Chapter 16
The snow of last night had piled up in deep drifts all around the house. “At least my absence at the Ladysmith this morning won’t be remarked on,” I said, peering out a window while Griffin enthusiastically scrambled eggs. “Not to suggest it would be otherwise.”
“I thought the Ladysmith was a well-oiled machine, every cog working together to make it ‘the best’ museum in America,” he remarked, in a fair imitation of the director’s voice.
“More like a cabinet of curiosities—the staff, that is, not the museum.” I returned to the kitchen and sat down at the small table. There was a larger dining room, but I preferred this more intimate setting. It reminded me of all the meals I’d had with Miss Emily, when the rest of the family had been too busy for me. “The museum’s philosophy is to leave us alone to encourage our brilliance, which actually does produce results for the most part. The downside is, I could probably expire from a gas leak in my office, and if Christine were in the field, no one would notice for weeks.”
“You and Dr. Putnam are good friends?” Griffin asked. Although his tone was studiedly casual, he seemed to be giving the eggs far more attention than they required.
“She’s my only friend, besides you, I suppose. I would say she’s like a sister to me, except I was never at all close with my older sister.”
Was it my imagination, or did Griffin’s shoulders relax just a fraction? Certainly he seemed less intent on the eggs. “She seems very…driven.”
“She knew what she wanted from life, and she took it,” I said, although the words were far too simple to encompass the battles she’d fought. But the story was Christine’s to tell, not mine. “If she makes it in to the museum today, she might notice my absence, although she’ll probably just assume the snow kept me home. She isn’t really one to worry.”
“Well, then, we shall thank the snow gods for the chance to have a lazy breakfast,” Griffin said, neatly dividing the eggs onto two plates.
We had coffee and cold cereal in addition to the eggs. Griffin took the newspaper at home, and courteously offered part of the morning edition to me. We sat together comfortably, with our food and coffee, perusing the news. I couldn’t recall a better breakfast.
“Last night,” Griffin said, after cleaning a good portion of his plate.
From his businesslike tone, he doubtless meant the investigative portion of the evening. The investigation of the house, that is, not one another.
“It was a trap.” The words had even more weight now, in the light of day. “They knew we’d be there. Or someone would.”
He nodded, his mouth pressed into a tight line. “Yes. The question is how.”
“Did you speak to anyone? You said you’d asked around. Perhaps the Brotherhood knew someone was looking for this Buckeye Jim character?”
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “Or perhaps it was planned from the beginning.”
“You mean, er, Rosa?”
His gaze rested on nothing, as if he didn’t see the warm little kitchen, but rather some far colder and lonelier place. “Madam Rosa, yes. She was the one who gave me Buckeye Jim’s name and linked him with Philip Rice.”
“But you said she was your best informant. Surely she wouldn’t have betrayed you.”
Griffin looked down at his plate. “I learned a long time ago not to rely on other people,” he said tonelessly. “I paid Rosa. If someone else paid her more, why wouldn’t she turn on me?”
“Because you were kind to her?” I suggested.
He glanced up, blinking as if he’d half-forgotten I was there. “I tried to be. But kindness isn’t always enough.” Don’t be naïve, in other words.
“I see.” My cold cereal had been reduced to a puddle of milk; I put the spoon down carefully. “If you’re right, the Brotherhood knows your identity. Why set up an elaborate trap instead of simply finishing you off here?”
Griffin shook his head. “You forget—I always go to the docks in disguise. Rosa doesn’t know my real name.”
“Very foresighted of you.”
“It’s habit, to hide as much of the truth as possible.” His mouth tightened, as if at remembered pain. “There were times working with the Pinkterons, when I could barely remember who Griffin Flaherty even was.”
It didn’t sound as if his memories were pleasant. I touched him lightly on the back of the hand. “If you ever need reminding again, I will assist.” My stomach clenched around my breakfast; when had I grown bold?
Griffin’s pensive expression melted into a smile, and he turned his hand palm-up, linking his fingers with mine. “I’ll hold you to that, my dear.”
