Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (39 page)

“It’s too much,” sobbed Henry. “I feel it getting closer every day: the rocks tumble, chains of ancient days weaken, and the sea churns with the stirring of its form. Dark waters are rising, and the stain of man will be washed away. Noah and his kin had the way of it. Only way to live, to flee the rising waters. Wash it all away, the filth, the corruption, the lost souls, and the organism that failed.”

“Henry, what are you talking about? Please, you have to help me! Amanda’s life depends upon it. Where are the ghouls? Who is the priest in red? If you know, you must tell me!”

“I can’t,” screamed Henry. “I don’t know. There’s nothing left of me. No memory, no will. I am Nemo, you understand? The no-man now. The things I saw, the things I did…please forgive me, but I tried. It was too much. The things we read, may God forgive me…”

“Please,” said Oliver, taking Henry by the arms.

There was no strength left in Henry, and Oliver easily held him fast.

“No! Please, no!” screamed Henry. “You can’t. Mustn’t. The darkness is coming, and everything will die, wiped away for a fresh start.”

“Henry, for the love of God, please help me!” shouted Oliver.

“Do well, whatever you do,” cried Henry. “It’s the most important thing!”

Something of this last utterance struck Oliver as relevant, but before he could dwell on it, Henry curled up at the end of his bed. Henry’s arms curled around his head as he rocked back and forth. Oliver felt a moment’s pity for his old friend. The drive to know everything, to unlock the mysteries of the world was a compulsion Oliver knew only too well. The desire to understand the workings of the world and the people within it were what had seen Oliver enter the world of academia. But as he was coming to realize, there was such a thing as too much knowledge, limits beyond which it was unsafe to venture.

Oliver sat back, resting his head on the cold wall as Henry quietly wept into his sheets.

It had been a wasted trip.

He had learned nothing.

* * *

Oliver made his way back down through the hallways of Arkham Asylum, his mood despondent and his spirits low. He had been sure there was still some shred of the old Henry left, a part that retained some good, but that aspect of his friend was as broken as his sanity. Whatever remained of Henry Cartwright, the professor, the colleague, and the fellow traveler on the road of enlightenment, was gone.

Tears pricked the corners of his eyes, as Oliver mourned his lost friend. While Henry had remained in the asylum, Oliver had always held out faint hope that there might be a cure or solution found to bring him back from the edge, but this latest encounter had dashed that hope. Henry was gone, and Oliver felt the pain as keenly as any death.

Monroe was contrite as he led the way back to the main vestibule of the asylum, and Oliver gave him a numb nod of thanks as he opened the last door. Oliver made his way to the desk and scratched the time next to his name as he signed out of the building. The orderly who normally sat there was absent, so Oliver simply made his way toward the main door.

Before he reached it, he heard hurrying feet and looked round to see a woman emerge from one of the offices. She wore a nurse’s uniform, and Oliver recognized her pale skin, dark eyes, and brown hair from his last visit. Her red lips seemed at odds with her clinical bearing, and she flashed Oliver a knowing smile.

“Professor Grayson?” she said.

“Yes?”

“There was a telephone call for you,” she said, making it sound like a huskily voiced invitation, though Oliver couldn’t imagine what such an invite might portend.

“Oh, did the caller give a name?”

“He said his name was Gabriel Stone,” she said. “From the hospital.”

Oliver’s guts tightened in anticipation. “Did he leave a message for me?”

“He did,” confirmed the nurse. “He said to tell you that Rita’s woken up.”

* * *

The mood in the hospital room was quietly optimistic, though no one dared voice any such sentiment for fear of jinxing it. Rita was sitting up, propped by a mountain of pillows and sipping a glass of crushed ice. Too much fluid would have been just as bad for her as none at all, so the doctors were limiting her intake. Finn was also responding well to medical treatment. His wounds were severe, but Arkham’s doctors were more than competent. Despite some serious blood loss, Finn Edwards was resilient and wasn’t going to make it easy for the Sidhe to carry him to Tir Na Nog.

Rex, Minnie, Stone, and Alexander gathered around Rita’s bed, trying not to crowd her, but eager to hear what she had to say. Introductions had already been made, and Oliver was the last to arrive, speeding across town at a lunatic forty miles per hour to get to St. Mary’s. Though he had never met Rita before, he was elated to hear she had awoken, and rushed up the steps and along the tiled corridors to her room.

