Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (14 page)

“Yeah,” said Gabriel. “I work for the Pinkertons, but I’m here for myself. My little girl got killed, and I’m here to find out who did it and see he gets what’s coming to him.”

“What does that mean?” asked Minnie, pushing her unfinished lunch away.

“It means whatever I want it to mean,” said Stone. “Now are you going to help me or not?”

“Sure, Gabe,” said Rex, flipping the pages of his notebook.

“It’s Gabriel.”

“Oh, sure, okay. Gabriel,” said Rex. “I think we can work together. We can share information, yeah. You find your daughter’s killer, and we make sure her story gets told straight, yeah?”

Stone nodded and Rex continued. “Okay, well, first why don’t you start by telling us how you knew it was your daughter. I don’t think the cops even know that yet.”

“They know,” said Stone. “I spoke to a bull called Harden last night. Good cop, but he don’t like to be told his job. Guess I don’t blame him.”

Minnie leaned over and said, “But how did you know she’d been…you know, killed?”

“My Lydia’s a good girl,” said Stone, as though it was important to establish that fact up front, like maybe Rex and Minnie had doubted it. “She had her mother’s spirit, God rest her soul, but she was a good girl. Always wrote me every fortnight, told me how she was getting on, what classes she liked, what professors were dull or interesting. Every two weeks, regular as clockwork I’d get a letter on Monday morning, but I didn’t get no letter this week.”

“And that was enough to bring you here?”

“Yeah,” said Stone. “I came up and did what I’d do on any missing person case. Trawl the morgues and lean on the night shift workers, maybe grease a few palms along the way. Took a couple of hours…but I found her at a place called Eleazar’s. My little girl, laid out on a damn slab with half her arms and legs missing. What kind of sick bastard could do that to a little girl…”

“Golly,” said Minnie, putting her hand on Stone’s arm. “That’s terrible, I’m so sorry.”

Stone nodded and cleared his throat.

“I got her out of that place, lickety-split,” said Stone. “Got her to a respectable place up on French Hill. She deserves that, you know, to be someplace nice.”

“Were you and your daughter close?” asked Minnie. “I know it sounds like a dumb question, but I have to ask.”

“Yeah, we were close. Ever since my wife died, we’re all each other’s got. I didn’t want her to come to Arkham. ‘What’s wrong with the New York schools?’ I said, but she wasn’t having none of it. Wanted to get out of the city, to go to school someplace where you didn’t live right on top of ten other families, I suppose. Our place ain’t big, just a walk-up apartment in the west Bronx, but it was home. She came out here two years ago, and she seemed to like it, even though she missed the New York vibe. She loved music and dancing. Liked to get out to listen to jazz and hep it up with the other girls.”

“There’s not many places you can go to dance in Arkham,” said Rex, hastily scribbling what Gabriel Stone was saying. “The good townsfolk tend to look down on youngsters that want to listen to jazz and drink and smoke.”

“Then it should be easy to track down where she was before she…met her killer.”

“Should be,” agreed Minnie. “That’s the sort of lead Rex and I can chase down.”

“We need to find this guy,” said Stone, putting down his cup and rapping the table with his knuckles. “I found out he’s done this a bunch of times before, and if we don’t find him, then a whole lot more girls are gonna die. Someone gets a taste for this shit, he’s not gonna stop.”

“Yeah, your daughter was the sixth girl in three years,” said Rex.

“Sixth?” said Stone, shaking his head. “Try twenty-fourth.”

Rex and Minnie looked at one another, unsure whether or not to entertain such an absurdly high figure. The idea that twenty-four girls had been murdered in Arkham without the vast bulk of them coming to the attention of the town was surely ridiculous.

“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.