Arkham Detective Agency: A Lovecraftian-Noir Tribute to C. J. Henderson Read online

  The madame, of course, had her own bag of tricks to perform. She rolled her bones, did an open reading with the tarot deck she had made herself and set herself to staring into the crystal shard she used for focus to reach out beyond herself to bind herself with the house’s aura—searching for unwanted visitors. After that, as Nardi went room by room, setting his machines and traps, she pulled back into herself, and then opened her own aura to the building and to all and any that might be within it. Reaching deep within herself, she peeled back the layers of modern life, of concern over her daughter’s college expenses, moved past the aches and pains a body some one hundred and sixty pounds past its medically approved weigh for its height felt constantly, dug down inward until she had found the pure essence of her inner being and revealed it completely and utterly.

  By the end of the night the pair were utterly exhausted—Nardi from covering the old place attic to basement as well as every room of the three floors in between, Renee from having thrown herself open past all boundaries. She had poured her soul and heart into every bit of wire and plaster and mahogany the old home had to offer, placing herself out before it, helpless and beckoning, and had received nothing for her efforts.

  This fact confused her greatly.

  “What are you talkin’ about?” asked Nardi. The detective desperately wanted to fall back into the recliner he had chosen as his bed and shut his eyes, but a job was a job and so he coaxed the woman further.

  “C’mon, spill it.”

  Renee propped herself up on the couch with one of her massively fleshy elbows. Staring at Nardi, knowing he did not believe in anything they were doing, she struggled to find a way to voice her concern. Finally, she simply told him what was on her mind.

  “Listen, I don’t want to go around and around with you on this, so I’ll just say it. I did several readings of the house before we got started—future glances, stability predictions—that kind of stuff. It’s the low end of what I do for one of these things. Then I fired off the big guns, really put myself out there, bared my soul, big irresistible hunk of ectoplasm for anything nasty in the area and … I didn’t get a bite.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “No, you Italian shit. If you had a soul that could be touched by anything you’d know I was more than earning my fee here. If this was a spirit shanty, I would’ve paid a price, believe me.”

  “Then I don’t get it,” answered the detective honestly, stifling a yawn. “What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that something should have come for me.” When Nardi said nothing, she continued, explaining, “Those early readings I did, they said this place is, I don’t know, that something’s going to happen here. Something … nasty, maybe, I don’t know. I couldn’t get a good sense of it. I didn’t worry about it, because I figured I’d find something later that would point the way to the truth. But the more we checked the place out the cleaner it seemed to get.”

  “And this is bad?”

  “No; it’s just confusing.”

  Taking a tiny bit of pity on his temporary partner, and also knowing that placating her would allow him to get some sleep, he said, “Look, we’re just here to do a job. If we don’t turn up anything more, then that’s what we tell the too-rich pair of country-club snots who bought this museum. We give ’em the bad with the good, tip our hats, and we leave.”

  “I know,” Renee said. “It’s just that I met the wife. She’s young. She’s in love. She’s,” the sizable woman paused for a moment, then found the word for which she was looking. “She’s nice. I don’t want to just take their money. Not this time. Am I making sense to you?”

  Franklin Nardi did not like to reveal much about himself, especially to women. But, he was not heartless, and he let Madame Renee know that he did indeed understand her concern. He also told her that, tired as they were, if there was anything in this house waiting to play with their minds, this was the time they would do it.

  “We both came extra tired. That’s the deal. Our systems are as weakened as it can get without us bein’ sick or something. We’re as vulnerable as can be. If nothing bites our asses tonight, and we don’t find any reactions in the morning, will you be happy?”

  “Heavens,” the large woman answered. “I’ve heard concern in the voice of Franklin Nardi. Why, I’m happy already.”

  The detective simply reached over and turned off the lights as Madame Renee chuckled softly.

  - - -

  Despite his fatigue from a long evening on top of a long day on top of a week where he had already worked two double shifts, Frankie Nardi could not sleep. Renee’s words had stayed with him. As much as he was willing to trade quips with the woman, he respected her as a professional. To him, her tarot readings and the such were the hard evidence of her line of work. Opening herself up to her surroundings was subjective.

  If her hard evidence told her one thing, and her subjective evidence told her another, he was wondering exactly what was wrong.

  Did she just do a bad reading? Three different types? All wrong? Was that possible?

  Nardi drummed the fingers of his left hand against the recliner. Wide awake, he worried more and more over the problem before him. Although he did not like the de-ghosting part of his agency’s business, it was not because he did not believe in the supernatural. No NYC cop lasted twenty years without hearing about the Zarnak files, the Thorner case loads, old Tommy Malone …

  “Damnit.”

  The whispered word hung in the living room air accusingly. Franklin Nardi was a good detective. He had been a good cop. He did not leave a job unfinished. All stones on his beat were turned over. His tongue pressed against his teeth, face a tight mask of skin and tension, he threw his jacket off himself and got up out of his chair.

  “All right, house,” he said, getting down on his knees. “You want something juicy, I got juicy for you.”

