The Dark Rites of Cthulhu Page 17

  My eyes pop wide. I see my foot about to trip Shun, and then his leg melts and bubbles around mine, as if it’s made of liquid mercury. I struggle, but let the moment by, staying in the fight, even though part of my mind is screaming. Shun spins and brings his leg up and then down into a hatchet kick at my neck. I leap to the side and roll, coming up onto my feet already punching at my opponent. I feel my left jab connect briefly, but slide off as Shun twirls under my punch. My right cross punch meets only air, and I feel him shove me. I stumble, looking to where he just was, but he is now a blur moving around me faster and faster, flickering punches and kicks at me as I do my best to dodge and counter.

  I realize that I hear him whispering something, but it makes no sense. His murmur becomes a chant, getting louder and louder. For all the world, it sounds like he’s saying “I stand at the Gate of the Silver Key and call to open the Gate. Yog-sothoth! Blur the Spheres of Time, and Open to Me.”

  Still makes no sense. But I have bigger problems. I still can’t see Shun. I hear his voice, and feel his attacks coming, but even those appear more now to just be thrown out there, not really meant to hurt me, just a part of whatever form he’s doing. All I really see is a gray blur of iridescent spheres in the mist.

  Then I’m on my knees. I think Shun may have hit me like he did that first time, out of nowhere, but I realize there is no flash of pain. But I feel weak, like I’ve been sick for days, and not eating. I look up and I can see something at the edge of the clearing. It looks like two columns that weren’t there before. I’m sure of that. They’re too out of place for me not to have seen them as soon as we got here. I waiver, and drop so I’m sitting on my feet, supporting myself with my shaking arms. My head and shoulders feel heavy, and my muscles threaten to go limp. My upper lip is wet, I realize, and I look down to see that blood is dripping from my face forming a crimson puddle under my chin.

  As I watch, something more comes into view between the columns. It looks like a wrought-iron gate…and it’s swinging open. I squint, and my breath comes in pants. I force myself to keep watching. The mist in the gateway seems to whirl and coagulate into what looks like sea foam, twisting into a stretched mass of grayish…something.

  “Yog-sothoth! Yog-sothoth! Yog-sothoth!” cries Shun as he continues his invisible spinning.

  The something grows as lights throb and blaze from beyond. Empty sound begins to roar in my ears with deafening silence. Multicolored ball lightning bubbles out into the clearing, floating around the foggy grassy field moving opposite Shun’s dervish dance. A form materializes between the columns and a black-shrouded, impossibly tall figure steps forward, and Shun stops his whirling so suddenly I fall again, now lying on my stomach, propped up on my elbows, not allowing myself to stop watching.

  Something is different about Shun, though, now that I can see him again. His hair is snow-white, and he stands with a bit of a stoop. I see him drop to his knees and open his arms wide in front of the form. The giant reaches down with a gaunt hand, and touches Shun’s forehead.

  Shun stands and turns to me. He walks over and stands behind me. “I am sorry, Pete,” he whispers, and yanks me up onto my knees by the back of my collar. “But I need you for something else. If I am to keep going, I need to offer one who has glimpsed the Spheres and begins to understand. You showed such promise, but the millennia weigh heavily upon me, and I must do this if I am to continue walking the Earth.”

  I’m too tired to do anything but tear up and let the tears fall. I have no strength left. Shun hoists me to my limp feet and guides me to the giant. He looks down at us, his face still hidden within the cowl he wears. The figure opens his arms, and Shun lets go of me. As I wobble and start to fall, I feel Shun’s foot shove me at the lower back, forcing me into the creature’s embrace. I drop forward into darkness.

  The arms close around me and I am falling, falling.

  Anger, fear, resentment drift away, and the darkness is no more.

  The Gate opens.

  Now I can see.

  Forever.

  The Bride of the Beast

  By Glynn Owen Barrass

  What a hell of a place, what a god-awful hell of a place. Robson took a nervous drag from his cigarette and squinted. The cemetery grounds were layered in mist, lying thick on the gravel path he walked down, coating the ancient, ivy smothered slabs he passed. The trees loomed like a canopy above him, allowing a ration of early morning light to filter through, and making the whole scene surreal, dreamlike, as if he hadn’t been pulled out of bed at five in the morning to come see the murders at Highgate Cemetery. He was really just back in bed, tucked up with his wife’s warm shape beside him, snoozing away for a few more hours before work.

