Arkham Noir, pt. 2

SHORT STORIES

ARKHAM NOIR, PT. 2

Outside the room, a mass of weak, diseased people were wandering around aimlessly, coughing and confused. She pushed through them all, working her way back to the staircase. When she got back to the second floor, she searched through several of the deserted rooms, until she found a dry coat and an umbrella. The fact that she was stealing only occurred to her for a moment—she just wanted to be dry, and to leave.
    The rain had lessened, but seemed more depressing, to her. She walked out to the nearest street, and hailed another taxi. She gave him directions to take her home.
    She'd already dealt with too much that night, more than she had ever intended—the ritual, Jones at the diner, the hospital. She'd actually killed someone that she knew, shot him in the head. A compulsive thought kept entering her head that she'd done something horribly wrong, no matter what justification she tried to give it. In the back seat of the taxi she took her gun out and inspected it—just one bullet spent, one fatal bullet, but she'd been pointing it at so many things, at everything that scared her. It felt wrong.
    Why was Jones there, in the basement of the bookstore? And Mark, a man from the medical faculty. Why would two professors from such diverse departments be there together, performing some obscure ritual? And who were the others? It must have been Jones' idea, it must have been him that brought them all together—he was a highly esteemed world literature professor, but he had a proclivity for questionable things. He was just the kind of man that would involve people in a horrible situation without consideration for what might happen to them. A wave of anger took her over, an anger for Jones, and she had to consciously slow her breathing.
    Only then did she notice that the driver wasn't taking her home—for a second she thought perhaps he was taking an indirect route, but then he made another blatantly wrong turn. She asked, concerned, “I said 19th, didn't I? I'm a little out of my senses, but I meant to say 19th.”
    She expected an apology, but instead the driver said, without turning his head from the road, “You can't escape, Lena.”
    And she aimed the gun at the back of his head. There was nothing else she could do. “Who are you?” she asked.
    He didn't react to the gun—it was possible he didn't even know it was there. Still he only looked forward, both hands firmly on the wheel. But he wasn't dressed in a robe and she couldn't feel the void—something was different. “Tell me who you are,” she said. She pressed the metal of the barrel firmly against his skull.
    “The world will be ours. You are powerless against us,” he said.
    The words hit her with an overwhelming force. All at once she crumpled into an emotional ball, broken and insignificant. She felt a real despair, unlike anything she'd ever felt before. She genuinely didn't want to live—she felt that absolutely anything would be better than being alive, and so she pointed the gun at her own head. Tears streamed down her face. Her hand tightened around the handle. She was about to kill herself, and it felt like the best thing to do.
    The taxi driver said, the moment before she pulled the trigger, “Did you think you felt that way, until now? I know all about you, Lena. I know all about everyone. What makes you tick, what makes you fall apart. I have control over it all.” Then he laughed.
    “A fun game lies ahead,” he said.
    She dropped the gun from her head, although she couldn't stop from crying. And the taxi driver, in a completely different tone, apologized for taking her the wrong way. He said he phased out, and started taking turns at random. “It's fine,” she told him. “Just take me home, please.”
    In front of them was a long line of intersections in a row, with traffic lights at every one. All the lights were changing rapidly—green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red. All the lights except the one they were idling in front of, which remained a solid red. Off in the distance, three intersections away, a man in a purple robe was looking up at the lights, first in one direction, then another.
    “Run him over,” she told the driver.
    “Are you out of your mind?” he replied. He turned to look back at her, and only then saw her tear-stained face, and the gun in her hand. His eyes widened in panic.
    “At least drive closer. I need to see his face.”
    “The light's red,” he objected, clinging at the very least to the rules of the road.
    She put the gun back up to his head. “Roll your window down.” He did. “Run him over.”
    Although hesitantly, he drove forward, out onto the intersection. There were no cars coming at them—there were no other cars, anywhere. When they started to move, the man in the robe seemed to finally notice them. He took a few steps in their direction, and Lena felt the beginnings of the void. The engine of the taxi began to visibly overheat—steam billowed out from under the hood, and its acrid smell filled the cabin. The streetlights went blank.
    “Faster!” she yelled. The driver obliged, and put the accelerator to the floor. The taxi lurched towards the man.
    In a moment they were close enough for Lena to recognize him—and she did. He was a man from the math department. Dr. Moses. But she couldn't recall his first name. She understood that she had to yell his name, to render him helpless as the car ran him over, but there was nothing she could do to remember it. So she did the only things she could—she yelled, out the window, “Moses!” And then they hit him.
