“Look, Gabriel,” began Rex. “I don’t want to sound harsh, but don’t you think if that many girls went missing we might have heard about it? I know the cops around here don’t have the reputation of the Pinkertons, but they do a pretty good job of keeping the peace.”
“Do they?” snapped Stone. “I’ve been here four days and I probably know more about the bootlegging operations going on here than they do. Girls have been going missing here for the last three years, but no one’s done anything about it. Sure, not all of them have been turning up the way my Lydia did, but they’re going missing all the same.”
“So how come we haven’t heard of them?” asked Minnie.
“Missing ain’t the same as dead, sugar,” said Stone. “Since I left New York, I been reading up on this place. You wouldn’t believe half the shit that happens here, but no one seems to care or notice. I got friends in the department, and they got me a record of the missing persons from Arkham, and it’s a big list. Sure, some of them are drunks who fell in the river, or schmucks who figured they’d try and outrun their debts or take off with a floozy, but too many of them were girls at Miskatonic.”
“Were they investigated?” asked Rex.
“Don’t look like it,” said Stone. “Most of their parents got letters saying they were heading to Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles to make it in showbiz or to get married to some new fella they didn’t think their folks would like. Cops don’t investigate runaways.”
“Holy Mary Mother of God,” said Rex, crossing himself at the notion that so many girls had met grisly fates in Arkham. Rex was what he liked to call a “lapsed Catholic,” one who fell back on its tired rituals in times of stress and muscle memory.
“Okay,” said Minnie. “We can look into the dance clubs and jazz holes. What are you gonna do?”
“First up, I need you to get me a look at the records of the Advertiser,” said Stone. “You got a newspaper morgue in the basement, don’t you?”
“Sure,” said Rex. “But Harvey won’t let you get down there. He keeps that place locked up tighter than Lillian Gish’s corset. I can’t get you in there. Sorry, Gabriel.”
“You sure about that?” said Stone. “I mean really sure.”
“Harvey’s a real stickler for who gets to look at his files,” said Minnie, and Rex could have kissed her for the support. “We have a hell of a time getting down there and we work for him, but I think we can get you in one night, can’t we, Rex? Maybe Harvey’s bridge night?”
“I guess we might be able to,” conceded Rex. He leaned forward over his coffee. “If we get you in there, what are you gonna go looking for in those files?”
Stone took out his notebook, a leather-bound pad encased in black leather. He flipped it open and scanned down his copious amount of notes. He tapped a small pencil against a particular name and nodded to himself.
“I want to find out everything I can about this guy,” said Stone. “He knew Lydia, and she used to say he was always interested in her work.”
“What’s his name?” asked Minnie.
“Grayson,” said Stone. “Professor Oliver Grayson.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The stink down by the riverside was something powerful, but Pete had smelled far worse in his time. Living on the streets gave a man a chance to smell all kinds of awful things, not least his own body and clothes. Pete’s eyes slowly levered open, and he smacked his dry lips. The sour bile of whiskey vomit coated his chin and he reached up with a dirt-encrusted hand to wipe the worst of it away.
The sunlight hurt his eyes, and he rolled onto his side as a coughing fit wracked his body. He dry heaved, retching and hacking a gelatinous lump of phlegm onto the shoreline.
“Hell,” said Pete. “Firs’ solid food ‘n two days an’ I spit it in the damn mud.”
Pete slumped back as the waking world began to take shape around him. He lay in the mud down at the river by the edge of the railroad’s properties. The railroad ran out of Arkham from its Northside district, and all along this portion of the river’s north bank crowded sidings, warehouses, storage sheds, and locked freight cars. It was a risk coming here, as the railroad bulls that patrolled along here were fond of the cosh, and weren’t scared to put a hobnailed boot through a hobo’s face if they caught him sleeping rough. But if you could avoid them, it was at least quiet at night and you didn’t get rousted by the cops.
If you were smart, you could light a fire in the lee of the freight sheds and keep warm while you tried to sleep, but these days Pete was finding sleep harder and harder to come by. The empty bottle of rotgut whiskey beside him was proof enough of that. A drunken stupor was preferable to the horrific nightmares that had plagued him over the last few weeks. If he couldn’t panhandle enough nickels and cents to get a cheap ass bottle of what passed for liquor in this town, he’d be in for a night of feverish nightmares of the war and things worse than he’d ever seen over there.
