The Hungering God Read online

  Sykes had nothing to say. He just sat and stared at the hulking marshal sitting in judgment over him with a look on his face like a man who already knows he’s being measured for a pine box.

  Meeks waited and flagged the waitress back over to clear the plates and refill his coffee cup.

  “Say something, Sykes. You look like a man seldom lost for words.”

  “There are other, local issues as well. It’s not…healthy here, there’s sickness…” Sykes struggled to say what he meant. “And the people in the surrounding countryside are very…superstitious… There are stories, they just don’t talk to outsiders much. It’s hard for anybody to…”

  “Stories? Stories you tell me, ‘not healthy’—that’s an understatement. This town has had more murders, assaults, and tragedies in the last few years than a place twice the size and drowning in poverty could expect to see in a decade or more. On top of that, there are an unknown number of disappearances that have been brushed under the carpet, and then people going crazy like it’s contagious in batches. Now these are hard times, and people have it bad all over, but this here stinks of something a lot worse. But you talk to the people that should know just what’s going on here—people like you—and all you get is ‘stories’ and hints and rumors and pointed silence.

  “Now on the rational side of things, from what I was told in Boston, is that on top of that, the university here is shedding students like leaves in autumn, and any resident not deadlocked in a mortgage is selling up and moving away. The only ones staying are those without a choice in the matter and the old town families gone to ground.

  “The town is dying on its feet, Sykes—and you’re telling me that’s all down to a few moonshiners throwing their weight around and superstitious New Englander gossip getting out of hand? Truly? This place is too big, too old, too established, and too damn close to the rest of civilization to fold up that easy. This is New England, damn it, not the God damned jungles of Brazil.”

  “Do you have a point, sir?” Sykes said looking cowed, but grim.

  “The point is, Sykes: not on my watch. I am here to do a job, and you are going to help me do it, ghosts and goblins and fear of things going bump in the night notwithstanding, because I will have none of it, and the Department of Justice will have none of it, understand?”

  “Look, Mr. Meeks,” Sykes offered weakly, placing his hands palms up on the table in a gesture of supplication, “I don’t want any trouble, and I’m not your enemy, okay? I’ll do whatever you ask.”

  “Order, Sykes, whatever I order,” Meeks corrected coldly, and the younger man, looking distinctly sicker and less cocksure than he had when they’d sat down together only a few minutes before, nodded in reply.

  “Good, well the raid will be a start,” Meeks continued in a more level tone, “and there’s this you will be assisting me with as well while I’m here in Arkham.” Meeks opened the battered leather briefcase he had brought with him and dumped a manila file on the table top between them, the contents spilling out. Arrest reports, newspaper clippings, and fingerprint swatches filled the space between Sykes’s hands. Principle among them were an Immigration-stamped photograph of a rugged man that looked dangerous even in a black and white mugshot, and what looked like a college yearbook picture of a conservatively dressed but far from unattractive-looking blond.

  “What is it?”

  Meeks pulled an eagle-headed paper out of the file and put it on top of the other documentation. “This,” he said, “is a federal arrest warrant for one Anthony Morgan and one Daisy Walker on multiple charges of murder, conspiracy, and grand larceny.”

  Chapter Four

  Arkham & Cold Spring Glen

  November 23, 1929

  Nate Fellows had been a cook once; nothing special, but he’d been second man to the chief of a big hotel in Providence, he’d had staff of his own, his own specialties, a family, his own house, and his self-respect. That was before everything had been stripped from him like an onion, one layer at a time. His wife had been first, the influenza taking her back in ’18, and in his darkest moments he called that a blessing, as it spared her from what was to come. The Crash had broken the back of the hotel’s owner in a lightning flash, and his job with it. Then it had all came rotting down so damn fast—the house he couldn’t afford the payments on, the bottle, the pawn shop, the roach-infested dive he and his son had been forced to move into. The rat bites on his boy’s ankle that got infected and turned bad. One look at his son on plywood crutches, the stump where once a whole leg had been, the tired, broken look in his boy’s eyes…that had been enough for him to climb into the bottle and stay there. They’d taken the boy from him while he was in jail, given him away, changed his name.