    Or at least they would have hit him, in a perfect world. Instead, he ended up in the passenger seat next to her, completely unharmed.
    Dr. Moses said to the driver, “Will you keep driving forward? I'm trying to fix the lights here. There's a better way to run them, a better pattern. The Great One wants optimal traffic patterns, before he ever agrees to come here.”
    They reached the next intersection, which had a red light. The driver, out of his mind, did what habit dictated—he stopped.
    Dr. Moses said, more to himself than anyone else, “Yes, you'll have to stop here. But it's for the greater good. The cross traffic is much more important here. Takes priority. Higher ordinality.”
    The void was strong enough, in his presence, that she could feel herself being pulled in. She said his last name again, but nothing happened. He wouldn't even acknowledge her—he only cared about the traffic lights, obsessively. She pointed her gun at his head and pulled the trigger, just to see what would happen. The hammer struck, and the cylinder rotated, but it never fired. She was afraid. If he did finally turn his attention to her, she would be helpless. The taxi was still stopped, so she got out. The light turned green, and they drove on without her.
    As a matter of chance, the University was very close to where she let herself off. An idea formed in her head, and she decided to walk the rest of the way there.
    Somewhere in the distance, sirens were ringing. She couldn't tell which direction they were coming from—they echoed off of all the buildings, sourceless. It didn't really matter to her—she didn't want to know. Hopefully the authorities were capable of taking care of things on their own. She couldn't do it all.
    A huge lawn separated the University's main building from the road. She didn't bother to take the sidewalk, since that would have been a longer walk. Her boots sunk deeply into the muddy turf, making it an effort for her to cross. She didn't notice.
    At the main door, she took a set of keys out of her pocket and found the right one. None of the lights were on, inside—the atrium was shrouded in darkness, as well as the hallway immediately after. There were plenty of windows, though, and there were lamps outside, which cast enough light for her to see where she was going. The shadows of trees moved on the walls, as she made her way to the small, neglected math department.
    Dr. Moses' office was one of three, and on the door was a name plate—but, to her disappointment, it just said, “DR. MOSES,” as if that was all that needed to be said. She tried the doorknob, only to find that it was locked. There weren't very many heavy objects nearby—in the end she used a wooden chair to break the knob off, and entered.
    What she expected to find, as she searched through all of his personal belonging, was his name written on something. She found a stack of exams on his desk, every one of them marked with a failing grade—only the names of students. She found one of his personal research papers in a drawer—written by “Dr. Moses”. There were large chalkboards on all four of the walls, covered in symbols that were frighteningly similar to the ones that comprised the portal—just math. She recognized a few integrals, but not much else. She became extremely frustrated, and kicked over a portion of his desk. Papers flew everywhere, and one of the chalkboards cracked down the middle. No name. His wife was Courtney—timid, fragile thing—why could she remember that useless woman's name, but not his?
    After she calmed down, and more slow breathing, she left the office, shutting the door behind her. It just swung back open, because of the broken knob. Again she became frustrated, irrationally, and slammed it closed, only for it to swing open again. She just wanted the door to shut, but it wouldn't. She breathed some more, slowly. Then she let it go, and set off with a purpose, towards the physics department.
    A friend of hers—the one that had put the book on reserve for her, what seemed like a lifetime ago—practically lived in the University. He would be in his office, she was certain. And she wasn't let down—a light was visible under his door, and when she placed her ear against the door she could hear a man humming to himself. Relieved for reasons she couldn't understand, she knocked.
    A voice told her to come in, and she did.
    “You startled me. It's late,” Damon, her friend, said.
    “I know it is. I know. Listen, there's a lot of really crazy things happening, and I really just need your help.”
    “Tell me what's going on,” he said, a concerned look on his face. He stood up to direct her to a chair in front of his desk, and she sat. He returned to his own seat, facing her.
    “I need to know Dr. Moses' first name. Very important.”
    “It's Matthew,” he said. “But seriously, what's going on.”
    She had everything she came for, and a sense of urgency somewhere in her mind told her to take the name and leave, but her heart didn't want to. She took off her soaked fedora, and tossed it aside. Her hair was matted, from sweat and from rain, but she didn't care. “I'm really scared, Damon. I'm not sure I want to tell you why. That book you put aside for me—you definitely found the right book, Damon. I wish you hadn't. These other people got a hold of it.” She still had it with her—she took it out of her coat's large pocket, and placed it on the desk. It looked so innocuous, so scholarly, sitting on a physicist's desk, but she knew better. She didn't want to carry it anymore—she didn't know why she still had it.
