Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) Read online

  “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.”

  “So?”

  “So I ask you, Martin Quinn, what sort of diving bell goes down that deep?”

  “I dunno, Patrick,” replied Martin. “What kind?”

  “No kind,” said Patrick. “I can’t be sure what that thing is, but it ain’t no diving bell.”

  * * *

  The athletics field was now a crime scene. The area around the body had been roped off and two police Model Ts were parked on either side of the running track. Crowds of rubberneckers had already begun to gather on the bleachers, ghouls hoping for a better look at the body. Dr. Vincent Lee climbed out of his car and nodded to one of the young cops, a rookie he hadn’t seen before, and made his way toward the roped off area of the track. Luther Harden was already there, kneeling beside the body and lifting strips of black material to get a better look.

  “Please don’t do that, Detective Harden,” said Vincent. “No one should touch the remains until I have had a chance to examine them.”

  Harden looked up, the brim of his trilby pulled down over his forehead and his ever-present cigar rolling at the corner of his mouth. His complexion was ruddy, and his eyes regarded Vincent as though he were a potential suspect. In his mid-forties, Harden was—as far as Vincent could tell—an honest cop, but one who didn’t suffer fools and always looked for the simplest explanation. Blue smoke coiled from the stogie and Harden wiped his hands on his trousers before holding one out to Vincent. As his jacket shifted, Vincent saw the butt of a department-issue revolver.

  “Whatever you say, Doc,” said Harden.

  Vincent declined to shake Harden’s hand, finding the man’s lack of respect for the dead distasteful. He nodded toward the stained patch of ground behind the man and said, “The same as the others?”

  “Sure seems like it,” agreed Harden.

  “Who found her?”

  “A student from Miskatonic,” said Harden, consulting a black notepad. “A Bayou girl out running.”

  “Does she have a name, this student?”

  Once again Harden consulted his pad, though Vincent found it hard to believe he could have forgotten the girl’s name after such a short time. Harden was nothing if not formal.

  “Rita Young, athletics scholarship from New Orleans,” said Harden. “She’s down at the station now. Harrigan’s taking her statement.”

  “New Orleans? She’s a long way from home,” observed Vincent absently, moving past Harden and kneeling beside the bloodied remains wrapped in the torn black dress.

  “Looks like wild animals got her,” said Harden, the words a statement, not a question.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” replied Vincent.

  “Sure, Doc,” said Harden. “Just get this wrapped up pronto, huh? I got a dozen other things I could be doing today, and believe me, this is another mess I don’t need.”

  “I’m sure this poor girl felt the same way,” mused Vincent, letting his eyes roam the body.

  The girl was in her early twenties and dressed in a fashionably short dress that exposed her knees and left her arms bare. Was she one of the flappers who danced and smoked and drank at the speakeasies and dance halls that were springing up all over America? The sober, God-fearing people of Arkham had resisted the incursion of jazz, and the grasping celebrity-obsessed culture of the times as best they could, but youngsters seized onto these new crazes like a drowning man holding onto a kisby ring. The dress was lightweight and barely decent, typical of what the youth of today were wearing in search of excitement. This girl had certainly found excitement of a darker sort than she’d been expecting.

  She had been pretty in life, with a slender face and high cheekbones. Her hair was cut in a short bob, like Colleen Moore in The Perfect Flapper, and though glassy in death, her eyes were a vivid shade of green. The girl’s skin had been drained of color, and she was quite probably from a good family, though she bore none of the hallmarks of Arkham breeding.

  Her left leg was bent underneath her pelvis, and a gleaming heeled shoe lay next to her ravaged body. The lower portion of her right leg was missing below the knee, and her right arm was likewise absent. Her left had been stripped of flesh from the shoulder down, and only the last remnants of connective tissue and sinew held it to the body.

  “Yeah,” said Harden, spitting a brown stream of tobacco saliva. “Wild animals.”

  “If you’re so sure about that, why did you call me?” asked Vincent, growing tired of Harden’s observations.

  “I need you to write up cause of death on the death certificate.”

  “I’ll do that once I’ve actually determined cause of death.”

  “Just make it quick, okay?”

  “Is Asa here?” asked Vincent, hoping Arkham’s Chief of Police could rein in his more aggressive underling. Asa at least understood the value of professional courtesy.

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Harden. “He’ll still be in his pajamas eating toast and drinking coffee. The chief doesn’t like to hear about crime beyond bootleggers, gamblers, and drunks.”

  That much was true. Asa Nichols was an honest cop, but he hadn’t quite grasped the way the world had changed in the wake of the Great War. Despite the number of strange deaths and mysterious occurrences that plagued Arkham, the Chief of Police hadn’t yet woken up to the new reality of the world. A time of innocence had ended in the wake of that globe-spanning conflict, and the world was still in a state of shock. The youth of the nation were reacting to the psychic scars the Great War had left with a desperate zest for life that laughed in the face of the horrors wreaked on the European battlefields.

