Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) Page 4

  “Sadly, yes,” said Hillshore. “Such suffering as you would hope never to believe existed in this world. War may break the bodies of soldiers, but we are only now beginning to understand how much it scars the mind. Though, of course, you will be only too well aware of this.”

  “Regrettably so, William,” said Oliver. “You received the photostats I sent you?”

  “I did indeed,” confirmed Hillshore. “Marvelous thing this transcontinental airmail, I must say. A courier delivered them from Crissy Field just yesterday, so you understand I have only had the chance for a cursory examination of your colleague’s pathology.”

  “Of course.”

  “I must say, it makes for fascinating reading, though. A decorated veteran of the United States Marines, and a hero of 1918 whose unit was instrumental in helping stem the German Spring Offensive. Quite a remarkable man.”

  “He is that,” agreed Oliver.

  “And yet five years after returning from Europe, he was convicted of multiple counts of arson and incarcerated at Arkham Asylum. Of course, I shall have to peruse Dr. Hardstrom’s notes more fully before I can offer a professional diagnosis, though my first thought is that I see no correlation between his diagnosis and the presented symptoms.”

  “Do you think you can help him?”

  “I’m almost certain of it,” said Hillshore, and Oliver smiled at the confidence and certainty in Hillshore’s voice. It had been the right decision to contact the Englishman, and Oliver felt his lingering sense of melancholy begin to lift.

  They spoke briefly about trivial matters for a few minutes longer, before the clicks and buzzes on the line told them they were reaching their allotted time limit.

  “It’s been swell to speak to you again, William,” said Oliver.

  “A pleasure as always, Oliver,” agreed Hillshore. “I shall be in touch directly when I have had a chance to fully digest Henry’s case notes. Perhaps I might even come out to you in Massachusetts; I’ve a hankering to plunder that Miskatonic library of yours. I’m told you have some quite juicy texts there.”

  “That would be very kind of you, William.”

  “Nonsense. As a wise man said, ‘men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.’”

  “Heraclitus?”

  “Very good, Oliver,” laughed Hillshore. “I’ll make an Englishman out of you yet.”

  * * *

  The light was fading as Rex Murphy scribbled his impressions of the athletics field into his battered notepad.

  It was a creepy place, surrounded by dark forest that seemed too thick to be healthy. Like it was closing in.

  That was dumb. Of course it wasn’t closing in, but with the sun fading behind the hills to the west and the shadows lengthening, it sure was hard to shake the idea from his head. He took down a few more impressions, really trying to capture the feel of the place for his story.

  Spooky.

  Threatening.

  Overgrown. Like the world wants this part back again.

  Like it’s being reclaimed by something older.

  He looked at that last bit again, wondering where it had come from. He often had flashes of insight he couldn’t explain, and didn’t question, but this seemed like it came from somewhere outside, as though the impression had been placed in his head. Rex smiled and shook off such a crazy notion, tipping his hat back and pulling out a pack of Chesterfields from his rumpled coat.

  When things went his way, which wasn’t often these days, Rex was a good reporter, with a nose for a story and an eye for detail that really sold it to Joe Average. A contact in the Arkham telephone exchange had tipped him off to this one, a call coming into the police station that a dead girl had been found at the university athletics ground off the Aylesbury pike. Rex had called Minnie and they’d burned rubber to get here, arriving just as they took the body away. By now she would be riding a slab at Whitechapel Mortuary or Eleazar’s, though Rex’s money was on the latter.

  He lit up and the tip glowed as Rex inhaled, casting an orange glow over his notebook.

  “Those things’ll kill you, honey,” said Minnie, collapsing the trellis struts of her Autographic Kodak camera. “And they stink.”

  “These?” said Rex, taking another drag. “Nah, haven’t you heard the advertisements? Smoking these babies is going to make me like Douglas Fairbanks.”