He realized his feet were wet and looked down the length of his body. The tide had come in and his boots were lying in the water. Though he was exhausted from a troubled, uncomfortable night’s sleep, Pete scrambled back from the river’s edge, suddenly fearful of the black water lapping at the shore. The water was the color of oil, frothed with yellowish scum—sulphur seepage from the scores of coal heaps further along the shore.
Satisfied he was far enough from the water, Pete slumped back and squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to blot out the half-glimpsed memories of his dream.
Fire falling from the sky.
Water rising up to meet it and the world in-between boiling away to nothingness.
His eyes snapped open as what felt like a wet piece of sandpaper rasped across his cheek and hot, animal breath panted into his face.
Pete waved an arm as he rolled in the mud away from the source of the panting.
“Damn it, Duke,” said Pete. “Can’t a man sleep where he wan’s without gettin’ disturbed?”
The object of his rant dodged out away from Pete’s flailing hand, a scabby mongrel dog with wet fur and bright eyes. A red collar with a lank length of rope attached dangled from the dog’s neck, and it looked expectantly at Pete as he pushed himself upright.
Pete blinked in the sunlight, looking across the water to the desolate island that clung to the northern shores of the river. Low and swampy, it was covered in thick, wiry undergrowth, like a slice of land nobody wanted, but nobody could get rid of. No one visited the island, though Pete would swear he’d seen a fire burning out there over the last couple of nights, but the whiskey made it hard to be sure of anything.
Pete reached out and patted Duke’s head, smiling as the dog licked his hand, an act which most sensible folk would reckon to be a hazard to their well-being.
“You hungry, boy?” Pete asked the dog. Dumb question, he knew. Duke was always hungry, and would eat till he burst if given half the chance. “Yeah, me too, boy. Don’t reckon we’ll get much from the good people of Arkham today, but there might be some bins we can raid later. Whatever the rich folks don’t wanna eat, that’ll do Pete just fine.”
Pete picked himself up, and shook out the worst of the dirt and grime from his clothes.
Over the years of living rough, he’d picked up the nickname “Ashcan,” which wasn’t as bad as some names he’d been called in other towns. The folk of Arkham knew of him and in their own weird kind of way, tolerated him like he was a fixture of the town. Didn’t make them any more generous in their handouts, but at least he wasn’t beaten out of town like some hobos he knew. The lucky ones were hauled to the county line by the cops and kicked on their way with their bindle over their shoulders, while the unlucky ones ended up thrown in jail if they couldn’t pay the fine: which, of course, none of them could.
Pete set off toward the Garrison Street Bridge, knowing there was an easy route up to the streets there. He’d cross the river and head to the narrow streets of Lower Southside. The folks there were mostly immigrants and pretty poor as well,
but Pete had found that the measure of a person’s kindness couldn’t be found in how much money they had in their wallet. Oftentimes the best handouts he’d had came from those least able to afford it. That might make him feel bad for a second, but then he’d think of the whiskey he could buy and any guilt was washed away in his needy thirst.
He glanced over at the island and couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there were things moving in the long grass, shadowing his movements in the bracken. Over the years, Pete had developed a keen sense for when he was being watched, a talent that had saved him more than once from over-zealous cops eager to keep their streets safe and clear of vagrants.
“Come on, Duke,” said Pete. “Time we was outta here.”
Duke barked and ranged ahead, loping over the broken ground of the riverbank as he ran toward the bridge. Pete picked up the pace and started climbing the slope toward the streets above. Behind him, Duke barked and barked. Pete turned and saw his dog standing in the shadows of the bridge, his tail wagging furiously like he’d found the mother lode of doggy treasures. Pete beckoned the dog to join him, but Duke wasn’t moving and just kept yapping like he was fit to burst.
“Dammit, Duke,” said Pete. “Come on, you dumb mutt!”
