The Darkest Night: Terror in Arkham

"ah...s-sure I guess" Miles was tentative about this whole situation, he didn't know whether he should be happy, or uncomfortable. Honestly  Miles wanted to ask Olive if she knew anything more about this strange town and its history, and maybe this bike trip would give him a more in-depth tour.

He set his own kick stand and sped down the road, hot on Olives heels, down the trail as he kept an ear open to listen to her as they rode around.
 
Julia wasn't thrilled about jogging. She looked Amy up and down, and said "Let me set the pace. You'd outstrip me."


She wasn't going to respond to Amy conjecturing Julia looking for trouble. She wasn't, mostly. She was just going to illumjnate the ugly truths that everyone seemed to want to keep hidden. 'Dirty laundry hanging in the front lawn...' she thought, wryly.


She stretched lightly, unsure of exactly what the purpose was. After they were both done, she set off down the street in the direction of the river, setting a moderate pace, one she could keep for a long time.


"A horror movie?" she said. "I think more like-" 


'A detective movie.' She got excited just thinking about it.
 
The Arkham Riverfront was populated by rusting water towers, abandoned warehouses, crowded tenements, and mouldering water mills that all seemed to lean forward as if preparing to dive into the dark waters of the Miskatonic. 


As the pair jogged, the acute feeling of being watched was hard to shake. Shutters closed after them and blinds were drawn. There were no cars on the street and the only foot traffic was grey-faced middle aged men in overalls carrying spanners, racks of fish, or other refuse of half-hearted and mostly forgotten industry. 
 
Amy wanted to run down every side street and ally and look in every broken window.  Despite the small city being so creepy - and home to a gang of kidnappers, apparently - it had a certain, spooky charm.  The nearly-deserted streets, the occasional drawn blind or slammed shutter notwithstanding, held a certain grim fascination for Amy.  She reveled in solitude, and the infrequent appearance of a dock worker did little to mollify the apocalyptic barrenness of the riverfront.  And having Julia along gave her quite a bit of comfort.


Julia had a set a nice, steady pace that the athletic Amy maintained with ease, leaving her free to do something she rarely did, talk to someone.  The mill-workers and other men they had encountered so far all seemed to have the same reaction to a pair of pretty girls jogging in this district.  They looked on the pair as interlopers, as out-of-place out-of-towners.  But the pair were quite good looking, so the men's curiosity understandably overruled their displeasure with the foreigners.  They didn't do anything to make her suspicious in the least.  Amy said as much to Julia, curious as to her assessment of the reaction of the locals to their presence.
 
Julia had forgotten how much she loathed jogging. She was sweaty and hot and quickly becoming very very crabby. Especially since Amy was jogging along freely next to her and seemed to be having no difficulty at all. She was even chatting with her. Chatting! Julia could hardly push full sentences out of her lungs, and Amy wanted to have a conversation. Damp hair clung to her forehead. She swiped at it to get it off her skin and back where it belonged. 


This had been a bad idea. How long had they been at it, so far? Seemed like forever. Julia couldn't focus on what they were passing, she could only focus on a few landmarks, telling herself to just make it to that next lamppost, then to the mailbox, then to the next lamppost. The old runner's trick. Julia's breathing became heavier as she continued to push herself. Finally, she could take no more, and stopped, putting her hands on her knees and doubling over to catch her breath.


"No more!" she gasped at Amy. "Not right now."


She looked up, finally noting the area they had entered. She was just noticing how poor it looked, the looks of suspicion the two were getting. Julia didn't like being in this area at all. Not dressed the way they were. They stood out, it looked like no one went for a casual run along the Riverfront. She could see why.


"Whh-ell" she exhaled, having rested a little. "Shall we look around the area for a bit, see what's to see? I think I can run, still, but not quite yet." A walk around would let her stretch out a little more, and she knew enough to know she couldn't sit down, not yet. Besides, they had exploring to do.
 