I ducked my head, unable to suppress the silly grin stretching my mouth. My eyes chanced across a headline on my neglected newspaper.
“VIOLENT ATTACK ON GOOSE TEMPLE ROAD LEAVES ONE DEAD, ONE INJURED,” it read.
Within a few sentences, I had snatched up the paper. “Griffin, listen to this! ‘Yesterday, early risers found two men lying to the side of Goose Temple Rd. One had already expired from his injuries, but the other remains in desperate straits in the charity ward. According to relatives, the men were in the habit of drinking together late into the night, and must have been met their assailant while walking home from the saloon.
‘The widow of the dead man, one Gerald Dalton, insists he was partially eaten and covered with human bite marks. Police, however, deny her claims and say the two revelers met with a wild dog rather than any human assailant. They also deny any connection between the attack and the disappearance of Miss Ashley Moore, last seen in the same area five days ago.’”
Griffin regarded me with a thoughtful frown. “Do you think they ran afoul of the Guardians?”
“Perhaps, but most of them wouldn’t leave a human bite. I suspect something else. Someone else.” I dropped the paper and pulled the Arcanorum from my breast pocket. A hasty perusal brought me to the passage I needed. “Here we are. According to the book, anyone raised from the dead ‘must have it red’ for three months after.”
“And you don’t think they’re referring to wine.”
I glared at him from under lowered brows. “It means raw meat and blood, I’m sure of it. Perhaps cattle might do for the likes of the Guardians, as they’ve merely been built from the parts of dead men and animals, but for someone who had truly been resurrected, only human flesh would do.”
Griffin’s hands clenched convulsively on the table. “Blackbyrne?”
“Blackbyrne. It must be.”
~ * ~
The snow melted throughout the afternoon, until only a trace remained on the soggy ground. Griffin spent the day immersed in newspaper clippings and notes on the Brotherhood, cursing and muttering to himself as he scratched down ideas and wild speculations on a notepad. Sifting back through the newspapers, which he kept copies of in his study, he found reports of other unexplained attacks going back to the beginning of November, when Blackbyrne’s grave had been violated. It seemed more and more likely that our guesses were correct, and the Brotherhood had stolen Blackbyrne’s body and resurrected him toward some unknown purpose.
“I wonder…if Philip Rice was a member of the Brotherhood, did he begin to have doubts?” Griffin murmured, half to himself.
“After resurrecting a cannibal? Who then perhaps set about making the Guardians, or giving the instructions to do so? I’d think that would be enough to give anyone second thoughts,” I said. “Do you believe they killed him for it?”
“Maybe.” Griffin rubbed tiredly at his eyes. “Without more evidence, all we can do is speculate.”
When the alarm clock went off the next morning, before the sun had even risen, a number of curses in several languages went through my mind. Dragging myself out of Griffin’s warm bed and into the icy dawn was tortuous, a procedure made no easier when he sleepily tried to pull me back under the covers with him.
Only my need for a change of clothing before work impelled me out the door and back to my apartment. None of my neighbors seemed to have noticed my absence, which didn’t surprise me. I certainly wouldn’t have noticed theirs.
I walked up the steps to the Ladysmith’s entrance a short time later, surrounded by other staff members rushing to get to their desks on time. I’d washed, shaved, and attired myself in clothing not rumpled from being left on Griffin’s floor, and yet I still felt marked. It seemed as if any of them would know what I’d been up to with Griffin simply by looking at my face.
None of them gave me a second glance, however. The phalanx of suspicious-eyed guards hired to protect the exhibit did glare at me, as if certain I’d committed a criminal act of some kind—but they glared at poor Dr. Leavitt the same way, and he was over ninety years old and had never done anything more savage than collecting the Lepidoptera which formed his study.
Miss Parkhurst gave me her usual smile as I passed by her desk. “Good morning, Dr. Whyborne. Did you enjoy your snow day?”
