Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (19 page)

“Reporters? What the hell you want with this place?”

“We heard that a lot of the girls from Miskatonic come here,” said Rex. “That right?”

“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that,” said the invisible speaker. “Rufus might, though.”

“Rufus?” asked Minnie. “Does he own this joint?”

The unseen doorman laughed and hacked out a consumptive cough. “No, he don’t own the joint, but if anyone knows what goes on in here it’s him.”

“Can we speak to him?” said Rex.

“Maybe.”

“Would another ten dollars get us a
yes
?” said Minnie, gesturing to Rex.

“You could try and find out,” said the voice.

Rex sighed and took a ten dollar bill from his wallet. He passed it through the door. The letterbox snapped shut, leaving them standing on the street like a couple of schmucks. They stood in silence for a few minutes until Rex scratched his chin.

“Well, that was a waste of money,” he said.

Just then the sound of bolts drawing back sounded in tandem with a heavy lock being turned. The door opened and a waft of stagnant air breathed outward from the hallway, laced with the acrid reek of old booze and stale sweat.

“Get inside,” said the doorman, a hunched figure in a dirty shirt and stinking canvas trousers. He had bad skin and thinning wisps of greasy hair that hung over his collar. Rex imagined him as some deformed assistant to a mad professor. “Rufus is downstairs.”

Rex crushed his cigarette beneath his heel and tipped his hat to the repulsive doorman as he descended into the depths.

“I wonder what level of Hell this is,” said Rex.

“I’d say the bottom one,” replied Minnie.

* * *

Oliver led the way through the halls of the Tyner Annex, trying not to notice the odd looks his newly acquired companion was attracting. Students looked at Finn with barely disguised loathing, while the members of the faculty gave Oliver looks that suggested the dean was going to hear of this latest faux pas.

“This where you work?” asked Finn.

“Me? No, I work in the Liberal Arts building on the other side of the square.”

“Right you are,” said Finn, as though he knew where that was.

They made their way along a bare corridor, walled with gleaming ceramic tiles and punctuated by heavy doors of iron labeled with strange symbols warning of all manner of potential hazards. Oliver smiled as he wondered if these symbols were simply mankind’s latest attempt at magical scribbling. Didn’t these warning symbols have the same power to warn off the unwary as did a bloody handprint or a mystical sigil scratched on the wall of a cave?

“So where did you get that thing, Mr. Finn?” asked Oliver. “Whatever it is.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Oliver felt an unexpected touch of kinship with the man, as though they were both privy to knowledge neither was intended to possess. He glanced over at Finn, seeing the lurking fear behind the Irishman’s studied calm. Whatever that device was, however he had come by it, it was clearly a source of some discomfiture to the man.

“Oh, you’d be surprised what I believe these days,” said Oliver.

Finn looked at him like he was trying to determine if Oliver was making fun of him.

“Aye, well, it’s been a strange couple of days,” said Finn.” Buy me a hot coffee and I might be persuaded to tell ye.”

Oliver nodded and pushed on a large button outside a heavy metal door of painted white iron. A yellow light flashed above the door and a heavy lock disengaged from the frame.

“Jaysus,” said Finn, stepping back. “What sort of place is this?”

“This is one of the electrical engineering labs,” explained Oliver, pushing open the door with his shoulder. It was heavy, but once moving it swung smoothly open on greased hinges. “Lots of big machines in here, high voltages and the like, so it can be quite dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” said Finn, shaking his head, but following Oliver inside.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Finn. Dr. Hayes is a very competent individual. Right now he’s developing a new kind of battery for the university’s proposed expedition to the Antarctic. He’s a heck of a clever fellow, so if there’s anyone that can tell what that…object is, it’ll be him.”

Inside, the laboratory was a steel vaulted chamber of bare brick and metal. Heavy benches bore the weight of enormous machines of green iron and looped coils of brass cabling. Things on the tables were strewn about: complex blueprints, boxes of tools, crackling battery packs, and disassembled machinery. A couple of student assistants tinkered in the guts of a machine that looked like it was some kind of generator.

A pretty girl with bobbed brown hair peered through a microscope at an arrangement of wires. A crackling hiss of soldering fizzed from the work at her fingertips. She looked up as they approached, blinking as her eyes refocused from the magnifications of the microscope.

