The Arcanum (17 page)

27

BY THE TIME Doyle and Lovecraft made it inside the converted Chinese Theatre, which was now the home of the New York Rescue Society, they were soaked to the bone. The rain drummed on the roof as they shook freezing water from their coats. It had been a long night prowling missions and churches, searching for witnesses and information. Once they were able to compile names and descriptions and locations, all seemed to lead to this building. The air was stale and filled with the cacophony of nearly forty snoring tramps. The combined odor of rancid breath and sour socks was overpowering.

The building was long and cylindrical, with benches serving as beds laid out on both sides and a long aisle in the center. More bodies were strewn on the floor, and Doyle and Lovecraft walked carefully so as to avoid stepping on the sleepers. Bare lightbulbs swung overhead. The walls were painted with questions written in all capitals, like: HOW LONG SINCE YOU WROTE TO MOTHER? and THE LORD WILL PROVIDE. CALL UPON HIM WHILE HE IS NEAR.

“I’m afraid we’re all filled up,” spoke a stern voice from the back. It belonged to a tall, clean-shaven fellow with white combed-back hair wearing a white shirt and suspenders. His nose was hawkish and his face angular. Doyle took note of the revolver tucked in his belt.

“We’re not looking for beds,” Doyle said, opening his hands to show he carried no weapons.

“Fine. That’s plenty far.” Lovecraft and Doyle were only halfway down the aisle when the man spoke. “If you’ve no need of beds, you’ve no point being here. So get on your way.”

“We’d like to speak with you—” Doyle began.

“What you journalists don’t seem to understand is that we are grieving. Privacy is all we want. We’ve lost family, and this is neither the time nor the—”

“We’re not reporters and we’re not police,” Doyle said, cutting him off. “You might say we’re investigators, and this case has come to our attention. Ten minutes is all we ask.”

Minutes later, Doyle and Lovecraft sat with the man, who introduced himself as Joe. They were joined by his wife, Judith— an elegant, weary woman in simple clothes. There was such a weight of sadness on her it seemed an effort for her to walk. She was a gracious host, however, and made hot tea to warm bodies chilled by the storm. But her nervousness was evident as she fiddled absently with a porcelain butterfly brooch.

For simplicity’s sake, Doyle conceived names for himself and Lovecraft, and a back-story, which neither Joe nor Judith seemed to question. Troubles weren’t in short supply at the New York Rescue Society, and if strangers wanted to help, who were they to argue?

“So, is everyone accounted for?” Doyle asked gently.

Joe and Judith exchanged a look of exasperation. “All that can be,” Joe replied.

“There are others?” Doyle pressed.

“Wayward children,” Judith said weakly.

“Damned criminals,” Joe growled. His wife nodded, agreeing but obviously disapproving of her husband’s language. “But what can we do?” Joe asked Doyle as if accused. “We’ve no extra hands. I’ve a brood upstairs to look after. I can’t chase them to Hell and back, can I? We’ve already lost one trying to track them down. Dexter.” Joe frowned, as if still surprised by the depth of his grief. Judith only sighed and gathered up Doyle’s empty teacup.

“More, sir?” she asked.

“No, no, that’s fine.” Doyle leaned in to Joe. “I know it’s difficult, but do any of your children or any of those who work for the mission,” Doyle dipped his hand in his pocket and brought out the coin pendant, “wear anything like this?”

The coin spun slowly in the candlelight.

“That’s Matthew’s pin,” Judith said instantly.

“Matthew? Where is he?” Doyle asked.

“I just said—” Joe started, angrily.

“No. Tonight, I mean. With the rain. There must be certain areas of retreat in a storm like this. Somewhere the tramps would go.”

Joe nodded, understanding. “Well, if not here or the mission on Twenty-third and Lex . . .” He turned to Judith.

“Then the train tunnels,” she concluded.

“Which ones?” Doyle demanded.

“I’d start with the City Hall station,” Joe answered.

28

“PARIS,” ABIGAIL SAID, between sips from the wine bottle. “And I’d be a dancer.” She threw out her arms and twirled in a circle, her laughter echoing off the tiled walls of the City Hall station—a gothic labyrinth of arched ceilings, shadowy stair-wells, and spidery chandeliers. One could walk for days and not retrace one’s steps, thanks to all the dividing, merging, and subdividing levels and passages. At this late hour, the station was a quiet sanctuary from the driving rain.