Amy silently chided herself for forgetting that not everyone could just jump up and run a couple miles.  She expected that from older people, but she was constantly surprised that someone her age wasn't a specimen of perfect physical fitness... which was really a stupid and arrogant assumption on her part.  She was struggling to come up something to say, to maybe even express her feelings or simply say sorry, when Julia suggested they walk around.


"Good idea!" she said a little too quickly, latching onto the suggestion.  "And maybe we'll see Miles and Olive tooling around," she added, hoping to keep things light and easy for a while.


She turned a slow circle, taking in the sights around them, noting with fascination the decrepit architecture of the warehouses and industrial buildings. Even more shabby were the few tenements and stereotypical New England triple-deckers.  It occured to Amy that if a gang of criminals was operating out of the riverfront district, they probably lived in the area - unless they were the sort to rent a house as a base of operations, which gave her a creeping feeling of dread.  That kind of operation meant a wealthy individual or a monied organization.


"How do we tell the difference?" Amy asked out loud.


Then, realizing she was not being discrete, and that Julia would have no idea what she was on about, she added much more discretely this time, "Between, say, a local drug gang doing kidnappings on the side, and a rich pervert-psycho?"


She looked around again and added even more quietly, "Because this doesn't look like gang territory, to me."
 
Farther the street wound and ebbed towards the Miskatonic, then terminated abruptly in an old wooden dock. A small, abandoned fishing trawler bobbed in the river at the end of the dock, and two men with long white beards say smoking tobacco pipes on the wooden stumps that rose on either side of the pier. 


A small cobblestone riverwalk wound its way east towards the Bridge and west towards the edge of town. On the landward side of the riverfront, the hulking, decrepit form of "Jay and K's Fishmonger and Cannery" dominated both sides of the street with a rickety wooden bridge passing between the buildings above their heads. On the side of the road, a payphone booth was the only feature on the pavement. Like a lost child crying for its mother, the phone suddenly began to ring. The old men on the dock looked towards it with disinterest and went back to their conversation. 
 
Oh, how relieved Julia was that Amy had agreed to walking around. She was also relieved that Amy hadn't said anything about Julia's low stamina. She sighed gratefully, and stretched out a bit before starting to walk down the street.


Amy blurted out a comment on the kidnappings. Julia was too tired right now to filter her mouth. "It's not a gang." she said, shortly. "A gang doesn't kidnap and not ransom."


Hardly noticing she was still speaking aloud, she said "It's possible we're dealing with two criminals. The crime scene we walked into could be a gang or some such thing looking for money, and it could be unrelated to the other kidnappings." She stopped walking and looked around. "But the kidnappings here, judging from what Officer O'Saur had to say-"


Julia jumped, interrupted in the middle of her sentence by a payphone. She didn't move to answer it. She had a bad feeling about all of this.
 
Amy looked between the ringing payphone, the two oldsters on the dock and Julia.  Seeing that Julia was reluctant to pick up the phone -and who could blame her- Amy tentatively reached for the old fashioned handset.  What had started out as a bright, warm and sunny day, suddenly seemed drear and gray.  She wanted to use her T-shirt to keep from getting fingerprints on the phone.  She realized she was starting to get paranoid... well, more paranoid than usual.  Defiantly, she snatched up the phone.  The black plastic was cold and alien feeling in her small hand.


"Hello?" she said, the momentary bravado melted out of her voice even before she spoke, turning the confident 'hello!' she had intended into a rather meek little question.
 
At first, the only sound that the payphone emitted was a low gurgling, like water in the back of someone's throat as they drowned gasping for air. Finally, a voice came through the speaker. The intonation was almost inhuman, but it had the overall characteristics of someone who is deeply, deeply afraid. 


