Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (15 page)

“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.
”

There were other, equally florid descriptions, but time and again, Oliver saw phrases and concepts that resonated with Amanda’s description of the sunken city she had seen. Not only that, but many of the descriptions of the sunken god matched what Kaula, the Yopasi shaman, had divulged to Oliver when drunk. It was all too fantastical to be real, yet with each correlation, Oliver began to despair of making any real progress. He couldn’t publish anything using Fitzgibbon as a reference; he’d be laughed all the way back to Baltimore.

A shadow fell across him and he jumped, startled by this new arrival. Hastily Oliver closed Fitzgibbon’s book, lest he be taken for giving it scholarly weight, and looked up to see Alexander Templeton standing beside his table with a book under his arm.

Templeton smiled. “Fitzgibbon? Really, Oliver?”

Oliver let out a breath and nervously tapped the book’s vulgar cover. “Yes, well, I need to explore all avenues, eh? No matter how fanciful. It’s nonsense, of course, but it makes for interesting reading if nothing else.”

“I’m glad you think that,” said Alexander, placing his curious volume of lore upon the desk. “May I?” he said, indicating the empty chair opposite Oliver.

“By all means,” said Oliver, dismantling his wall of books so he could see Alexander. His friend wore a dark suit, as though preparing for an evening’s excursion, and though he was indoors, still wore his hat.

“Passing through?” asked Oliver.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Alexander. “I have a dinner engagement with an old army colleague at six.”

“How nice for you,” said Oliver, looking to the clock on the far wall. “It’s a quarter to six now; won’t you be late?”

“I’ll be fine. I have a taxi waiting to take me to Anton’s.”

“Anton’s,” said Oliver. “Very nice.”

“So I am led to believe,” agreed Alexander. “Anyway, I have a book that might help with your research concerning Miss Sharpe’s dreams.” He tapped the book he’d brought and Oliver detected more than a hint of nervousness to Alexander’s demeanor, as though he were the bearer of bad news. “I called by your office, but they said you’d already left for the library.”

“Very kind of you to bring it to me, Alexander. You could have just left it in my cubby hole you know.”

Alexander shook his head. “Not this one, I’m afraid. It’s rather…specialized, old fellow. Not really for mass consumption, if you take my meaning. Some of its contents might be taken the wrong way.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Alexander pulled his chair around until he was positioned adjacent to Oliver. With one hand resting on the cover of the book, Alexander said, “In my researches, I have in the past consulted some very ancient books, tomes containing lurid tales that are quite beyond the pale. They tell of quite fantastic things, horrible things, concerning the far distant past of this world and the…beings that lived before the time of man. This book is not for the faint-hearted, Oliver, so I warn you that you’ll need a stiff shot of whatever liquor you have stashed away beside you as you read it.”

“Come on, man,” said Oliver. “You’re exaggerating,” but one look at Alexander’s face told him that his fellow professor was deadly serious. Alexander gripped his forearm, squeezed, and Oliver frowned at the earnestness he saw in his friend’s eyes.

“I’m giving you this book because I think you have already seen a measure of what lies beyond the fragile veil of ignorance that shields mankind from utter oblivion.”

Was it just Oliver’s imagination or did the glow of the streetlights outside dim slightly?

“Alexander, I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about. And what’s all this talk of ignorance? We’re professors, damn it. It’s our job to fight ignorance. Isn’t that why we pursued this career?”

Alexander gripped harder, desperate to impart the seriousness of what he was saying.

“Would you teach a child of war or murder, Oliver? Would you let a babe in arms play with a razor?”

“Of course not, don’t be foolish.”

“Mankind is that child,” said Alexander. “And the full horror of this knowledge is that razor. Some things even the wisest of men are not meant to know, yet some things a poor unfortunate few must know.”

“You’ve lost me,” said Oliver. “I don’t like this one bit, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” said Alexander. “When you and Professor Dean went to Alaska, you touched the very edges of a wider world. I read the paper you published at Brown. It came so very close to exposing that which should never be exposed. Truths mankind is not yet ready to face. Dean tried to shield you from all that you’d uncovered, but his mind couldn’t withstand the horrors of what he learned.”