  Footsteps approached, muffled by the mist, followed by a thin shape. Balding, combover, long tan trenchcoat, mid-fifties. Bill Hookham, good man, Robson thought. The pathologist sucked on a cigarette, smiled around it as he stopped before Robson.

  “Hey chief,” the man said. “Came looking for you. Heard your footsteps.” He removed the cigarette with one woolly-gloved hand and raised the other to shake Robson’s own.

  “Bill. Always a pleasure,” Robson said, and they walked side-by-side the way Hookham had come from.

  He turned to Hookham as they walked.

  “So what’s it like there? Jessup was vague in his call.” Jessup, a Detective Sergeant and Robson’s assistant for three months now, was still a little wet behind the ears, but…he was a good man.

  “The lad’s there already,” Hookham said, “With four of my boys and a couple of beat bobbies. This is ugly, chief, the worst I’ve seen. Three kids naked and dead and…”

  “And…” Robson looked at Hookham again.

  The man sucked his cigarette to the filter and tossed it into the mist.

  “Witchcraft,” he said. This one word was all Robson needed to make his day a thousand times worse.

  “Oh fuck,” Robson replied.

  Still with the mist, it wasn’t lifting, but at least the trees had parted, bringing more light to the scene as the pair approached an aged crypt, grey, cracked and weatherworn. Four of Hookham’s men, dressed in white coveralls, stood to the right of it, smoking. One uniform stood before a copper door green with verdigris. To the left stood Jessup in his grey suit, making notes on his pad while the other uniform spoke. The uniform nodded in Robson’s direction and Jessup turned, waved, and hurried over. Robson shook his head and tossed his cigarette, pausing to stub it out before continuing forward.

  “Detective Inspector!” Jessup said, a beaming smile on his face. Early thirties, clean shaven with blonde hair a little too long for Robson’s liking, Robson gave Hookham a look that was reciprocated at the man’s unwarranted enthusiasm at a murder scene. “You should see this place!” Jessup continued, “weeping angels and gravestones shaped like dogs and pianos, and—”

  “And let’s just get to the nitty gritty of it shall we?” Robson said. Hookham snickered. He approached the crypt, nodded to the surrounding men, and paused before the officer guarding the door.

  “Detective Inspector,” the man stood to attention like he was in a parade.

  “You might want to brace yourself sir,” said Jessup.

  Robson snorted and stepped forward. The officer pushed the door open and stepped aside. “Was the lock on the tomb forced?” he asked the officer.

  “No, sir,” the man said, shaking his head.

  The lintel above the door bore the name ‘De Racine.’ Spanish? Italian? Yeah, Italian, Robson thought and went to enter.

  “Oh, hey.” He felt Hookham’s arm on his sleeve, turned to see the man had retrieved a large rubber-coated torch from an open toolkit on the ground. “You’ll need this.”

  “Thanks.” Robson nodded and stepped forward, pushing the door open further while finding the torch’s ‘on’ switch. The tomb interior filled with illumination, and he grimaced.

  The press are going to have a field day when they hear about this. Robson squi
nted his eyes shut. Footsteps behind him opened them again; Jessup squeezed passed him and cleared his throat.

  Three corpses lay upon the flagstone floor, two women and a man, the male’s feet facing the door while the women’s heads did likewise. The women’s arms were positioned so that their hands, right and left respectively, touched the man’s genitalia.

  The women, a long-haired blonde and a brunette, had scratches across their exposed stomachs, swirls and dots and triangles. The man, long brown hair, moustache and sideburns, had a pentagram painted across his stomach, a pentagram in a circle done in either red paint, or blood. It shone in the artificial illumination, so unless it was still fresh Robson guessed the former.

  Jessup cleared his throat again and stepped further into the tomb. “Looks like the, um, residents weren’t interfered with,” he said. “You remember that thing some years back? The vampire scare? You don’t think this is connected, do you?”

