Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (9 page)

Oliver saw her screw up her courage, suddenly understanding how difficult this confession was for her. What could be so bad that she felt so nervous speaking of it?

“The sunken city you talked about? The one the Yopasi believed the sea devil lived in?”

“Yes,” said Oliver. “They called it the ‘crypt of the star-fallen.’ What of it?”

“I think I’ve seen it,” said Amanda.

* * *

The East River Shipyard was bathed in light from strings of electric lights hung like Christmas decorations. Arc lights on tall steel towers illuminated the rear quarter of the DCV
Matilda Rose
as sheets of rain fell, blown in from the Atlantic by a squalling western wind. Under the shelter of a corrugated iron awning, Charles Warren stood with his fists bunched and a thick vein pulsing at his temple.

The news he had received from Arkham was not good. With the theft of the Travelers’ device, the
Matilda Rose
was simply millions of tons of scrap metal. He looked at the workers hammering, welding, and painting on the deck of his ship, and imagined them all burning alive, like the Germans they’d killed at Belleau Wood. He watched a gang of painters working on the hull from a suspended plank, hundreds of feet above the quayside, and willed the rope to break.

To watch these men plunge to their deaths might quell his rising fury, but he doubted it.

Dressed in an expensive suit from Brooks Brothers, Charles Warren looked, at first glance, like any number of Wall Street brokers, but one look at his pugnacious face, thunderous brow, and fist-fighter’s hands made it clear that he was not a man to be taken lightly. He turned away from the gleaming ship and made his way back into his office. The walls were covered with plans and blueprints, pinned invoices, and letters. A pair of drawing boards heaped with T-squares, protractors, and slide-rules sat unused at the back of the office, and his heavy pinewood desk was similarly chaotic.

A pretty young woman sat in the corner, behind a smaller desk and a dented typewriter. He didn’t know her name, but it didn’t pay to learn their names. She looked nervous, some innate womanly instinct warning her that he was a dangerous man. She hadn’t been working for him long, barely a week, and had yet to feel the full force of his anger. She would, though. That was inevitable. The last girl’s body had been dumped quietly in the Hudson, and the scabs were still visible on Charles’s knuckles.

“Any news?” he demanded, his gruff tone precisely conveying how bad it would be if her answer were not to his liking.

“No, sir,” she said, swallowing hard. “No one’s called. I’m sorry.”

He laughed at her pathetic attempt to apologize for something totally beyond her control, as though that might one day save her from his monstrous rage. This time it had. It wouldn’t a second time.

Charles sat behind his desk, wondering if he should call the unlisted Arkham number he’d been given. He immediately decided that would be foolish. The caller had been very clear about how bad things would have to be to justify such a call. As self-absorbed as Charles Warren was, he knew enough to understand how much he would suffer if he displeased his master.

The words of the earlier call still rang in his ears. A clipped New England voice had simply said that the final piece of the device had been lost, but that it would be retrieved forthwith. There had been no hint of contrition in the voice, though Charles knew the speaker would never demean himself with anything so prosaic as an apology.

“Can I get you anything, Mr. Warren? Coffee maybe?” ventured the girl, seeking to defuse his simmering anger with pathetic blandishments.

“No,” he said. “Go away. I’ll hurt you if you stay.”

She gathered her coat and all but fled the office. He knew she would consider not coming in tomorrow, but the money was too good for a young thing like her to refuse. Booze, dresses, dancing, and cigarettes needed to be paid for. She would come in to work tomorrow as if nothing had happened. And one day soon he would beat her.

The thought gave him a delicious thrill of excitement, like the last days of the war, when the urges that had beset him since childhood had been given free reign.

 
When he had become a monster and been embraced for the fact.

* * *

Oliver studied Amanda as she settled into the chair opposite him and turned her attention to his bookshelf. They had left the classroom and climbed the steps to his office, where she had politely declined a glass of water and sat with the awkwardness of students throughout the world when in a professor’s inner sanctum.