  “So what do you think, Doc?” said Harden, leaning over his shoulder and blowing a cloud of toxic smoke into his face. “Wild animals, right?”

  Vincent coughed and lifted the skeletal arm. He peered at a number of deep striations in the bone.

  “It certainly looks like something ate the flesh directly from the bones, but the bite marks don’t look like any a
nimal I know that would devour a human being.”

  “So don’t keep me in suspense, Doc. What do they look like?”

  Vincent hesitated. Though he was no stranger to the darker underside of Arkham, he knew better than to draw unnecessary attention to it. Yet this was the sixth body to be discovered like this in the last few years.

  “They look like bite marks from a human jaw,” he said.

  “Human? You mean a person did this? No way, Doc. I don’t buy it.”

  “It’s not about whether you buy it, Detective Harden,” pointed out Vincent. “The evidence is right here in front of us. The facts speak for themselves, no matter how impossible they might seem.”

  “What are you, Sherlock Holmes?” snapped Harden. “I don’t need this. Have you any idea what will happen if it gets out that there’s a maniac killing and eating young girls? There’ll be a panic. Lynch mobs. Street justice. The townsfolk won’t stand for it.”

  “They’ve stood for much more, believe me,” said Vincent before he could stop himself. Immediately, Harden was in his face.

  “You trying to be smart with me, Doc?” he said, jabbing his smoldering cigar at Vincent’s face. “You might have come up from Boston with your fancy Yale degree, but this is my town, and I don’t like it when outsiders try and mess with me. You understand?”

  “I’m not sure I do, to be honest,” said Vincent. “I am just telling you what I find.”

  “Yeah, well get her bagged up and taken down to Eleazar’s.”

  Vincent nodded, having expected as much. Jaspar Eleazar ran a low rent funeral home in the lower Southside and wasn’t too picky when it came to how a person had met their end. The other dead girls had been taken there, and no autopsies had been performed as far as Vincent knew. Like many other things in Arkham, this would be quietly buried, and a highly evolved desire not to face the facts would allow the townsfolk to pretend they lived somewhere normal.

  Harden turned and beckoned a patrolman, the rookie Vincent had nodded to as he arrived.

  “Muldoon, right? Lend a hand to the Doc here,” ordered Harden. “Make sure he gets the body to Eleazar’s, you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Muldoon, saluting crisply.

  Harden shook his head and said, “You Boston types,” before walking away.

  The rookie held a hand out to Vincent. “Tommy Muldoon,” he said. “I’m kinda new here.”

  “Vincent Lee, and aren’t we all?”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t mind me, Tommy,” said Vincent. “Death has a habit of making me surly.”

  “Heck, I don’t blame you, sir. I ain’t never seen nothing like this, neither,” said Muldoon, his face as blanched of color as the dead girl’s. “The instructors at the Police Academy told us we might see some hinky stuff, but this…this is just about as nasty as I could imagine.”

  “Trust me,” said Vincent. “This is Arkham. You’ll see nastier and stranger before long.”

  * * *

  Oliver Grayson’s office at Miskatonic University was located on the third story of the Liberal Arts building in the Department of Anthropology. Situated on the southeastern corner, it had a pleasant view over the Copley memorial bell tower and its surrounding parkland. The red brick form of the west dormitory could be seen through the trees, and beyond that was the three-story gothic structure of the university library. Constructed from locally quarried granite in 1888, the Miskatonic library was the kingdom of Dr. Henry Armitage, keeper of all the secrets held within its echoing hallways and close-packed stacks of papers, books, and pamphlets.

  The office was stuffy and as Oliver waited for the telephone operator to connect him with the Jesuit College of San Francisco, he levered the window open a fraction, keeping the earpiece pressed to his ear with his shoulder. Cold air sighed into the room, but it was welcome, and helped diminish the smell of ashes and burnt offerings that had clung to his senses ever since leaving Henry at the asylum.

  Looking out over the campus, Oliver watched students walking in groups toward their classes. Gray strips of cloud clawed the sky like gouges and the threat of heavy rain and snow was very real. A brooding melancholy hung over the streets and parks of the campus, which Oliver attributed to the approach of winter, though he knew, on some fundamental level, that there was more to it than that. He was out of sorts, but then he was always out of sorts after he came back from seeing Henry. That such a brilliant scholar could be so debilitated by the horrors of the Great War was galling enough, but that Oliver hadn’t seen the damage Henry’s service had wrought was a guilty thorn in his side.