  Renee had done this kind of thing a hundred times. A thousand. Maybe that was where the problem was. Maybe whatever her readings had picked up wanted more than a few bites out of a pro who could reject their spectral advances. Maybe she had found something lurking in a corner that wanted to taste real fear.

  Fine, he sneered within his head. C’mon, I gotta bellyful of it for you.

  So saying, Nardi closed his eyes and began pulling off his clothing. A man who never went to the office without a tie and jacket, who did not like the beach, who showered strictly by himself, the detective peeled away his layers of protection and sat naked on the floor. Then, slowly, he began to peel away those mental walls he had built over the decades as well.

  It was hard work for Nardi, mainly because, like most people, he did not know where to begin, where the boundary lines were drawn.

  As he fumbled, the back of his mind whispered; It’s like George Carlin said: everyone driving slower than you is a moron, and anyone driving faster is an asshole.

  The detective knew what he was trying to tell himself. With the courage he had used to smash in the door of a known gun dealer, that he had used when he had charged straight into a hail of gunfire thrown at him by both sides of a gang war, he looked into his soul and tried to figure out why he had never had a serious relationship.

  What was it about women that he dreaded so? He had watched his father and others all his young years. So there were fights? So what? People fight. So families split up. His hadn’t. Some women cheated, but so did some men. His mother and father had been faithful. Everyone in his family had been as far as he knew. There were plenty of ugly rumors about who stole what from whom, and who didn’t bathe, and who drank too much, his one uncle—the one who stayed a confirmed bachelor until he died, left all his money to the church, all those video tapes they found: Lassie, The Wonder Years, The Andy Griffith Show, anything with a young boy in the cast—he had heard it all, knew it all.

  So what’s your problem, Nardi?

  The detective could feel the sweat flowing from his body. He thought of women he could have made a life
with, remembered their faces, their bodies, the way they smelled in spring, the sound of their laughs, and he shuddered as one by one he remembered shoving them away from himself. Until it became easy. Until it became routine.

  He thought of women with whom he had slept, those he had used as rough fun, for sex and satisfaction and nothing more. And he thought of others. His mind brought him pictures of dozens of girls, some he had slept with, others he had played around with, those he had merely kissed, and even women he had simply dreamed about.

  And then he remembered Anna.

  Anna, with her perfect hair. Anna, with the shoulders so straight, body so taut, legs so long, whose lips tasted of happiness and whose eyes could see into his lungs, could watch the oxygen in them reach his bloodstream and rocket to his brain. Anna, who had laid beside him the night he got his acceptance papers to the Academy, who had surrendered herself to him, allowing him his ultimate conquest on his day of triumph, when he was a king who could not be denied.

  Anna, who had been so shocked when he had rejected her when she told him she was pregnant. Anna, who he had sent to have an abortion. Anna, who he had ordered to murder his son, and then had blamed her for his death.

  Anna, who had spit on his shadow and told him to rot in Hell, and who had found herself another.

  Nardi sank to the floor and sputtered, tears pouring from his eyes, spittle bubbling on the carpeting. Afraid to face responsibility, afraid to be father to a thing like himself, he had instead poisoned his own life and then spent twenty years trying to throw it away. His gentle sobs turned into wails of despair, so violent a noise that he never even noticed when Madame Renee rose from the couch and covered him with her blanket.

  - - -

  The next morning Nardi and Renee spoke at length. He explained what he had tried to do, and what the results had been. At first he thought he would be embarrassed, but he was too empty, too drained of anger and shame to care. For the first time in over a quarter of a century, he felt like a whole person and did not mind talking about it.

  “So,” he asked, shoveling in a large spoon of corn flakes, “where does this leave us?”

  “I think it comes down to what you said last night. We went through the entire place this morning—not a tripped wire, not a bit of powder out of place …” when the detective corrected her, Renee laughed, “all right, so we have to tell the blushing bride her pantry has mice—and small mice at that. But that’s it. I’ll offer to come back and do another reading after they move in, but that’s it. This place is clean.”

  Madame Renee stared at the detective and marveled at what he had done. To throw himself open to such psychic damage, to be able to face his deepest fears, unaided, unprotected—this was a man, she told herself. A Hell of a man.

  “It has to be clean,” she added.

  And so the two packed their machines and clothing and bits and pieces and piled them into their vehicles. Making certain he had both reactivated the security system and locked the front door, Nardi took one last look at the old house, then said, “Well, no one can say the Nardi Security Team doesn’t earn its pay.”

  Renee made a surprisingly graceful bow of acknowledgement to his statement, then headed for her car. Nardi turned back to the house, tipped his baseball cap to its weathered roof, and then headed for his own.

  And, inside the house, the foul presence which had spent the entire time of Nardi and Renee’s visit suffering in exquisite anguish, allowed itself to burst forth once more from its thousand different hiding places. It was an elder, jaundiced thing, and its hate bounded from the walls as it unfolded itself.

