Whispers From The Abyss (5 page)

It stares at me in silence. The thing from the depths roars and the very walls around us tremble, rocks shake loose and slide off into nothing. The automaton grips the sack with spindly, needle like fingers, and without so much as a glance it tosses the sack into the pit. “Fresh!” it yells, looking around excitedly as though it were addressing a crowd of onlookers and not just empty shells dangling from cords.

Then it descends the cable again, and moves it’s face just inches from mine. “Name your price.” It says flatly.

“A battery.”

The automaton doesn’t say anything in response, he simply skitters back up his cable and pulls himself towards one of the unmoving drones hanging from the ceiling. It spins the drone around, and with one swift movement it drives it’s fingers into the drones spine. The drone doesn’t make a sound, but it shakes terribly, like a man suffering a seizure. Eventually the shaking stops, and with a loud snap the automaton pulls the drone loose from it’s tethers and casts it down below. The automaton then descends, and gently lays the oily black cube that had been the drone’s power source into my outstretched hand. “Back the way you came. Two rights, then a left. Take this, and never come back here.” Then it’s eyes go dark, as though a light bulb has burned out inside it’s head. The things arms hang limply at it’s sides and it speaks no more, as though whatever intelligence possessed it has gone without a trace.

I hurriedly place the cube into the empty socket just behind my ear, and that ticking in my chest that had been growing ever slower now returned to the slow hum that I was more accustomed to. For the first time since I set  foot in this place I felt a sense of relief wash over me. I shudder to think what might have happened to me had my power run out in the Morgue. Almost instantly I feel a surge of energy; everything around me seems brighter, tired muscles feel full of vigor. Oblivion has been put off, at least for a little while.

As I turn away I suddenly get the sensation that I’m being watched. I can almost feel the red eyes of those robotic mannequins on the back of my neck; and I imagine them sliding down the cables, reaching their metallic fingers out to me. I don’t have the courage to turn around and see. I just start moving, fast as my tired legs will run.

I know from past dealings that the machines always honor a bargain and  I’d be allowed to leave unharmed; but that doesn’t stop me from breaking into a sprint down the corridors, away from that cave. I know what awaits me if I dwell here too long. If I give them time to learn that the body in that bloody sack is not a man, but an animal carcass mutilated and made to look like one...

Two rights and a left doesn’t sound too difficult; but the hallways are all identical in their lack of detail, and the corridors that branch off from the main hall are hard to distinguish from doors that simply open onto barren rooms.

Then all of a sudden the  lights shut off, and the whole place goes silent. All the horrible experiments, the tools, the screaming dead; it’s all stopped, like someone flicked a switch and shut it all down. I run for what seems like much too long, hopelessly lost.

And then by some miracle, I see a pale light up ahead, and I can just make out the stairway that leads back up to the sewers. I’d almost feel lucky, if I weren’t completely terrified.

Then, in the darkness of that stairwell, I hear a noise that freezes me in my tracks and makes my blood run cold. It’s not the scream of a human being tortured, it’s not the clicking of tiny metal legs on the stairs behind me, nor is it the storm bearing down ever harder on the streets above; it’s the return of that slow ticking in my chest, the signal that my life energy was nearly depleted, that my eyes would soon grow dark.

It was too late. They’d known all along. And they were toying with me.

As I rush upwards to the stairs a great roar breaks the silence; the sound of some immense,  fiery engine of destruction; an industrial saw ripping through concrete. A roar that can only be the bellowing of that gargantuan mechanical beast that dwells in the pit below. The piercing roar echoes all around me and grows in intensity like a horrid emergency siren. And beneath it I hear the marching of dozens of automatons just below me, already coming up the stairs.

The power cell they’d provided me has very little life left in it, but I make a promise to myself; I swear that I’ll make it out of the Morgue and die in the swamps where the machines never ventured. I swear that I won’t become a drone. I know it’s an empty promise, but it gets my legs moving.

As I ascend the stairs my eyes are already failing me. I stumble numerous times, but the footsteps of the machines never seem to grow closer; almost as though they’re in no rush to catch up with me.