She was pretty, in a bookish sort of way, with straight blond hair and a heart-shaped face framed by half-moon glasses. Like most girls in higher education, her clothes were demure and sensible, not like the girls you saw in the movies dancing on tables and smoking like they were characters in
The Beautiful and the Damned
. After all, women were a new feature at American universities, and such bastions could never have been stormed by those dangerously exciting types.

She smiled nervously, and Oliver saw she was at the point of regretting her decision to speak to him. Before her nerve failed her completely, he sat forward and steepled his hands before him on the desk.

“So, Amanda, that was a rather remarkable thing you said in class.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” she said with a nervous laugh. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’d be very interested in what you have to say.”

“I feel stupid telling you this…”

“Not at all. Imagine how I felt when I had to inform the university bursary that three years’ worth of research was wasted.”

“I suppose,” said Amanda, “that must have been difficult.”

“It wasn’t pleasant,” agreed Oliver, not wishing to relive that particular horror again. “But I don’t want to bore you with such stuffy matters.”

“I should tell you what I saw, I guess.”

Oliver nodded and took out a yellow legal pad and pencil, scribbling the date and Amanda’s name at the top of the page. “That would be most useful, Miss Sharpe. You don’t mind if I take notes?”

She shook her head, keeping her arms folded tightly across her chest. She was nervous, scared even, and Oliver waited for her to begin. When she spoke it was with a soft voice, as though she were afraid of being overheard. Or was afraid of being ridiculed.

“When I say I’ve seen the sunken city, I don’t mean literally, you understand? What I mean to say is that I’ve dreamed it. Almost every night for the last two weeks.”

“You’ve dreamed it?” asked Oliver, almost disappointed.

“Yes.”

“And what happens in this dream?”

“I’m floating on the surface of the sea, in the middle of a huge ocean. I can’t see any land, and it’s night I think. I can see stars overhead, turning like the intricate mechanisms of a clock as they slot into position. I don’t feel scared, but I know there’s something wrong, something just, I don’t know,
not right
.”

“I see,” said Oliver, writing what Amanda said in his spidery handwriting. “Not right in what way?”

“I’m not sure,” replied Amanda, her fingers knotting and unknotting in her lap. “It’s just a feeling, like intuition, that something’s out of place. Like when you look at a movie screen. It looks real, but you know it’s not. It’s like someone has
twisted
the world just a little and it doesn’t fit anymore. I know that’s not a very good description, but that’s how it feels.”

Oliver shrugged. “I don’t think dream logic has to hold true to the strictures of the real world, Miss Sharpe. It’s quite understandable that some things feel out of place or otherwise distorted.”

Amanda shook her head. “No, it’s not ‘cause it’s a dream that makes it seem out of alignment, it’s something else. Something below the water. And as soon as I realize that, I feel the current drag me under the water.”

“How dreadful!”

“I’m not scared, at least not yet. I can breathe and no matter how far down I go, I’m not cold or drowning. I don’t know how deep I go, but it feels like I’m going down forever and ever. It’s then I see the city and hear the chanting.
That’s
when I get scared.”

“And what does this city look like?” asked Oliver.

“It’s big, I mean
really
big. Like someone sank Manhattan, then dumped Chicago and Boston on top of New York. But it was ruined, like it had fallen all the way from the surface and hit the bottom with an almighty crash that toppled all the statues and buildings in a big pile.”

Oliver leaned forward. “Can you describe any of these statues?”

Amanda closed her eyes, and her eyes darted behind her lids. Frown lines appeared on her forehead and her skin went quite pale as though she were remembering something hideous. She flinched as though slapped by an invisible hand and when she opened her eyes, they were moist with tears.

“They’re horrible, like one of those stitched together monsters in Mr. Barnum’s freak shows. They’re squatting things, like a gorilla or something, but their faces are missing.”

“Missing? You mean the heads have been knocked off?”

“No,” said Amanda, clearly distressed at her recall. “It’s more like you can’t see them.”

“Why not?”

“There’s just tentacles there, as if it’s got a giant squid or octopus for a face.”

Oliver rose from behind his desk and ran his thumb along the spines of the research materials he had gathered on the island of the Yopasi. When he came to the sketchbook he was looking for, he returned to his seat and opened it in front of Amanda.

