Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (37 page)

Kate gave him a dubious look, and Oliver’s heart sank. Finn had abandoned them to make his own way up the cliffs, leaving them in his wake to distract the ghouls long enough for him to reach the tower and home. Oliver supposed he couldn’t blame the man, but he had hoped common decency would overcome his “natural” criminal tendencies.

He and Kate struggled onward, each oversized step a trial to climb and each one gained a small victory. Oliver could hear the whooping barks of the ghouls behind them, and tried not to imagine the pain of being eaten alive. Claws scrabbled on stone and angry yelps sounded as the flesh-eaters fought past one another to be the first to claim the meat prize.

Oliver had nothing at all with which to defend himself, save his fists, but he was no pugilist. Kate disentangled herself from his helping arm and curled herself into a tight ball as the screeching yelps of the ghouls echoed like the chittering of bats off the rocky walls. Oliver turned toward the pack of beasts, determined to at least face them on his feet. He looked over his shoulder with one last hope that Finn might be there, but there was nothing to see except more steps.

He almost laughed as he saw how close they had come to their goal.

The crooked tower split the sky above him, its base surely just around a spur of glassy obsidian. Was this world mocking them now, teasing them with the dream of escape only to snatch it away at the last moment? Oliver let the anger come, and balled his fists.

The first ghouls came into sight on the steps below, predatory things of pallid, rugose skin stretched too tight over their bony frames and large skulls. Maws filled with flat, yellow teeth jutted from distended jaws and brackish saliva drooled over lipless mouths. To feast on corpses was merely existence, but a feast of living flesh was the choicest sweetmeat.

There was no finesse to their attack, the creatures bounding over one another in their desperation to feed. Dirty claws reached for Oliver and Kate, but before they tore the skin from their bodies, a wild, ululating war cry echoed from the mountains. Like Cúchulain himself, Finn leapt through the air and landed on the step beside Oliver. He held a long spar of broken wood, and there was a wildness in his eyes that reminded Oliver of the Yopasi warriors as they gave him a demonstration of their fighting style.

The timber spar lashed out and caved in the first ghoul’s skull. The reverse stroke broke the neck of another. A monster leapt at Finn, but he swung the timber around and slammed it into its spread jaws. Blood and teeth flew, and the beast dropped alongside its fallen kin.

“Go, Doc!” yelled Finn. “Get the lass up and run! The tower’s just up ahead now. I can hold them here for a time.”

Oliver wanted to tell Finn not to be so stupidly heroic, but knew that he and Kate would never escape without such bravery. He nodded, galvanized by Finn’s actions, and picked Kate up as the timber slammed down on another ghoul’s head.

“Come on, ye shower o’ worthless devils! Take more than you ugly bastards to get past this son of Erin!”

Another ghoul went down as Finn swung his ad hoc weapon like an axe-wielding logger. A ghoul’s ribs were splintered, and another had its arm broken before they were finally able to draw some of Finn’s Irish blood. A claw hooked in under the spar and ripped across his thigh. A wash of red spilled down Finn’s leg, and he dropped to one knee with a cry of pain.

Oliver finally reached the top step. The breath heaved in his lungs and his heart hammered the inside of his ribcage. Clear of the steps, he saw the impossible tower rising up to the stars, its ragged flanks glittering and uneven like the napped flint spearhead of primitive man.

A vast archway led within and an ancient door of rotten wood hung on rusted hinges. Together Oliver and Kate struggled toward the entrance, the nearness of home giving their tired limbs a new burst of energy. As they reached the door, Oliver saw a portion of it had been broken off with a fist-sized rock.

“So that’s where he got his weapon.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t going to leave us,” said Oliver. “He was arming himself.”

Finn’s wild yells of battle drifted from below and Oliver’s guilt weighed down on him like the albatross of Coleridge’s tale of the Ancient Mariner. Oliver pushed Kate toward the tower and said, “You have to go, Miss Winthrop. Get home and tell the others what happened here.”