I find the manhole and scale the ladder up to the streets, trying frantically to decide the best path through the city. The storm’s intensity has only increased in my time below ground, and that coupled with the continuing deterioration of my eyesight makes visibility impossible past a few feet in front of my face. Almost instantly I’m lost in that labyrinth of decaying streets. I stay near to the haze of the neon lights, relying on them to guide my way forward. In the alleys on either side I hear the whirring and clicking of the automatons as they draw ever closer. And the ticking in my chest is now just a series of faint, weak taps that are stretching further... and further... apart.

The womb machine bellows furiously. I try to convince myself that it must just be projecting some kind of alarm through the screens on the buildings overhead. I tell myself that something so large couldn’t possibly have left that cave to pursue me through these narrow streets; that the heavy pounding that’s shaking the ground under my feet can’t be those tentacled appendages propelling the beasts massive bulk closer and closer with every step I take. I pretend I can’t feel the frigid smoke of it’s breath on the back of my neck.

My legs fail me then; I collapse and slide across the rain slick concrete, feel the gravel scrape my face and arms. With all the strength I have left I try to pull myself forward, but my hands find nothing to catch hold of.

With the last of my energy I roll over to face whatever waits in the darkness behind me.

A sea of automatons too numerous to count marches towards me; the lights of the Morgue casting them in garish shades of green or red. In my dimming vision they seem like hellish, leering clowns; smiling from beneath masks of loose flesh. I can not see the beast directly, but I can see the outline of a horrible, bulbous
thing
squirming behind the machines, a writhing eclipse that devours the lights of the city in it’s mad dance.

I try to move, try to scream, but my body won’t respond. As my eyes finally go dark; as a soft, empty static begins to drown out the screeching of the womb machine, I pray. I pray that this darkness will be unending, and that I will never again awaken to the pale lights of the Morgue.

The mist came rolling across the hills the night I first heard the chanting. A sound so chilling, so haunting, I could not truly call it voices. It was like nothing I had heard before. A distant resounding rhythm, this chanting… It seemed to come from both the heights of Heaven and the ocean’s depth. My blood felt cold within me, yet my heart never beat faster.

My Mam and Da’ say it just my “special imagination”. Just more of my waking dreams, they’d say. I would get lost in strange lands of my own creation as we worked the potato fields. I used to enjoy them, these little dreams o’ mine. But not anymore. Nor do believe they are just dreams…

This mist was like nothing ever seen before in the whole of Ireland. No city, village, or country cottage had ever known a comparison. It clawed its way across the Emerald Isles. Thick and strangely colored, an almost black-green hue. Where once a serene drifting lace garnished the green hill-skirts of Ireland, now a sickly fog crept among the fields. This haze smothered all in its wake. Crops started dying. In the fields. The cellars. Everywhere. All rotted black in one night. And it wasn’t just my family. It was our entire county. And the next. Nothing could stop it.

Most of the villagers blamed the faie. They believed the fairies were angry and tried to appease them with food offerings and sacrifices. But the rotting and dying continued. I tried to tell them it wasn’t the faie. Tried to explain, something far worse that had fixed its eyes on
Ireland. No one would listen. They hadn’t heard the voices. Hadn’t seen the dreams. But I had. And those throbbing incantations were not the faie.

All of
Ireland was either dying or departing. And the dreams only grew worse. Dreadful, horrific images flooded head along with the voices. Such things, too terrible for words! So gruesome were these dreams that I tried to forego sleep. But the dreams found me… Dragged into sleep against my will.

It was always the same. First, a vibrating hum so low in pitch it made my head hurt. Then I’m standing on the banks of a bubbling, churning river of blood. Its breadth was such that I could not see the other side. A voice would pound in my head, painful and deafening. In each dream I clutch my hands over my ears. Drop to my knees. Though my ears are stopped the voices are not silenced. They rip through my mind, screaming in a language I’ve never heard yet somehow understand. And every word promises death.

Then a whirlpool forms in this river of blood. And I see them. They fix their eyes on me and I try to scream. But I can’t. To describe their features is to horrify. Massive in size. Unlike any living creature ever seen or heard of before. Tentacles and pincers for limbs. A stench so vile it knows no comparison. When I wake, my sight is no better.