My ears grew hot. “Er, I-I suppose.” It occurred to me I ought to respond in kind. “Did you? Enjoy your day, that is.”
“Oh yes!” Her smile was big and bright. “I went out with some of the other girls who live in the same boarding house, and we had a bit of a snowball fight.” She blushed lightly. “I suppose such things must sound rather silly to you.”
“It sounds delightful,” I answered. And it probably was, if one had enough coordination to actually hit anything with a thrown snowball. I’d watched my brother and his friends play in the snow as children, only to be laughed at and told to go back inside when I asked to join them.
Her smile had flagged; now it returned full force. “It was, sir. Would you like me to bring you some coffee?”
“If it isn’t too much trouble—”
“Not at all, Dr. Whyborne. You’re never any trouble.”
I sat at my desk for a while, uselessly shuffling papers and putting off the inevitable. Perhaps if I went to the library and searched for more references to Nyarlathotep? Or found Christine and pried her away from the exhibit long enough to discuss what Griffin and I had found?
All of which I needed to do…and all of which was simply an excuse to avoid the most urgent, but most unpleasant, task.
“Nothing for it,” I said aloud, as if hearing the words would bolster my courage. “Best to get it over with quickly. Like an amputation—just one fast slice.”
Dear heavens, maybe I was going mad, talking to myself in the confines of my office. Not to suggest I was the only one; I sometimes heard my colleagues muttering to themselves as I passed by their open doors. Still, the habit wasn’t a pleasant one, and I wanted to be normal, for Griffin’s sake.
I’d never cared what anyone thought of me before. Everyone already considered me odd, but I’d accepted my fate even before I reached adulthood. I wasn’t athletic enough, or competitive enough, or manly enough; I was too bookish, too quiet, too awkward.
And that was fine, really. Or, if not fine, at least tolerable. Survivable.
Before Griffin had come along, I’d been living inside a photograph: just a facsimile of life, without either color or depth. Could I go back to it, now that I had seen the alternative?
I took a sip of coffee. It had gone cold while I sat there wool-gathering. Or delaying, to be honest.
Swallowing the coffee, I squared my shoulders and left my sanctuary. Unfortunately, by the time I’d reached Bradley’s office, my determination had faded, and I was back to slouching and tucking my elbows in. Suppressing a sigh, I knocked on Bradley’s door. His voice distractedly called for me to enter.
His office was the opposite of mine: absolutely neat, with nothing on the desk except for an expensive pen set, a leather blotter, and the latest issue of The American Historical Review. Bradley had been busy reading an article; he glanced up, and his eyes widened to see me standing in his door.
And with good reason. I’d never been in his office, never having had the slightest desire to interact with him beyond what was absolutely necessary. Or beyond what he forced, given he had no such inhibitions about barging into my office.
“Percy?” he asked in obvious puzzlement. “What are you doing here?”
No “How can I help you?” or “Good to see you, old fellow, how did you make out in the snow yesterday?” I hadn’t expected anything different, but it would have been nice to be proved wrong.
If only I could turn around and leave, but it was too late. Taking a deep breath, I said, “Bradley. I need your help.”
~ * ~
A satisfied smirk crawled across Bradley’s blandly handsome face. “Well, well, got something your dusty scrolls can’t answer, eh?” he asked. He was joking, I was sure of it—but the cruel edge in his voice was no less real.
He’d marked me the first day we’d met, greeting me with a finger-crushing handshake and a snide remark about those dainty professors I’d studied under at Arkham. Both of us had known our respective places immediately. Bradley was an adult version of the boys who had tormented me at school, just as I took the role of the boys he’d no doubt tormented. He was a man’s man, despite his vocation; after all, he studied American history. A litany of red-blooded patriots, fighting savages and redcoats alike, taming the wilderness, proving their worth with bulging sinews and roaring guns.
How I fit into his narrative, I wasn’t certain. Probably as some quivering coward, sniveling behind the stockade walls with the women, while pseudo-Bradleys shot Indians and wrestled bears.