  Oh, great, this just gets better. “Hope to God, not,” Robson said. He raised the torch and shone it upon the walls. Alcoves holding old dusty coffins, dead, mummified flowers tucked in around them, no vandalism upon the walls, no witchcraft graffiti. “The surviving De Racine’s will be so happy,” he muttered, and stepped forward, kneeling before the recently dead. A dark, ugly bruise lay around the blonde woman’s neck. He turned the torch to the other woman. Same thing, and he found the same on the man’s throat.

  “Death by strangulation, the pathologist’s first guess,” Jessup said.

  Robson nodded, looked to the marks on the women’s chests and the pentagram. I’ll want photographs of those. “You know what, Jessup?” he said and dusted his knees before standing.

  “What sir?”

  “I really wish I was still in bed.”

  “So, old chap. You see the reason for quiet and caution in this case?”

  Robson nodded at Chief Superintendent Strange’s words. He’d been getting it in the ear for two hours now; he prayed they were nearly done. Strange – balding, white hair, handlebar moustache with a hint of sandy brown within the grey, was an old private school boy with a clipped accent that constantly intimated the words: “I am better than you.” Dandruff dusted the shoulders of his black suit jacket; not for the first time Robson quelled the urge to tell his superior to dust himself down.

  “The press have been very reasonable, since the last trouble at Highgate.”

  Robson nodded again.

  “So please, no leaks from your men, or it’ll be someone’s meat for the grinder.”

  Robson had turned his attention to Strange’s desk; elaborate, old, like the man himself. These words had him lifting his gaze to send Strange a steely-eyed stare.

  “My men are airtight, Hookham’s too. If there is a leak to the press I’ll have guts for garters myself sir. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  Strange met his stare for a few moments with one equally as steely, then he smiled. “Jolly good Robson. And what do you think your next plans are?”

  “I’d like to go through this, first.” Robson indicated the brown paper folder Strange had handed him earlier. It was thick with information on the Highgate Vampire debacle from earlier in the decade. “And then I’d like to see what else our boys found at the scene.”

  “And the cause of death, of course,” Strange said.

  “Of course,” Robson said, and retrieved the folder. “If that will be…”

  “Just that the owner of the crypt is a very wealthy, respectable fellow. Try not to step on any toes out there.” Strange rose from his seat. “Keep me appraised of the progress, and remember: mum’s the word!”

  Robson left Strange’s office, turned left down the corridor and passed three doors before arriving back at his own. His office was far less regal than Strange’s, with a threadbare carpet and a metal, laminate-topped desk. His filing cabinets were steel, not oak, and screeched and complained at their use on a good day. He retrieved his mug from the top of one of them and swigged a mouthful of cold coffee. He dropped the folder on his desk, poured the leftover coffee dregs in the wastebasket and poured a new cup-full from the percolator on the table behind his desk.

  He took a heavy swig, washing away the taste of the last cold, sour mouthful and sat, feeling the mug’s warmth fill his hands as he stared at the brown, dog-eared folder. He put the cup down, cleared a space on his desk by moving his ashtray and case notes, and pulled the file forward, opening it with distaste.

  There were lots of newspaper articles, going back to the 1960s. These he skimmed through, seeing lurid headlines like: ‘Caught on The Moonlight Trail of the Highgate Vampire!’ ‘Ritual Sex Act and Cat Sacrifice,’ (this article made him squirm uncomfortably), and ‘Does a Vampyr Walk in Highgate?’ He didn’t want to read them, but had to. So, he reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, lit a new one, and got down to reading tabloid trash.

  Five cigarettes and two mugs of coffee later, he had the gist of what had happened in Highgate. A group of local young people interested in the occult had taken to prowling Highgate late at night, one of them claiming to have seen a strange figure, another claiming that this figure was in fact ‘A King Of Vampires.’ There had been vandalism, mass vampire hunts, desecration of corpses, all perpetrated by a group of idiots looking for publicity. One of them had gone to prison three years earlier, in 1974, for damaging memorials and interfering with dead remains, and after that, the crackpots had disappeared off of the radar.

