Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (32 page)

“So, we’re buying into this?” asked Stone. “Monsters beneath the sea?”

“I’ve seen too much and read too much to take such matters lightly, Mr. Stone,” said Alexander. “Our very reluctance to believe in these creatures is their strongest ally. As we march into the modern world, with its glitz and glamour and so-called technological innovation, we forget the history the younger generation seems in such a rush to leave behind. All history becomes legend and myth with enough time. And even if you don’t accept what we are telling you, isn’t it enough to know that the people we are looking for believe it?”

Stone shrugged. “I guess that’ll do for now. I don’t care whether they believe in some underwater squid monster or fairies in a garden. All I need to know is what they are and how we stop them.”

“I think I can shed some light on what they are,” said Alexander. “But first I will need to tell you a little more of how I came to be in possession of the unholy knowledge of the Great Old Ones.”

And Alexander told them of the Great War.

* * *

“I was a Marine captain in the 3rd Division during the war, part of the American Expeditionary Force,” said Alexander. “We were billeted in a little place called Pavont when the Germans attacked the western front in March of 1918. It was part of their spring offensive, and they were hoping to push the British army back before the American forces were in place. But they didn’t figure on old Bundy, Major General of the US 2nd.”

Alexander’s eyes lost their focus and Oliver knew he was back in the mud and horror of France, reliving the terror of those days of battle and bloodshed. He could only imagine how vile it must have been to take part in such slaughter.

“The British 5th Army took a hell of a beating, and there wasn’t much left of them by the time the Germans were finished. I remember seeing the stragglers and wounded coming south in a never-ending convoy. I don’t mind telling you that it scared me to see so many men broken and bloodied in so short a time. What had we come to as a species when we could inflict such mayhem on one another? But I was a captain and I had a job to do. The brass threw us forward to Château-Thierry alongside the 2nd Army Division and we took up position in the shelled ruins of the castle, stretched out along the southern banks of the Marne. We were there for a few days before the Germans attacked, but before then, Henry Cartwright and I discovered a hidden library secreted in the catacombs of the castle.”

“Cartwright?” said Stone. “The guy in Arkham Asylum who set those fires back in 1923?”

“The very same,” said Oliver sadly.

“Yes, Henry and I served together in France, and may God forgive me, but what we found in that library is what set him on the road to his lunatic fire-starting. He and I descended into the library, a dusty, cobwebbed place filled with ancient books, scrolls, and collections of what looked like occult paraphernalia. Henry and I, together with a few Marines of a more academic bent perused the books, and not a day goes by where I wish I had not succumbed to my curiosity and thirst for knowledge. What I read in those books has haunted me ever since and my happy ignorance of the horrible truth of the universe was forever shattered. Yet as great an effect as those books had on me, it was nothing compared to the effect it had on Henry and the others. Most could not bear the horrors recounted in those books, and they took their own lives, but before we could learn much more, the Germans attacked.”

Alexander paused, and such was the pregnant weight of expectation hanging on his words that no one dared press him to continue. This was a tale that would be told at its own pace.

“We came under heavy shellfire at dawn, followed by wave after wave of German soldiers. The smoke was thick over the river and the rain was making it hard to see much of anything, but we were Marines and we train harder than anyone else. My men fought like damn heroes, even though we felt like we were in our own Alamo. But even Marines have their breaking point, and by the end of the afternoon, we’d reached ours. We’d taken heavy losses, but just when I thought we were going to be overrun, the damnedest thing happened. Huge fires erupted among the German forces, like living balls of flame that leapt from man to man, igniting everything they touched. I swear it was like the fire was alive. Like fireflies
made
of fire. A storm of embers engulfed the German soldiers and I reckon it would have gotten us too if we hadn’t taken shelter behind the walls. Inside of a minute, the battle was over. All that was left of the attackers were blackened corpses, burned so far beyond recognition it was hard to tell they’d once been human.”

“What was it?” asked Minnie, still holding onto Rex’s hand. “What happened?”