  He was skin and bones then and nothing more, but even ragged as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to die. He’d been waiting for something, he realized now, waiting for the truth, waiting for the Hand of Solace.

  Their promise had filled the void inside him; he could have it back, he could have it all back, better than before, perfect. In faith of that promise he lived for them, breathed for them, lied, stole, and killed. Now, now he watched. He’d watched the two men enter the old House of Solace separately, talk together and then part ways. The one he had seen before, the newspaperman he had followed, followed and learned much, eavesdropping on his frantic, almost excited phone call from the bus station kiosk.

  He had broken his vigil then, such had been the importance of what the man had said, and now was hurrying back along the backstreets of Arkham’s Merchant District in the gathering darkness, toward the new place of Solace. To Dr. Fields, who he was sure would reward him further with ecstatic visions of all he had lost. He craved those blessed moments to come with the fervor of the most debased addict, and it blinded him, half-starved as he was, from the things that were closing in on him until it was too late.

  Fellows collided squarely with a man who a mere second before had simply not been there. The impact poleaxed him as if he had slammed into a brick wall and he dropped backward onto his rump, his feet skidding from under him.

  He was about to snarl his anger when the man’s urbane voice cut across him, mocking and superior. “In quite the hurry, isn’t he, Mr. Fetch?”

  Fellows jerked his head backward and saw a huge shape looming behind him.

  “But I’m afraid we can’t have that can we, Mr. Fetch? Tattling tales, not yet. Spoil the game so early on. Tut-tut.”

  Fellows went for the pistol underneath his raincoat, but no sooner than he had the Colt in his hand, a vice-grip caught round his elbow from behind and jerked him clean off the ground and into the air. As helpless as a fish on a hook, his legs kicked frantically but found nothing, and the handgun fell from his grasp as the bones in his elbow ground together like broken glass. He would have screamed but another massive hand had fastened around his face, cutting off his vision and stifling his screams. All he was aware of now boiled down to a morass of raw pain and the dead-fish reek of the tainted flesh ensnaring him.

  “And goodnight,” the urbane voice mocked and laughed.

  Fellows’s world blossomed in agony and his last clear thought was the chill terror that he could not remember the faces of his dead wife or his lost boy.

  When the task was done and Fellows’s body was bent treble and stuffed in a trashcan, the pair walked at an easy pace back to the street side by side, just as two heavy trucks piled with armed men growled by.

  “It’s going to be a fine night, Mr. Fetch, a fine old night,” the one said to the other.

  * * *

  Meeks raised the .38 and fired three times in rapid succession into the night, the shots echoing crazily through the tangled woodland. On the fourth and fifth trigger-pulls, the hammer snapped empty and Meeks swore violently and fumbled at his belt for fresh shells.

  He had no idea if he had hit it or not, but the figure that had danced in the darkness on the edge of sight was gone.

  “Murtry, Murtry, stay wit
h me!” he barked at the man slumped against the tree beside him, and let the smoking empties fall from the revolver’s cylinder.

  “Still here, sir,” Murtry replied faintly, his hands folded over his stomach and shivering as if he were terribly cold.

  “Good man,” Meeks said vehemently. Only two bullets left. How many times did I reload? I can’t remember!

  Meeks slammed shut the revolver and pulled back the hammer, his head swinging back and forth, searching the strangely angled nightmare of the dark wood on all sides of them for attack, for movement, but there was nothing.

  The world was painted silver and black by the high moon, silent and still. In a flash of sudden apprehension, Meeks conceived of the total blackness that would fall if the clouds were to cover that moon, and made an involuntary whining sound in his throat. He caught himself and swore again angrily, rage and shame forcing back the fear that threatened to eat him from within with cold pincers.

  “Do you still have your sidearm, Murtry?” Meeks asked in a cracked voice.

  “No, I’m sorry, sir…I lost it; I dropped it when you were carrying me.”