Stone in particular appeared to have taken the greatest joy at Rita’s awakening, and it wasn’t hard to understand the reason why. Rita’s survival was a symbol, a tiny spot of light against the dark, but a light just the same.

“You get anything from Cartwright?” asked Rex as Oliver entered the room.

“Little I think will be of use,” said Oliver.

“Damn,” said Minnie, surprising them all with the force behind her curse.

“Are you Professor Grayson?” asked Rita, her voice little more than a croaking wheeze.

Oliver moved to stand beside her and delicately took her hand.

“I am, yes,” he said.

“Amanda told me to find you,” she said as tears eased from her eyes. “I went to your office, but you wasn’t there.”

“No,” said Oliver. “I was…uh, elsewhere. I’m sorry.”

“You have to find Amanda,” said Rita. “I left her there. I’m sorry, Mandy. I didn’t have no choice. I had to get out and get help.”

“You did the right thing, Rita,” soothed Oliver.

“I couldn’t just sit there and let them kill us.”

“Let who kill you?” asked Stone.

“I dunno…those guys. They wore robes, like priests or something. There was one, a guy in a red robe. He wanted to know about Mandy’s dreams. Threatened to feed me to the monsters unless she told them.”

“The ghouls,” said Alexander. “She was held in their lair.”

“A man in a red robe like a priest?” said Oliver excitedly. This was the link between the murdered girls, the ghouls, and the sphere Finn had taken from the monstrous flying creatures. It was all linked, every gruesome thread part of a larger design, with the minions of dread Cthulhu at the heart of the web.

“Yeah, he was like a Klansman in red,” said Rita, wiping her face with her sleeve. “I don’t know who he was…we could never see his face, but he scared us. I mean, more than any man should. He had bad mojo in him, real bad, the worst I ever seen.”

“Bad mojo? I don’t know the term,” said Oliver. “What does it mean?”

“Means he’s evil,” said Rita. “Evil in his heart like it went bad, you know? Nothing smells worse than something that’s gone rotten.”

Rita screwed her eyes shut at the memory of this man. Eventually she sighed and Oliver stroked strands of hair from her forehead.

“Rita, this is very important,” said Oliver. “Can you tell us where you were? Do you remember anything about the place you were held prisoner? Even the slightest detail could help us find Amanda.”

Rita shook her head. “It was a cave, underground somewhere. We never saw how we got there. We got jumped on the bridge after we left the Commercial, and that’s the last thing I remember before we woke up in the cave. They had those things in cells around the wall. Oh hell, Mandy, I’m so sorry! We have to find her!”

“We will,” Stone assured her. Behind him, Rex wrote furiously in his notebook.

“You have to, before he gets her to tell,” said Rita. “Mandy’s a good girl, but she won’t last, not without me to keep her strong. She’ll tell him, and then he gets what he wants.”

“What exactly was he wanting?” asked Oliver.

“Her dreams,” said Rita. “Everything she dreamed about that damn city under the water.”

“Do you know why?” asked Rex.

“He thought he could find it, I guess,” said Rita. “I think he thought Amanda’s dreams would show him where it was.”

“Can he do that?” asked Minnie. “It was only a dream, after all.”

Alexander shook his head. “No, it wasn’t. It was a vision of another place. Maybe even another time. After what’s happened to us all recently, is that so hard to believe?”

“I guess not,” agreed Minnie.

“How did you manage to escape?” asked Rex, earning him a stern glance from Stone.

“A few ghouls came back one time, and some looked wounded. Like they’d been shot.”

Stone and Oliver exchanged a look of understanding.

“The others ate them right in front of us. It was horrible, but I got a weapon out of it.”

Rita told them how she had fought the cultists, and Oliver felt his admiration for this courageous girl soar at her desperate escape from the lair of the ghouls. To have survived so long and still have the pluck and energy to fight free was staggering.

“Did you see where you came out into the river?” asked Stone.

“I tried to,” said Rita, “but I got turned around too much to see for sure. Somewhere upriver of the West Street Bridge, but I can’t say for sure. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m surprised you remember anything after all you’ve been through,” said Oliver.