“At first we thought it was our artillery dropping incendiary rounds. Dropped hellishly close to us, it’s true, but we didn’t mind since they’d saved our bacon and no mistake. It was only later I found out we didn’t have any guns nearby with those kind of shells. You needed to be close to use incendiaries, as the phosphor burns up so quickly. There wasn’t a gun with that kind of shell within ten miles of us.”

“So what was it?” said Rex.

“It was Henry,” said Alexander. “The books we’d found contained all manner of arcane secrets, the names and histories of creatures so terrible as to defy explanation. They also contained the incantations, formulae, and vile words needed to summon aspects of their form to Earth. Henry had made use of one such rite to bring down a shred of a being known as
Cthugha
, an ancient Old One whose matter is said to be composed entirely of fire that burns with the intensity of a star.”

Oliver listened with stoic intensity, now understanding a measure of the mysterious rants Henry had issued in the years since his incarceration. To hear of things that could only be described as
spells
was incredible, but what was even more incredible was the ease with which he could assimilate this into his new worldview.

“Of course, I didn’t realize this at the time; it wasn’t until later I learned of what Henry was capable. In any case, we were obliged to fall back from the castle the following day, and despite my misgivings, Henry insisted we bear with us as many of the accursed books as we could before the Germans took Château-Thierry.”

Alexander paused, allowing his audience a moment to process what he was telling them. After a mouthful of coffee, he continued.

“The next time we fought the Germans was at a place called Belleau Wood. Fritz had punched through the French to our left, so our boys marched six miles through the night to take up positions along the Paris-Metz highway. It wasn’t pretty, but the pasting the French had taken didn’t leave us a lot of choice. We were told to hold where we stood, so we dug shallow fighting pits and when they came at us we gave them hell with volley after volley of gunfire. We sent them running with their tails between their legs. The Frenchies kept telling us to fall back, but we told them straight, “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!” I have to give the Germans their due—they kept coming, but we held our positions. No way were we letting them through.

“Anyway, we had them stuck fast, and before they could plan something else we took the initiative and hit them first. The French attacked to our left and we launched an assault on Hill 142 to stop them getting torn up by flanking fire.”

Oliver’s breath caught in his throat.

“142!” he exclaimed. “Henry keeps raving about 142! Sometimes it’s all he can scream before they have to sedate him. What happened on that hill?”

“It’s where Henry lost all sense of reason and humanity,” said Alexander. “It gives me no pleasure to relate this, Oliver, but I suspect it will give you some insight as to the nature of Henry’s madness. It was a hell of a fight, and we lost a lot of good men getting up that hill, but we damn well took it and began our advance into Belleau Wood. We were taking heavy fire, and heavy machine guns were cutting men down all around me. I was utterly terrified, expecting a bullet to hit me with every step I took. We pushed into the south end of the wood and ran into a nightmarish assembly of machine gun nests, barbed wire, and snipers. You could hardly see anything for the smoke, but we got in among the Germans and it was the most terrible thing. The fighting was hand-to-hand, men tearing at each other with bayonets, knives, entrenching tools, pistols, and grenades. It was hideous, seeing men that were grade school teachers, accountants, mechanics, or cooks reduced to the level of animals, fighting and killing like beasts. I suppose we were all beasts that day.

“We couldn’t go forward and the Germans were on the verge of pushing us out of the woods, when Henry came to me and told me what he wanted to do. He told me that what he had done at the Château was the tip of the iceberg, that the fires he had summoned were the servants of Cthugha. Today he would summon the essence of Cthugha himself! I tried to talk Henry out of it, to tell him how dangerous it was, but he would have none of it. He even called me a coward for shrinking from such power. The following morning, the forest was all but destroyed.

“The brass later said it was a coordinated barrage, but it was nothing of the sort. I watched as the sky tore open with a hellish red light, as though the clouds themselves had ignited. It was like watching a vast ocean of fire fall from the heavens. We pulled back as lashing tendrils of flame and ruin slammed into the earth and destroyed everything they touched. The noise of it was the most terrible thunder, and by the middle of the afternoon, there was nothing left of the forest but a devastation of shattered trees. We could only look at this burned wasteland like it was the surface of the moon. Almost the entire wood was gone, wiped off the face of the Earth along with every living thing inside it. That wasn’t the end of the battle; it took six attacks before we pushed the Germans out of there, but that firestorm broke them and sucked the fight right out of them. We’d taken the woods and held the German offensive, but Belleau Wood turned out to be the bloodiest, most hard-won battle our boys fought in the whole of the war.

