The Book of Cthulhu

To Live and Die in Arkham

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

Arkham. A nice upscale college town. Just the right shops and bars and restaurants, grills, and cafes, if you have Money—a name helps too. If you don’t, there’s the other side of town—the side always twitching with things from the inside of Midnight. The city fathers and the police call it, The Downside. Drugs, and cheap street whores workin’ the dreamless corners by pool halls and gin joints and open sewers the city fathers call abandoned buildings where the homeless hide and hungry eyes that will take your cigarettes and your wallet and your watch and your life if you can’t walk fast enough or if you’re a plain John Q. Citizen who is not supposed to be roamin’ the cold blocks. That’s the side Albert Bergin had come to. He needed something done and this was the place to find fixers and doers of just about anything, if you have the money or the juice. $200 just for the name and directions to the door. Like anyone needs them, you just follow the rot. But Professor Bergin wasn’t looking for some tail or blow… He had a task that needed to be performed, he called it an old score, and for that he needed someone who knew The Game and how it’s played on The Bottom.

“You want him tits-up maggot food. What’d he do? Fuck yer wife while you were at some sin-posium fucking your secretary in the ass?” Will laughed. His 9 didn’t.

“He is in possession of an article of mine and I want it back.”

“Can’t blame a hound for not returnin’ good pussy. Can ya, Fuckhead? She give good head?”

“I’m not married.” Professor Albert Bergin sat rail straight. No smile.

“With that face and that gut I’m not surprised. They got this thing called walking nowdays. Ya might try it. Maybe you’ll meet some fat bitch who wants a mercy fuck?”

“Could we skip the… bullshit?”

“Ah. Now yer talkin’. Get yer thing and get it back to you and kill the fuck—Just like that… That’s hard cash. You prepared to soak me in it?”

“I have money.”

“I can see that, but are you willing to part with it? Your jones itch that much?”

“If need be.”

“It need be.”

“How much?”

“Details, then you get the bill. If you can pay, I play. If you can’t. You’ve wasted my expensive time and you pay in other ways. Or you can lay a grand on me right this fuckin’ minute and blow. Pick a door, fuckhead.”

“I will pay 25,000 dollars.”

“You’ll pay what I tell you… If I do it. And I get half upfront. Now, get on with it.”

“Professor Daniel Washington…”

Will skipped his regular info gathering. Spreading around cash would be a waste with these bookworm types. He’d follow the guy for a day or two and sit outside his house and see what he did at night. Besides, once Professor Washington showed up on a slab and the cops started digging, Will’s name would pop up as a person of interest if he inquired about Washington’s name or the address. Better to keep this as far under the radar as he could.

All the prim and proper Miskatonic U crowd had their paper reps and little else, he figured. An old boys and ignored pussies clique, who at the end of the day wanted what everyone else wanted, they just took a deep breath and stayed hush-hush about it.

“Sinful Suzie” Jaymes, 5’ 6”, 109 lbs., Green/Blonde, 38D [so her doctor said after cashing her check for 10 grand]-25-36, she was a favorite of lawyers, investment suits, and bookworms. Will hit the The Treasure Chest looking for Suzie. They’d been on and off half a dozen times in the past few years and the straights really lost it for her. She came on like a librarian turned feral and if you had the cash she had the ass, many of her clients said it could start a revolution, or she had any other part your kink required.

Lap dances in your home. Blow jobs in your car. Bubble baths or spankings in hotel rooms, you pick it she pretty much did it, just so as you paid up before the ride.

Will bought her a drink and asked if either Washington or Bergin were on her dick list. Washington was a no go to both the name and the photo, but Bergin was known. Some of the girls said he was heavy handed. A real Mr. Wham-BAM!. He’d spread around some big money to cover the scars he’d left on a couple of girls.

“He’s been in here sniffing around, but never looked at me. Never looked at any of the girls with big tits. Likes ’em skinny and young I hear. Your mark is a hardcore power-tripper. No fuckin’, only head. You peel, dance around a little, and give. He gets. You’ve met the type.”

Will had. Fuckin’ pussy scumbags. They’d bounce a woman around—fists or whatever else was handy when they popped, but didn’t have the balls to even talk hard to other men. Fit his assessment of Bergin.