Seeing the dog wasn’t going to move, Pete went back down to the shoreline, where concrete piers supported the bridge’s footings. Each was a wide slab of gray, stained with tidemarks, and piled high with washed up trash and assorted detritus thrown up by the river.
At his master’s approach, Duke bounded into the darkness beneath the bridge and stopped beside an inlet formed in the gap between two of the bridge’s footings. The water here was stagnant and foul, scummed with runoff from the railroad workings and unidentifiable froth.
“Jesus, Duke, what the hell’s the matter with you?” cried Pete, smelling something worse than even his own powerful body odor. “What the hell you got?”
Duke was tugging something at the water’s edge and Pete squinted in the low light to see what he had. It looked like a length of pale piping, but as Pete’s eyes adjusted to the low light beneath the bridge he saw exactly what it was. He’d seen enough human bodies reduced to their component parts in the war to know what one looked like when it was taken apart. Duke didn’t have no pipe, he had a human femur in his mouth.
“Duke!” yelled Pete. “Put that down!”
Startled by the authority in Pete’s voice, Duke dropped the bone and backed away from him. Pete raised his hands as if saying sorry and crept forward, scanning the rest of the inlet as he heard the sloshing of thick, sludgy water against the concrete.
“Oh, sweet Jesus Christ,” said Pete.
The water was thick with body parts: arms, ribcages, and bones of all sorts. And it wasn’t just one body’s worth. Skulls—some fleshless, some clung to by stubborn scraps of flesh—had been washed to the shoreline, grinning from the water like doll’s heads. Rendered down flesh floated just beneath the surface, like dirty fat from a skillet tossed in a cold basin.
“Christ, there’s gotta be a dozen folks here,” hissed Pete.
Pete had seen and done some terrible things in the war, horrific, mind-wrenching stuff that had left him unable to sleep or hold down a job when he got back to the States. In an instant, he was right back there, surrounded by dead bodies so torn up you couldn’t tell one man’s remains from another or what part of him you were looking at.
Duke crept to the river’s edge, but Pete snatched up his rope leash and hauled him back. The dog protested, but Pete wasn’t about to loosen his grip.
“No way, Duke,” said Pete, shaking his head. “We’re gettin’ outta here.”
Pete turned away from the river and made his way toward the streets, dragging Duke with him. The idea of telling the cops about the charnel house beneath the bridge crossed Pete’s mind. He dismissed the thought; he had learned the hard way what would happen to a man like him if he were to go to the cops with something as dreadful as this. No, sometimes it paid to be silent, to keep quiet. Sometimes it even paid to play stupid and act like nothing had happened.
The hairs on the back of Pete’s neck bristled, and his sense of being watched returned even stronger than before. He could feel baleful eyes regarding him from the swampy island, or was it just his imagination? No, he was sure there were malicious eyes on him, hungry eyes with a taste for human meat and fat in their jaws.
He shook off the image, remembering dark tales told in France of subterranean tunnels dug deep beneath no-man’s land, where packs of deserters from both sides were said to have hidden to escape the horrors of the war above. The tale had done the rounds many times, getting more gruesome with each retelling, but enough of the details were similar enough that Pete had always wondered whether there was some kernel of truth to them. In many of these trench tales, these deserters had been there since the beginning of the war and were described as little better than feral cannibals.
Though the madness of the war was long behind Pete, the after-effects would never leave him. He felt his limbs begin to tremble and he felt his mouth go dry and his bladder tighten.
“Oh God in heaven,” he said, feeling his terror mount.
Quickly, he climbed the grassy slope toward the world above and took a relieved breath when he reached the pavement. The sun shone down on Arkham, but though the normality of the sight was a blessed relief, there hung a lurking unease over its winding streets and gambrel-roofed buildings, a fear understood, but never acknowledged.
Pete remembered that fear well; it was the same feeling that settled in a man’s bones as he stood knee-deep in muddy water in the trenches before going over the top.
* * *
The Miskatonic University library was quiet, as it always was at this time of day, the yellow glow of streetlights from College Street and Garrison Street forming pale blobs on the ceiling of the third floor. Oliver flipped through Justin Geoffrey’s People of the Monolith, scanning down the page to check for any references that might aid him in his attempt to spare Amanda Sharpe’s fragile mind from further dream assaults.