  “This is nothing to do with our case,” he said aloud, wanting to give truth to his thoughts by saying them. He hadn’t been around during the Highgate Vampire phenomenon, and from what he read, Strange was right in not wanting a resurgence of that sordid, long standing affair now that it was dead in the water. Still he took his notepad from his jacket pocket, noted down the two principal antagonists in the affair, and thought to send someone to snoop around and see what they were up to.

  Just as he was putting the notebook back in his jacket, his door knocked, followed by Jessup bustling in.

  “Hey sir!” Jessup said. Full of enthusiasm, he held a large brown envelope in one hand and his coat in the other. He closed the door behind him with his foot.

  Robson indicated the vacant seat facing his desk and Jessup draped his coat on the back of it and sat down.

  “We have the photos as requested,” he said with a beaming smile on his face. He leant over and placed the envelope atop Robson’s Highgate material.

  If he was a dog I’d pat his head and say ‘good boy,’ Robson thought, then, “Good work Jessup. Anything from the scene?”

  “Funny you should say that sir,” Jessup said. He patted his jacket pockets and removed his notepad from the inside one. “Just hold on one second,” he continued and leafed through it.

  Robson took the opportunity to open the envelope and pour the contents out. There were six large glossy photographs, three of the Highgate corpses at different angles and three of the women’s and man’s mutilations up close. Teenagers. Barely more than children really. Just what did they—

  “Ah, this is it,” Jessup said.

  Robson looked up from the photographs. The other man was reading from his notebook.

  “Two twelve-volt car batteries were found in the bushes near the scene. Six cigarette butts, Pall Mall brand. The batteries are in the Met Lab right now – they’re looking for fingerprints… And that’s it.”

  “Car batteries, hmmm,” Robson said. “There were no signs of torture apart from the flesh wounds and ligature marks, were there?”

  “You thinking car batteries to the genitals, sir?”

  “Hmmm, possibly. Just thinking aloud.” Robson scanned the photos again. “Anything proving identification? Missing Persons Bureau contacted?”

  “No on the first. Their office said it’s too early to tell on the second,” Jessup said. “Oh, and Hookham says he’ll have his report on your desk later this afternoon.”

  Robson tapped his hand on one of the female cl
ose-ups, realized he was tapping the breasts and moved his hand. “Fancy a drive, Jessup?”

  “Of course, sir. Where are you thinking?”

  “See if you can find me a phone directory,” Robson said, “And we’ll take it from there.”

  There were four De Racine’s in the Greater London Directory, and after discreet phone enquiries Robson found one that did indeed have ancestors interred in Highgate Cemetery. Robson played it cool on the phone, friendly and professional, and told the man there had been some vandalism and could he make a visit today?

  Half an hour later he and Jessup were driving his weathered Ford Anglia through Kensington with Jessup using his A-Z to guide them to Chelsea Crescent.

  They found it soon enough, a row of four-storied, white stucco-fronted terraced buildings with neatly trimmed rows of box trees lining the second-floor balconies. Expensive cars dotted the street, including a couple of Rolls Royce’s. Robson realized his car would look a heap beside them.

  “Looks nice,” Jessup said.

  “Expensive,” Robson replied, and pulled up outside number fifteen.

  “You know sir, we could have easily sent one of our uniforms to deal with this.” Jessup said.

  “I don’t think so,” Robson said. He pulled his keys from the ignition and left the car.

  A few minutes later, after knocking briefly and being let in by the butler, an elderly, hollow cheeked man with wispy white hair, the pair stood waiting in an oak-panelled foyer. The room was opulent, with ancestral portraits lining the walls and thick tortoiseshell carpet underfoot. The butler knocked on the door to their right, announced the two, and then made his precarious way up the stairs facing the front door.

  The door opened, and Robson was taken aback at the apparition that appeared there.

  Tall, very thin in his brown tweed suit, the man’s skin bore a yellowish cast to it. His eyes were sunken, dark with circles as if he hadn’t slept in days. His thick black hair was combed back, his forehead lined with veins, his nose hawkish above a black goatee surrounding thick, red lips. The ghoulish face smiled, and Robson cleared his throat.