“Boring,” Matthew said as he tried to grab the wine bottle from Abigail’s hands. “Besides, you can’t dance.”

“I can,” Abigail pouted. “See?” She stood on her toes like a ballerina, until her legs buckled and she fell.

It was Matthew’s turn to laugh. Abigail tilted the wine bottle and slowly poured its contents on the floor in revenge.

“Hey!” Matthew shouted, reaching for the bottle.

“Say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

Abigail kept pouring.

“I said it,” Matthew yelled, slurring his “s.”

“Mean it,” Abigail instructed.

“I mean it,” he exclaimed, grabbing her in an embrace and bearing her down to the floor.

She wriggled beneath him. “Your breath stinks.” She waved a hand in front of her nose as Matthew tried to kiss her.

Matthew nipped her nose with his lips. “What about Hong Kong? We’ll steal away on a freighter.”

“Do I look Chinese to you?” Abigail asked. Matthew laughed as she kissed him.

“As long as I’m with you, I don’t care where we go,” Matthew said.

“And what about the others?” But Abigail immediately regretted asking, for Matthew’s expression changed in an instant.

“Aren’t we allowed our own lives, for God’s sake?” He climbed off her, sat up, and swigged the remaining wine from the bottle.

“I know,” Abigail said, also sitting up.

“If you want to be a baby all your life, go on, then! Let them tell you what to do.” Matthew’s temper could get hot when he drank, and Abigail spotted a tantrum on the way. She tried to soothe him by stroking his hair, but he shoved her off. “I don’t know why I waste my time with you. You never change.”

“That’s not true,” Abigail said. “I want to go with you.”

Matthew staggered to his feet. “Forget it. I want my own life.”

“Don’t leave,” Abigail pleaded.

Matthew scowled. “Don’t follow me. Go back to Mummy and Daddy. I’ll find a real woman.” His emphasis on the word “real” made Abigail wince.

Matthew lurched off into another passageway. Abigail could hear him muttering, and knew his guilty anger would subside when he sobered up. But for now she was alone, and Abigail hated to be alone. She tilted her top hat down over her ears and blinked at the flickering chandeliers. She slid down the wall and sat by the puddle of wine, arms locked around her knees. She could hear the pounding of the rain on the streets above, and the sound made her indefinably sad. Tears trickled down her cheeks, but she paid them little heed. They always came in these moments when she was alone. They were tears Matthew had never seen, and never would if she had anything to say about it. They were her secret, a private sorrow that had been with her as long as she could remember. She closed her eyes and rested her forehead on her knees, trying to sleep, letting the distant raindrops lull her, when a tremulous squeal echoed in the tunnels.

Abigail lifted her head and peered down both ends of the long corridor. “Matthew?”

ELSEWHERE, JUST BELOW street level, four shadows reached across the stone floor of City Hall station.

Houdini removed his hat and shook off the rain.

Doyle stepped past him, trying to get a sense of his environment.

Marie shut her umbrella and scanned the tunnel archways. “Somet’ing wrong here,” she said.

Lovecraft brought up the rear, lugging a battered satchel, which clanged loudly with every step.

Marie covered her face with a trembling hand.

Doyle approached, worried. “Marie, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Feel like I can’t breathe.”

“Claustrophobia, perhaps?” Houdini asked.

“No,” Marie answered. “Somet’ing in the air.”

Doyle turned to Lovecraft. “It’s time.”

Lovecraft set his satchel on the ground. He unhooked the latches and opened it, revealing a set of quasiscientific instruments—a mobile workshop of demonological research. Most of the devices had no obvious purpose, but Lovecraft fingered each with a surgeon’s deliberateness, clearly weighing their usefulness. He removed his black fedora and slung a pair of bulbous goggles around his neck. Then he worked his arm into a gauntlet that appeared carved from a large animal bone, and tightened it to his wrist and elbow with leather straps and buckles. Symbols were etched into the gauntlet and multicolored wires had been threaded through the bones like veins. They reached from the jade hand-shield into a control unit, which was a small steam engine shaped like the end of a fishing rod. Lovecraft fixed the goggles over his eyes and rapidly spun the reel on the control unit. With accompanying sparks, tiny pistons started moving up and down. A hum shuddered through the gauntlet as power flowed along the bundled wires, causing the snakelike symbols to glow.