    For a moment he looked like he would pick the book up, but instead he took her by the hand. She gave them both, willingly.
    “Why are the names so important?” she asked, although she knew the question would be senseless to him. Tears started coursing down her cheeks again—against her volition, she was crying. She slumped forward onto the desk.
    He said, “There's a lot of power in a name. Sub-atomic particles, for instance, quarks—they only exist when we say they do. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. You give them a name and you bind them to existence, make them measurable—but there's so many nameless things out there, Lena. You can't name them all.”
    She looked up at him, confused. He was staring at her intently.
    He said, “You know, Lena, I've always loved you.”
    She became a lot more composed, and straightened back up. His hands tightened around hers, constricting. His face became a crazy sneer. The void opened. “Let go of me,” she said.
    The door opened behind them, and reflexively she turned to see who it was—it was Damon. He was surprised to see Lena, and even more surprised to see himself. He stood frozen in the doorway.
    The death grip on Lena's hands disappeared. A man materialized out of the air, in the hallway, behind the real Damon. Lena didn't see how it happened, but in an instant Damon's head was severed from his neck. And standing behind him, covered in blood, was Dr. Jones.
    He said, as her friend's body collapsed to the ground, “You'd go to him, Lena? Him, of all people?”
    In response, she screamed. The sound was meaningless—only despair. Confident that he'd broken her, Jones began to walk away. Before he'd gotten very far, though, Lena gathered herself together. “Paul!” she yelled, and shot him in the back. He staggered forward, and out of her view.
    She ran into the hallway after him, but there was no one there. She decided to run after him—she didn't want to turn back and have to see the limp body of her deceased friend. She ran.
    Outside, there was no indication of where he might have gone. Sirens still rang in the distance, though—that was a start. She would go toward the sirens, and certainly she'd find something. If she confronted the ordeal directly, perhaps she still had a chance. She followed the sound.
    It took her a few blocks to find the source—an entire fleet of cop cars, lights blazing, forming a circle around a building in a residential area. When she got closer, she realized that all of the cops were just standing around, motionless. She tried to speak to one of them, a corporeal officer with a profound mustache, but he said nothing in reply. It unsettled her deeply, all the more so because she could feel an ethereal wind blowing—coming from the house.
    She didn't know who lived there, had never seen the place before. As she walked up to the door, all she could think was that she didn't want to be there. From the porch, she looked back—all the cops were staring blankly in her direction. Flashing lights spun round and round, coloring her red then blue. As a matter of course she took out her gun, then pushed open the door.
    The interior couldn't have been more normal. Coats were hanging up on a rack near the entrance. A family portrait smiled convincingly from the opposite wall. She studied the picture carefully, to determine who it was. Just as she expected, it was another professor—Dr. Morgan. John Morgan. With a name, she could actually kill him.
    She wondered, fleetingly—was he the man in her mind, back in the taxi? The one that had nearly caused her to commit suicide? It seemed to make sense—the medical professor had gone to the hospital, and made zombies out of the patients. The mathematician was walking through the streets, manipulating all the lights. It made sense that a psychology professor would be tempted to mess with people's minds. But why would he just let her into the house, if that was the case? Maybe she was wrong. Or maybe he wanted her there—a thought she didn't want to consider for more than a moment.
    Someone was crying in the kitchen. Because it had a definite feminine quality, Lena's curiosity drew her there first.
    It was John's wife, sitting at the dinner table, sobbing into her arms. She heard Lena approach, and raised her head. It felt wrong to point a gun at a crying woman, so Lena lowered it to her side. The woman stood up, and ran toward her—Lena was unbelievably anxious, but didn't know how to react. And the woman threw her arms around her, in a hug. Lena was still at the end of her nerves, but found the resolve to hug the woman back. They stood like that for a while.
    “There's something wrong with him, Lena,” she said, omitting her husband's name. “He's just sitting in his chair, staring at nothing. He didn't eat the dinner I made—he hasn't moved since he got home. He's wearing strange clothes, clothes I've never seen before. I didn't buy them for him, and I buy all of his clothes. And there's just something unnatural about him. It's hard to be near him. I've been trying, but it's so hard. I've said a few things that he seems to notice, but then he just goes right back. And there's cops outside, but I don't know why. I tried talking to them, but they're just like he is—everyone is so still. God, I'm so glad to see you. You move. I thought I was in a nightmare—maybe I am. But you're here now, and you move. I'm really losing it, Lena. Please help me.”