There was little to be gleaned from this poem, for the poetic stanzas were uselessly outlandish in their form. Apparently Geoffrey had gone mad a year or two before, which was no surprise to Oliver given the nature of his poetry. He closed the collection and pinched the bridge of his nose, stifling a yawn as the rigors of the day began to catch up with him.
Henry Armitage, the dour master of the library, had left for the night, but his assistant had provided Oliver with all the books he had requested and more besides. Many of them were now piled like a fortress wall at the end of the desk, and Oliver had filled several pages of his notebook with half-formed thoughts and vague cultural references to myth-cycles ranging from the native tribes of America to the coastal tribes of Ceylon and Madagascar.
All he was finding was interesting, but whether it would help Amanda was another matter entirely. He needed to speak to her again, to record their conversation under laboratory conditions and perhaps even ask her to submit to hypnosis. The university had several cylinder recorders and a single gramophone Oliver could request the use of, and the thought of recording Amanda’s testimony for posterity was a thrilling prospect.
“One thing at a time,” whispered Oliver, remembering Alexander’s advice regarding intellectual rigor. Hit the books first, gather information, sort fact from fiction, and then, and only then, close in on the human aspect.
His table was piled high with books, their subject matter covering anthropology, the occult, archaeology, and mythology. He’d consulted The Golden Bough, of course, as well as lesser-known texts: Witch Cults in Western Europe, Exiles of Hyboria and Others, Malleus Maleficarum, and, of course, The Interpretation of Dreams. He found many teasing references to arcana that bore striking similarities to Amanda’s dreams, but most were found in books no serious scholar would treat as fact.
A book of this latter stripe was Dreams of Atlantis. Oliver had never consulted this
book before, and with good reason. Its author was a discredited Englishman by the name of Prothero Fitzgibbon, a disgraced professor of Oxford University. In the excited preface to his book, Fitzgibbon claimed the spirits of dead Atlanteans had entered his body and used him as a vessel to tell how their land had met its end. The resulting text was filled with protean ramblings of these so-called spirits, lamenting their lost cities and describing at length the doom that had befallen them.
Fitzgibbon had been ridiculed in the press and became the laughingstock of the literary and academic worlds for his steadfast adherence to the truth of his work. The man had been forced to quit his position at Oxford, and (so tongue-wagging gossips had it) had later been committed to an insane asylum somewhere in the south of England. Oliver had smiled to see the book in the pile the student library assistant had brought him, but the more he read in its pages, the more he began to wonder if perhaps Fitzgibbon had been, if not correct, then at least honestly led by dreams of a similar nature to Amanda’s.
In one dream, Fitzgibbon, or rather the spirit possessing him, talked of a great beast arising from the deep:
“…a monstrous mountain of quivering flesh, more landmass than living thing. It marched upon the seabed as a man walks in the waves on the shore. Its every step a tidal wave, its every movement a doom-laden gesture as it laid waste to the sapphire shores and silver towers of our beloved Atlantis with no more thought than you or I might crush an ant. Gods spare us from the walker between the stars, risen now from his sunken tomb! Cursed be the day the stars aligned and freed his abhorrent form!”
Another spirit spoke of how he had sought to save their homeland from the beast:
“Lo! Yet the waves rush through the Pillars of Hercules and surge across the ocean to crash upon the pillared capitals of the Twin Halls of Gadeirus and Atlas, we may yet be saved. Though fish swim in the Great Library of Elasippus, and the spires of Ampheres vanish below the waves, there is yet hope. Our doom is at hand, and nothing now can prevent the loss of the greatest treasures of the age, but across the gulfs of time and space, others may yet heed our ending and learn from the hubris and willful arrogance that destroyed us. Yea, though the beast sinks our gilded land, know that its horror can be sent back to the ancient prison to slumber until the stars are right once again. Hear me now, scrivener yet to be born, heed my words and etch them in your damnable book. And once written, hide them away from the sight of men until the beast’s abominable bulk is heaved unto the surface to wreak its horror and the sun hides its face in shame. For I am Nereus-Kai, and I alone know the terrible fate of the world.”