“Hello,” she said, her voice timid and quiet. “Can I help you?”

“I certainly hope so,” said Oliver. “I’m Professor Grayson, and I’m looking for Dr. Hayes. Is he here?”

She shook her head, eyes downcast as though it was her fault the doctor was absent. “No, I’m afraid he’s not. He and Professor Pabodie are off testing his latest battery design with the new drill.”

“Ah, I see,” said Oliver. “Do you happen to know when they might be back?”

“Sorry, professor, I don’t,” she said. “Perhaps I can help you? I work closely with Dr. Hayes. I mean to say that he’s a great teacher and I, well, I might be able to help you if it’s nothing too complex.”

Finn transferred his bundle into the crook of his arm and stepped forward to take her hand, shaking it enthusiastically with a roguish glint in his eye.

“That’d be grand, lass,” said Finn. “Finn Edwards at your service. And who might you be?”

“Kate Winthrop,” said the girl with a shy smile. She was pretty, with a stylish haircut and the demeanor of a girl who liked the latest fashions, but would never dare to wear them beyond the confines of her bedroom. She wore a lab coat over a shapely figure of subtle curves. Oliver saw Finn taking in every one of them.

“Mr. Finn, I mean, Mr. Edwards,” corrected Oliver with a discreet cough, “has a strange device he’d like Dr. Hayes to have a look at if he gets a moment. I know he’s busy with getting everything ready for the Antarctic proposal, but if he could spare an hour or so, Mr. Edwards would be very grateful. Wouldn’t you, Finn?”

“Aye, very grateful,” agreed Finn, placing the sphere on the table and unwrapping it.

Once again, Oliver was struck by the sheer strangeness of the object. There shouldn’t have been any perturbation—it was just a sphere of polished metal—but there was some indefinable queerness to it that disturbed Oliver.

“Goodness,” said Kate, bending down to take a closer look.

Finn grabbed her arm and said, “Careful now, Miss Winthrop, that thing’s not quite…”

“Not quite what?” asked Kate when Finn didn’t proceed.

Finn struggled for the right word, before finally settling on one that seemed to fit the bill.

“It’s not quite stable,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I ain’t exactly sure now,” said Finn, sounding embarrassed. “I was movin’ the pieces on the surface around and my room at Ma’s started to go all screwy. It was like the world got, I dunno, thin or something. The walls were shifting and moving like I’d been on a three day bender with a gallon of bathtub gin. Which, I might add, wasn’t the case. I was sober as a priest on Ash Wednesday, I swear. Hungover maybe, but not drunk, no way.”

Oliver listened to Finn’s words, now beginning to regret his decision to allow him within the university buildings. The man reeked of cheap whiskey and had obviously not had a wash today. Clearly Oliver’s readings of Laban Shrewsbury’s book had left him open to believing all manner of outlandish nonsense.

“Ach, I see the way you’se are lookin’ at me,” said Finn. “You’ll be thinking I’m a crazy gobshite, I can tell. Well, to hell with you two, I
ain’t
crazy. I’ll figure this out on me own.”

Finn made to retrieve the sphere, but Kate stepped in front of him with a strange look in her eyes. Oliver had taken her for timid and shy, but her body language spoke of a fierce determination. How easy it was to misjudge people!

“I don’t think you’re crazy, Mr. Edwards,” said Kate, sounding intrigued. “Flux stability and magnetic resonance integrity are my fields of research, so I assure you, I will treat this matter with all seriousness.”

She bent down to take another look at the sphere, and Finn backed away from her.

“I didn’t get a word of that, did you, Prof?” said Finn.

“Not really, no,” said Oliver, turning to Kate. “Are you saying there might be something to what this man is saying?”

“Absolutely,” said Kate, a measure of her original quietness coming to the fore. “I mean, it’s all experimental, but we’ve been having problems keeping a charge in the new batteries, and I’ve uncovered something that might explain it. At least, I think I have.”

She led them toward a machine on a far desk, which looked like a cross between a candlestick telephone and a mangled trumpet. Copper wires were wrapped tightly around a central hub, while glass rods capped with brass ran the length of the device.

