Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (7 page)

“So why do you stay here?”

Rita snorted with grim amusement. “Where the hell else I got to go? I either make it here or I go back to being dirt poor on the banks of the Mississippi. Anyways, don’t be giving me no hard time about this. You just told me you know this place is bad, too. Those dreams prove it.”

“I don’t want to talk about that just now,” said Amanda, swinging her legs off the bed.

Rita grabbed her arm and said, “Your dreams. You never had them till you came to Arkham. We both know this town stinks worse than a Mississippi slaughterhouse at low tide.”

“I don’t know…”
 

But Rita wasn’t convinced.

“Don’t try and back out on me, Mandy,” she warned, smiling to mask her seriousness. “I’m your friend, but I will knock you upside the head if you lie to me.”

“You’re right,” said Amanda at last. “Ever since I got lost on the way to Professor Grayson’s class and I saw…something. A painting, I think. I don’t remember, like I tried to blot it out or something. It’s weird.”

“Uh-huh,” said Rita, nodding. “Bad mojo.”

* * *

Finn pushed the mansion’s door with the barrel of his gun. It creaked open on rusted hinges, just as he knew it would, and silver light illuminated a dusty hall of warped floorboards and cloth-draped furniture. The whole house creaked and a puff of powdered plaster dust fell from the ceiling as Finn stepped inside, his pistol sweeping left to right in case anyone was lying in wait for them.

“Kind of creepy, huh?” said Jimmy.

“Yeah, creepy is what it is,” agreed Finn. He could hear a faint background hum, an electrical buzz like what could be heard from the ground when a trolley car was coming around the corner. He tried to pinpoint the source, but gave up when it seemed to be coming from all around him. It felt strongest when he tilted his head to the ceiling, but it was hard to be sure.

It was just a noise, but it raised the hackles on Finn’s neck with its strangeness. He’d never heard anything quite like it, and wasn’t sure he was keen to learn what was producing such a quietly menacing noise.

“So d’you want to tell me what we’re looking for?” asked Jimmy.

Finn shushed him, and looked toward the grand staircase in the center of the wide hallway they now stood in. Wide doors led off to either side, but Finn ignored them, climbing to the second floor and a landing carpeted in a thick layer of dust. The humming was stronger here, and he wondered if there was some kind of machinery stored in one of these upper rooms.

“Do you hear that?” he whispered to Jimmy.

“Hear what?”

“That buzzing noise. Or a hum, I’m not sure.”

“I don’t hear nothing, but I ain’t got the sharpest lugs.”

“Among other things,” muttered Finn, moving on.

The ceiling creaked, like there was something moving in the attic above. That made sense. That was where Finn had seen the pale pink blob in the window, and whoever he’d seen was still there.

“Find a way up,” said Finn. “Stairs, attic ladders, something.”

Jimmy nodded and took the left portion of the landing. Finn moved down the shadowy hallway on the right, keeping his gun out before him and checking each doorknob as he passed. One was locked, the other led into a small bedroom that clearly hadn’t been used in decades. Sheet-draped furniture was scattered throughout the room like oblong ghosts, but one look at the undisturbed dust told Finn that nobody was hiding underneath.

He moved on. The last room was a small bathroom, and he was about to close the door and catch up with Jimmy when he noticed the door in the corner of the room was open a fraction. He’d thought it an airing cupboard, but the hideous droning noise seemed louder here, like there was some kind of generator or transformer up there.

Finn backed out of the bathroom and looked across the landing. Jimmy was puking his whiskey in the corner, and Finn waited until he looked over before beckoning him with a curt wave of his gun. He looked back into the room and he smelled Jimmy before he saw him.

“Christ, you stink,” he said. “Come on.”

Without waiting for a reply, Finn eased open the door in the corner of the room, smelling a stink worse than Jimmy’s vomit-spattered shoes. The buzzing sound was louder now, like a hive of angry bees poised to drop on him from a great height. It took an effort of will to peer around the doorframe. A narrow set of stairs led toward the attic, and with his gun stretched out before him, Finn took a hesitant step upward.
 

