SHORT STORIES

Arkham Noir 2

Arkham Noir 1

Real Estate

Catacombs

Distillation

The Mall

Roadkill

Triage

ARKHAM NOIR, PT. 1

Lena Durwood made her way down a dark street, through the business district of Arkham. An opaque fog surrounded her, making visibility poor—she couldn't make out the store fronts on the opposite side, and people appeared and disappeared in all directions like wraiths. The lamps at the intersection corners were of no avail—they created feeble cones of light, stretching towards the ground but never quite reaching it.
    She wore a heavy overcoat, and a fedora with the brim tipped down to her nose. A cigarette protruded from her lips, another feeble light in the dark. The smoke, when she exhaled, blended seamlessly with the fog around her. She walked with quick, concise movements, and her footsteps echoed hollowly below.
    She'd never been to that part of the city before, but there she was alone—searching for an extremely rare book that a colleague from the University had tipped her off about, a book that she'd been after for years.
    The book was a travelogue, written by an archeologist that had been researching some islands deep in the Pacific. The author had died before he was able to publish his findings, and the manuscript had been lost somewhere along the way. Her colleague had found it just that morning, entirely by accident. There wasn't a title or an author written on it anywhere, he said—he'd happened to flip it open and scan its contents, and recognized a name that she'd been talking about a few days before. But he wasn't completely certain that she'd want it, so he left it on reserve for her, in case she wanted to have a look herself. She only made a few delays before setting off after it—she gave her evening lecture, had dinner with her husband, and then was on her way.
    She finally arrived to the store—there was a wooden sign, suspended from the haze above, that said “Strange Writings” in narrow, obscure letters. She tossed her cigarette and entered.
    When she made her way to the front, a man detached himself from a nearby shelf, where he had been kneeling, organizing books. He was an old man, heavyset, with grey hair and atypically thick glasses. She said to him, as he assumed his position behind the counter, “A friend of mine put a book on hold for me, this morning. I was hoping to have a look at it.”
    “Title?” he asked, politely.
    “No title. He said the binding was green, though.”
    There was a shelf behind him, lined with various books, and he turned to rifle through them with his thick fingers. After going through them all, he said, “It doesn't seem to be here, ma'am. Are you sure this was the place?”
    “Very.”
    “Well, it's possible that it was accidentally sold. Or maybe someone accidentally put it back out on the shelves. Either way, it isn't here.”
    She didn't respond—she was perturbed, but calm. She left the counter, and began to walk slowly through the narrow lanes of the bookshelves, inspecting their wares.
    Every shelf there was overly burdened, sagging in the middle, in tight rows that went all the way up to the ceiling. A musty smell pervaded the room, and dust covered a majority of the books. She read some of the titles—“Strange Writings” was a very apt name for the place. There were countless books that a person would never expect to see in a store—books on mysticism, ancient and obscure history, magic, death; scrolls of paper, unbound manuscripts, yellowed parchment. She picked up one book only to find that it was entirely blank. Strange place indeed, she thought to herself. More than one book caught her eye, as they pertained to her academic interests—she collected a few, and brought them up to the front counter to buy them.
    “Did you find what you were looking for, after all?” the old man asked her, smiling hopefully.
    “No, I didn't,” she said. His smile quickly faded, but she didn't care.
    On her way out, someone else entered the store. She recognized him immediately as a professor from the University, which caught her very much by surprise--and also made her afraid. She said, “Dr. Jones, what a coincidence, seeing you here. This place must be more popular than I had imagined.”
    The man's surprise was even greater than her own. For a moment, it almost seemed like he intended to ignore her entirely. Then he said, in terse fragments, “Dr. Durwood. Yes, coincidence. Very popular.”
    “I highly recommend that, if you find something that interests you, buy it while you're here. Dr. Schubert put a book on reserve for me, and they lost it in less than a day.”
    “Great advice,” he said.
    Since it didn't seem like he intended to say anything else to her, she left the store. Outside it had begun to rain, a slow, monotonous drizzle. The fog was dissipating, driven down by the persistent moisture. She didn't have an umbrella, so she stood under a patch of darkness under a nearby awning and lit another cigarette, which she smoked slowly.
    She expected her colleague to emerge from the store, eventually—but he never did. She waited thirty minutes, as the fog dwindled to nothing and the rain gradually intensified. She threw the stub of her second cigarette on the ground, put it out with her shoe, and walked back into the store.
    Dr. Jones wasn't there. The employee was back to kneeling on the ground, arranging books, and she approached him directly. Although she was small in stature, for the moment she towered over him. “The man that came in after me—where did he go?”