  Meeks nodded furiously, his brain working again at breakneck speed, replaying his retreat through from the clearing, Murtry over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, the kaleidoscope of shadows…he’d crashed through the woods, away from the bonfire, shooting blind behind him.

  Murtry had carried a .45; the ammo was useless even if he still had it with him, and Meeks’s shotgun was gone. Just the .38 then, two bullets, just two bullets, and I have no idea where I am, no idea how to get us back to the trucks—they could be a stone’s throw away but they might as well be on the other side of the world… The knowledge settled on him like a funeral shroud.

  “Sir, what happened, was…where…,” Murtry said in a faraway voice, failing to form what he wanted to say properly.

  “Stay easy, son,” Meeks managed to say with a false confidence that sank hollowly in his belly for the lie it was, “I’ll get us out of here.”

  Meeks wiped the cold sweat from his brow and realized he’d lost his hat somewhere, and almost laughed that that should startle him. How had it gone so wrong so fast? Meeks just couldn’t put it together in his mind; it was a flickering, jumbled mess, like a movie reel that had slipped its sprockets and jammed fast, burning and bubbling away to white.

  “Boss!” A whisper hissed through the trees to his left. Meeks’s heart leapt in his chest, but he still spun smoothly to face the sound, arm straight, revolver braced to fire.

  “Boss!” the voice hissed again with startled impetus. “It’s me, Corey, and Fry’s with me. We came to find you.”

  The pale faces resolved themselves in the moonlight and Meeks almost collapsed with relief. It was the Dunwich men, the damned Dunwich men. Meeks sagged against a tree. “You find anybody else?”

  Earl Corey shook his head slowly. “Only you. Heard your pistol and we circled back around; thought it had to be one of our lot involved, one way or ‘tother.”

  Regaining his composure somewhat, Meeks looked the Dunwich men up and down; Corey looked haggard but unharmed, and still had the ancient repeating rifle he’d brought with him cradled in his hands. The older of the two, the grey-bearded Fry, was the worse for wear, though. He had taken a good blow to the head by the looks of him, one eye now swollen shut. Fry had lost his own rifle along the way, but held a jackknife steady in his hand.

  “You hurt, boss?” Corey said, nodding at him.

  Meeks looked down to see his shirt and coat glittering wet and black in the moonlight and it took him a second to realize he was half covered in blood. “No,” he replied simply, and nodded to where Murtry lay slumped, his expression unreadable in the moonlight, his meaning plain to the Dunwich men.

  “We have to get him out of here,” Meeks said challengingly, as if he expected the newcomers to disagree. “No sense blundering around here looking for the others in the dark. They either made it out or they didn’t,” he added bitterly when neither of the Dunwich men gave comment.

  The rest Meeks left unspoken; the fear, what might be waiting for them in the darkness, what they had all seen at the clearing in the madly flickering light of the bonfire. Bootleggers? The Sheldon Gang? Dear God. The only Sheldon they’d seen had been strapped to a blasted tree on the edge of the clearing. Sykes had recognized him, what was left of him—even with the top of his head missing and the insides scooped out. Sykes, you coward, if you made it out of this mess alive then heaven help you when I catch up with you.

  “I’ll carry him,” Fry grunted and put away his knife.

  “We’ll both carry him,” Meeks countered. “We’ll go faster that way.” He nodded to Corey. “Can you get us back to the trucks?”

  Corey simply spat into the underbrush in reply as if moderately insulted despite their situation, and led on.

  The tramp through the broken, half-dead woods that bounded Cold Spring Glen would echo in Meeks’s nightmares, and although it took them no more than a quarter of an hour before the sure-footed Earl Corey with the barrel of his rifle going before him led them to where they had left their trucks at the edge of the dirt path that led from the Dunwich road into the glen, it seemed a lifetime of pent-up fear had passed to Meeks. Every broken branch underfoot, every rustle of dead leaves was like the footfall of death; every labored breath sounded as loud as a hurricane and sure to bring terror down on them. Terror of what?