“Our detection equipment here is quite advanced, but still woefully inadequate to capture the full spectra of information I need to make my equations accurate enough. Put simply, the electromagnetic fields in this town are shot to hell, which means there are hot spots of dimensional instability that bear a striking resemblance to what you just described to me, Mr. Edwards.”

“Jeez, girl, where’d you learn all them big words?” said Finn.

“Here at Miskatonic,” said Kate, choosing not to take offense at Finn’s words. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

Her device was connected to a wall socket. When Kate turned the switch, the transparent rods hummed with a static buzz, and a flickering white light danced along the inner faces of the glass.

Oliver felt a curious metallic taste in his mouth and the hairs on his arms stood on end as an actinic charge hazed the air with static. The light in the room suddenly felt…
thin
, as though the skin of the world had been pulled tight over its face. Oliver lifted a hand to his forehead as a vertiginous dizziness threatened to overcome him.

Kate turned a brass dial on the device and the thinness was replaced by a heavy solidity; the lines of the bench, the floor, and the walls seemed to etch themselves indelibly onto the surface of his retina. Though he knew it was nonsense, it felt as though the mass of reality in the room had become infinitely greater.

It was a dreadfully uncomfortable feeling, and Oliver’s eyes watered as he felt the surrounding air exerting an inexorable pressure on his body. Though he had never been in a decompression chamber, Oliver had read of its unpleasant side effects if used incorrectly, and this felt a lot like the dangerous symptoms described in the medical journals.

“Good God,” said Oliver, feeling his stomach lurch and threaten to expel its contents.

“It’s…it’s…too
real
!” said Finn, gripping the edge of a nearby bench. “I feel like I’m gonna puke.”

 
“It takes a bit of getting used to,” said Kate. “Breathing shallow helps.”

She reached over and switched the device off. Instantaneously, the world returned to normal and the alternating thinness and sickening solidity that had swelled around them vanished.

“What the hell was that?” demanded Finn.

“I call it the flux stabilizer,” said Kate, checking the device as though disappointed with the effects it had produced. “It can weaken or strengthen the electromagnetic field in a localized area, but I can’t get the resonance to a high enough level to fully counteract the anomalies we’ve been seeing.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow any of this,” said Oliver. “Nor do I see what this has to do with the sphere Mr. Edwards has brought you.”

Kate gave him a look that suggested he was being willfully dense and moved over to a machine that looked similar to the cylinder recorder his Cambridge friend Hillshore used. It was apparent, however, that this device did not record sound. A thin pen on a slender wire described a sinuous waveform across a long sheet of graph paper mounted on a slowly revolving drum.

Kate lifted the long length of paper that had already been drawn by the machine and held it out to Finn and Oliver. The inked line went up and down in a smooth curve at regular intervals, but Kate pointed to a sharp dip on one of the wave crests, which was immediately followed by a sudden spike.

“This is a modified Hospitalier Ondograph,” explained Kate. “It records a waveform image built up over time, using a synchronous motor drive mechanism and a permanent magnet galvanometer. It’s not the most accurate method of measurement, but it’s the best we have. Right now it’s recording the density of the electromagnetic flux within a two mile radius. Normally it’s pretty steady, but see these changes? That’s where I turned on my device. I weakened the field first, then strengthened it a moment later. You see? The ondograph captured the flux in black and white.”

Seeing Finn and Oliver’s confusion, Kate gave an exasperated sigh.

“For goodness sake, freshmen taking Physics 101 know more than you two. Electromagnetism is a fundamental interaction of nature; it’s like the glue that holds the world together. If you can measure it, you can learn where the weak spots are. My device is designed to strengthen the electromagnetic field for a short time. To shore up the walls between worlds so to speak.”

“I’m sorry,” said Oliver. “The walls between worlds?”

“Yes,” said Kate. “
Now
who sounds crazy?”

* * *

Rex led the way as they traveled down a dirty hallway and entered a ripe-smelling cavern of a room, its glossy floor wet with mopping, and the air bitter with an ammoniac reek of bleach. Tables and chairs were stacked up in front of what was presumably a dance floor, and the place was depressingly empty.

“Sheesh, this is where college kids come to get their kicks?” asked Minnie.