    The question upset the man visibly. He said, “The man? After you? Surely he left. Yes, he must have left.”
    Lena looked all around, but there was no one else there. She scanned for places that Dr. Jones might have gone. There was a door on the other side of the counter, and she saw that a strip of light was visible at the threshold.
    She said, “I know it's not any of my business, but what's behind the door over there.”
    “Just a storage area,” he replied.
    “And you leave the light on?”
    “Sometimes I leave the light on, yes. It's more convenient that way, yes.”
    Another person entered the store, and she was relieved to not recognize them. There was only so much coincidence she could tolerate. Quickly she made a decision—she turned, as if to leave immediately, and walked through the narrow hallway down the center of the store. The stranger tried to make room as she attempted to pass, but still she bumped into him. And then, seemingly by accident, she also bumped into one of the shelves, and knocked over an entire row of books. A cloud of dust erupted, and caused them both to cough.
    She apologized and began to pick up the books, wiping dusty tears from her irritated eyes. The stranger, being a gentleman, apologized far more vehemently, and insisted that he pick up the books instead. She smiled winningly, and stood back up.
    It was very obvious that the stranger didn't care how the books were returned to the shelf, so long as they were returned. She didn't blame him—she'd made an impressive mess, books and papers everywhere. He stacked them on top of each other, in all orientations, and shoved them haphazardly wherever they would fit. The employee, watching from a distance, became flustered, and came to their assistance. He pushed his way in and began to organize, as the other man handed him the remaining books on the floor. While they were distracted, Lena silently returned to the back of the store, to the counter. When she was confident that they were absorbed in their labor, she stole around it, and quietly went through the door.
    On the other side was a staircase, leading down. A solitary light bulb hung from the ceiling by a string, swaying gently. Without delay she started to descend, as quietly as she could manage. She could hear, now, a choir of voices. When she rounded the wall at the base of the stairs, a strange scene unfolded before her.
    Five people, dressed in purple, hooded robes, were chanting in unison. They stood in a semi-circle, facing a brick wall that had a huge chalk drawing scrawled on it. Cobwebs and dust covered everything, but she could make out other drawings on the other walls—cult symbols that she was very familiar with. But she'd never seen the drawing that they were facing, and had never heard the words that they were chanting.
    They didn't stop when she arrived—they noticed her, and some of them dodged nervous glances in her direction, but they continued to chant.
    She wrapped her fingers around the handle of a revolver, inside the pocket of her overcoat. It didn't seem like anyone intended to attack her, but she didn't like the tension in the air.
    Then she spotted a book, sitting on top of a table in the corner of the room. Without turning from the group, she sidestepped over to look at it. It was open to a page—a drawing, identical to the one on the wall. She picked it up and looked at the front of the book. No title. The lighting was dim, but she was confident that it was an olive green color. The book she was looking for. She returned to the page with the drawing, and read the text around it. What she read caused to her to gasp in horror. She drew her gun from her pocket, and pointed it at the nearest person.
    “Stop,” she yelled, and cocked the revolver's hammer. They continued, so she thrust it forward in an attempt at intimidation. “I will shoot you.”
    Then they stopped. At first she was relieved, but her relief was premature. The bricks behind the chalk drawing began to disintegrate, starting in the center and radiating outward. A cosmic draft, an undefinable wind, struck her, and she lost the strength in her extended arm—still, she devoted all her energy to keeping the gun raised. The drawing was now a black hole, a void, the magnitude of which her mind couldn't comprehend. It emanated a deep sound, a reverberation, an echo from the walls of the universe. She wouldn't have survived much longer, but then the wall reappeared, as if nothing had happened.
    Everyone was silent. One of the people pulled back their hood, and she recognized them immediately as Dr. Jones. He turned to face her, but still said nothing. Perhaps he was thinking about what he should do with her, the unintended witness to their act. She hadn't lowered her gun, but it wasn't pointed at anybody—subconsciously she had directed it at the wall, at the former void that had nearly destroyed her.
    Sensing that she didn't have much time, she decided to make her move. She grabbed the green book with her spare hand, and pointed her gun at Dr. Jones' head.
    “Leave it there, Lena,” he finally said.
    “No. I don't know what it is that you've done, but it shouldn't have been done.” She backed up, towards the staircase—somehow she had been drawn forward, forward towards the wall.
    “Leave the book, Lena. It isn't yours.”