I stand among the dead and dying now. My stomach empty. My head full of horror. The sun cannot shine through this haze covering the whole of
Ireland. All the brightness of life has been drained from this once rich, vibrant Isle. They are coming. I know that now. Not the dreams but those who send the dreams… They are coming.

Tonight is the blackest it’s ever been. Again, I feel Them summoning me. But I refuse to sleep this time. My final resolve has given me the strength to keep the dreams at bay. So now I walk to the cliffs. I will watch the dimmed light of sunrise turn the waters blood red. And then I will join Them in the deep.

I will dream no more.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

H.P. Lovecraft

“Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man
—evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it.”

Hunter S. Thompson, 'He was a crook' Jun 16, 1994

We were lost in
Providence, somewhere on the wild and forgotten roads between Arkham and Innsmouth, when the drugs started to fade and the horror began.  Maps were hopelessly outdated and downright speculative in nature.  Orange, yellow, and red leaves dropped from the trees as we raced past them on cracked and faded concrete in the red 1966 Impala Super Sport 427.  The colors bled together in a star-streaked rainbow that shimmered in unison.  “Smell that?” 

The driver turned towards me with a cocked brow over his thick aviator sunglasses.  This brute of a man looked to be six and half feet tall thick with muscle and tubby girth.  He wore his brown oily hair tied back into a ponytail like a modern Viking ready to pillage the entire east coast once more.  His beard was wild and shaggy with a hint of grey from his years of hard living.  He wore a vest with the colors and tags of the infamous Hell’s Angels.  “Smell what, Doc?”

I plucked the cigarette from my mouth, held onto my green-billed visor, and stuck my head out the window to smell the air of Providence.  “Did you know that a guilty man has a distinct scent?  Take a long whiff!  That is the putrid stench of a man that is so terrified of being caught that he has shat in his pants!”

Rooster scoffed and shook his head.  “How can you be so sure that you’ll find something to nail Tricky Dick?”

Doubt was to be expected of the rubes not familiar with the show.  Rooster didn’t have the nose for news, but it was almost always a good idea to keep happy any man that can beat you to death with his bare hands.  “Did you perhaps notice the unusual stares we attracted from the gentle and kind townsfolk of Arkham?”

The giant shrugged his shoulders with a satisfied smug.  “People look at me like that all of the time.”

I scratched my head.  The connections were there buzzing just beneath the skull, if only I could access them.  “Don’t you see?  They should have been afraid of us.  We’re the great unwashed from the land of savages, junkies, and Charlie Manson.  They were irritated we were bothering them.  Think!  When was the last time someone openly expressed contempt and irritation at you?”

Rooster scratched his beard thoughtfully.  “You say it like it means something, Doc.”

“It means that the name Waite Transportation is important somehow to the entire scheme.  And if we snoop around Innsmouth, we might find out how the Nixon campaign managed to score so much funding this late into the election.”  I leaned back into the seat and let that set into his mind.  Rooster had a proper animal cunning to his plans.  “Just drive and let me think on it for a minute.  I’ll think of the best way to connect the dots.  I am a doctor of journalism after all.”

How was it possible that I had managed to capture the story of the decade?  If we found the alleged proof, I could grab that bastard Nixon by the balls and show him an unceremonious exit from politics forever!  Was it possible that this was a kind and loving universe with a creator that didn’t simply hate us all? 

This strange and terrible saga started like many so many other tragedies in my life.  I woke to a thunderous ring that would not end.  My head ached like I had scrimmaged against the Chicago Bears sans helmet.  My tongue felt thick and my mouth tasted like spoiled fish three days.  There was an unholy stank in the hotel room that could have struck Jesus dead after His resurrection.  I eventually fumbled just enough to answer the phone.  “I will find you and cut you.”

“Hunter!  Get it together man!”  It was the deep tones of Ben Fong-Torres, editor-in-chief of
Rolling Stone
magazine.  His voice sounded like a jazz player about to give a very personal and uncomfortably sexual performance.  “Where are you on the story?”

“Humphrey is a hack.  Barely a step above Tricky Dick!  Muskie’s campaign has the stench of death!”  Hate always brought me to my senses very quickly.  This time it was a different opiate that brought me out of my stupor; hope.  “McGovern seemed the only one in the lot with a soul.  I’m writing about him at the moment.”

Fong-Torres cut me off.  He usually had the patience of a saint.  I knew then and there that whatever he had in mind was big.  “Put that on hold.  We need you to cover a different aspect of the campaign for the moment.”

“This is the most important story of the decade!” I protested.  “We need to stop that evil bastard from being re-elected.  After what I’ve been writing, we’ll be rounded up and shot!”

“Hunter!  Listen to me!”  Fong-Torres snapped.  “We have a source that says the Nixon campaign has been collecting illegal contributions from an unknown source in Massachusetts.  This might have something to do with a strange rumor we’ve heard about a government cover-up in the 20s involving bootlegging.  I figured you’d be the only one crazy enough that could get these kinds of people talking.”

I accepted the story immediately and wrote down the information with a perverse joy.

Nixon was the greatest mystery of our generation.  You can look at that squalid, shifty bastard and just know he was plotting to bugger you with tears as the only lubricant.  Normal people simply rationalized it away not believing in the physical reality of the devil.  If there was proof that Nixon was playing dirty pool, the entire campaign would be over. 

I didn’t want to venture into the unknown alone.  I’ve seen
Easy Rider
.  I know what happens to folk like me in small towns.  This would normally be where I’d call my attorney, but he was somewhere in South America leading a revolution.  I did the next best thing and tapped an old friend with a bit of muscle that owed me big.  Rooster Brown and I once fought the modern incarnation of Dracula together.  Yeah, I’m not entirely certain that it actually happened either.  We investigated the
Rolling Stone
lead into the city of Arkham, but eventually dead-ended at the infamous Arkham Asylum.

It took three days, a few bribes, and an unsubtle threat from Rooster to get formal permission to see our contact.  A squat orderly named Akeley led us down to the asylum’s basement where they kept the most violent of their residents.  He had thick jowls, bulbous eyes, and a suspiciously Nixon-like jump nose.  I made certain that he was always two steps ahead of me and always in my line of sight.   

We heard screams that would have set a crazed ether fiend on edge.  Rooster and I flinched, but the orderly simply shrugged.  What sort of bastard doesn’t flinch at the sound of a scream?  I didn’t know what those bastards had done to be locked away, but I was suddenly quite happy that I was on this side of those cool concrete walls.

Akeley stopped at the end of the hall in front of a large metal door with a monstrous antique lock.  He fumbled through a giant ring of rusted keys until he found the right one and jammed it into the ancient lock and turned it.  The metal door opened with a loud whine revealing a room that stank of piss, sweat, and desperation.  Sadly it was not an entirely unfamiliar scent.  There was no bed, but the entire surface of the room was covered with a padded surface, likely to prevent the poor bastard from bashing his head into the wall. 

“Only one visitor at a time,” the orderly barked.

Rooster shrugged like Atlas.  I wanted to punch Ayn Rand in the ovaries.  “I think this is your trip, Doc.”

I swallowed uncomfortably.  I didn’t like the idea of being in the room alone, but Rooster was right.  This was my gig and I knew if nothing else that my friend would be able to get me out of any potential trouble.  “Remember, I’m not a permanent resident here.  Not yet anyway.”

“Don’t get too close,” Akeley warned with a savage cackle.  “Marsh bites when he gets too agitated.”

I stepped into the oubliette of form and paddling and shivered as the door locked behind me.  Would Rooster forget about me as the world had forgotten Josh Marsh?  The room was dark with rays of light filtering through the slits in the metal door.  “Are you there, Josh?  It’s me, Hunter.”

Marsh had been a regular contact and occasional dealer of delights of mine for years.  He sold a unique form of acid allegedly derived from a rare fungus that could only be harvested near the ocean floor and was quite difficult to reach.  I had more than once bought some of his supply. 

