Champagne; good liquor; a palatial penthouse suite in the Miskatonic Hotel; party girls; half toasted big wig mobsters, both Irish and Italians; a lively swing band. We soaked in the scene… it couldn’t be more at odds with the day he’d just had.
“No… I ain’t seen no one come or go from that place for days”, the elderly woman mused, her eyes staring without focus passed Kieran, “and I sit here day in, day out!”. Kieran glanced back at the apartment building. This was where Sticky Jack Fulton was said to live, but there was something about it that disturbed him. Something discordant. Something disconnected. “Maybe they’re fumigating the place… strange to do it in winter though”, she continued, her needles clacking absent-mindedly.
He thanked her and left her to close the window they’d been talking through. As he crossed back to the building he thought he heard peculiar music. It was just for an instant… maybe he’d imagined it. What came next he didn’t imagine… it was Marty yelling from around the back. Kieran broke into a run.
He vaulted the back steps, almost colliding with Marty who was standing toe to toe with an angry woman in the doorway. A chair, and the grunting grip Marty had on her arm, seemed to be the only thing keeping her anger from throttling him. Kieran didn’t hesitate. He jabbed his right fist over Marty’s shoulder into the woman’s face. Nose bloodied she staggered, dropping something, but Kieran didn’t pause… he pushed past Marty and hit her again. This time she dropped. Kieran surveilled the scene. The kitchen was in complete disarray, a cleaver vibrated where she’d dropped it sharp-edge-first into the floor. Marty, thankfully, seemed to be unharmed.
The inside kitchen door swung in quickly. Wes appearing with a revolver in hand. It took him a moment to make sense of the scene before him. He blinked. “Tie her up… let’s find this Fulton fella”, he suggested. “His place should be just above this one”, he said, turning to leave the apartment, revolver leading he way.
Marty could see that Kieran was reluctant to follow, but they had a duty and he wasn’t one to shirk duty. He took a few moments to settle himself and get his shotgun in hand. He stepped into the hallway after Wes. It was an unsettling experience. The hall seemed to stretch, twist and then snap back in a instant… this left him with the oddest sense of vertigo. He shuck it off and went to climb the stairs to the next floor. A load thudding, like a wrecking ball rolling over furniture and bumping walls, greeted his ears as he cleared the last step. The faintest hint of unrhythmic music followed, fading before he could really catch it. This place was strange, but he had a duty – do the job, protect the lads.
The door to the thudding apartment, for it could only be coming from this place, stood before him. He twisted the handle, the door creaked inwards. The room in front of him was all debris and destruction. Every piece of furniture, every wall, all decoration was in ruin leaving a carpet of splinters and mess. He stepped in, shotgun ready, but there was nothing else to be seen. The cause of the destruction wasn’t here.
Something slammed into the wall beside him, shards of plaster sent flying cut his cheek. He looked, but again there was no sign of the cause of the destruction. He went to step back, but something clipped him as he went, pushing him solidly back into the hallway. He’d grown up with stories of púcas and bean sís that he’d always discounted as ‘stuff Mammys tell kids to keep them quiet’, but that room housed something that he couldn’t explain without using a word like ghost, spirit or presence. He shuddered and blessed himself. He wondered how much he’d endure for duty, for the job, to protect the lads.
Wes thumbed the shotgun shell in his pocket. A family swung before him. Their ashen faces were held in rictus torture from the pull of gravity against the neck-wrapped ropes preventing their bodies falling to it. His work sometimes required taking things to an extreme and maybe it was some of those things that robbed this scene of its obvious horror. There was nothing he could do. They were gone. All of them. He simply stepped back into the hallway and closed the door.
He proceeded upstairs and went directly to apartment 2b, where he hoped to find Sticky Jack or, more to the point, the items Jack had stolen. Another unlocked door. That nearly concerned him more than what he had just seen downstairs… what kind of idiot leaves their door unlocked in Arkham, particularly in this part of Arkham.
Two sounds hit him as the door opened, discordant music and the whimpering and crying of a man. It took a moment for his eyes to make sense of the room… it initially seemed too long to be housed in this building. Maybe he was coming down with a fever. He shook his head and entered, vaguely aware that Marty had come up behind him.
The music was coming from a closed door off this living room. He ignored it. He pressed for another open door, seemingly into a bedroom. The whimpering was coming from there. The bedroom was, like the living room, well ordered. He didn’t really take it in. His gaze was pulled to a man sitting beyond another doorway. Strewn about the tiled floor were papers. He clutched a strange dagger and some parchment. There was blood everywhere… it seemed to be flowing freely from gashes at his wrists and neck. “Kill me!”, the wretch said, “Please kill me!”. An earsplitting blast filled the space. Pellets slammed into the man, making a mess of his chest and lower jaw. He still sat there, pained eyes staring at them. “Ssh-kill, shh-me”, he hissed through his ruined mouth. Wes’s ears rang. He wasn’t sure he heard the man or just imagined what he had said. Marty shoved past him, loading two more shells into the gun. Time slowed for Wes as he saw Marty place the barrel in the man’s mouth. “Nnnn…”, was all Wes got out before the space was again filled with the shotgun’s boom. The man’s head disappeared in a shower of blood, brains and bone. The body collapsed unmoving to the bathroom floor. Marty dropped his beloved shotgun and slumped listlessly against the doorframe. Wes glanced up at him as he retrieved the items from the dead man’s hands, but Marty’s eyes were vacant. He stuffed the items in his pockets, grabbed the gun and took Marty by the elbow. “A stiff drink’ll see ya right. Let’s get outta here”, he said slowly, as if speaking to someone who was a little bit simple. They left bloody footprints in the bedroom and the living room. He called for Kieran as they were about the leave the apartment. In listening for a response he noticed something, or more specifically the lack of something. The music had stopped. He realised that the shotgun shell stopped too… had it been moving in his pocket?
Until next time,
Owen