He left her a C-note and told her he’d call her.

He hit the street. Time to circle the target’s nest and see how to play this out.

Will got all the formal paperwork on the S. French Hill St. property of Daniel Washington from the bureaucracy first then cased the house. Two floors, open access from the back and sides, and a botanical garden’s worth of trees and deep, tall scrubs all around. Almost the perfect place for a quick and quiet in and out.

1 P.M. Sunny. A model afternoon on a model street. He walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. He had his line ready should need arise. Waited. Played it casual. Looked in windows—bookcases and bookcases and bookcases. Suppressed a laugh examining the lock.

It’s a wonder these idiots have indoor plumbing.

Assholes, so deep into their books and lectures and papers they didn’t know how to lock up and lock down properly. Not that it really mattered, no one wanted to rob these academic types, their houses were full of books and books and books—like anyone was going to pay good money for Professor Hilary Shitfart’s Memoirs of Some Dead Old Fuck From East Boring as Hell or Sir Ralph Fuckface’s A Case Study of the Glories of 28 Quiet Sundays in Solitude, and art crap you couldn’t pawn easily, not in New England. No expensive TVs, no DVD players, no iPods, bullshit laptops, and next to no jewelry. And tryin’ to dump big heavy antiques in this part of the state was a sure fire 3 to 5, the way the Staties were all over the market. Fuck robbin’ ’em, they spent their whole lives in their minds.

Tomorrow night. If he was home. If he was alone…

Will rang the bell. Daniel Washington answered. Will’s gun backed the older man up.

“Sit yer fuckin’ ass in that chair and don’t say a word. When I ask you a question, you answer, then shut the fuck up. Got it?”

“Yes.” Thin, weak, frightened as his eyes. “Good. If you move or talk you die.”

Washington nodded.

Will looked around the room… He froze. There was a photograph of his mother on the mantle and one on the desk. Expensive frames. Dusted though most of the other things in the room were not.

“Where did you get the pictures?”

“I had them taken nearly thirty years ago.”

“Why?”

“I was going to ask Seton to marry me.”

His mother’s name on the lips of this stranger. The gun was moving right to left. Finger and trigger hungry to talk.

“Keep talking.”

“Do you know her?”

“I ask the fucking questions, Asshole.”

“I was a student at M. U. Seton worked in the diner on Boundary near St. Mary’s. We were in love.”

“What happened?”

“Why are you so interested? Did you—”

“I said, I ask the questions.”

“There was a terrible—She died.”

“I know that.”

Daniel Washington looked at the man. He had her eyes. Her coloring. Could this somehow be her child?

How could he be?

“If you want to live you’ll tell me everything you can about you and her. Start right fucking now.”

“We were young and in love. I was a poor student working my way through my second year at M. U. We dated for almost a year. One night on her way home from work she was savagely attacked near Hangman’s Hill. Beaten, raped, and horribly scarred by her attacker. I went to the hospital several times to see her, but she wouldn’t see me. A nurse told me her face was horrible to look at.”

Will remembered her face, and the black veil she hid it under. He’d been four, maybe five. Remembered coming out of his bedroom in the small flat and seeing her crying before the mirror. He’d screamed. She closed the bathroom door.

“Two weeks after the attack I received a letter from Seton saying telling me to leave her alone. I went to her rooming house but her landlady said she’d moved away. I couldn’t find her… Back then I had very limited resources. Several years later I heard she died. That’s about all I know.”

Will knew the back end of her story. She scrubbed floors for a living. Drank gin straight from the bottle. And tried to never touch him. She didn’t abuse him, but she couldn’t stand to touch him. She didn’t like to talk to him either. When he was eight she slit her wrists in the tub with a broken gin bottle and he went to the orphanage. After that he went to jail and back to jail and back to jail… From the age of eight until seventeen days after his twenty-fourth birthday he was locked up.

And sitting before him was the only link to his past he’d every met. Ever heard of. He was here for money not to face his past. Will tried to keep his nights full and avoid solitude or any point in time where his mother’s ghost would sit across the table or at his elbow and watch him. It was like surf, rising, a great weight pulling him from his mental steeping stones toward… Outside. The zone of stark, lonely dunes no drug could cure, no woman could kiss away.