  Oliver idly flicked through some test papers he had yet to grade and lesson plans for the day’s lectures. He saw the words, but they didn’t penetrate his consciousness. He reclined on his creaking leather chair, listening to the hums, clicks, ghostly burbles, and whispers of distant conversations on the line.

  Bookshelves lined opposite walls of his office, anthropological texts including all twelve volumes of Frazer’s Golden Bough, Kroeber’s On the Super-Organic, photostats of Margaret Meade’s preliminary findings after her fieldwork in Samoa, together with numerous texts by the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas: Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, Mythology and Folk-Tales of North American Indians, The Mind of Primitive Man. Mixed in with the required reading of any serious student of anthropology was Margaret Murray’s fanciful The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.

  The latter volume was a curio, as Murray’s findings were largely discounted by the anthropological community as being selective and over-stretching the limits of her accumulated data. It had amused Oliver to read it, before he realized that the various denunciations of her work were appearing in obscure academic journals unlikely to be read by the public. Such nonsense was gaining credence in the wider world, and he and his fellow professors of anthropology would need to fight against such sensationalist nonsense.

  A measure of how he viewed Murray’s work could be read in their placement alongside Oliver’s treasured volumes of Jules Verne. Dozens of the fantasist’s books lined the lower shelves, including precious first editions of From the Earth to the Moon, The Mysterious Island, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. As a child, Oliver had loved the work of Verne, and though the expense of acquiring these texts had been ruinous, he had not heeded the cost when the Baltimore auction house had telegrammed him with news of the books’ appearance under the hammer.

  His own published works, detailing the cultural practices of the indigenous tribes of America, Alaska, and the Pacific Islands were modestly gathered above these books, alongside his copious research findings from the Yopasi expeditions. An entire shelf of books and papers was dedicated to the three years he’d spent with the Pacific Island tribe: drawings and monographs on language, belief systems, and physiological data. Given the disappearance of the Yopasi, none of that work would see the light of day in any academic publication of note, and Oliver felt the familiar bitterness at the sight of the shelf of wasted work.

  On the wall behind his desk were his diplomas from Brown University, one in Cultural Anthropology, the other in Ancient Languages, with specializations in Latin and Arabic. Framed in dark walnut, the gold leaf of the lettering caught the reflected light from the window. His qualifications were hard-earned and the result of many years of study and fieldwork. It seemed they were looking down at him like some kind of joke now, colorful titles that weren’t worth the embossed paper they were printed on.

  A tired-sounding female voice crackled from the earpiece of his telephone.

  “Professor Grayson,” she said. “I have your other party on the line.”

  “Ah yes, excellent,” said Oliver, turning his attention back to the telephone. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” said the operator, her voice disappearing with an electric click.

  “Hello?” said a cultured, English voice. “Oliver, are you there?”

  “William,” said Oliver. “Lovely to speak t
o you again.”

  “Indeed, old chap,” said Professor William Hillshore, resident psychologist, lecturer, and acting rehabilitation physician of the Jesuit College of San Francisco. Oliver had met William Hillshore in 1920 at Cambridge University while he had been a visiting professor, delivering lectures on linguistic relativity. Oliver and Hillshore had sparred good-naturedly in the staff common rooms in regards to his findings, and their friendship had firmly established itself in the pubs and smoking houses of that ancient city. Many years of friendship and correspondence had followed.

  “It’s an absolute pleasure to hear from you,” said Hillshore, “It’s been far too long. How the devil are you?”

  “Well,” said Oliver. “Still at Miskatonic and still underpaid, but ‘he is richest who is content with the least.’”

  “The life of a scholar, dear chap,” agreed Hillshore. “But Socrates? Really? How unoriginal of you, Oliver. I would have chosen Epictetus: ‘the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant’ or perhaps something by Plutarch.”

  “You always did have the edge over me on the old philosophers.”

  “The benefits of a classical education, dear boy,” said Hillshore, and Oliver heard the scratch and hiss of a striking match. He could picture the Englishman in his office, smoking on his pipe and enjoying a pot of Earl Grey amid his books and wax cylinders, upon which he insisted on recording his patient interview sessions, despite the availability of more modern equipment.

  “Yes, I suppose I’ll have to muddle through with my poor colonial education.”

  “We must all make sacrifices, Oliver,” said Hillshore. “That is why I now find myself on your side of the Atlantic, trying to educate the good people of this nation on the intricacies of the mind and its attendant foibles. The theories of Herr Freud have barely reached these shores, and there is a great deal of work to be done.”

  “You’re still working at the Letterman?” asked Oliver, remembering that Hillshore had been volunteering his expertise at the Letterman General Hospital in the Presidio for a time. Originally built to care for wounded veterans of the Spanish-American War, it now catered to servicemen suffering mental trauma inflicted during the Great War.