The Dark Rites of Cthulhu (2 page)

"We should talk to these other guys," Jake said. We were back in O'Hara's, on the black stuff. The case had its hooks in my partner now, and like a terrier with a bone, he was in no mood to let go. "Look at that last email again. Mitchell wanted out—that would threaten the gravy train. There's our motive, right there."

"We can't," I said, trying to be the voice of reason. "The case is closed, and so are the ranks of the great and good. We can't go charging around like a bull in a china shop—we've got no evidence."

Jake smiled and I realized I'd fallen into his trap.

"Well, let's go find some then. There must be something in the Mitchell house that everybody missed."

Disturbing a crime scene was enough to get us both shit-canned, but I didn't mention it as we opened the door, slipped under the tape and went into the dark hallway—it wasn't as if this was our first time at this particular dance.

For half an hour I thought Jake was going to be disappointed. We went through the ground floor fast—nothing to see but the normal domestic habits of a family with two kids—and a stain on the hallway wall I didn't like to look at too closely.

Upstairs proved little more fruitful, although a search of the study delivered a small notebook tucked in the back of a drawer that contained columns of letters and figures that were obviously in some sort of code. Jake pocketed that, and finally we headed to the one place neither of us really wanted to go—down into the dark cellar.

Despite our best efforts, neither of us could find a light switch, so we both had our flashlights lit as we went down—me first, this time. My fingers were twitching to draw my weapon—it felt like the situation demanded it, but I knew it was just my mind reminding me of the last time. Even so, I half expected to see a naked corpse on the dusty floor when I reached the foot of the steps. I let out a sigh of relief when a sweep of the torch showed nothing but the etched circle of strange pictograms, the design partially scuffed and smudged by the footprints of the cops and forensics men that had come through here.

A bulb burst into light just above my head, almost blinding me. I turned to see Jake, hand on a switch.

"Well, that's something at least," he replied, and smiled, although I saw the same tension in his eyes that I felt in my chest.

We made a search of the room, each of us—consciously or otherwise, working around the drawn marks on the floor, as if fearful of stepping on—or worse, inside, the lines. There was nothing to see but packing cases, packed earth and dry walls. I was about to admit defeat when Jake hushed me into silence.

"Do you hear it?" he whispered.

If I hadn't known Jake better, I might have thought he was about to take a powder. Then I heard it, too—distant chanting, getting louder.

"Where the fuck is it coming from?" I whispered, suddenly afraid to raise my voice. The chanting got closer—a strange, guttural cacophony that contained no words of any language I could recognize. At that point I wasn't even sure that human vocal chords were capable of making the sounds we heard—yips and cries, chirps and whistles intermingled with bass drones and harsh glottal stops. The whole effect chilled me to the bone, exasperated by a sudden blast of cold air that swept through the room like a gale.

"Somebody opened a window," I said.

"I don't think so," Jake replied, and pointed into the left-hand corner of the room.

At first it was just a darker shadow that seemed to suck the light away, leaving only bitter cold behind. My eyes strained to make out detail as the chanting rang in my ears and the room vibrated in sympathy. The light fitting swung lazily in time.

My whole body shook, vibrating with the rhythm. My head swam, and it seemed as if the walls of the cellar melted and ran. The light receded into a great distance until it was little more than a pinpoint in a blanket of darkness, and I was alone, in a cathedral of emptiness where nothing existed, save the dark and the pounding chant.

I saw stars—vast swathes of gold and blue and silver, all dancing in great purple and red clouds that spun webs of grandeur across unending vistas. Shapes moved in and among the nebulae; dark, wispy shadows casting a pallor over
whole galaxies at a time, shadows that capered and whirled as the dance grew ever more frenetic. I was buffeted, as if by a strong, surging tide, but as the beat grew ever stronger I cared little. I gave myself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the stars.

I don't know how long I wandered in the space between. I forgot myself, forgot Jake, dancing in the vastness where only rhythm mattered.

After a while I dreamed. I dreamed a funeral—an open coffin where Jake's pale face stared up at me, a face I could barely see through my tears. I stretched out a hand to touch his cheek.

A gunshot brought me back—reeled in like a hooked fish, tugged reluctantly through a too tight opening and emerging into the blazing light of a cold cellar.

Jake stood in a firing crouch, emptying a clip into the corner. I drew my own gun and joined in, despite not being able to see anything but darker shadow. My ears rang, almost deafened by the shots in the close confinement. All too quickly my trigger pulled on empty. The echoes died away leaving dead silence behind.

Jake and I stood in a quiet, empty cellar that suddenly felt warm and stifling. We took one look at each other and headed for the steps at a run. He beat me to it, just, but I was level by the time we barrelled through the hallway and stumbled, almost fell, out into the driveway. A blanket of cold stars mocked us from on high as we drove off, leaving a squeal of tires in our wake.

"What the fuck just happened?"

O'Hara's bar again, and more of the black stuff, helped down with whiskey. Jake hadn't spoken since we left the cellar, but at least his hands stopped shaking as we headed into the second pint of Guinness.

"Magician's tricks and fucking hocus-pocus," he said. "That's what fucking happened. I told you there was something hinky going on, I fucking told you."

What I'd seen—and felt—back in the cellar was a bit more than
hinky
, but I knew when to keep my mouth shut, if nothing else.

"We're onto something," Jake said. "Somebody just tried to warn us off."

"Actually, I think they succeeded," I said, and got more of the Guinness inside me, trying to make a warm spot in a body that still held too much memory of dancing a cold empty vastness.

Jake took out the small notebook—I'd forgotten all about it, but he'd had it in his pocket the whole time.

"This is it," he said. "This is the thing that will crack the case open for us."