What the fuck is this shit?

“I said everything.” The rules are simple the 9 said. “And I meant everything.”

A delicate, hollow blind man lost in the echo of a love song frightened to death by evil, Daniel Washington went down in the dark place of cold rain better left undisturbed.

“Back then I had nothing but her smile and my dream. She gave me so much love, made me so very happy, then they told me she was… When she wouldn’t talk to me, see me, I searched for details. When you take Valentine’s Day from a man he seeks redemption. For me it was in facts.”

All the horror came out. Fact after fact. The ones carved in stone and the ones his heart knew but could not prove.

“I own a gun, but have never had the guts to shoot him.”

“Who?”

“I can prove nothing.”

“Give me the fucking name.”

Daniel Washington was trying to make sense of this, but couldn’t get his mind around it. All these years he’d been faithful to her memory and now this man he thought might be her son was going to kill him. How? Why?

“The fucking name.”

“Albert Bergin raped her. Left her for dead.”

Will tried to catch his breath. He’d sat in a room face to face with the monster that had killed his mother and sent him into the tombs.

The two men in the room were stone. Outside the world in an episode of cursed sensations. In a distant valley, naked, raped, no roof or sky, only despair… And anger. Crawling from the labyrinths of heart and mind. Claws bared. Hate sharpened and raw. Hate and claws becoming the everywhere. The red wind screamed the monster’s name.

The gun lowered. Eyes choking back tears.

“I can’t be completely certain it was him.”

The room the contract was written in was in Will’s mind. The face, he studied it and studied it. Took it apart. Something about that face. The set of the jaw. The nose… It was like… Looking in a mirror.

The gun almost slipped from his hand. Will had never known a single fact about his father until this minute. Now he knew too much.

“Look at me. Can you see him in my face? Do I look like him?”

Daniel Washington strained to see through his tears. And it was there.

“Exactly how old are you?”

Will told him. Washington’s expression told him the final fact.

“Your jaw, your nose—he’s your father. You’re the product of—”

“Rape.”

The air was almost too solid to breathe.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“Albert Bergin and I were rivals in school. We were both studying the same subject. I was a better student and quicker. Our professors favored me. I know Bergin disliked me and was jealous… Everyone knew how in love I was. I think he raped your mother to unseat me. If I stumbled in my studies he could catch up, maybe surpass me. He destroyed her because of professional jealousy. I always knew he had a black heart, but… I can’t believe I never saw this before. Guess I’ve always thought he was drunk or something and lost his temper.”

“But why do you think it was him?”

“Once in the library he was a little drunk. He was reading the newspaper. He had this, almost triumphant, grin on his face. I don’t know, the cat that ate the canary, maybe? It was pleased with itself, and evil. Cold. It was very cold. And I thought I heard him say, ‘She should have shut up.’ When he got up he left the paper and I went over and looked at the article he had been reading. It was about your mother and the rape. I should have went after him and killed him. I went to the police but they didn’t believe me. A friend of his family was the investigator on the case and thought because we were rivals in school I was trying to tarnish him.”

Will wanted to be out in the cool night air. Running. Running from the photos, running to someplace where he could get a drink and his bearings.

“I’m not here for the reason you think. Bergin sent me to get something and bring it to him. And to kill you.”

“What are you to get for him.”

“A book. Faded red leather with a scorpion-like emblem on the cover.”

“The Navarre. It all makes perfect sense. We both studied philosophy, religion, and metaphysics back then. Do you believe in magic or the supernatural?”

“No.”

“I do. And so does Bergin. That’s what we pursued in our studies.”

“Ghosts and shit?”

“No. More like a little-known religious belief. There is a race of terrible beings who once savaged the universe. Somehow they were imprisoned, awaiting a time when they would be free. We tried to separate myth from fact regarding these entities. As a believer I have always sought to understand as much as I can to keep them imprisoned, if that’s possible. Bergin had a jealous nature and was power hungry. His lust led him to dark places and darker studies. The book he wants is said to contain rituals and spells to free these otherworldly beings.”

