Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (33 page)

“Then I’ll get it out of him,” said Oliver.

“It will be buried deep,” Alexander warned him. “And you may not like what you find along with it.”

“I don’t care,” said Oliver. “If Henry is responsible for these killings, then I may be the only one who can find out how to stop them.”

* * *

After deciding to meet again the next day, the ad hoc band of investigators split up, and Oliver made his way back to the university. Alexander declared himself too drained by the retelling of his years in the war and made his way home, while Rex and Minnie returned to the offices of the
Advertiser
to hunt down anything that might help in the identification of where Henry’s ghouls might have made their lair. Stone declined to mention where he was heading, and took off in his Crossley.

Oliver’s office had been newly furnished with a door, a sturdy portal of polished oak that nicely matched the surrounding frame and looked solid enough to resist any future attacks. Oliver hoped there wouldn’t be any further attacks, but it was good to have such a robust barrier between him and the outside world.

Lying upon his desk was a brown envelope marked with his name. Oliver recognized the elaborate cursive handwriting of Professor Drouet. He tore open the envelope and saw a copy of the French text he’d sent over for translation. A sheet of paper was clipped to his own transcription, and as he read the English translation, he sat behind his desk like someone was slowly letting the air out of him. His heart hammered and his skin became clammy.

He’d wanted to deny what Alexander had told their group about Henry’s cannibalistic monsters, but this, combined with his intelligible ravings, left no doubt in his mind as to the depths of horror his friend had plumbed during the war.

The text read:

— In the sphinx-haunted deserts of the pharaohs, the bestial ones are worshipped. Men once, flesh-eaters now…Anubis judges the dead and casts them back. Eaters of the dead, they exist in the shadows, ashen, degenerate things. An army of them in my catacombs falls from the lofty grace of god-created man, becoming something less and something more.

— As our race moves ever on, so too can that march of progress be reversed.

— And the Men of Leng know degeneration is progress of a sort.

— The things I have seen, the things I now know…these are the secrets of which the Mad Poet of Damascus spoke. Yakthoob of Irem schooled him, and though he was taken to those spaces in-between, where dwell the Great Old Ones, his revelations live on. The translation of Wormius eludes me, but the Black Man of Egypt yet retains a copy that escaped Torquemada’s pyres. What price might he demand? Whatever it is, I shall gladly pay it, for what price can any man place upon illumination?

— They gather against me: the delusional Sun King, his foolish clergy and the fearful peasants! They fear the truths I know, yet once the wine of knowledge is uncorked it can never be sealed again. Though the walls of my château are cast down and the mob rampages, destroying treasures of a thousand years without a thought, my works will endure. Others will come, and they will learn what I have uncovered…

Reading these words, Oliver felt a chill of revulsion and horror creep across his skin. These were terrible, monstrous ramblings, and he could not imagine how damaged a man must be to put such vile things down on paper. God only knew what Professor Drouet must think of him for having sent this over to him!

Oliver read the words again, and knew immediately they did not belong to Henry, but to the madman whose diary he had read during the war. He had no idea what much of it meant, the names obscure and the concepts too fantastical, but he knew a man who would: Morley Dean, his colleague from Brown University and companion in adversity during the expedition to Alaska.

Oliver took out a pen and dashed off a letter to Morley, his pen scratching across the surface of the paper in a spidery scrawl that reminded him of the last few missives the intended recipient of this letter had sent him. In as economical terms as possible, Oliver outlined the nature of the books he had recently read, and copied the translated French onto a separate sheet, together with selected highlights from the text he had transcribed from the wax cylinders.

He folded the sheets of paper and slid them into an envelope, thinking long and hard about whether to post them. Morley had suffered greatly in pursuit of arcane truths, and did Oliver have the right to potentially damage him yet again with his request for information and help? Were it not for the gruesome nature of the situation in Arkham, Oliver would have left Morley to his quiet life in the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Lives hung in the balance, and Oliver knew he had no choice but to seek whatever help he could, no matter the cost. He scribbled Morley’s address on the front of the envelope and gathered up his coat as he made his way from the Liberal Arts building. As he passed the staff facilities at the front door, he dropped the letter to Morley into the external mail tray.

Outside, the sun was a little over halfway through its journey to sunset, and he pulled his coat tighter around him as he crossed the open park space on his way to the Miskatonic Library and his appointment with Kate Winthrop.

Anything to divert his mind from the horrible murders.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The hallway of Ma’s Boarding House was like a sepia photograph in a volume of Wild West history. It was late afternoon, and everything was bleached of color. A fine coating of dust lay on the ornaments, portraits, and knick-knacks, none of which looked like they’d been moved since they were put in place by the first Ma, back in the late seventeen hundreds. Only the threadbare carpet was dust free. Clearly this boarding house was an establishment with a fast turnover of guests.

Oliver and Kate looked around with the awkwardness of strangers appearing in the hall of someone they knew only slightly and who didn’t want to break anything. Oliver carried the heavy sphere in a carpetbag Kate had brought in order to transport it safely, and the weight of it was beginning to hurt his arm.

Finn appeared on the landing above them and gave them a wave.

“Jaysus, about time you two got yer arses round here,” he said. “I’ve been going bloody stir crazy, so I have. C’mon up, and tell me what ye’ve got.”

They went upstairs and followed Finn into an anonymous room that smelled of sweat, whiskey, and unwashed clothes. The Irishman stood perched beside a faded dresser and waved them toward the unmade bed.
 

Oliver looked at the state of the sheets and took a breath, not wishing to offend a man he had come to learn was a hardened criminal. He looked around for a gun or a knife in the room, but wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t see it. It would be tucked into Finn’s pants at the small of his back wouldn’t it?