  Meeks still could not quite reconcile what had happened after they had entered the clearing in his mind, though some of it was vividly clear: the cluster of tumbledown shacks, the old truck jacked up on logs, wheelless, the broken still, disused, empty bottle crates, and packing straw torn up to make firewood. The bootleggers—or what were they?—all standing around the bonfire they’d made in a perfect circle, close enough to the flame to scorch, not moving, not one of them, utterly still, unaware of their approach.

  Then they saw the bodies, strapped and pitted to the dead trees around the clearing, with fencing nails and loops of rusted barbed wire all facing inward, all mutilated. Meeks remembered shouting, then chaos, gunplay, the shotgun bucking in his hands as he fired. Then it all became tangled, incomplete. Running, shooting, screaming and through it all a strange piping noise, thin and horrible, like ice being forced into your ears. Something running in the dark, snarling—dogs? Somebody had shouted that: “Dogs!” But they weren’t dogs—one of Sykes’s men, open-mouthed, screaming, being snatched…upward?

  “Boss, boss we’ve gotta go.” Corey had laid a calloused hand on his shoulder, shocking him back to his senses. He was in the back of one of their two flatbed trucks, looking down into Murtry’s ashen face, a rough bandage made from the lining of Meeks’s overcoat strapped round the gapping, ugly tear that had laid open the man’s chest.

  The other truck had already gone. Sykes.

  “He’ll never make it to Arkham,” Meeks pronounced bleakly.

  “Dunwich is closer,” Corey replied.

  “You got a doctor there?”

  Even as exhausted and disturbed as Meeks was he didn’t fail to catch the strange look that passed between the two Dunwich men.

  “No, but somebody about as good, I reckon,” Corey answered after the pause.

  “Some chance is better than no chance,” Meeks conceded, and leapt down off the flatbed to start up the engine.

  * * *

  Grace Zabriski was woken from a formless dream halfway to grey nightmare by the charge nurse’s pinched hand worrying at her shoulder. She jerked up violently in the chair and the startled nurse stepped back sharply. “Yes…yes,” she asked, rubbing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “What is it?”

  “There’s an emergency, Doctor,” the older nurse responded primly, clearly put out to find her sleeping, but utterly powerless to do anything about it but pointedly disprove. “A sheriff’s deputy injured downstairs, and another man, a federal agent, I think; they need help.”

  “What…but…,” she b
egan, but then it came back to her. Arkham Asylum was handling the overflow emergency cases now, along with the university medical school, and as the junior doctor on call it was her responsibility to help where she could. Ordinarily they would have gone to St. Mary’s Hospital, of course, but these weren’t ordinary times, and after the terrible ward fire, the venerable old hospital was all but shut down after hours. “What time is it?”

  The nurse peered at her lapel watch. “A little before midnight.”

  “Oh joy,” she replied with no joy at all. “Come on then.”

  As expected, the evening chorus was already beginning, and as the young psychiatrist walked from the secluded office where she had sought sanctuary for a while, the sounds from the wards and private rooms (as the administration preferred to call the padded cells so far as the general public was concerned) rose up to greet her. To the accompaniment of moans and whispers, sighs and exultations, she walked quickly down the dim corridors, taking time to nod to the sparse crew of harrowed-looking orderlies and nurses she encountered at checked doors and stations along her way as she hurried past; it was camaraderie of shared trouble and burden.

  She tried not to think about how bad it had gotten and how quickly. Arkham Asylum had been one of the most respected psychiatric institutions in New England; it still was, she supposed, really, at least on paper. She had counted herself very lucky to get a placement here when one of its previous psychiatrists had left unexpectedly. There were still many obstacles to a woman in her field, and she’d encountered a great deal of prejudice on her less than untroubled pursuit of a medical career, but she was still a Bowery girl at heart, and had flint to cope with adversity that many didn’t. Still, that resilience was being sorely tested now. She’d been with the institution for nearly a year now, and if she let herself dwell on matters, the signs had been there all along, the portents; but it had been in the last four or five months a tipping point had been reached.