  He coughed and Minnie cocked an eyebrow. Petite and curvy, Minnie Klein was a firecracker of a gal, with a butter-wouldn’t-melt face and a skewed sense of humor that Rex liked enormously. Dressed in a cornflower-colored dress and with a short haircut like Clara Bow, she was attractive in a fashionably prim way. Sometimes Rex thought she was as pretty as a picture, but other times she looked like a dowdy housewife. Minnie was wise to all the latest crazes, but didn’t seem to have any interest in jazz, or smoking, or dancing, which made her an almost polar opposite of Rex.

  The Arkham Advertiser’s go-to gal for creepy photos of the city’s underbelly or a particularly gruesome crime scene, Minnie had impressed the paper’s owner, Harvey Gedney, enough to get her put on the payroll, much to the chagrin of the stringers that carried a camera around and called themselves photographers. Arkham born and raised, Minnie had an eye for a photograph that had impressed Rex the moment he’d seen her work. Surprisingly, Minnie had read his stories and offered to work with him. They made a hot pairing, bagging some juicy stories and getting some amazing pictures.

  “Anyway,” continued Rex. “It won’t be these that kill me, it’ll be Harvey if we don’t get some good copy to him by the end of the day.”

  “You get anything sweet from Harden and the Doc?” asked Minnie, packing the camera away into its padded case.

  “Not a bean,” said Rex. “All Harden gave me was a glare that would buckle a railway spike, and the Doc wasn’t any more helpful. All he said was a young woman got killed.”

  “Killed? He mean murdered?”

  “Wasn’t specific,” said Rex, spotting one of the young cops coming around a police car, looking like he’d just tossed his cookies in the bushes. Rex didn’t know this kid, and bet that would cut both ways. Rookies were always the least guarded of the cops. You could get some real juice from them because they didn’t know to watch their mouths. He stuck his pad into the satchel he wore over his shoulder and ran his hand through his unruly hair.

  “Come on, Minnie,” said Rex, crushing his cigarette beneath his heel. “Let’s bag us a rookie.”

  “Play nice,” warned Minnie, hauling the camera case into the back of their car, a battered Ford that looked like it had belonged to a careless drunk. It belonged to Rex, and that impression wasn’t far off the mark.

  “Hey, don’t I always?” said Rex, walking over to the cop with his most winning smile plastered across his genial face. Slim and dressed in a suit two sizes too big for him, Rex cut a disarming figure, and the glasses he wore only reinforced that impression. His tousled brown hair blew in the wind, and a scrap of fuzz on his chin completed his slightly shambolic appearance.

  The cop saw him coming and gave him a look Rex had been used to all his life. It was a look that said, Take a look at yourself and get your act together.

  “Patrolman,” said Rex, sticking his hand out toward the cop. “I don’t think we’ve met, have we? I’m Rex, Rex Murphy from the Advertiser. And this little bundle of fun is Minnie Klein. Ain’t no one with a better eye for a good picture, no sir. She can make Fatty Arkbukle look like Valentino or make your grandmother look like Mary Pickford. No word of a lie.”

  The rookie took a step back in the face of Rex’s verbal barrage, but recovered quickly.

  “Patrolman Tommy Muldoon, and I know who you are, sir,” said the cop. Rex caught the unmistakable tones of a Bostonian accent. This kid was straight out of Charleston or West Roxbury. And with a name like Muldoon, it didn’t get any more obvious where his ancestry lay. Second or third generation Irish at the most.

  “Glad to know you, Tommy
Muldoon,” said Rex, revving up for his machine gun delivery. “So what’s going on here, son? A nasty one and no mistake, young girl murdered, cops on the hunt for a killer. Terrible stuff, isn’t it? You think things like this only happen in the big city, but they don’t, do they? They happen right here, in nice towns with nice people. Horrible, just horrible. So what happened?”

  “I don’t think I should say, sir.”

  Okay, so this one might have a bit of savvy to him.

  Rex briefly entertained the idea of fishing out a few bucks to grease Muldoon’s palm, but suspected that would be a bad play. Best to play on the compassion angle.