Stone and Oliver quizzed Rita for another hour, learning everything they could of her terrible ordeal. As Rita began to doze off again, they were no nearer to finding Amanda’s location, save that it was likely somewhere in the western parts of the Campus or Merchant District. But that still left a lot of properties in which Amanda might be held prisoner.

Stone approached Oliver and said, “Rex tells me you got nothing from your friend at the asylum. Tough break.”

“It’s hard to know what to make of what he was saying. I’m no psychiatrist, though perhaps I could have my colleague, William Hillshore, come out from San Francisco to examine him more thoroughly in the days to come,” said Oliver.

“Maybe,” agreed Stone, “but that won’t do us much good just now.”

“I know, but sometimes it felt like Henry was on the verge of saying something profound, but then he would veer off into raving lunacy. I’m afraid the experience of the war has broken him. Henry kept talking of the world being wiped clean, of the stain of humanity being washed away.”

“Do you know what he meant by that?” asked Minnie.

“Not really, no,” said Oliver. “But it bears relation to the rise of the demon’s undersea tomb city. I suspect Henry’s madness and the machinations of the Cthulhu cult to be inextricably linked.”

“You’re sure he didn’t say anything that’d help us find Amanda? Think, professor.”

“He said he’d seen the ghouls, found their lair even, but he didn’t give me any clue as to where it might be located.”

“Damn,” muttered Stone, turning away and sitting at the end of Rita’s bed.

Oliver shrugged and said, “I
do
think he wanted us to find Amanda. The more I think about it, the more I have a hard time believing that this was Henry’s doing. If anything, he seemed utterly horrified by the idea of these ghouls loose in Arkham. I had the very distinct impression that he’d found them, and tried to stop them, but was in turn stopped himself.”

“By the guy in the red robes,” suggested Rex.

“I suspect so,” agreed Oliver.

“We need to find him,” said Stone. “Whoever he is.”

“I’m not sure I want to,” said Rex, jerking his thumb toward the recumbent figure of Rita. She was dozing, not quite awake and not quite asleep. “If even half of what Rita says is true, then this is one serious guy. He doesn’t mind getting his hands bloody at all, and I don’t want to be the next item on those ghouls’ menu.”

“We don’t have a choice, Rex,” said Minnie.

Rex slumped in his chair and tapped his pencil against his pad. “So what else did Henry say, Oliver? Gimme a quote to end on, eh?”

Oliver massaged his temples with his fingertips. “Henry did give me one piece of advice. He said it was the most important thing.”

“Yeah? What was it? Don’t eat yellow snow?”

“Hardly,” said Oliver. “He said, ‘Do well, whatever you do.’”

No sooner had the words been said than Rita sat bolt upright.

“He said what?” she demanded, her eyes alight with sudden fervor.

“‘Do well, whatever you do.’ Does that mean anything to you?” asked Oliver.

“I knew they were bad news!” exclaimed Rita. “Get me outta here. I’ll kill ‘em!”

“Woah, there,” said Stone as Rita tried to hurl herself from the bed. “You’re in no condition to go anywhere, missy. Lie back and tell us what that means, okay? I got a big gun, and if anyone needs killin’, you best be leaving it to me. You understand?”

Rita looked up at Stone and recognized a man who never broke his word, never lied, and never made a threat he wasn’t prepared to back up with violence if need be. Oliver felt an acute relief that he counted Stone as an ally, for he would make a potent enemy.

“What does it mean, Rita?” Oliver asked again. “What is its significance?”

“It’s their motto,” said Rita. “He told us at the Commercial. ‘Do well, whatever you do.’ He was bragging, telling us how smart they was, how lucky we were to be with them. All he did was look like some rich kid boasting he had more money than me.”

“Who was this?” asked Oliver.

“Wilson Brewster, he’s part of the AQA Fraternity,” said Rita. “Oily bastard’s been trying to be Amanda’s sugar daddy ever since he laid eyes on her.”

“AQA? What’s that?” asked Rex.

“Age Quod Agis,” said Oliver. “It’s a Latin abbreviation, and means—”

“‘Do well, whatever you do,’ I get it,” finished Stone. “Where’s their frat house?”

“It’s on West Church Street, I think,” said Alexander. “Near the graveyard…”

“That’s it,” said Stone, his hand drifting toward his pistol. “We got ‘em.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN