Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) (42 page)

“Find Amanda!” shouted Stone. “Quickly! I got my hands full here!”

Oliver nodded and crawled along the hallway toward one of the frat house’s front rooms. He couldn’t hear any voices from that room, but didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. More shots and screams sounded from behind him: shouting voices and desperate demands from Stone for surrender.

“Amanda!” shouted Oliver, though how she was supposed to hear him over the clamor of battle he didn’t know. “Amanda! We’re here to help! It’s Professor Grayson! If you can hear me, shout out!”

CHAPTER 20

Amanda drifted in and out of consciousness. The pain from her lacerated back was intense. She lay broken and at the end of her endurance, hearing voices from her past and images of strange futures. Though she thought she was awake, it seemed that she could hear shouting voices and distant bangs, like backfiring cars.

She raised her head, seeing the surface of the pool ripple with the distant tides, and in its inky blackness, she thought she could see strange reflections. The city she had dreamed to life and which had led her to this place shimmered in the depths of the water, a tomb not for the mighty undersea demon, but for her. She had not dreamed of a long-slumbering monster, but her own doom.

The ghouls in the cells across from her snarled and howled, rattling the bars of their caves as though in agitation. They were hungry and wanted to finish the job of devouring her. She had given the red priest exactly what he’d wanted, describing in great detail the layout of the stars in her dream. She thought she had passed out before finishing her description, but couldn’t be sure.

She couldn’t be sure of anything just now.

She hoped the man had lied about Rita rotting in the tunnels.

Amanda turned her head as a sound drifted down from the darkness above. She knew the meaning of the sound, but couldn’t place it. It sounded like a voice she once knew, and it wasn’t a sound from this place. It was a voice she trusted, a voice that had promised to help.

She knew the man whose voice she was hearing, and her entire body shook as the name finally came to her.

Professor Grayson!

Amanda pulled herself upright, her entire body a mass of pain and exhaustion. There was no part of her that didn’t hurt, no part of her that hadn’t been degraded and humiliated by her captors. No part of her save the desire to live.

“I’m here! Down here!” cried Amanda.

Deprived of water and food for so long, her voice was little more than a cracked whisper, but she gulped and tried to moisten her mouth with saliva. Fresh determination filled Amanda, and she rose on wobbling legs, using the cave walls to support herself. She shouted again and again, each time growing louder and louder as the thought of rescue grew from a forsaken hope to a potential reality.

“Professor Grayson!” she screamed. “Down here!”

Each time she yelled out, the ghouls in the cells roared and howled in rage, as though they could sense their prey might be snatched away at the last moment. Latimer hurled himself at the door of his cell, and Amanda blanched as she saw yet another bar come loose. Her captors had not seen fit to repair the damage Latimer had wreaked on his cell when Rita had made her escape.

Latimer reached out and tore one of the bars from his cell completely off.

“Professor Grayson! Hurry!” yelled Amanda.

* * *

“Come on,” said the mirror image in Henry Cartwright’s cell at Arkham Asylum. “You’re so close. If you look outside you can see Fomalhaut clearly. The Great Old One is almost here, so why stop now? Just one more try, what do you say?”

“No,” said Henry through gritted teeth. “I. Will. Not. Say. It.”

“Yes, you will,” said the figure. “If I have to come over there and reach down that throat of yours and rip the words out with my bare hands.”

The veins stood out like taut hawsers on Henry’s neck, and his skin flushed a deep red. Blood vessels hemorrhaged in his eyes, and a crimson curtain fell across his vision. Henry’s muscles spasmed and he fell onto his back, jerking and convulsing like a patient undergoing electro-convulsive therapy.

His fingers clawed at the floor as the light of the moon shone down on him, its gibbous glow eclipsed by the red star that hung low over the horizon. Its glow shimmered like hot air above an asphalt road in the summer. Even in his delirium, Henry felt as though it was a gelid eye staring unblinkingly at him with a monstrous appetite. It was an intelligence of old acquaintance to Henry, a being he had seen once before in all its hellish majesty as the landscape of France burned. He had seen this terrible creature’s avatars at work, sparking into horrid parodies of life before the walls of Château-Thierry, and knew how capricious and destructive they could be.

His shadow-self leered down at him.

“You see,” it said. “The Great Old One is almost here anyway. You might as well say the rest of the incantation.”

Henry tried to fight the sounds pressing against his teeth, but it was no use.

He heard the hideous words vomiting up from inside him.

“
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha Formalhaut n’gha-ghaa naf’l thagn! Iä Cthugha!
”

Henry’s back arched and his mind fled to the forgotten darkness in its deepest recesses.

* * *

Oliver crawled through the chaos of the frat house, hearing frantic yells and gunshots echoing from the walls. He was utterly terrified, and had no idea where Stone was, but the fact there was still a gun battle raging surely meant the man was alive and fighting. He kept shouting Amanda’s name, and had all but given up any hope of receiving a response when he heard a faint voice calling his name during a brief lull in the shooting.

He turned a corner and saw two young frat boys with blond hair and Ivy League good looks at a door secured by a heavy iron padlock. One had a red robe draped over his shoulder and clutched a ring of keys. The other carried a heavy axe, like an executioner’s blade that might once have beheaded kings. They looked up as he came into view, and Oliver thought they looked familiar, but didn’t have time to wonder where he’d seen them.

“Kill him, Wilson!” said the boy with the keys.

The boy identified as Wilson ran toward him, but Oliver was acting on pure instinct and adrenaline now and shot the boy twice in the chest. Wilson collapsed, screaming in pain, but Oliver ignored him, training his gun on the second boy.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” said Oliver. “But I will.”