Doyle watched in mild astonishment as ghostly mathematical symbols appeared in the air like flickering fireflies around Lovecraft, emanating from the transistorized gauntlet. As the reel spun on its own power, Lovecraft rotated a red dial on the steam-powered unit with his free hand and watched closely as some of the phantom numerals blinked out, only to be replaced with different floating formulae. “Fascinating,” Lovecraft muttered to himself.

“Is that thing dangerous?” Houdini asked, taking a wise step back as greenish light enveloped Lovecraft.

Doyle cleared his throat, “Howard?”

Lovecraft shushed him.

Doyle tried again. “What is that instrument doing?”

Lovecraft spoke quickly and quietly, as if not to disrupt the operation of his tool. “It’s an Eltdown Shard, which Duvall modified. The symbols you see belong to the Great Race of Yith.”

Houdini whispered to Doyle: “Does that answer your question?”

Doyle frowned. “But, Howard, what’s it doing?”

Visibly irritated, Lovecraft glanced away from the floating symbols. “I’m forming a small ether-bridge, obviously, but I need a moment to finish, so be silent.”

As Lovecraft walked away, Doyle and Houdini returned to Marie, who was huddled against a column, shivering.

“Can you explain what you feel?” Doyle asked her.

“Cold. Worse than ice. Inside me.” Marie wrapped a shawl about her neck. “Normally, I can feel the breath of the spirits around me, but not here. There’s just a void here.”

“I’ve got something,” Lovecraft cried. He pulled the goggles down around his neck. His face was moist from the heat of the instrument. “There’s interference, but I’m definitely picking up a sub-aural chatter.”

“A what?” Houdini spoke for the rest of them.

“It’s confirming a relatively new theory of mine, quite exciting actually, on the wave-band thickness that an extra-dimensional signal structure would have to travel on to achieve coherence on our material plane.”

Three sets of eyes just stared at Lovecraft.

He sighed. “Perhaps I can simplify. It’s been posited, for example, that whales signal to one another on a far deeper frequency than we do in our day-to-day conversations. And why is that? Because water carries sound differently than the far thinner atmosphere between our bodies. Now, imagine the consistency of an extra-dimensional universe of, say, sixteen dimensions as opposed to our four. When a life-form accustomed to vibrational signaling in that environment suddenly comes to our world, then I theorize the trace of their heavier frequencies would linger on the air like a footprint. A recording.”

“And translated into the king’s English, Howard?” Doyle asked.

Lovecraft smiled grimly. “It means we’re not alone down here.” He pointed at the blinking, changing formulae in the green mist surrounding the gauntlet. “I’m picking up five or six energy signatures within three hundred yards.”

Doyle studied the symbols, unable to make heads or tails of them. “How do we know they’re not vagrants or the police?” he asked.

“The way they’re talking, Arthur. It’s definitely not human.”

At that moment, from somewhere deep in the bowels of the tunnel system, a tremulous squeal arose that chilled their collective hearts.

“The stairs!” Doyle shouted, already ahead of the others. Marie and Houdini followed, trailed by Lovecraft, who was still lugging his equipment.

“Can we track them, Howard?” Houdini shouted as he took the steps three at a time down toward the deeper platforms.

“I can try,” Lovecraft stammered, attempting to free himself from the gauntlet as he ran. He stuffed it back into the suitcase and extracted another tool, this one resembling a battery-operated eggbeater with the handgrip of a pistol. It, too, seemed to be a hybrid of enhanced technology built about a primitive relic. As Lovecraft squeezed the trigger, the battery pack spit sparks and the eggbeater portion—fashioned of wooden tribal fetishes—began to turn and beads trapped inside the wood rattled together. “They’re close,” Lovecraft said.

As he ran, Doyle gripped the knob of his walking stick, pressed a hidden button, and freed a long blade from its sheath.

Houdini, the fastest of them by far, had taken the lead, when Lovecraft suddenly called, “Wait!”

The others stopped, and turned.