“Did it look anything like this?” he asked.

Amanda looked down at the picture, a painted representation of the abode wherein dwelled the Yopasi’s demonic nemesis. The work was crude, without the benefit of perspective and realism, though that was perhaps a blessing. It was a riot of impossible dimensions, for no two angles seemed complete or possible, as though the stubborn reality of mathematics and planar geometry were cosmic laws that no longer held dominance.

Amanda drew in a panicked breath and looked away, as though she had been shown a hideous photograph of a murder victim. She nodded and the tears that had been gathering on her eyelids now fell freely down her cheeks.

“Yes, it looked just like that,” she gasped, dabbing her eyes with the sleeve of her green cardigan. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cry, but it’s all getting a bit much for me. I’m scared to close my eyes, because I’m afraid I’ll see the city again.”

“It’s quite all right,” said Oliver, ashamed that he had caused Amanda to cry, but the similarities between her dream vision and the city drawn by the Yopasi shaman were too great to ignore. The seaweed-hung statues of that ink-rendered city were virtually identical to those described by Amanda. She could not have seen this picture, which begged a stark and unanswerable question.

How had she seen this city?
 

Oliver pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and passed it to Amanda, who smiled gratefully and dabbed her eyes. She nodded toward the sketchbook, but studiously avoided looking at the image on the paper.

“What is that?”

“It’s the sunken city where the star-fallen is said to sleep,” said Oliver. “A Yopasi shaman named Kaula drew it for me, though it took months of persuasion and hard liquor to get him to put pen to paper.”

Amanda sniffed and moved some papers from Oliver’s desk to cover the image.

“How can I be dreaming of that place? I’ve never seen that drawing before.”

“I was wondering that very thing, Miss Sharpe,” said Oliver. Afternoon sunlight shone through his blinds in crisp bars, yet the office seemed dark, as though low rain clouds pressed down on the world. “You couldn’t possibly have seen that image, but perhaps something else is at work, something not unlike the primal shared consciousness that linked the earliest shamans. Perhaps you too share a latent connection to the memory of this ancient sea devil, and some recently manifested sensory awareness has made you more sensitive to these visions.”

Amanda gave him a sidelong look. “I’m sorry, professor, you’re losing me.”

“I know it sounds ridiculous, and if I were you, I’d be tempted to call me a lunatic and have me sent to the asylum, but bear with me. This is a queer town, no mistake, and some of the texts Armitage keeps in the restricted section make for even stranger reading. There have been scores of documented cases where people sensitive to such things experience visions of things they cannot possibly have seen. Now, tell me, Miss Sharpe, you say you have been experiencing these dreams for two weeks. Can you be more precise? When exactly did they start? Was there a catalyst that brought them on, a precipitating event that might have caused you to begin seeing such things?”

Amanda gave the matter some thought as Oliver took more notes in his pad, writing a complete record of their conversation. She chewed her bottom lip as she thought, until a light of clarity appeared in her eyes.

“Yes, I remember,” she said. “I was looking for your class at the beginning of the semester, but went to the wrong floor. I ended up in the Department of Fine Arts and wandered around there until I realized I had to go up another story.”

Amanda paused in her recollection, as though her mind had become fogged and uncertain. She cocked her head to one side, frowning as though trying to recall the name of a distant friend.

“Before I found my way, I went down a corridor that led to an office. The door was shut, and looked like it hadn’t been opened in a very long time. It looked closed up, and closed up for a good reason, like the person whose office it was wouldn’t be coming back for a very long time. There was a picture on the wall, I think.”

“A picture? Do you remember what the picture was?”

“That’s the thing,” said Amanda. “I remember looking at it, but for the life of me I can’t remember anything about it, just impressions really. Sea, waves, and a mass of foam. It might have looked like a giant whirlpool. I’m sorry, I’m not being much help here.”

“On the contrary, Miss Sharpe, you’re being a tremendous help. Was this corridor lit by an electric light fitting with one bulb cracked and lightless?”