“No, you won’t,” said the boy, ducking through an open door beside him. Oliver fired, but his shot missed and smashed into the doorframe. Oliver cursed and ran down to the locked door. He pressed himself to the door, hearing the faint pleas of a young girl.

“Amanda!” he shouted.
 

Oliver heard his name shouted in reply, the cry surely belonging to Amanda. Oliver rattled the handle as he uselessly pulled at the door. There was no way he could repeat Stone’s feat of breaking the door down. At least not without a tool to help him. Oliver returned to the groaning body of the boy he’d just shot and retrieved the axe, surprised at its weight as he hefted it over his shoulder.

He was about to take a swing at the door, when he saw he wouldn’t need to.

In his hurry to escape, the other boy had dropped the ring of keys.

Oliver swept them up and slid a key into the lock. The angels were looking down upon him, and the first key he tried turned out to be the right one. The lock snapped open with a satisfying click, and Oliver pushed the door open. A set of steps was cut into the earth beneath the house, and the rank stench of putrefaction wafted up from below, as though this was the entrance to the very bowels of Hell.
 

Fear of the dark and the unknown warred within Oliver as he imagined the terrible things he might see below. This was surely the lair of the ghouls. What debaucheries might he find within so wretched a place?

He took a deep breath and checked the chambers of his pistol.

He was down to his last bullet.

“Damn you, Stone, why didn’t you give me any more bullets?” said Oliver.

Should he find Stone to reload? No, that was foolish. Instead, Oliver took up the executioner’s axe as Amanda’s scream of fear and the clang of metal on rock echoed from somewhere below the frat house.

Oliver set off down the stairs at a run.

* * *

The sound of gunfire was audible from outside the frat house, sounding tinny and distant from the construction site. Rex eased closer to Minnie as the first shots sounded, subtly placing himself between her and the house.

“Getting gallant in your old age, Rex?” she said.

Rex gave her a lopsided smile, the kind she had grown to love over the last few years. “I guess so. It’s gotten a bit too real now, I guess. Do you think we ought to go in and help?”

“Not unless you got a gun in your pocket you haven’t told me about.”

“Point taken,” said Rex. “But I don’t like this. Sitting on the sidelines isn’t my style.”

“I would have thought it was exactly a reporter’s style,” said Alexander, crouched behind a mass of heavy cinderblocks and alternating his glances between the frat house and the sky. “What I mean to say is, isn’t it a reporter’s job to simply report and not get involved? Surely the best reporting is unbiased and objective?”

“I guess,” answered Rex. “But this is different. We’re not here as reporters, but as decent human beings who want to help. But what are we doing out here to help?”

“Staying alive,” answered Minnie. “If this all goes south, then the three of us are all that’s left to keep digging and carry on what we’ve begun.”

Rex gave a weary shrug, accepting the logic of what Minnie said, but not too happy about it. Minnie knew that Rex was itching to get in on the action, or at least seen to be getting in on the action. It wasn’t that she thought Rex was a coward, far from it, but he was a man who knew his limits. Getting involved in a shoot out was way beyond his limits.

Beyond hers, too, for she had no wish to put herself in harm’s way.

Having her camera set up so near to a gunfight was about as close as she wanted to get to conflict. Some reporters had traveled to France in the wake of the war, sending back harrowing stories from the aftermath of the fighting, and there was talk of newsmen being allowed to travel with the armed forces as they consolidated their hold over Europe.

As much as the idea of getting that close to the news scared her, she couldn’t help but think of the kinds of pictures she might get. The whip-crack of a passing bullet made her duck. She hid behind the tripod of her camera, even though she knew it was useless as protection.
 

She looked over at Alexander, the man taking cover as though he feared a stray bullet might somehow penetrate the ten feet of cinderblocks he was sheltering behind. He glanced up at the sky once more, and a flickering red glow shimmered faintly across his normally unflappable features.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Is it just me, or does that star look a lot closer than it ought to be?” said Alexander.

Minnie and Rex looked up, and their breath caught in their throats as they saw the blazing light of a red star hanging over the frat house. The night sky seethed with orange and red, and a rippling haze compressed the air as a curtain of suffocating heat descended. The clouds flashed to superheated steam as the sky was pulled apart with the sound of tearing cloth.

Waterfalls of fire fell from the heavens amid a billowing cloud of spinning embers that darted like fireflies.

* * *

Gabriel had burned through five speed loaders, and the gunfight showed no sign of letting up. These frat boys were putting up a hell of a fight, and it was lucky for him that most of them couldn’t shoot worth a damn. Bullets zipped through the air, twitching the clouds of smoke. The reek of cordite was thick in his nostrils. He’d shot maybe ten or fifteen guys, but felt no remorse for their deaths.

They had tried to kill him and were responsible for the death of his daughter.

Fifteen deaths didn’t even begin to make up for that loss.

Three guys rushed him from a side room, two armed with guns, another with a large machete. Stone shot the first, and dodged to the side as the other fired a wild burst of shots. The doorframe broke apart into splinters, and Gabriel threw himself back as another bullet tore through the lath and plaster wall he’d been standing against. He swung back and put a bullet into the face of the shooter, catching a fleeting glimpse of a face contorted into a ravaged mask. His bullet destroyed the face before he could get a good look. Gabriel was grateful for this small mercy.

The machete swung at him, and Gabriel had no room to move. The blade hacked into the meat of his upper arm, and the pain was the most terrible sensation he’d ever known. The gun dropped from his hand, and he staggered back, falling to the carpeted landing as the frat boy came at him again.

Gabriel rolled onto his back and kicked out with both legs. The heels of his heavy boots slammed into the boy’s knees, and Gabriel heard a satisfying crack of bone. The boy fell to the floor with a shriek that said he’d never walk again. Gabriel reached over with his left hand to snatch up his fallen gun.