    Lena patted her on the back, soft, slow, reassuring impacts. Thoughts formulated violently in her head. “Stay here,” she told her. “I can fix this.” The woman smiled, and nodded. She even laughed, a tittering, gracious laugh. Lena didn't tell her that she intended to kill him.
    She walked into the adjacent room, and there he was. The void that he emanated was stronger than a feeling—she could actually see it. A blackness filled the room, the darkness of space, and off in the unimaginable distance she could sense the presence of something absolutely terrible, getting closer by the moment. And there was the sound, so deep that it was inaudible, but she felt it in her soul. John sat in the middle of it all, an absurd island of humanity. He looked like he was sleeping, with his chin resting against his chest. He didn't move as she approached.
    She got as close to him as she could manage, and was just about to say his name, when she heard rapid movements behind her. She turned just in time to get stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife, by his wife. In an instant Lena was struggling for her life, but still she had the presence of mind to realize that it might not have been the wife's fault—perhaps he was possessing her, just as he had possessed the taxi driver. She grabbed the woman by the shoulders and threw her against a wall, head first. Pain erupted in her stab wound. She said, “John,” and shot him point blank in the head.
    The void imploded—it coalesced into John's head, then shattered violently. His viscera covered everything, including his wife, insensible on the floor. Dazed and wounded, Lena stumbled out of the house, never looking back.
    As she should have foreseen, the police outside of the house had regained their consciousness. They had guns, and spotlights, and all their attention was on her as she emerged from the building. Her own gun was still in her hand, and she was splattered with blood. The knife was still lodged in her chest. One of the officers yelled into a microphone, “Stop right there! Hands up! Do not move!”
    She didn't know what to do. She should have thought things through better. But there she was, so she did as she was told. She stopped.
    Dr. Jones appeared next to her, dressed as a police officer. He said, as she stood motionless, “I can save you Lena. I saved you from John—he wanted to play with you, toy with you. I stopped that. But then he set this whole thing up, to get back at me—he thinks he knows you better than I do, he thinks he knows all of us better than we know ourselves, just because he's a psychologist, but he's wrong. I know you best. I can save you from these guys, if you make the right choice. You have a gun, and inside the house is a person with a bullet in their head. You'll be in prison for the rest of your life—unless you come with me.”
    She was compelled, at that moment, to think about the past. Years before, Jones had violated her—she had turned down his many advances, said she was married, said she wasn't interested, and then he violated her. She never told anyone, because she was ashamed. She thought that maybe she could move on, but it never really went away. She saw him in the hallways of the University, smiling, waving, laughing, enjoying himself. Her hatred only intensified over time—there was nothing that she wanted to do more than shoot him directly in his face. When she saw him back at the bookstore, she thought that he was stalking her, about to violate her again. She had waited for him, outside, because she had actually considered killing him when he came out. But when she had her gun pointed at him in the basement, after the ritual, she hadn't been able to pull the trigger.
    They all had their obsessions. Mark had sickness, and his wife. Matthew had the lights. John had psychology, controlling people. Jones was obsessed with her, and would follow her everywhere, until she got rid of him. He could actually control her, she knew that he could, but he was trying to make her choose him anyway—she didn't really have much of a choice, but to his sick mind the illusion was probably all that mattered. He wanted to hear her ask to be saved. Were the police surrounding her John's trap, or were they really his? Her thoughts wouldn't form coherently, she couldn't decide. She wanted a cigarette, but she was out—that was the one thing she knew with absolute certainty.
    She could see blood exuding from his chest, where she'd already shot him once. The bullet went all the way through him. She didn't know what to do—shoot him again, in front of all these cops—they had their guns drawn, and there was a possibility they'd shoot her right back. The mathematician was still out there somewhere, as well as another man she had yet to find. They were still beacons, and would bring about whatever catastrophe awaited the world. She'd seen it, and even from a distance it was the most terrifying thing that she'd ever experienced, even more terrifying than her experience with Jones. But it hadn't wronged her like he had, as terrifying as it was.
    It wasn't really her job to save the world, she finally decided. “Hey, Paul.” The void closed. The hammer struck.