike plate.

  A moment later, the light in the ceiling came on, revealing an unfurnished room with a bricked-up window. Unlike every other portion of the house Norman had seen, this room had right-angle corners unaltered by molding. Painted in dark blue and ocher pigment, geometrical designs adorned the walls with some sort of glyphs written around them.

  Norman pivoted back toward the door. Stane was peering through the peephole with his good—or was it his only?—eye. Norman felt a sudden furious and quite uncharacteristic impulse to try to gouge the eye through the bars.

  But even in the unlikely event that he could accomplish such a feat, it wouldn’t help him. He took a ragged breath and said, “All right. Now tell me.”

  Stane laughed. “Back in the parlor, I didn’t get around to explaining everything I’ve gleaned about the Hounds. It hasn’t been easy, but the hints are there in the Livre d’Eibon, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and even comparatively modern sources like Prinn and d’Erlette if a person knows how to interpret them. One thing I picked up and rather to my dismay—” The crooked man interrupted himself with another shrill titter of mirth. “On those rare occasions when a man escapes the Hounds, he doesn’t always stay escaped. Sooner or later, they’re apt to come after him.”

  On another occasion, that revelation would have chilled Norman, but now he had more immediate problems. “Don’t you see? That’s all the more reason for you to work with me to find ways to thwart them.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But I already have a strategy. Appease them. Feed a dog, and it’s less likely to take a bite out of you. Or in my case, another bite.” Stane giggled.

  “You’re sacrificing people.”

  “If you care to think of it that way. It’s easier than you’d imagine. Some theatrical makeup combined with the bad l
ight outdoors at night and I don’t look too horribly ugly. And the people I approach on one pretext or another—hobos, drunks, whores, Ethels—aren’t picky. I collect them out of town, and a nip from a drugged flask keeps them docile until I get them home.”

  “It’s monstrous! How can you live with yourself?”

  “Ever since that night, I’ve seen life differently. I remember loving Barbara, but I’ve never cared that the creature tore her apart. Better her than me. I don’t care when a Hound kills one of my offerings, either. To tell the truth, I like to watch.”

  “So you intend to hold me prisoner until a Hound shows up?”

  “Ah, that would be grounds for hope, now wouldn’t it? Under normal circumstances, it could be weeks, months, or even years before a Hound manifests in this particular space. Plenty of time for someone to come looking for you. But I’m not leaving the entity’s arrival to chance. ‘Mysticism’ affords me the means of lighting a beacon to draw it here. It’s actually rather easy for someone in my psychically aberrant condition.”

  With that, Stane took a step back from the door and began to recite. The sounds had sufficient differentiation and cadence to suggest actual words and sentences, but they weren’t in any language Norman had ever encountered. The shrill, staccato yips and snarls were more reminiscent of a hyena than the madman’s laughter.

  Lightheaded and short of breath, Norman told himself that, despite all the uncanny events he’d experienced hitherto, arrant witchcraft was a step too far. Clearly, Stane was delusional, and nothing would happen in response to an incantation.

  Then a pulse of blue and ocher light illuminated the door and the wall around it. Norman turned. The painted designs and symbols were glowing, brightening and fading in a rhythm like a heartbeat. They looked three-dimensional as well, but inconsistently so. One moment, they stood out from the walls, the next, they seemed farther away, like lamps shining through mist.

  Stane brayed laughter at his prisoner’s consternation. Norman’s light-headedness whirled into outright vertigo, and his stomach churned with nausea.

  He scrambled to one of the geometric figures, a tangle of octagons pierced by isosceles triangles. It flattened back into two dimensions when he came within reach of it, and he clawed it with his fingernails. Chips of paint flaked away from the plaster beneath.

  “Good thought!” called Stane. “But you can’t possibly do enough damage in the time you have left.”

  The assurance in the hooded man’s voice made Norman believe him. But what else was there to do except attempt to deface the paintings? He cast about for an alternative and found nothing. The cell was empty, the window sealed, the sturdy door secured from the other side—

  Or was it? The door hung on three barrel hinges. When it was closed as it was currently, the screws that held the hinges to the frame and door were inaccessible, but the pivots and cylinders were on his side of the barrier.

  He emptied his pockets. They proved to contain his wallet and paper money, his keys, a Mercury dime, two buffalo nickels, a pencil stub, a crumpled pack of Chesterfields, and a matchbook with two matches left. Why wasn’t he carrying his Barlow knife?

  Too late to worry about it now. He’d have to work with the makeshift tools at his disposal. He scurried to the door and inspected the hinges.

  The pivots had screw caps on top to anchor them in the cylinders. Experimenting, he found that the dime just barely fit the notch in the uppermost. He gripped the coin between thumb and forefinger and attempted to twist the cap counterclockwise. It resisted.

  As he strained, a familiar sense of malevolent scrutiny stabbed through him, and he gasped. Evidently sensing it, too, Stane giggled.

  But the Hound didn’t burst from whatever corner it occupied. Not yet. Perhaps, for all its ferocity, it possessed a measure of caution as well.

  “What are you doing?” asked Stane. The small window didn’t afford a view of a person at the edge of the door.

  Norman didn’t answer. He was too busy struggling with the screw. Finally, grudgingly, it yielded a hair, balked once more, and then rotated all the way out.