  “Come on, Tommy,” said Rex. “I got a nose for a story, and right now the old conk is telling me that this girl met a sticky end. Am I right? I’m right, aren’t I? Come on, I’ve lived in Arkham long enough to know that this ain’t exactly the first time something like this has happened, you know? I’ve seen the files. I’ve done the digging. I know what’s going on here, so you might as well gimme the juice to make sure I get it right. I mean, that young girl’s parents are gonna be broken hearted as it is, without a sap like me getting things all turned around. They deserve to know the truth about their little girl don’t they?”

  It was a bluff, but one Rex calculated Tommy Muldoon’s big Irish heart wouldn’t see through. Keep ‘em on the back foot, keep ‘em thinking you know more than you do, and that they’re only confirming what you already know. That’s the way to get things out of folk who don’t want to tell you anything.

  “I suppose you’re right sir, but you have to keep my name out of it,” said Muldoon. “And no pictures, Miss Klein.”

  “Of course,” said Minnie as Rex fished out his pad and pencil.

  “So what’s the deal here?” he asked.

  Muldoon looked around as though nervous and whispered, “A student from Miskatonic was out for a morning run when she found the remains.”

  “Remains?” interrupted Rex. “She wasn’t just, you know, dead?”

  “No, sir. Looked like she’d been set on by wild animals.”

  “Good Christ!” said Rex. “If that don’t beat all.”

  “Quite, sir,” said Muldoon. Rex caught the younger man’s irritation at his casual blasphemy. “It ain’t the first, neither.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No, Doctor Lee said it’s the sixth. Seems like there have been five others over the last three years.”

  Rex wrote quickly on his pad, fighting to conceal his excitement. There had been stories, rumors really, that young girls had been going missing, but no one had ever been able to confirm the truth of them. All over America young girls were leaving their podunk towns for the big cities in search of fame, excitement, and to be part of the burgeoning jazz scene, making it hard to be certain how many of them were disappearing for perfectly innocuous reasons and how many for something darker. To hear this from the mouth of a cop had set Rex’s newshound instincts off like a shot of bathtub gin to the gut. He found it hard to breathe.

  “That’s terrible,” said Minnie, seeing his struggle. “Do they know who she was?”

  Muldoon shook his head. “Not yet. We’re going to canvas the campus to see if anyone’s reported a missing person. She was dressed like one of them city girls you see in the movies, like she was from New York or something.”

  “A flapper?”

  “Yes, Miss Klein, just like that,” agreed Muldoon. “And though I won’t speak ill of the dead, I wish I could say I was surprised to see where such a lifestyle leads. If you drink, smoke, and look for trouble, it’s going to find you soon enough.”

  “I think you’re absolutely right,” said Minnie with a neutral expression. Rex saw Muldoon glance at her flapper-like haircut.

  “Well, thank you very much, Tommy,” said Rex, tucking his pencil behind his ear. “I think we got all we need here. You’ve been a great help, and that poor girl, whoever she was, thanks you for being there for her.”

  Muldoon nodded, but didn’t reply. He turned back to the roped off crime scene, signaling that his patience with Rex had come to an end. Rex and Minnie made their way back to his rusty Ford and tried to contain the excitement of what Muldoon’s words potentially meant for their careers.

  “Wow,” said Rex at last.

  “Yeah,” agreed Minnie.

  Rex looked around the athletics ground and sparked up another cigarette.

  “We got to get this written up right now,” said Rex. “You got all you need, picture-wise?”

  “A few doozies, Rex,” said Minnie. “The light’s going anyway, and I got some good shots of where they found the body, cops looking clueless, and the sun setting behind the hills. And that creepy guy over by the bleachers.”

  “Good girl,” said Rex. “Wait, what creepy guy?”

  “Over there, standing by the Crossley parked up at the bleachers.”

  Rex couldn’t see who she was looking at until he realized a Crossley was a car, a big ugly car like the army used to drive in the war. Sure enough, there was a guy in a long brown duster and fedora watching what was going on, like some frontier lawman awaiting a gunfight.

  “So who do you reckon he is?” asked Rex.

  “Beats me, Rex,” said Minnie. “That Crossley’s ex-military, so I’d say soldier or private dick. Or maybe he’s some sicko that likes to get his ha-has from this kind of thing.”