“What are you talking about, Oliver? Come on, we need to go!”

“I can’t leave Finn like this,” said Oliver, turning and running back to the steps.

Before he reached them, Finn came into view. The man’s chest and legs were savagely clawed and the skin of his cheek hung loose like a flap of cloth. Oliver blanched as he realized he could see the man’s teeth through the hole torn in his face.

“Coming back for me, Doc?” said Finn, his voice a wet gargle of blood.

“Yes,” said Oliver. “Christ Almighty, Finn. Look at the state of you!”

“Aye, but you should see the state o’ the damn ghouls,” said Finn, spitting a mass of bloody teeth. “They’ll not soon forget Finn Edwards in these here parts. Now what do you say we be getting outta here. I gave the first lot a good hiding, but there’s plenty more coming up behind them, an I think I might have a bit of a job seeing them off too, you know?”

“Absolutely,” said Oliver, humbled at Finn’s selfless courage in defending them.

“I almost didn’t come back for ye,” said Finn, shaking his head. “Damnedest thing. I got to that there door and I was all set to climb to the top when I swear I heard the voice of me dead mam saying, ‘Finn, lad, if you don’t go back for them folks, I’ll skelp your backside till it’s red raw, dead or no.’ And trust me, that woman had a mean right hand on her.”

Oliver didn’t know what to make of that, so he kept his mouth shut as he helped Finn through the door. The man had lost a lot of blood and had suffered a great many deep gouges all over his body. God only knew what kind of filth or diseases those creatures carried beneath their claws, and the sooner he could be seen by a doctor the better.

The inside of the tower was hollow, its walls uniformly smooth and polished to a mirrored sheen. Vague, suggestive shapes swam in the capricious reflections thrown back by the ambient phosphorous light of this world. Glittering fog filled the space, and Kate was waiting for them on the bottom step of the tower’s stairs. Unlike the corkscrewing staircase that had brought them here, these steps were more human-sized in their dimensions, built into the inner face of the tower and spiraling up its length.

They raced upward as quickly as possible, bearing the weight of the injured Finn between them and keeping close to the reflective walls. The Irishman was leaking blood with alarming rapidity, and his bravado grew less vocal the higher they climbed. Oliver looked down as he heard a bellowing roar from below, a terrifying cry that could not have come from the ghouls. Something giant blundered in the glittering mist, a towering beast with slate gray flesh and a muscular, simian-like frame.

Its barrel-sized head turned upward and its jaw spread wide as it loosed a deafening bellow of rage. Oliver almost dropped Finn in terror. The beast’s jaw, in defiance of all other creatures on God’s Earth, opened vertically, a fang-filled gash that split its face down its length. A pair of broad arms swung at its heavily muscled shoulders, but at the elbow, each arm split apart to form two furred paws that ended in vicious claws.

Kate screamed at the sight of the monster, and the fragile courage Oliver had built after their survival against the ghouls evaporated in the face of this new horror. What manner of beast could defy the basic principles of evolution so blatantly? Its anatomy was proof of the lunacy of this terrible world, and Oliver struggled to hold onto his diminishing ability to function.

The creature roared again, and something in the timbre of the sound told Oliver that this was not a roar of mindless animal hunger, but one of outrage, as though they had committed some hideous trespass within some sacred place. The giant monster lumbered onto the steps, but before it could climb higher, a dozen slavering ghouls swarmed through the tower’s open doorway and fell upon it.

The giant swatted them with its monstrous, clawed hands, but for every ghoul it plucked from its body and crushed, two more leapt onto his back or legs. Like prehistoric hunters working to bring down a mammoth, the ghouls snapped and bit and tore at the hideous giant, but before the outcome of the bloodshed was decided the mist closed in until all that could be heard was the bellowing roars and shrieking barks of the combatants.

