Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (3 page)

The words came out in a rush, years of frustration undimmed by this fresh telling. He knew Henry probably didn’t understand what he was saying, but it felt good to say the words out loud, to vent to a sympathetic ear. Even if that ear couldn’t really hear him.

A key clattered in the lock, and Monroe appeared in the doorway. The mossy stink of his cigarette quickly filled the room as he blew a series of smoke rings.

“You have to go now,” said Monroe. “It’s time for his meds.”

“Of course,” said Oliver, gathering his coat and briefcase.

Monroe stepped inside the room and took a drag on his cigarette. The tip burned brightly, and Oliver nearly jumped out of his skin as Henry let out a terrified scream and scrambled to the corner of his bed, pulling the sheets up over his head.

“Fire! Fire…oh God in heaven, no! Not the fire, please no!” yelled Henry, beating his sheet-covered head with his fists. “It’s coming down again. Fires falling from the sky to burn them all. It’s burning them all!
Iä Cthugha, na, Fnagt
…”

The words died off, but before the last nonsensical syllable was out of Henry’s mouth, Monroe’s cigarette sparked with fire, the entire length of the crooked roll-up bursting into flame that crackled for the briefest moment like a spiteful laugh. Monroe flapped like a flightless bird, and though the sight was comical, the words Henry had spoken left a bitter taste in Oliver’s mouth, like the acrid aftermath of a particularly bilious belch.

“Get out,” ordered Monroe, his words muffled by the hand pressed to his burned lips.

Oliver backed out of the room as Monroe slammed the door. He stood forlornly in the antiseptic corridor of the asylum, listening to Henry’s pitiful sobs and Monroe’s angry words. He wished there was something he could do for his friend, but there was little enough he could do for himself.

Oliver checked the time on his pocket watch.

He had a call to make.

* * *

Rita ran with her arms pumping at her sides, her long economical strides eating up the distance with ease. She left Dorothy Upman Hall and ran along the tree-lined thoroughfare of Church Street, giving a wave to the bronze statue of Dean Halsey as she passed. Behind the statue of the good doctor, the tall tower erected to memorialize the sons of Arkham who’d died in the Civil War reared up taller than the surrounding buildings, and Rita never failed to be impressed by its scale. It was the tallest thing in Arkham, and dominated the skyline south of the river.

She turned north alongside the old graveyard and onto the Aylesbury pike, heading west out of town toward the athletics field. The day was clear and the cold wind kept her nice and cool as the Georgian homes, cobbled streets, and clustered buildings of the town receded from sight.
 

Rita ran every day, and needed to keep her fitness level high. The last thing she wanted was to get kicked out of Miskatonic for failing to achieve sporting glory for the university. She wasn’t smart like Amanda, and knew that if she didn’t justify the faith her scholarship trustees had placed in her, then she’d be back in the tenements of New Orleans within the month.

She kept a picture of Paavo Nurmi above her bed, a Finnish runner who had won five gold medals in five events at the Paris Olympics in 1924. He was part of the Flying Finn, a group of runners who excelled at all levels of distance running, and a man whose achievements Rita hoped one day to emulate. He was her hero, a proper sportsman, not like that thug Jack Dempsey the boys at Miskatonic all seemed to idolize. He was simply a brawler who’d begun his sporting career by picking fights in bars and walking away with the winnings of the bets made against him. Sure, he’d won a bunch of proper fights since then, but hadn’t he just lost his title in Philadelphia to an ex-Marine?

There was a purity in running that couldn’t be found in any other sport, a battle with the self to find those last reserves to keep going when your body was telling you to stop. When it was so easy to give up, the challenge was to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep pushing on. And Rita never gave up. She’d been a fighter ever since she’d decided to get the hell out of New Orleans. She’d had to: after a group of Klansmen had bought her older brother out of jail only to force him into virtual slavery on their sugar plantations east of the city, she’d had no other choice.