  With it removed, he slid the pin out the bottom of the cylinder. He stuck it in his hip pocket and went to work on the middle one.

  Unfortunately, the second cap was screwed down even tighter, and the groove seemed narrower and shallower, or perhaps fear was making Norman’s fingers clumsier. In any case, the dime skipped repeatedly out of the notch while the fastener refused to yield.

  The sense of being watched intensified. Surely the Hound would soon emerge into the sacrificial chamber.

  That meant Norman had no hope of removing all three pivots in time if, in fact, it was possible at all. Terrified, frustrated, he slammed the heel of his hand against the door. With the top pin extracted, it shook a little in its frame.

  “What are you doing?” Stane repeated, only now in a different tone. Gloating cruelty had given way to alarm.

  Norman realized that while he knew he wasn’t going to get all three hinges disassembled, his captor didn’t. Was it conceivable that he could “double shuffle” Stane into doing something foolish?

  Not if he sounded desperate. Swallowing, he resolved to imitate the cool, superior confidence with which Sherlock Holmes, A. J. Raffles, and Boston Blackie spoke to their adversaries. He’d read their exploits in his younger days, before he decided he had no time for such diversions anymore.

  “I’m taking down the door,” he said. “I’ll have it open in a few moments.” He gave it another thump.

  “That’s impossible,” Stane replied.

  “Did you hang it yourself? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you did such a flimsy job of it. Rich boys don’t have much experience with manual labor, do they?”

  “You’re wasting your time. The deadbolt will hold up the door.”

  “All by itself? Don’t be ridiculous. And with the way open, I wonder whom the Hound will attack: A stranger? Or the man it mauled years ago and has been sniffing around for ever since? You told me they like to finish what they start.” Norman pulled the pivot from his pocket and dropped it to clink on the floor. “That’s two pins out.”

  Metal scraped as the barrel of Stane’s revolver slid through the bars at an angle. Norman cringed, but when the gun flashed and banged, the shots missed. The window was too small and the bars too close together for the firearm to swivel far enough to the side to hit a target in his current position.

  “Nice try,” Norman said, dropping to one knee. Stane couldn’t see him, but he might be able to tell from what height his voice was coming. “I’m going after the last pin. Here it comes.” He gave the door another thump.

  A putrid-smelling gray vapor, so thin it was difficult to see in the inadequate light of the ceiling fixture, washed over him. The Hound was surely coming any second now.

  Stane seemingly caught the stench as well, and it spurred him to further action. “Damn you!” he screamed. The deadbolt latch clanked as he disengaged it to enter the cell and eliminate the supposed threat to the integrity of the door.

  Norman stood up. When the door swung open, he waited an instant, then shoved it as hard as he could.

  The door caught Stane halfway in, halfway out, and slammed him into the frame. Norman pulled the heavy door back and pounded it into the hooded man again. Then, praying he’d stunned his captor, he scrambled around the door. At his back, the Hound howled.

  Stane wasn’t stunned, at least not sufficiently so to keep him from aiming the revolver at Norman. A shock ran through the floor as the Hound made a first bound forward.

  Norman flailed and, more by luck than any pugilistic skill, swatted the firearm out of line. He grabbed hold of Stane’s robe and swung him out of the doorway and into the cell.

  In the process, he caught a glimpse of a rearing serpentine shape with crocodilian jaws and a long tongue lashing beyond. But Stane’s reeling, floundering body partially blocked the view, and for that he was grateful. He suspected that, had
he seen it any more clearly, he might have frozen despite the urgency of the moment.

  He fled through the space he’d cleared, yanked the door shut behind him, and secured the deadbolt latch. An instant later, an impact jolted the barrier so violently that, even though he’d really only removed one pin, he feared it actually would fall down. Trembling, he backed away.

  More thuds followed. So did a snapping sound that was presumably gnashing jaws. So did Stane’s screams.

  The crooked man’s face abruptly appeared behind the window. The hood was gone, revealing a left profile ridged and grooved with scar tissue and an empty eye socket in the midst of the ruined flesh. “Help me!” he wailed.

  Despite what he now knew about Stane’s murders, despite what the man had tried to do to him personally, at that moment, Norman wanted to help. But it was impossible. Even if he could muster the courage to reopen the door, doing so would only be throwing his own life away.

  Neither hand nor paw but something in between, smeared with a bluish grease or slime and terminating in a bristling bundle of hooked claws, reached over Stane’s head. It snagged the talons under its victim’s mouth and pulled upward, tearing his face away and obliterating his remaining eye as it ripped its way along. Then the beast yanked Stane down and out of sight.

  The thudding and screaming lasted a few more seconds. Then came a sucking or slurping sound. Then silence, at which point the vile-smelling vapor drifting through the round little window began to dissipate.

  Ready to turn tail at the slightest new sound, the merest hint of renewed activity on the other side of the door, Norman crept forward. His judgment told him the danger was probably past. His raw nerves, however, screamed that the Hound was still there, that it was just waiting for him to come closer. Then it would find a way to seize him, the barrier notwithstanding.

  He peered through the bars and could see nothing but walls, floor, ceiling, the sealed window, and the designs and sigils. The glow that had shined from the latter had all but faded away.