“Er, y-yes,” I said. He didn’t offer me a seat. I hovered near the door, unsure what to do with my hands. “That is, I, er, I was w-wondering—”
“Oh ho, come to me for advice, eh?” Bradley’s smirk turned into a leer. “Looking for tips on how to get little Maggie Parkhurst to crack her thighs?”
“I, er…what?”
“Don’t bother, if you ask me. She’s frigid.” Because of course any of the secretarial staff who didn’t welcome his advances must be frigid; the fault couldn’t possibly be his. “A few years ago, I would have said just drag her into one of the storerooms, but those days are over thanks to your friend Christine.”
I swallowed back my revulsion and tried not to imagine the clammy touch of his hand anywhere on my bare skin. “N-no. I wanted to ask about Theron Blackbyrne.”
“Ah, because of the grave-robbing! Dreadful business—the newspaper wanted a quote from me about it, you know.” He puffed out his chest slightly.
“Oh. Yes, exactly. I just wondered…I don’t know much about him, you see, and I was curious…”
“You’ve come to the right man, Percy. I know more than anyone else—and don’t listen to the old biddy at the county library, either. She doesn’t have access to source material I do.”
Of that, I had no doubt. If nothing else, the museum would have bought anything truly valuable the library had on hand, not wanting the competition. Still, it seemed rather petty to feud with an elderly public librarian. “Oh no, you’re—” I swallowed against bile “you’re quite the expert. So, er, is it true Blackbyrne dabbled in the occult?”
Bradley burst into laughter. “Only you, Percy,” he gasped out between chuckles. “Has all the ancient nonsense you study turned you into an occultist?”
“No, no, of course not.” I pasted an idiotic smile on my face like an ill-fitting mask. “It was just, ah, I’d heard he’d been accused, and…”
“Oh yes, he was.” Bradley’s speech took on a lecturing aspect, for which I was grateful. “Superstitious rubbish, of course. He supposedly met with other alleged witches in the woods outside Salem to perform dark rites.”
“Yes, very silly,” I said, before he could begin to recite the long litany of names, too many of which were of innocents who had ended up dangling from the end of a noose. Stories of the witches who had met such a dreadful fate had haunted my nightmares as a child. “Still,” I forged ahead, “I was told the accusations didn’t end with Salem.”
I’d been told no such thing, of course. Fortunately, Bradley needed no prompting.
“Oh yes, yes. Blackbyrne spent time in Europe. Of course lesser minds used his absence to claim he was seen in or near various castles and manors in Bavaria and Transylvania; places of legend, where superstitious peasants huddle around the fire and pray not to be carried off by the devil in the night. They even claim he joined some kind of cult while over there.” He leaned forward, as though imparting some secret knowledge. “Some diaries even hint he left instructions behind on how to resurrect him.”
My heart quickened. “Really?”
“Supposedly, he and the other families who followed him to Widdershins were all in on it together.” Bradley shrugged carelessly, but I recalled the odd arrangement of the graves and shivered. “About sixty years ago, it was all the rage to try to trace some kind of hidden message in the very streets of the town—ignoring the fact some of the streets have been realigned, and the city has grown considerably. As I said, it’s all balderdash. I’m rather disappointed another staff member would even express interest in such nonsense.” He paused and watched me slyly. “But don’t worry. I won’t mention it to the director.”
I wanted to tell him. I wanted to speak the secret name of fire. I wanted to summon up a Guardian with blood and thunder, and laugh when he wet himself in terror.
The Arcanorum would let me. If I’d understood its hints aright, I could call up a plague of psychopomps: whippoorwills in summer, crows in winter, which would dog him and haunt him until they snatched his soul from his lips.
My breath caught in my throat. Dear heavens, what was I thinking?
Griffin had warned me against the book. He hadn’t warned me against myself.
I forced my breath past the obstruction. “Thank you,” I said through lips gone numb. “I-I have to go.”
“Of course,” he called as I groped for the door handle. “Come back any time you want to make a fool of yourself.”
I slammed the door behind me and fled.