He sat on the bed. Its worn springs squealed like an injured cat.

“So?” said Finn. “What is it then? The round thing I brought ye. Any ideas for me?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Oliver, placing the carpetbag between him and Kate, who opened the bag and took out the sphere, careful not to disturb the patterns etched onto its surface. Gingerly, she placed the device on the floor.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Finn.

“It means that we’re not telling you anything about this object until you enlighten us as to how it came into your possession,” said Oliver.

Finn ran a hand through his unruly hair. “Ah, y’know I’d love to, professor, I really would, but ye’d never believe me. I was there, and I ain’t too sure
I
believe what happened.”

 
“Trust me, Mr. Edwards,” said Oliver. “Nothing you could tell me would eclipse the strangeness of the things I have learned in the last week. Please, tell us how you came by the device.”

Finn paced the room, looking like a caged animal and wringing his hands like some of the lunatics Oliver had seen in Arkham Asylum.

“You’ll think I’m a damn maniac,” said Finn.

“Please, Mr. Edwards, it’s vitally important you tell us,” pressed Kate.

“Well, seeing it’s you, pretty lass,” said Finn, stopping his pacing and pulling a creaking chair out from beside the dresser. He reversed it and sat facing them with his arms folded over the solid backrest.

“I don’t exactly know where to begin,” said Finn.

“The beginning is traditional,” said Oliver, then wished he hadn’t when Finn flashed him an angry glare.

“All right, then. Well, sometimes I work for some shady characters, you know?” began Finn. “I do a bit of work that you fine folks might find a bit…outside of the law. A bit o’ this, a bit o’ that, if you take my meaning? I help the good folks of Arkham have a wee drinkie. A little bit o’ whiskey never hurt anyone, I say. Well, aside from me brother, who kept getting into fights on a Friday night in the pubs in Battery Park. But that’s by the by. Anyway, like I said, I have to work for some bad men, just to turn a penny you understand, and sometimes that means I gotta do some stuff I ain’t proud of.”

“Mr. Edwards, I know about your brushes with the law,” said Oliver. “And I can assure you that we have no interest in reporting anything you might tell us to the authorities.”

“Just as well,” said Finn, and Oliver felt a tremor of fear at the implied threat.

“So, the device?” prompted Kate, and Finn nodded.

“Aye, well, me and some of the lads were out in Billington Woods the other week to collect a whole lot of whiskey from the Newburyport boys. Let’s just say that the deal didn’t go as smooth as we’d have liked. We were meeting by an abandoned house, a nice place, but falling to pieces, so it was. I thought I’d seen something in one of the windows, so me an young Jimmy takes a look inside, and sure, isn’t it deserted, like no one’s been there in years? We goes upstairs and into the attic, where I swore I seen a head or a face at a window. But when we got up there, we found it weren’t no face I’d seen.”

Finn paused and Oliver said, “What was it?”

“I dunno,” said Finn, and the haunted expression on his face was one Oliver had come to know all too well in the last few days. He’d seen it in his bathroom mirror every morning. “There was two of them, like some giant bugs or somethin’, I don’t know for sure. Bigger than anything God put on this Earth, that’s for sure. I mean they was bigger than Irish Wolfhounds, but shiny like raw meat. But that ain’t the worst of it, not by a country mile. They didn’t have heads, at least I don’t think they did. It was hard to make out exactly what they were, all I got was snatches of them, like they weren’t all there.”

“They didn’t have heads?” said Kate. “Surely everything has a head?”

Finn shook his head. “No, lass, these things didn’t. Just pink blobs, like something you see squashed on the road by one o’ them automobiles. Wet meat rolled up into a ball and stuck on bastard ugly bodies.”

Oliver was repulsed by Finn’s description, disgusted that such aberrant beasts could possibly exist. How could they have evaded discovery for so long? But as he was coming to realize, there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy.

“What do those things have to do with this device?” asked Oliver.

“The two of ‘em were working on that thing, floating like them little birds that beat their wings so fast you can’t hardly see ‘em. They weren’t no animals; they were working on that thing like they were making it or fixing it, and when we came into that attic, they didn’t like it, no sir. Jimmy was three sheets to the wind and fell on his arse as he came in, and, soon as they heard us, they was on us. I think I shot one, but it didn’t make no difference. I got outta the way, but they got Jimmy and cut him up like they was dressing a dead steer.”

Finn got up and paced the room, his voice stretched taut by this retelling, and Oliver felt a twinge of guilt for having judged him so harshly. To see such a sight would have unmanned any sane person.

“I grabbed that sphere thing and jumped out the window,” said Finn. “Lucky I landed on something soft, cause outside it was like a war was goin’ on. Bullets was flying all around and the whiskey we’d come to buy was burning up like the High King of Ireland on his pyre.”

“What was it, a rival gang?” asked Oliver.

“It weren’t no gang,” said Finn emphatically. “It was a bloody army of monsters. Half-naked and like wild dogs that had learned to walk on two legs. A dozen of them at least, wild things that jumped Sean and Fergal and ate them up right in front of me. I damn near shat meself to see them. They were killing men with their bare hands, tearing whole lumps of meat straight from the bone and wolfing it down like it were prime steak. No way was I gonna get eaten like that so I ran like the devil himself were on me tail. I got into the trees and looked back, and that’s when I saw him.”

“Saw who?” asked Oliver when Finn didn’t continue.

“The priest in red,” whispered Finn, like he was afraid his voice might reach the ears of the man he was describing. “The man who was in charge of them there monsters.”