Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (31 page)

“Do you see him?” asked Alexander.

Oliver finally spied Stone in a booth toward the back of the establishment, almost out of sight of the diner’s main thoroughfare. He sat with his hat perched on the back of his head despite the hour and being indoors. A man and woman sat with him, but Oliver could only see the backs of their heads just now.

“Over there,” said Oliver, setting off across the worn carpet toward their rendezvous.

He and Alexander arrived at the chipped table booth and Oliver removed his hat.

“Mr. Stone,” he said. “Sorry we’re a bit late. Got a bit caught up with all that happened last night, you understand.”

“Sure,” said Stone. “I get it. It was a rough night for you. Grab some coffee and join us. These are the reporters I was telling you about.”

When Stone didn’t continue, Oliver extended his hand. “Oliver Grayson, professor of anthropology and ancient languages at Miskatonic University. And this is Alexander Templeton, professor of ancient religions. Also at Miskatonic.”

“That’s a lot of ancient,” said the man opposite Stone. The reporter was disheveled and looked like he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a month. Oliver knew how he felt. His rumpled face was handsome in a downtrodden way, and the dark rings framing his eyes spoke of heavy burdens being carried by an old soul.

The young man stuck out his hand. “Rex Murphy, I work at the
Advertiser
.”

Before Murphy could introduce her, the woman stuck her hand out and said, “And I’m Minnie Klein, photographer of the strange and impossible. I sometimes work at the
Advertiser
, but who knows how long that’s going to last, eh, Rex?”

“Harvey will get a good story,” said Rex. “Look at the sources we have now.”

“Okay, so we’re all buddies now,” said Stone. “We’re all here for one reason, and one reason alone. Someone’s been killing girls in this town for years, and it’s time they were stopped. Between us we probably know enough to get a good idea of who that might be. Or if we don’t, we’ve got a hell of a good head start on the cops. Agreed?”

Murphy and Klein nodded, and Oliver wondered what they and Stone had uncovered in their investigations.

“Right, if we’re going to do this together, we can’t have any secrets,” continued Stone. “We’re here to lay out everything we know, full disclosure. And once we’ve gotten everything out in the open, we’ll try and figure out what it means and what we can do about what’s going on in this damn town.”

Oliver nodded. “That sounds eminently sensible.”

“I concur,” said Alexander. “We can have no subterfuge between us.”

“Agreed,” said Rex with a wry smile. “Full disclosure.”

“I got nothing to hide,” added Minnie.

Oliver felt a strange frisson to this meeting, as though this assembly of very different people was
meant
to happen. In the normal run of things, Oliver would never expect to deal with a Pinkerton agent and two reporters, but there was an energy to this gathering he could see reflected on every face around the table.

This was
right
. This was the beginning of something.

It wasn’t much to oppose the dreadful forces at work in Arkham.

But it was a start.

Part Three

Waves on the Shore, 1926

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Stone opened their assembly with the sad tale of his daughter’s death. He told how he had come to Arkham and met up with Rex and Minnie and the content of their first meeting. The two reporters filled in their half of the story, beginning with their sighting of Stone on the edge of the athletics field and the suspicion that he might have something to do with the murder.

The Pinkerton man went on to describe how he had discovered that many more girls were missing than anyone had thought. Oliver and Alexander gasped at these revelations, unaware that their monstrous enemies had exacted such a horrific toll upon the town. Oliver spoke of Amanda Sharpe and Rita Young’s disappearance, now appreciating that their vanishing was but the latest in a bloody chain stretching back many years.

At a nod from Stone, Rex spoke of how he and Minnie had canvassed the students at Miskatonic and learned that the Commercial Club was the place to go to listen to jazz, dance, and sample the delights of illegal liquor. Minnie took up the tale, outlining their visit to the Commercial Club, and the details, so far as Blind Rufus had told them, of Lydia Stone’s last night there.

“That’s where Amanda and Rita went the night they disappeared,” said Oliver.

“I reckon the Commercial’s the key,” said Stone. “Whoever’s doing this is using it as their own private game reserve. All those young girls, drunk or high or both…it’s easy pickings.”

Though he spoke with hard-boiled candor, everyone seated around the table could see how difficult it was for Stone to keep his composure.

“So what do we do, stake out the joint?” asked Rex. “It can’t be me or Minnie. Rufus would recognize us.”

“I thought you said he was blind,” pointed out Oliver.

“He is, but he…well, he sees somehow,” said Rex. “Trust me, he’d know.”

Stone shook his head. “We don’t got time for that. Those two girls have been missing for three days now. If we don’t find them soon, they’re as good as dead.”

“If they’re not already,” said Rex.

“They’re alive,” said Stone. “I know it. If they were dead, someone would have found their bodies by now. Like I said, whoever’s doing this wants this town afraid. They
want
folk so scared they shut all their doors and bar all their windows. People that are afraid are easy to control and they do what they’re told. All those bodies turning up threw the town into a panic, and folk are leaving every day. I’ve seen the boarded up stores and I’ve seen how people look at each other. Hell, the Brits could march back in here and take over again and no one would notice right now.”

“You think that’s what these killings are all about?” asked Alexander.

“Yeah, I do,” said Stone. “In themselves they’re not the killer’s goal, but they’re paralyzing Arkham and making it real easy for someone to get on with another plan and not have anyone else notice. And it’s been going on for a long time.”

Stone went on to list the many unusual incidents that had occurred throughout the history of Arkham, a string of events that painted a grim tapestry of the macabre and inexplicable. It seemed absurd that a man new to town should be the one to point out the madness lurking beneath the surface of their home, but sometimes it takes an outsider to see what’s hiding in plain sight.