Rita’s daddy had gone out one night with a shotgun and Mama Josette, the
mambo
of Rampart Street, to get her brother back. Her father and brother had come back just after dawn, but would never speak of what had happened out on the plantation. Rita saw her daddy’s shotgun still had both shells in the barrel, but when she’d asked how they’d gotten the plantation owner to give her brother back, her momma had told her to hush up and never speak of it again. She never did find out how her brother had been freed, but a month later, she heard a number of plantations along the east bank of the Mississippi had burned down.

No way she was going back to that life.

With that thought, she picked up the pace, knowing she would need to dig deep to finish her run if she peaked too early.
 

West of Arkham, the trees crowded in on the pike, forming shadowed leafy archways and drooping bowers. The road was asphalt, and though there weren’t any sidewalks, the sides were still grassy, so Rita ran there. The forests grew thickly around Arkham, surrounding the town as though seeking to keep it away from prying eyes. She’d mentioned that impression to Amanda once, but her friend had looked at her strangely and muttered something about the witch-hunts of hundreds of years ago.

Through gaps in the forest canopy, Rita saw the hills rising above the trees. Though they were many miles ahead, it seemed as though they too pressed in on the city, their rounded flanks and stone-capped summits bare of any vegetation whatsoever. Rita eased up, slowing to a more measured pace as she came up on the rutted turnoff to the athletics field. It was a mile and a half to the field. By the time she’d gone around the baseball diamond and the bleachers, it’d be time to head back to take a shower before heading to class.

She took the turn and came in sight of the athletics grounds: a football field and a crumbling stand, which backed onto a baseball diamond and tiered wooden bleachers stacked high behind home plate. A few jocks were out hitting a ball around, mostly freshmen from Hell East, and Rita didn’t blame them for wanting to get out of that crummy dorm, with its busted heating, crappy plumbing, and lousy rooms. She headed past the thwack of ash on leather and made her way along the cinder track at the edge of the grounds.

Running wasn’t as popular as baseball and football, and much of the track was overgrown with weeds. Rita was sweating freely now, her entire concentration fixed on continuing forward. She heard whooping yells and more cracks of bat on ball, but paid them no mind. She was in the runner’s “corridor” where all she could see was the ground immediately in front of her, the yard or so of track she would cross in the next second.

Too late, Rita saw the bundle of clothes on the track and tried to avoid it. Her right foot came down on the bundle and she felt her ankle twist as she tried to extend her stride to avoid it. The world spun around her and she tumbled to the ground, grazing her knee and slamming her cheek into the cinders. She rolled and spat dirt, grabbing her ankle with a howl of frustration. She could already feel the joint begin to swell and the pain throbbing up her shin told her that, at the very least, she’d sprained it badly.

Gritting her teeth against the pain, she looked to see what had tripped her.

“What the hell…?” she said, not sure she was seeing it right.

It looked like a tattered dress, black and sequined, with corn-colored butterflies stitched around the hems. The cloth was torn, as if it had been cut up with long pinking scissors, and Rita saw it was wet with a sticky liquid. Pink and red lumps laced with wriggling insects protruded from the arms and bottom of the dress.

A moment later Rita saw the bloody remains of the girl wrapped in the dress.

And this time it was her turn to scream.

CHAPTER TWO

Rivet guns and the sound of hammers echoed over New York’s East River Shipyard, reverberating off the cavernous assembly sheds as waterfalls of sparks fell from acetylene torches welding heavy sheets of steel together. The shipyard employed nearly ten thousand men: fitters, welders, riveters, steelworkers, panel beaters, riggers, glassblowers, surveyors, engineers, electricians, and skilled machine operators.

The vessel currently berthed in dry dock 23F was the DCV
Matilda Rose
, a deepwater construction vessel that was nearing completion. The vessel belonged to the Warren Mining Company, a business that had prospered under the ineffectual presidency of Warren Harding and the benevolence of the corrupt Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall.