“I sought Henry out at the end of the fighting, for I had lost contact with him since he had enacted his mad plan to bring a fragment of Cthugha’s essence to Earth. I found him weeping among the wounded, a broken man. He begged my forgiveness for what he’d done, for the thousands of lives he had ended, but I couldn’t help him. I was too horrified by what he had done to grant him any kind of absolution. He cursed me and I didn’t see him again until I came to Arkham.”

“Sheesh,” said Minnie.

“That’s a hell of a story,” added Rex.

“Yeah,” said Stone, “but it doesn’t answer my question. What are these things hunting the girls of Arkham?”

“I haven’t finished yet,” said Alexander, taking a deep breath, as though the telling of the terrible fighting against the Germans had exhausted him. “After the battle, I was promoted and transferred up the chain of command, but I heard rumors from my old company, vile tales of mutilations and torture done under the cover of darkness. I dismissed these stories at first, thinking they were nothing more than the product of some soldier’s over-active imagination that had spread through the ranks like dysentery. But then I thought back to the books we found in Château-Thierry, and I realized there might be more to what I was hearing than just rumor.”

“So what else was in those books?” asked Rex.

“Horrible things, my good man, horrible things,” said Alexander. “They weren’t just occult tomes of devilish incantations and forbidden rites. They were the diaries of a madman, a man who had dwelled in the castle two centuries earlier. His name was Francois-Honore Balfour, the Comte d’Erlette, and he was a terrible individual who learned how to transform men into monsters through cannibalism and cruelty. He created his own army of twisted, degenerate ghouls to serve him with unquestioning loyalty, and his diaries spoke of how such a process could be hastened. All wars have their horror stories, their tales of battlefield ghosts and the inexplicable, but as I began to hear more and more stories of half-eaten bodies and other dreadful tales circulating around my old unit, I began to fear that Henry had begun to put some of the Comte’s hideous teachings into practice.”

“So what did you do?” asked Minnie. “Did you stop him?”

“I was going to, but before I could do anything I was wounded in a German attack and sent back to the States. By the time my convalescence was over, the war had ended and our boys were back home. I tried to put the war behind me, but then I heard that Henry Cartwright was a member of the staff at Miskatonic University, and I knew I had to see what had become of him. Needless to say, our reunion was not a happy one, and he all but threw me into the street when I arrived on his doorstep. I had applied for a position at the university, but Henry vehemently opposed my appointment. I suppose he had tried to bury the memories of what he had done during the war deep within his subconscious, but my appearance must have shaken them loose. Not long after my arrival, the fire-starting began and then it wasn’t long before the poor fellow was incarcerated in Arkham Asylum.”

“These ghouls remind me of those things I scared off outside your office,” Stone said to Oliver. “I reckon your old friend sent them to kill you. If the bastard’s locked up, then it sounds like he got what he deserved.”

“Steady now, Stone,” said Oliver. “Henry is my friend, and I am struggling to reconcile these revelations of Alexander’s with the man I knew. It’s all so insane.”

“I know how it must sound, Oliver, but Henry stared too deeply into the abyss, not realizing that what dwells in the darkness was looking back at him. He hid it well, but a man’s sanity can hold on by its fingertips for only so long.”

“So you reckon Henry made himself some of these ghouls?” asked Rex. “He got some folk and turned them into monsters?”

“I think that’s exactly what he did,” said Alexander.

“But why?” said Minnie.

“I fear we will never know,” sighed Alexander. “Perhaps he once had a devilish plan, but it was derailed by his sudden descent into madness. Whatever his ultimate goal may have been, his creations are now loose and are killing according to the last design he may have left them. The secret to their defeat may lie locked in Henry’s mind.”