  “Or maybe he was just driving past and wondered what all the fuss was about.”

  “Then why’s he taking notes?”

  Rex peered through his glasses, seeing that Minnie was right; the man was writing something down in a pocket notebook.

  “You want to go speak to him, too?” asked Minnie. “Could be something.”

  Rex was about to answer her, but seeing that he was being observed, the man climbed into his car and drove away.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Rex.

  “Don’t worry,” said Minnie. “I got the plates.”

  “Clever girl,” said Rex, giving her a playful punch to the arm. “My clever, clever girl.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The battered truck bounced along the rutted road, though to call it a road was a stretch. More like barely visible dirt track, thought Finn Edwards as he steered the heavy Model T through the darkened forest. Billington Woods was a few miles northwest of Arkham, seldom visited and isolated, which made it perfect for tonight’s meeting. Only the faintest glimmer of moonlight penetrated the thick forest canopy, and after a few hits of Jimmy’s whiskey, keeping the truck straight was an even greater challenge than normal.

  “Jaysus, Finn, are you tryin’ to hit every bloody pothole in this damn road?” snapped Sean as a lit match fell from his hands. He cursed and stamped it out before lighting another and applying the flame to the tip of his cigarette.

  “You think you can do better, do ye?” demanded Finn, tired of Sean’s constant bitching. West Roxbury born and bred, his whining accent annoyed the hell out of Finn, but he was a favorite of the Boston gangs, so he bit his tongue.

  “Ah, sure now, Finn’s doing a grand job see,” said Jimmy from behind him, already three sheets to the wind, having finished his whiskey by the time they’d hit the Aylesbury pike. Jimmy turned around to look at the growling truck following them through the woods. “Better than Fergal anyhow, that boy’s all over the road like a drunken nun.”

  Fergal was the youngest of the four of them, and nobody liked him. Too earnest in his desire to please, he was irritating in the way only someone who tried too hard to be liked can be irritating. Which was why Jimmy and Sean rode with Finn.

  It had been a risk coming out this way, what with that poor dead girl found down at the athletics field, but the boys from Newburyport were coming tonight with the booze from Canada, so what choice did they have?

  “Cheers for the support, Jimmy,” said Finn. “But in your state, I’m not sure you’re the best judge of my driving skills.”

  “Yeah, shut your mouth, Jim
my,” added Sean, peering ahead as though he could penetrate the gloom. His cigarette filled the cab with smoke, but he didn’t think to offer Finn or Jimmy a puff. That was typical of Sean Cafferty, though: a man who didn’t give a rat’s ass for anyone but himself. If he weren’t so connected, Finn would have taken out his knife and gutted him right there and then.

  “If ye’d let me turn on the lights I could see better,” suggested Finn.

  “Don’t be an eejit, man,” said Sean, taking out his heavy .45 automatic and making sure the magazine was fully loaded. “You want to tell the world we’re here?”

  “There’s no one out here but us,” said Finn. “Ain’t that the point?”

  “No lights,” said Sean, and Finn shrugged, returning his attention to the road. They’d driven for nearly a mile, best he could tell, and the trees showed no sign of thinning. It looked like nary an axe nor saw had ever been taken to these trees, like they had always existed and always would. They reminded Finn of the fairy tales his mam would tell him of the Fey and the green men with thistledown hair who lived beneath the hills and stole children away in the dead of night. This was an ancient forest, one that could easily give rise to the darker kinds of fairy tales. Finn shivered, his Celtic soul alive with the possibilities of strange beings and malicious sprites making their homes within this place.

  “The house should be just ahead, Finn,” said Sean, holding his cigarette close to a crumpled map he had pulled out of his long coat.

  Finn nodded, already seeing the trees thinning out ahead. The road became less rutted and moonlight illuminated a wide expanse of flat ground, overgrown with tall grasses and bushes that hadn’t been trimmed back since God knows when. In the center of the clearing stood what had once been an elaborate three-story mansion, built in the Colonial style, but which had now fallen into disrepair. Vines clung to its walls, and the white paint on its wooden boards was peeling and stained with decades of neglect.