I wasn't sure where he was getting his certainty, but I trusted his instincts. He started to rifle through the pages.

"Maybe we should just leave it alone?" I said. "I saw something back there. I…"

"I don't want to know," Jake replied. It wasn't fear in his eyes this time—it was pleading. "Whatever we saw, it was just a trick. What else could it be?"

That was a question I asked myself all the way home. I fell into bed, but sleep was a long time in coming. When I finally drifted off, I fell into dreams of dancing galaxies, naked women lying on crudely carved circles, and Jake's dead eyes staring up at me through my tears.

I didn't feel rested on wakening, and when I got to work we caught a drive-by shooting that took us most of the morning to wrap up. When we finally got a quiet minute back at the precinct, Jake pulled me aside next to the coffee machine.

"I showed
Kaspervitch the notebook. He says it's a simple substitution cipher. He's working on it now. We should get the gen in an hour or so."

"And then what?" I asked. I was weary. I couldn't see an end on Jake's current path that I liked, and I kept seeing that last dream, of him in the coffin. I started to get a real bad feeling, and what I wanted more than anything else was to just lose myself in the daily grind and forget all about the Mitchell case. But Jake was my partner, and that bought him a lot of slack. I decided to back his play—for the time being at least.

He hadn't noticed my reticence.

"I told you—we'll crack this case wide open. We're onto something. I feel it in my water."

All I felt in mine was cold, a deep chill that even copious amounts of black coffee wouldn't shift. Jake whispered something as we went back to our desks. I didn't quite catch it, and didn't know how important it would prove.

"I've seen it."

"It's a diary," Kaspervitch said, dropping the notebook on Jake's desk and making Jake's fifty disappear into an
inside pocket. "Dates and places, I'm guessing of some kind of business meetings, for a lot of the names in his email contacts turn up in there too. But if they are business meetings, the times and places are off—unless I've made a mistake, all these meetings take place in quiet spots, in the middle of the night."

Jake looked up at me and smiled.

"See—I told you it was hinky."

He turned to Kaspervitch.

"So when's the next one penciled in?"

"Two days’ time—but he won't be there, will he?" Kaspervitch said.

"He won't. But we will," Jake replied. He had his game face on and the bit between his teeth. Nothing I could say now was going to make any difference. All I could do was tag along, and hope I could prevent the coffin dream from ever coming to pass.

The Thursday meeting was due for two in the morning in a disused warehouse in the docks. Jake and I got there early, around midnight. We parked well away from the place and walked in through the alleyways of derelict offices and factories. Both our fathers had worked here, way back when, and as kids we'd run together through these same docks, filled then with workmen and noise and vitality. Now they were as dead as the cellar beneath the Mitchell house, and damned near as cold. We took up a spot in the girders that made up what was left of the rafters of the warehouse, and tried to make ourselves comfortable for what might prove to be a lengthy stakeout.

Jake was quiet, scarily so, for I've rarely met a more voluble man, but he seemed content to sit and watch. He wouldn't allow any discussion of the events in the cellar. I couldn't really blame him for that—but I also couldn't help but wonder whether he had seen a dream of his own—and whether he might have been looking down at me in a coffin in his version.

My butt was starting to get numb from the cold seeping up through the girders when we finally saw some action. We were alerted firstly by the slam of car doors—two followed by a third a minute later. After a delay, three men, dressed in long, hooded robes that might have been comical in another situation, walked into the warehouse from the west-end and immediately started drawing diagrams and circles on the floor. The end result was all too familiar—it seemed to perfectly match the one that had been etched beneath Mrs. Mitchell's dead body.

I realized I was holding my breath, waiting for something—distant chanting maybe, or another vision of the cold depths of space. What I didn't expect was for one of the three figures to stand in the center of the diagram, turn, and look straight up at our position.

"You can come down now," a deep male voice said. "The show's about to begin and you'll get a better view from here."

Jake didn't seem in the slightest surprised by the turn of events, leading me to wonder again what it was that he had seen in our time in the cellar. I was still wondering as we clambered down through a tangle of metal and girders to the floor of the warehouse.

The tall robed man was so polite it was almost surreal.

"Welcome, gentlemen," he said. "We've been expecting you."

"You saw it in advance, didn't you?" Jake said. "That's what you do—you use some kind of new trick to see what's going to happen."

"Oh, it's not a trick, I assure you," the robed man said. "And it's not new either—the Gatekeeper has been showing people the way since time began. You'll see for yourselves soon enough."

"I've got no intention of seeing any more," Jake said. He drew his gun and aimed it directly at the robed figure's chest. The other two—neither of whom had yet said a word, stood several paces further back, but showed no sign of getting involved.

"Jake," I whispered. "We can't do anything here. We've no proof of anything."

Jake waved his pistol towards the tall man.

"He did it—I know he did—he killed the Mitchell family."

The tall man laughed.

"Is that what this is about? I'm afraid you have it all wrong. Mitchell saw what needed doing at our last meeting. His wife was going to die—he saw it, and he knew it—that's the way it works. Once something is seen, it cannot be changed. Poor Mitchell couldn't handle it. He snapped—and you saw the results. And of course, his poor wife died anyway—such a shame."

He didn't sound in the slightest bit concerned, either at the death of Mitchell and his family, or by the fact he had a gun pointed at him.

Jake's earlier calm was rapidly being replaced by anger.

"That's not what happened—there's no way Mitchell could have done it—his gun was in the cellar."

"Oh, I did that," the tall man said casually. "I had to, you see—I saw it, so it had to happen. And I think I'm beginning to understand why it had to happen. It brought you here, to this place, this time. It brought you to the Gate. Yog-Sothoth has something for you to see."