  The fat cow, she had been so easy to resist it was a thing of amusement to the cursed soul, a humor so gay it crippled the violent spirit. But the man, all that marvelous, seething, ever-so-fresh pain …

  That had been hard to ignore. Agonizingly hard. Oh, for a tiny tongueful of his sniveling grief, the merest pinprick of his pain …

  But that would have alerted the pair of interlopers, set them upon it, forced it to fight back, wasted time, lost it the prize.

  No, it purred, remembering the bride soon to be thrust into the bowels of its domain, the smell of her innocence, the drooling wonderfulness of her softness, the flesh to be touched, the love to be poisoned …

  What did they think it was, some inconsequential? Some mere nothing of mere human memory? Fools.

  The thing which pulsed within the old house exploded with laughter. It had been sorely tempted, but it had won its prize. It had been afraid for a moment; the detective had almost snared it with the delicious aroma of his fear.

  Almost.

  But it knew a thing or two itself, about the idea of fear, and it had conquered its own.

  Now, it mused, bring me something else to conquer.

  The house laughed, and the trees shuddered, but there was no one there to hear.

  Yet.

  CRUELTY

  C.J. Henderson

  “Weak men are apt to be cruel.”

  —George Savile, Lord Halifax

  “Oh, Mr. Nardi, sir, oh my goodness. Thank God you’ve come.”

  The speaker was a painfully thin gentleman, the kind one could determine at a glance could consume several hundred thousand calories a day and gain no weight. It was an attribute that would have made him a thing despised most everywhere in modern America, if it were not for his eyes.

  “It’s all right, Mr. Clemmens. It’s my job.”

  His eyes were deeply worn pits: tired, frightened orbs that let one know their owner never slept well, never had time to relax, never found a moment designed to allow him the luxury of a smile.

  “Now tell me,” continued the newcomer, forcing his way through the ever-growing throng to join Clemmens in the building’s interior, “what’s gone wrong?”

  “Oh, Mr. Nardi, it’s something terrible. Ghastly. It’s been so long since anything like this … oh, good heavens—”

  As the thin man reached for a badly dampened handkerchief in his suit coat’s breast pocket, Nardi stopped their forward movement. Giving Clemmens a moment to dry his brow, the newcomer said;

  “Listen, take it easy. Calm down. I’m no doctor, but I walked the beat long enough to know the look of someone beggin’ for a stroke. Now, stop talkin’ for a second and take a deep breath. Then take another. Relax for me, okay?”

  Frank Nardi was the head of Nardi Security. A twenty-year man with the NYPD, he had taken his pension and fled the chaos and horror of the Big Apple for the calm and serenity of the New England countryside. Deciding on Arkham, Massachusetts, as his new hometown, a placid, historic burg just big enough to support his plans, he had opened a private security firm with three other retiring officers.

  “Thank you, Mr. Nardi, I feel better. But I am afraid you will not share such feelings when I explain what has happened.”

  Harold Clemmens was the president of Miskatonic University, final signer-off on all decisions, final arbiter of all disputes, final check on all balances. It had been his decision to bring in a private security firm to add another measure of safety in reference to the school’s library, a repository known for containing the largest collection of rare occult material in the western hemisphere.

  “Try me.”

  Nardi and his people did not guard the library like foot soldiers. No, Clemmens was much a visionary, and he had hired the firm based on information about its background. What Nardi and his people did was merely keep their collective ears to the ground, listening for any hint of possible break-ins looming in the library’s future. Over Miskatonic’s two hundred plus years, its wealth of rare and exotic texts had attracted all manner of thieves, some rumored to be more than merely mortal.

  Determined that there would be no more such incidents during his watch, Harold Clemmens had offered Nardi a healthy retainer to monitor the underworld and to protect the library from further incursions. Although the ex-police detective was loath to take all the credit for the relative quiet the university h
ad enjoyed over the past year, there had not been any unwanted intrusions or thefts since his company had been on the job.

  “We’ve been preparing the Exhibit Museum for a rather impressive show. As well as the finest selection from our own stores, it is to have pieces on loan from major museums and private collections around the world. Magnificent.”

  “The Egypt show, right? The one Tony was overseein’ for you?”

  “Yes, yes,” answered Clemmens, almost too quickly. As the pair started walking again, he continued, saying, “Your Mr. Balnco was most thorough in his execution of his duties—perhaps too much so.”

  As the university president continued to chatter, Nardi listened with a part of his mind, another section working to piece together a sense of what was happening. Miskatonic was no sleepy little backwater school. It might reside in a small town, but then so did Harvard and Princeton. As Ivy League as any campus, its yards were usually bristling with activity. But, Nardi knew, not the kind of activity through which he had made his way moments earlier.

  Something had happened inside the Exhibit Museum—of that he was certain. Something big.

  Something bad.

  There were too many people on campus, too many non-students. They stank of curiosity, an odor Nardi remembered well from his days on the streets of Manhattan. They were townies, so far, but there was a terrible certainty working through his nerves that told him that would change—soon. Next-town-overs were probably on their way. And the media. Of course, the media. He could tell from the sickening nerve vibration slithering through the halls that whatever this bad thing was, it was one more than large enough to slap cameras in hand and focus attention.