“Are ye gonna stand around all day or get on with climbing this fekkin’ tower?” asked Finn groggily. “Cause that’d be just grand, folks.”

The very banality of Finn’s question spurred them to action, and leaving the sounds of the dreadful fight to the death behind, Oliver and Kate carried onward to the tower’s summit. Oliver feared that the sheer immensity of the tower’s height would defeat them, but once again the baffling geometries of this world confounded him. Though they could only have been climbing for ten minutes at most, the top of the tower was soon within sight.

A great stone trapdoor gaped above them and the weak light of the dying sun seeped into the tower. Oliver and Kate dragged Finn onto the roof, relieved beyond words to have finally made it here alive.

Nebulous fog surrounded the summit, blistering arcs of blue energy flashing randomly with colors beyond those of the conventional spectrum. With each burst of lightning, a faint vision of the world they had so recently left would shimmer in the depths of the iridescent mist. Some Oliver recognized, others he did not, but all were ill-favored places: tumbled churches long since abandoned, decaying graveyards, blasted heaths, or forgotten tenements where vagrants had died unnoticed and unmourned.

“So what now?” said Kate. “How do we get back home?”

“I’m not sure,” replied Oliver. “I was hoping that we would find another doorway similar to the one that brought us here.”

“Are you two thick as navvies?” slurred Finn. “There’s only one way to escape from the kingdom of the Sidhe.”

“What’s he talking about?” asked Kate.

“I fear he is delirious,” said Oliver, but Finn shook his head.
 

“You two are the professors, and here’s me the clever one. Who’d a thought it?”

With that, Finn shook off their supporting arms and lurched like a drunk at closing time toward the edge of the tower as another bolt of lightning flashed. A broken field of fallen tombstones and weeping angels worked in granite appeared within the clouds.

“Only one way home!” shouted Finn. “A leap of faith!”

The Irishman threw himself into the cloud and his body vanished with a bang of displaced air and a hiss of static. Oliver shouted Finn’s name, but the man was gone as surely as if he had never existed.

A bellowing roar issued from beyond the trapdoor: the terrible giant climbing toward them to cast them from its holy place.

Kate offered Oliver her hand and said, “Looks like it’s a leap of faith then.”

“I suspect you might be right,” replied Oliver.

Hand in hand they leapt into the glittering mist.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Rex sat by the hospital bed, his head nodding as sleep kept sneaking up on him. The bustle from the nurses’ station down the hall had become a droning blur of hushed conversation, and the bitter cup of hospital coffee hadn’t helped him stave off his tiredness. Minnie sat next to him, resting her head on his shoulder, and he liked the easy intimacy of the gesture. She was a great gal, and Rex wondered why she’d never found herself a good man, and kept hanging around with him.

Alexander sat in a chair beside the door, while Stone paced the room, tapping his notebook against his thigh in a nervous tattoo.

Rex could understand his frustration.

Rita Young lay on the bed, her eyes closed and her body swathed in bandages. She hadn’t regained consciousness since collapsing in Oliver’s office, and the doctors had told them she was severely dehydrated and suffering borderline malnutrition. The many cuts and gashes on her arms and legs were also likely infected. All that could be done was to clean the wounds regularly and hope Rita’s own immune system could fight off the infection.

Rita had come back to them, but what of Amanda?

Rex doodled on his own notepad, the words coming unbidden from the depths of his subconscious.

Survivor

Visionary.

Key to the mystery.

But for good or ill?

Stone’s frustration was getting to Rex, the constant pacing, the grunts of impatience, and the constant tap, tap, tap of his notebook.

“Will you sit down, Gabriel?” said Rex. “This cat on hot bricks routine is getting on my nerves.”

Stone flashed him an angry glare, and put away his notebook, but continued to pace up and down. Every now and then he would throw a glance at Rita and grunt. Rex shook his head and opened his mouth to chide Stone again.

“Rex, honey,” sighed Minne. “Leave it. Don’t poke the bear.”