He turned back to Jimmy and whispered, “Keep to the edges, Jimmy. It’ll make the steps creak less.”

Slowly Finn climbed the steps, his heart in his mouth, thudding like a great kettle drum and sounding unfeasibly loud. His breath echoed in his skull and a suffocating fear arose in him, as though his entire body were fighting against his ascent. Behind him, Jimmy stumbled and let loose a loud curse. Finn bit back an angry retort. Any hope of surprising the attic observer was now gone.

If he couldn’t have surprise, he’d have ferocity. Though fear attempted to keep him rooted to the spot, he charged the rest of the way with a battle cry worthy of Cúchulain himself. He burst into the attic, a vast space enclosed by exposed rafters and the underside of the roof. Moonlight painted bright strips on the floor, and in the center of the arched space, suspended above a slender pedestal of brass was an irregular silver sphere that spun like a whirring globe. Finn took in all this sensory input as soon as he entered the attic, but the strange, hybrid…
things
hovering above the pedestal and working on the sphere with clicking, chitinous, multi-jointed limbs, those took him a moment longer.

His raised gun lowered as he struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. Grotesque, with bulbous insectoid bodies and crab-like pincers, the monsters flew on ragged, bat-like wings that seemed not to flap, but simultaneously coexist at each stage required for flight. Where Finn might have expected a head or some form of sensory apparatus, there was nothing more than a gelatinous blob of glistening meat, like a brain shorn of its enclosing skull.

Finn tried to rationalize what he was seeing with what he knew of the world, trying to shoehorn these creatures into a neat box where things made sense. It wasn’t working, and the sheer alien horror of these beings threatened to unhinge his mind.

Then Jimmy blundered into the attic, tripping over his own clumsiness to fall flat on his face. He landed hard and his pistol went off with a deafening bang, blowing out the remains of a window. Finn jumped at the noise, his descent into madness momentarily stalled. The creatures swung around in the air, the meaty lumps of their heads spinning through a kaleidoscope of color. The buzzing increased in intensity, and Finn raised his pistol as one of them swooped toward him.

His pistol boomed and his bullets slapped into the pulpy mass of the creature’s body, but didn’t appear to harm it in the slightest. Finn dropped to the ground as its slashing pincers clawed at him. The sleeve of his coat tore, but his skin was untouched. He rolled and fired again, emptying his pistol in a flurry of shots, until the hammer clicked down on an empty chamber.

“In the name of Christ!” shouted Jimmy, looking up from the floor and finally laying eyes on the hideous flying things. “What the bloody hell is going on here, Finn?”

Finn didn’t answer him, throwing his gun away and scrambling over to where Jimmy’s weapon had landed. His own bullets had done nothing to the creature, but he felt better being armed. Even before he reached the gun, he heard fresh gunfire coming from outside the house. Had Sean and Fergal seen what was happening somehow and come to their aid? He doubted it, but it was a pleasant notion.

He grabbed Jimmy’s fallen pistol and rolled onto his backside in time to see the two creatures tear into his hapless comrade. There was nothing frenzied or animalistic about their attack. Razor sharp pincers sliced at Jimmy’s chest and belly, and blood sprayed the flying monsters as they expertly sliced him open, like a butcher dressing a carcass for the shop window.

Finn backed away on his rear, bumping into something behind him. He heard a screech that sounded like tearing metal or a busted axle grinding a gear shaft, and looked up in time to see the silver sphere on the pedestal wobble out of alignment and fall to the dusty floorboards. It hit with a heavy crunch that was surely out of proportion to its weight, and no sooner had it landed than the two creatures dropped Jimmy’s dissected remains and spun around to face him.

Without quite knowing why, Finn scooped up the silver sphere and ran to the shattered windows. He had no plan save getting out of this room, and the flying things were between him and the stairs. The fall would kill him, he was sure, but it was preferable to being cut open like a frog in a grade schooler’s biology lesson.