Lovecraft stood at an intersection and studied his instrument. When he pointed his device down the north tunnel, the fetishes slowed their turning considerably. When he pointed it down the south tunnel, they sped up. He looked up at the others. “This way.”

“That thing can sense them?” Doyle asked, looking down the south passage.

“Yes, it can. They’re demons.”

“According to whom?”

Lovecraft held up the spinning fetishes. “According to the Mad Arab Abd al-Azrad. This is his demon rattle, discovered in the Nameless City. A design improved upon, with the benefits of technology, by Duvall and myself.”

“Demons,” Houdini groused. “I hate demons.”

Doyle stepped aside and gestured to Lovecraft. “Lead the way.”

Lovecraft set off in front, looking paler than usual. Steam rose off the instrument as Lovecraft and the Arcanum spread out onto the first-level train platform. The fetishes whirled and the beads inside rattled loudly. Sparks spit from the battery pack. Lovecraft held the instrument out at arm’s length, then the entire contraption blew to pieces, raining wood and steel across the floor. And then there was silence.

Doyle looked at the smoking pieces of the demon rattle on the ground, and contemplated an evil purer than anything even imagined by the Mad Arab Abd al-Azrad, author of the
Necronomicon.

Slowly, Lovecraft turned back to the others. “In there.”

ABIGAIL EMERGED FROM one of the pedestrian corridors onto a platform some one hundred feet below street level. Still the storm winds moaned from the mouth of the tunnels, even this far down.

“Matthew?” she called, then looked back at the long corridor she’d just traversed. As if in answer, another flurry of squeals erupted from somewhere nearby, freezing her blood. “Matthew!” she called again, stepping closer to the edge of the platform. “Matt—?”

A hand burst from the darkness below and grabbed her ankle. Abigail screamed as a laughing Matthew rose from the pit.

“Why did you do that?” she cried, close to tears, picking herself up off the dirty stone floor. “I hate you!”

Matthew climbed out of his hiding place. “You’re such a girl sometimes.”

Abigail caught Matthew solidly on the jaw with her fist, knocking him down.

“Why’d you make those sounds?” Abigail demanded.

“What sounds? I came down here and waited.” Matthew rubbed his jaw and stood up. “It was probably just the wind.”

Suddenly, another squeal erupted from the pedestrian passageway across the tracks, and a strange, birdlike shadow spilled across the platform.

Matthew swallowed. “Jesus.”

Abigail gripped the back of Matthew’s jacket, but he shook her off. “Go,” he whispered.

“No.”

Matthew whirled around, more serious than she’d ever seen. “Go. Now!”

Abigail turned to run, but several robed bodies flowed into the passage in front of her. Their heads bobbed grotesquely as they squealed in unison and surged toward her. Abigail saw their ruby eyes and sticklike noses, and felt her legs weaken.

“Abby!” Matthew shouted, spinning her around.

Three more of the creatures appeared on the opposite platform. These carried blades. They waited, watching. Their breath wheezed, and their ruby eyes did not blink.

Matthew took Abigail’s coat and pulled her toward the edge of the platform. “Get ready to jump.”

“Why? What are they?” she demanded, close to a panic.

“I don’t know,” Matthew answered. “But I think they’re the ones who killed Martha. We’ll lose them on the tracks.” He tried to sound confident, but failed.

The creatures behind them wailed, freeing shining hooks from their tattered sleeves.

“Now!” Matthew barked, swinging Abigail over the edge of the platform and dropping her onto the tracks.

She landed in a puddle, and rats scuttled away from her. Matthew landed beside her. “Move!”

It was like a nightmare. Abigail’s legs felt rubbery, and she couldn’t run fast enough. She glanced back and saw the creatures flow across the platforms and spill onto the tracks.

Matthew turned to face them, and Abigail clutched at his arm. “Matthew, no!”

Rotted scaffolding clung to the tunnel walls, forgotten pieces of an abandoned construction site. The floor on both sides of the tracks was littered with nails and wood.

“It’ll give you time,” he said, his voice rough with fear. He picked up a two-by-four from the dusty ground and swung it menacingly.

Abigail backed up a few steps. “Please, Matthew—”

“Don’t look back. Just run and don’t look back.” Matthew cut the air with his makeshift club.

Tears streamed down Abigail’s cheeks. “You can’t. Please come with me!”