In 1922, the
Wall Street Journal
had uncovered evidence that Fall had leased government petroleum fields at Elk Hills and Teapot Dome to oilmen in return for huge bribes and numerous gifts. One of the benefactors of this had been the oilman Charles Warren, and though the fields at Elk Hills had since been returned to the government, his drilling rigs’ brief tenure on the land had made him millions of dollars. Though the ensuing scandal had hit Warren and the other oilmen hard, America’s voracious consumption ensured that their businesses weathered the storm without noticeable ill-effect.
 

Work on the DCV
Matilda Rose
had begun at the East River Shipyard the year before, and her launch date was set for early November. The foreman of the shipyard was optimistic that he and his work gangs would hit that deadline. Designed to build offshore drilling platforms, the vessel was ungainly and ugly, but would allow Charles Warren’s drillers to reach oil fields that had, until now, been inaccessible via conventional means.

Her decks swarmed with workers, mainly steel fabricators and welders fitting the last portions of her deck and winch gear. A giant A-frame crane rose in the middle of the ship, and it was here that Patrick Doyle and his workmate, Martin Quinn, watched the quayside cranes lifting a tarpaulin-covered object onto the forked fantail at the rear of the ship. Patrick and Martin had, together with a veritable army of welders, recently finished attaching a complex series of winches and cable drums to the
Matilda Rose
and were enjoying a well-deserved break.

“So what d’ye reckon that’ll be then, Patrick?” asked Martin, carving a slice of his apple with a small pocket-knife and nodding toward the object being maneuvered into position by a gang of foreigners. They were mulattos and oriental-looking types mostly, but among them were a sprinkling of strange looking men of uncommon bulk with skin burnished bronze in distant lands.
 

“Damned if I know, laddie,” shrugged Patrick. He took a drink from an unmarked glass bottle and handed it to Martin. “Here, a drop o’ the real stuff. By God, we’ve earned it.”

“Aye, that we have, Patrick,” agreed Martin, taking a slug of the Irish whiskey. “Saints alive, Patrick, where did ye get that from? That’s whiskey right enough, none of your bathtub shite.”

“Sure, didn’t I run into a lad from Killarney the other night in Shaughnessy’s? Lad’s come in from Ellis Island not three nights previous. Come to New York looking for his mother, he says. She came here six months ago, says he. Tells me her name, and I say, as God is my witness, that I knows her. Sends him up to Bowery Mission with a tear in me eye, and isn’t he so overcome with gratitude that he gives me this bottle?”

“Away with ye!” laughed Martin. “That’s ten Hail Marys at least.”

“Ah, but it’s worth it, eh?”

“Sure is, Paddy-boy,” said Martin, taking another drink.

The crane lowered its cargo to the deck, and the strange workers began fixing it to the deck plates with rivet guns and long lengths of chain. Whatever it was, they were keen to keep it covered, but the winds whipping in off the East River had other ideas. A gust caught the edge of the tarpaulin as it was lifted aside to enable one of the big men to reach something underneath, and it blew up and over the object.

“Well would ye look at that, Martin?” said Patrick.

Amid shouting voices in a language neither he nor Martin understood, the workers tried to cover the object up again. Patrick saw a flash of bronze metal, curved enough to suggest that what lay beneath was roughly spherical in shape and adorned with gleaming metal protuberances that didn’t look like any piece of drilling equipment Patrick had ever seen.

Martin handed the bottle back to him.

“Looks like some kind of diving bell,” he said.

“Aye, that it did,” said Martin, the matter already slipping from his thoughts. Patrick saw him glance surreptitiously at the bottle and knew he was angling for another drink. Patrick obliged him as the foreman shooed curious riggers away from the freshly covered object.

“It looks like a diving bell, right enough,” said Patrick. “But you and I both fitted those bloody big cable drums for that frame, and as sure as me father was the best pub fighter in Cork, I know for a fact there’s thousands of meters of cable stored below decks.”