Rex nodded when Stone recounted the decades-old case of the cannibal murderer who stalked the streets in the wake of the typhoid outbreak.

“Yeah, I remember that,” said Rex. “Before my time, of course, but I remember the old guys that used to staff the office talking about it. Big news in its day, closest this town ever got to waking up from its morning coffee.”

Alexander dismissed Stone’s theory that such a madman could still be on the loose.

“If he were such a deranged maniac, then he would have kept killing until one of two things happened: either he would be caught again or you would have seen a consistent number of murders occurring since his escape from Sefton.”

“Thing is, professor,” said Stone in rebuttal, “we have. If this guy escaped in 1921, then he might have been kept controlled or, I dunno, chained up in someone’s basement until now. The first disappearance I have is Mary Ellen Masters, last seen October 15, 1923. And then I got a steady flow of missing persons, murder victims, and runaways that ain’t runaways.”

“True, but the murders we’re seeing here seem more
planned
,” said Alexander, “like the girls are being chosen, almost as though there’s something special about them. That doesn’t seem to fit how the Sefton killer hunted.”

“There’s that,” admitted Stone, realizing the truth of Alexander’s words. “And killers don’t tend to curb their lusts, only develop them. I knew it was a long shot, but what else we got?”

And so Oliver told them of Finn Edward’s curious silver sphere and Kate Winthrop’s belief that it was a key that would allow its bearer to open doors between worlds. The others looked at him strangely, but Oliver carried on regardless. He had no idea whether Finn’s object held any relevance to the murders, but they had declared that there would be no secrets between them, and Oliver intended to hold true to that intent.

Minnie told him of Edward’s criminal past, and Oliver felt a little queasy at the thought of having dealt with such a violent member of society. A bootlegger and brawler—what else might Finn Edwards be mixed up in?

Taking a moment to compose himself, Oliver went on to tell of how Amanda Sharpe had come to him with her dreams of a sunken city, a desolate undersea mausoleum that bore a striking resemblance to the one described in the myth cycles of the Yopasi tribe. He told the assembled group of the patterns he had discovered in the legends of other tribal groups scattered throughout the world. Some of these, explained Oliver, were actively worshipping the being said to be entombed within the submerged city, while others were engaged in some manner of warding duty.

Though he was reluctant to voice the hideous name of the slumbering demon within the seaweed-encrusted city, he finally said it out loud.

Cthulhu
.

The name was unknown to the others, yet its utterance had a profound effect on all three. Rex blanched at the name and Minnie’s eyes widened in fear. Stone’s fists clenched, and Oliver gave them a moment to recover before continuing. He told them of the tome Alexander had given him, the damnable work of Laban Shrewsbury, and in hesitant, halting words, he told them the gist of its fractured, incomplete contents.

Though it was close to noon, the light from outside Lucy’s seemed to dim, as though the mere mention of such beings as the Great Old Ones was enough to affect some atmospheric change. Shadows appeared where no shadows should have been, and the five of them drew closer around the table. Minnie took Rex’s hand as Oliver spoke of these monstrous godlike beings who slumbered in the forgotten places of the world, and whose devotees worked in the shadows to hasten their return to the mortal realms.

He could see skepticism on Stone’s face, but it was studied denial—the face of an investigator confronting a criminal’s truthful alibi: wanting it to be false, but knowing it wasn’t.
 

Alexander spoke of how some people were more sensitive than others to the horrid dreams of the slumbering Cthulhu: how artists, sculptors, and poets might often be moved to loathsome bouts of creativity by some strange psychic vibrations from uncounted fathoms beneath the ocean.

Minnie nodded at this and told of how, in March of last year, she had been moved to take some of the strangest photographs she had ever conceived. Though hesitant to talk of them openly, Minnie described how she had traveled in the depths of the night to the riverfront to take photographs of the Miskatonic River and the strange, blasted island nestling between the Garrison and West Street Bridges. Fires burned on that island, and the images she later developed in the
Advertiser
’s darkroom bore no relation to what she had believed she had captured on film: strange, phantom images of the water, the ripples forming vague suggestions of grasping tentacles reaching up from the bottom of the river; glimmering obelisks, hidden so deep as to be unreachable, wavering in the black water; shadowy suggestions of giant creatures capering in the ruins of a half-glimpsed city formed from titanic blocks of unimaginable scale.

“What did you do with the photographs?” asked Oliver.

“I burned them,” said Minnie, sheepishly. “I couldn’t keep them in the house. They gave me the creeps and I couldn’t sleep knowing they were there.”

Rex too was moved by Minnie’s confession to nod and admit to a period of strange mood swings around the same time.

“I was an okay reporter,” said Rex. “Nothing too sharp, though. I could spin a good yarn to keep your average Joe interested, but I was never going to win any prizes. Most of my stories had a habit of getting away from me at the last minute. A witness would forget what they saw, or some real juicy bit of proof would get lost in the post or something. It was a bad time for me. I was drinkin’ too much and I didn’t know from one day to the next whether I’d have a job. From the sounds of it, looks like it was around the time Minnie was taking those weird photographs that I started getting these hinky vibes whenever I saw a crime scene. Before, I’d just look at it and write what I saw, but then I started writing what I was
feeling
. I could look at a place where someone had died and I’d know, just
know
, what the emotion of the place was. I could write about the murder like I’d been there, like I’d felt what the victim had felt. I could write about death like I was Fitzgerald or Hemingway. All of a sudden folk wanted to read what I was writing, but it went just as quickly. I’ve been trying to get it back ever since, but so far it ain’t happening.”