    Suddenly, one of the men started screaming and tearing at his head, which was still obscured by a hood. Confusion ensued—Lena took the opportunity to run up the stairs, and bowled over the portly employee on the way up. The man had suspected what she'd done, and tepidly came down the stairs after her, but didn't want to interrupt the ritual below. He was of little concern to her—she knocked him over, ran through the empty bookstore, and burst out into the open air. From there, she chose a direction at random and ran. The rain continued to fall, now in heavy sheets.
    Instead of retreating to the comfort of home, where her inclination pulled her, she went to a nearby diner. If she was being followed, the last thing she wanted was to bring her family into it. The place was brightly lit, with plenty of windows to see outside, and crowded with people. She sat herself at a booth in a corner, and ordered a coffee when the waiter asked her what she'd be having.
    She pulled out the green book. Alone in her corner, she read everything that it said about the ritual that they were performing.
    The words that caught her eyes the most, over and over--the followers will become a beacon, visible to the Great Ones. It was a quote, apparently transcribed by the author from a rune next to the original portal. His sketch of the portal, in exceptional detail, took up a full two-page spread. She studied it intently, trying to recognize even just a piece of it. But she couldn't. Then she read onward, and became more and more upset with each word.
    The waiter finally brought her coffee, and set it down right next to the open book. He looked at what she was reading with a passing curiosity, but it was all meaningless to him.
    The smell of coffee brought Lena back to reality. Even though it was still very hot, she took a few sips, and felt human again. She was experiencing something like shock, from what she'd seen and from what she'd read, although her long exposure to cultist practices had desensitized her, in a way. She'd never seen something so real, though.
    The door to the diner opened, filling the room for a moment with the sound of the pattering of rain. And Dr. Jones was the person that entered, still dressed in his purple robe. He made his way directly to the booth that Lena was sitting in. His dark, inhuman eyes locked with hers immediately, from across the room, and he never let go.
    Lena had nowhere to run, so she sat motionless—her gun was drawn, but she held it underneath the table. He took a seat across from her, and smiled a morbid, irrational smile.
    She spoke first. “This book doesn't have any of the answers I want, just vague threats of all sorts. You are now a beacon, it says. And what, exactly, does that mean?”
    “I can see the other side,” Dr. Jones replied. He was excited, agitated. The muscles in his face contracted and released in spontaneous, meaningless patterns. “I can still hear the sound—it's calling for me, and I'm calling for it. Soon it will come. I can feel it getting closer.”
    Lena could feel the void again, and the cosmic wind blowing in her face. Once again, she was in the presence of some incomprehensible, enormous force. Behind Dr. Jones, at the various tables of the diner, other people could feel it too—they all turned to stare, a look of sheer discomfort on their faces, and everything was ungodly silent. Lena was afraid to say anything, since everyone was listening.
    When the weight of the universal silence became unbearable for her, she decided to say, “Your wife wouldn't approve of all these strange things, Paul.”
    Suddenly the void closed, just like it did back at the bookstore. The unnatural tension disappeared from his face, and Dr. Jones said, “Lena, you have to kill me. I can't control this.”
    She raised her revolver above the level of the table, and the people in the diner began to panic. Then the void opened up again, radiated. Dr. Jones smiled, then imploded. Nothing remained where he had been, and the chair and part of the table that he left were warped, distorted, by whatever had happened to him. Lena was staring at his absence when a noise on the window to her side startled her—Dr. Jones was standing on the outside, smiling, his hand against the glass. Then he began to run.
    Lena aimed at him, through the window, but never took the shot. He disappeared in the darkness of the night. She slammed her fist against the table in frustration, but her emotions only overcame her for a moment. She grabbed the book, stood up, and went to the diner's long counter, which ran along half the room. There was a waiter standing behind it, dumbfounded, and she told him, “Make a police report for me—this is really important. Are you listening? There are six men, dressed in purple robes, armed and highly dangerous. Lethal force will be required. Are you listening?” She snapped her fingers in front of his face, and it broke him from a trance. She repeated herself, then left the diner.
    She had doubts that the police would feel compelled to use lethal force, as she had suggested, but at the very least the thought would occur to them. She hoped for the best.
    Outside the diner, the rain was visibly curving through the air, forming a funnel that pointed somewhere a mile or so away. She had no idea which directions Dr. Jones had run in. She hailed a taxi, and gave him directions that took them toward the base of the funnel.
    The directions took them towards Arkham Hospital—the rain became unbelievably thick, like an ocean draining itself from the sky. The taxi driver became hesitant, more than once, as the volume of rain made the road impossible to see. When he got her as close as he was willing, she paid him and got out.