“Like bring the things here? He wants to tear the roof off Hell and let these monsters out?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fucked up.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“No you’re not. My mother, he owes me for her. And for my life.”

“Then let me have some retribution too. Your gun is too merciful. I know a way.”

“I’m listening.”

Daniel Washington stood, he seemed dry, a faded summertime photograph, and walked to a bookcase. The ghost hand, now off its knees, deliberate, pushed a hidden button and a door opened. There sat a book and what looked like a rusty iron can.

“Take these items to him.”

“Is that the book?”

“It’s an exact copy. The real one is locked up.”

“And that thing.”

“Something he will think is one thing, but it is something entirely different.”

“What does he think it is?”

“He will think it holds magical vapors which grant vision. A mage who studied the things Bergin and I have studied once said, ‘Great Cthulhu sleeps in his house and shapes the dream of what shall be, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.’ Based on an incorrect translation, Bergin believes with these vapors he’ll be able to see into the dreams of this being.”

“Shit’s poison. Ain’t it?”

“Something far worse.”

“You sure he’ll be dead?”

“Yes. Certain.”

“What do I do?”

“Just give him this and leave.”

“Huh?”

“Tell him I’m dead and give him this copy of the book—tell him it’s the only one you found. Tell him as compensation you picked this up, thinking it might interest him. Tell him you saw the sigil and it being the same as the one on the cover of the book you thought they might be related in some fashion. Then leave. Do not stay there. You do not want to be in the house when he opens this.”

“Why? Is it going to blow up?”

“Something like that.”

“I’ll be back.”

Will rang the bell. Albert Bergin answered. Will’s gun backed the older man up.

“There’s your shit. Where’s my money?”

The 9 was heat-soaked stone ready for blood. Bergin knew it.

“He’s dead?”

“No, Fuckhead. I put him on a plane to Vegas with a blonde. Yes. Dead as yer grandmother’s pussy. My money—now!”

“Of course. I just want to see the book first.”

“Then look.”

Bergin opened the backpack.

“This is not it.”

“It’s all I could find. The thing on the cover looks like you said it did. You said it was written in French. That looks like fucking French to me. And there’s no fucking doubt it’s old. The fucking thing’s falling apart. The old fuck was crying before I shot him, said it was a copy. Look at that can-thing I grabbed while I was there.”

Bergin removed the object from the bag. If a demon could be delighted with an unexpected present, his eyes said he was.

“This is… Navarre’s. How? Where was this?”

“With the book. It’s got the same logo thing on it as the book. Figured they went together or something. Now where’s my money.”

Bergin began to open the container.

“Fuck that! You ain’t openin’ that fucking thing while I’m here. I seen shows on TV about when they opened those old tombs in Egypt and I ain’t breathin’ in any old germs that would lay my ass over in Potter’s Field. You can wait ’til I count my money and leave.”

Bergin sat the container on his desk.

“It’s all there. Count it. And leave.”

Will picked up the brown manila envelope and began counting.

“We’re square. You have fun with yer fuckin’ shit there and forget my name and that you ever saw me.” Will leveled the 9 at him. “You understand?”

“Yes.”

And Will was gone.

Bergin’s hands opened the vessel containing Navarre’s Vapors. Coughed. His hands burned. Cold and shadows came into the room…

Tentacles of yellow/greenish curling smoke. A burnt odor. The sound of roaring fire in howling wind and a great grinding. Albert Bergin has It in his hands and It has him in its hands…

Will had been locked up in labyrinths and abysses for years and years, passed from hand to hand by creatures with demonic faces and demonic hearts of utter blackness. Cast into a life of Hell by the demonic hands of his father. Will heard a scream inside the house. Remembered the first time he’d screamed when the creatures had him in their hands…

Will remembered some bookworm in a bar once saying something about the child is the father to the man. He wasn’t sure just what the guy meant by it, but he knew his take on it. “Just returning the lesson, Daddy.”

The real world in slow motion. Will lit a cigarette. Starting walking away from Back. “Who says that’s just the way it is? I’ve never hit a woman or sold dope to kids.” Never killed anybody that didn’t have it coming. “Maybe I still have options.”

He took a drag off his smoke. The sun was out. He started walking toward Daniel Washington’s house…

∇