The buzzing creatures zipped toward him, but Finn was already moving. He hurled himself through the broken window. He missed most of the glass, but a spiteful shard caught the hem of his trousers and probably saved his life. Instead of sailing out into the air and falling three stories to the ground, he swung back toward the mansion like a pendulum on the fulcrum of his caught trouser leg.

He slammed into the wall and dropped straight down as the cloth gave way, landing hard on the angled pediment of the building’s columned portico. The sound of gunfire punctuated the night, though Finn had no time to wonder what the hell had gone wrong with the deal. The wall next to him erupted in dry explosions of plasterwork and lath as a burst of automatic weapons’ fire arced upward.

“Jesus jumping Christ!” yelled Finn, rolling out of the line of fire. Still clutching Jimmy’s gun and the silver sphere, Finn slid down the roof and off the end of the pediment. Something below him blew up in a mushrooming pillar of fire, but before he could wonder what it was, he landed with a thump in the bushes to the side of the main entrance. Though it hadn’t killed him, the fall had winded him badly. Finn fought for breath as he waited for the pain of broken limbs to flare up his spine.

The pain never arrived, but his breath came in terrified hikes. The darkness was banished in the light of burning trucks. Both vehicles belonging to the Newburyport lads were gone, and in their place were burned out wrecks, ablaze from end to end. Burning whiskey filled the air with a sour mash reek, casting leaping shadows as dozens of figures struggled in life-or-death fights.

“What the hell…?” said Finn. “What in the name of the wee man is going on here?”

He saw Sean and Fergal, firing wildly into the trees, as the Newburyport lads picked themselves up from the explosion of their trucks. Blackened bodies lay strewn around, and wiry figures darted from the trees with squealing shrieks. Finn couldn’t see them clearly, but that was a mercy, as one form fell upon a fire-blackened corpse and tore a lump of seared meat from its haunches. This was too much. Flying bloody insect monsters, and now a cannibal horde… Christ, he had to get away!

Finn scooped up the silver sphere and edged around the corner of the building, keeping low to the ground as the battle raged in the glare of the burning liquor. He ducked around the corner and ran for the trees, not daring to look behind him, not daring to stop for fear of what he might see at his shoulder if he did. At last he reached the shadows of the forest, and pressed his back to the thick bole of a tree. Horrified tears welled in his eyes, but he blinked them away as anger took over from fear.

He risked a glance around the tree, catching a last snapshot of the horror unfolding behind him. Finn saw Sean borne to the ground by three pallid-skinned savages who bit and tore at the skin of his face. Fergal ran into the forest with a pair in pursuit. Mobsters’ guns blazed to little effect. The fires were dying as the liquor burned up. He heard a crash of glass and a resurgent buzzing noise of unnatural wings that couldn’t possibly allow flight.

“Christ, who the hell
are
these guys?” gasped Finn.

Scampering forms, like men but hunched and degenerate, loped through the clearing before the house, and in their midst walked a hooded man swathed from head to foot in crimson robes like some ancient pagan priest. The creatures did not touch him, but gathered around him like supplicants. Finn couldn’t see the man’s face, the hood wreathing his features in shadow.

Though this was simply a man, not some blood-hungry cannibal or hideous monster from beyond the realms of understanding, Finn felt his terror mount at the sight of him. Terrible evil, palpable and without mercy, flowed from this dreadful figure, as though all the malice and horror in the world were bound to his mortal form.

“Oh Jesus Christ and all his saints, save me now,” hissed Finn.

Unable to bear the sight a moment longer, Finn turned and ran blindly into the forest.

He didn’t know where he was going; all he knew was that he had to get away from that damnable crimson priest.

CHAPTER FOUR

Oliver paced the length of the classroom, tapping a piece of chalk against his palm with every step he took. His students watched him attentively, and he waited as they copied his words in their books before continuing. Polynesian Anthropology was his favorite class to teach, and his passion for the field hopefully passed to his class. Certainly there were several students who didn’t need to take the class, but had chosen it as an elective credit.