    She sheltered under an expansive tree, to gather her surroundings, but it didn't provide too much protection from the weather. Still, she took a moment to inspect the hospital, which loomed over her.
    Lights in all the windows flickered on and off at random. They were never on long enough to make out what was going on inside. There was nothing else to see. Against her better judgment, she hurried to the main entrance.
    After feeling her way through the dark lobby, she began searching through every supply closet that she came across. Eventually she found what she was looking for—in a closet full of emergency supplies, she found a flashlight. The lights above went on and off spontaneously, exposing for a second all the things around her in clear relief, but now she had a steady source of light.
    The first thing she did with it was to try to light a cigarette. A majority of the matches in her pocket were wet, so she used the flashlight to determine the driest one. Even that one failed to strike, her first few attempts, but eventually she was sitting on the ground, back against a wall, halfway through a cigarette, gathering herself together. Then she stood up.
    She took the staircase, and found that the first floor was deserted. All the doors were open—her flashlight shined in on empty beds, overturned chairs, abandoned suitcases. She took the stairs to the second floor, and found the same. On the third floor, she caught up with the procession.
    Down the middle of the hallway was a line of people, dressed in hospital gowns, ambling towards a staircase at the end, on their way up to the fourth floor. Patients were filing out of their rooms as the line passed them, slowly, hypnotically. Lena had her gun drawn, but no one seemed to care—she shook one of them, trying to wake them from their trance to ask what they were doing, but it achieved nothing. They crumpled to the floor, and then got back up again when she stepped back. She decided to join the crowd, to see what awaited them above. The line moved forward, and soon she was on the top floor.
    The lights were more consistent here, the scene more apparent—at the end of the hallway, elevated by some strange force, was a man in a purple robe. He was laughing maniacally, in between loud prognostications of doom. Lena could hear him say, from a distance, “Your sickness, your deplorable sickness. How did you ever sink to such abysmal depths of existence? Hardly life at all.”
    Suddenly he broke off, followed by a moment of silence. Then he said, “You've come, Dr. Durwood! I can smell your health, over all this putrid mess. You'd think that the rain would wash all the filth away—that's what I've brought it for—but it doesn't. It still smells. The Great One wants to know about the infirmities that plague this world—he's told me so. I am just his messenger. I'd suggest you leave, Dr. Durwood. You don't belong here.”
    It was a long hallway, but she felt confident that she could make the shot. She aimed her gun in between the swaying heads of the mindless patients, and put pressure on the trigger.
    All the lights went off at once, and everything went black. Lena could sense, in the darkness, that everyone's attention was on her—everyone turned towards her, everyone looked at her with sightless eyes. She panicked, and ran into the nearest room, knocking several people over. They responded quickly, rushing after her. She closed the door and locked it, then moved the bed in front of it as a barricade. From the hallway they pounded and screeched, but it seemed like the door would hold for the moment.
She turned her flashlight back on, to try to figure out what to do next. It was a small room, occupied only by the bed she had placed against the door. There was a window, which she opened to look out of—the rain hadn't abated for a second. It was too high to jump. There was a fire escape, but it was connected to the adjacent room. It might have been possible to walk along the ledge between the two rooms, but it looked slippery from the rain. Still, she considered it.
    “I wouldn't do it,” a voice behind her said. Again, the void opened up for her.
    Reflexively, she shined the flashlight in his face, but it was extinguished after a second by some invisible force. That second was long enough for her to recognize the man, though—a professor from the medical department of the University, someone she actually knew fairly well. She hadn't recognized him before, because of the hood and the maniacal distortions of his voice.
    As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she tried the same tactic that had given her a moment at the diner—she said, “How's Marla? She should be here somewhere, shouldn't she?” The professor’s wife had an acute case of tuberculosis, and had been in the hospital for years. She thought that maybe a reminder of his domestic life would disrupt his power, as it had done for Dr. Jones.
    Instead, Lena suddenly felt various pieces of her anatomy going wrong—a pain surged in her abdomen, and her heart fell into a violent tachycardia. She dropped the flashlight, and clutched at her chest with her arms. She was quickly losing control of her body, like all the people in the hallway. Mentioning the man's wife hadn't done anything. “Listen, Mark,” she said.
    Suddenly the pain went away—without waiting another second, she shot Mark in the head.
    She could hear, like the sound of a wave across the roof, that the rain immediately spread out. The lights came back on. In front of her was just a man, lying dead on the floor, his blood seeping into his purple robe.