Something in the shape of a man skittered in the darkness.  I immediately reached for the door absolutely certain that bastard Akeley put me in here to die.  “Hunter?  Is that really you?  I can’t be certain.  I hear so many voices now.” 

A shallow, jaundiced familiar face emerged into the light; a dissolving echo of a friend that had seen better days.  It had been only a year since I had last seen Marsh in
Fresno, but the visage before me appeared at least twenty years older with yellowed skin, deep lines and wrinkles, and thin spots where a luscious head of hair had once been.  Marsh had been a handsome, gregarious man always surrounded by lots of pretty girls.  “Josh!  What are you doing here?  What happened?”

He blinked.  It was almost a human gesture.  “The Waites put me in here.  I had second thoughts about the resurrection.”  His eyes were wide and terrible like a man that had completely surrendered to the beast and nothing could ever return him.  “They came back.  The Government bombed them back to the Stone Age during Prohibition, but somehow they survived deep in the water.  It doesn’t matter because their plan already worked.”

“Resurrection?  What do you mean?”

Marsh glanced around the room suspiciously as though there was some unseen observer.  “The Esoteric Order of Dagon sent out one of their brides to
Yorba Linda, California.  Her name was Almira Milhous.” 

That name was familiar.  It took a moment to realize that it belong to the mother of the devil himself, Richard Milhous Nixon.  Was this the break he was looking for?  “Wait, Nixon has family in Innsmouth?  Is that where he is getting the campaign funding?”

“They’ve been waiting for a day like this for decades since the government stopped the waking of Dagon.  They’ve waited for the day that one of their sons would arise in politics.”  His breath stank of rot.  “Why do you think we’re over there in Vietnam?  Fighting one of the other cults trying to bring across some monster from Leng!”

“
Vietnam started with Kennedy.  Tricky Dick might be a bastard, but you can’t blame him for everything,” I protested feeling sick that I was defending Nixon even for a moment.

“You think the Kennedys aren’t involved in this?  You think Jack was a good man because someone put a bullet into his brain?  History is written in the blood of the victims of the truth!

Yes, they are a picture perfect family with classic Boston roots.  Most folks don’t realize that those roots lead right here in Arkham and a history of bootlegging to Innsmouth.  The Order planned to use him and old Jack eventually refused them when he realized how things would turn out.  He threatened to tell the world about the Order in Dallas and paid for it in blood.”

Marsh babbled nonsense for an hour, but I had experience with proper junkies and was able to piece together some information.  One name came up over and over again.  Waite Transportation. 

When Rooster and I finally cleared the asylum, we decided to head on over to Innsmouth before returning to Boston.  The name burned in my brain without even knowing why.  How did all of this connect together?  Would the secret be the magic bullet to take down Nixon? 

I barely registered it when Rooster slowed down the Impala and pulled into the old, dilapidated fuel station.  Several egg-shaped propane and diesel tanks rusted along the edges of the gravel road that circled the property.  Touching anything here would surely lead to a tetanus shot.  How could this be the only public gas station in the county?  “Don’t stop!  This is fish country!”

“We don’t have a choice, Doc.”  Rooster pointed to the dashboard.  There was less than a quarter of a tank in the Impala.  “We’ll need the gas if we get into trouble and that almost always happens around you.  I figure we should simply plan for it.”

We rolled into the gas station punctuated by a loud, echoing ping.  A blubberous giant in greasy overalls with a tag that read Gilman emerged from the office wiping his sausage fingers with a red rag.  Was it possible that his poor bastard’s name was Gilman?  Could some wily fisherman have quietly dragged this mutant fishman from his net and set him immediately to slave labor working at the town’s old gas station instead of a traveling circus?  The lines and spots that pocked his cheeks and neck almost appeared to be scales.  When his mouth opened, his teeth were yellowed and sharp like a shark.  “What can I do ya for?”

The trick to handling an uncomfortable situation is to push full ahead without thought to the possible consequences; the stranger you act the better.  Push your luck to edge and hope if you drive off that cliff that somehow you learn to fly.  “Gas, please.”