"Help me... I don't know where I ... am... but I feel near the sea... The creatures! I am one of them! I am one of them! Oh Merciful God! Alert the authorities to our existence, and plead them purge the blasphemous underwater mountains in fire! Oh God..., Oh God! R'lyeh, Dagon bug gof'nn ph'shtunggli n'ghft shagg! Dagon! Dagon!" The voice subsided into a random, juxtaposed soup of disjointed English and some language that was blasphemous to the ear and made one's hair stand on end. It rose up in that watery gurgling noise again before finally subsiding, and then the phone clicked to signify the call had been terminated. 


Immediately following, a female voice chimed in through the phone's speakers.


"To make a local call, please insert twenty five cents. If you are calling collect, please insert an additional seventy five cents."
 
Immediately upon hearing the low sounds, Amy turned the phone's hand set toward Julia and beckoned her to lean in and listen to the strange sounds.  When the call ended, Amy closed her eyes and tried to recite what she had heard, "Help me, I don't know where I am but I fear near the sea... creatures... one of them, alert authorities to our existence???  Purge blasphemous mountains of underwater fire???  Dragon bug?" She couldn't remember the rest.


"Do you have your phone on you" she asked Julia, her eyes still closed while she again recited what she could of the quiet pleas.  Even remembering the strange sounds made her skin crawl, made her shiver as if the breeze had shifted.
 
Julia stood, frozen for a time as Amy looked at her and the two men on the wharf stared at both of them. Slowly, she approached, stiff-legged, and not just from her run. She bent down to Amy's outstreched hand which held the phone reciever in it. As she neared, she heard the panicked tones and crept closer to it, in time to hear the person on the other side beg them to alert authorities.


Then, the garbling started. Julia stood, trasfixed, with her head close to the reciever. She couldn't move away, even as her own mind screamed at her to stop, stop listening to these horrifying noises. A chill came over her, and she shuddered.


Just as abruptly as it had started, it stopped, and the call ended. Amy stood back, and in her place, Julia took the phone. She listened to the lady on the other end speak as Amy talked into her other ear. Wait, what?


She turned to Amy. "What kind of town charges more to call collect?" 'Where are we?' she thought. She hung up the reciever, and glanced at the two men on the dock. She looked around a bit to see who else was looking at them.


She turned her back to the men on the dock, still facing Amy, and said in a slightly-louder-than-normal voice, "It was probably some dumb prank." She shrugged her shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of dismissiveness. Her expression, turned towards Amy, was all seriousness. She darted her eyes towards the men on the dock then back at Amy, praying she understood the hidden meaning.


"Look, I'll prove it. Excuse me!" she called out loudly to the two men on the dock, turning away from Amy and walking towards them. She fixed an expression of disdain and disinterest on her face, hoping she looked the part of a haughty suburbanite. "Who uses this phone?" she jabbed her thumb behind her to the payphone.
 
A very distant and distracted part of Amy's mind was glad that Julia was looking around, being observant and careful, the way girls are supposed to buddy up and protect each other when they go to college parties.  She didn't need her eyes to know this, the very sounds of Julia's movements were familiar enough that Amy was relieved and reassured.


"Your phone," Amy whispered, "Do you have your cell phone?"  Still, she kept her eyes closed, trying to focus on remembering what the caller had said.  When Julia started talking to the men over on the dock, she again quietly recited the words, leaving out the nonsense about a dragon bug.  She reached out mechanically and fumbled the handset off the hook and dialed zero by feel.  It was a crazy and impulsive thought... and probably futile.  Phone companies didn't have operators any more, did they?  But then, how many towns still had pay phones, so maybe it was worth a shot.  And it was better than dialing 911over what may very well be as Julia said, a dumb, drunken prank.


But the voice echoed in Amy's mind, watery sounds and watery words, full of the desperation of a drowning man.  And a local Arrkhamite by the archaic phrasing.  "Alert the authorities to our existence... plead them purge the blasphemous mountains..."  Amy shuddered at the remembered fear in the voice, and silently hoped that an operator would pick up.
 
The old-timers on the dock looked at Julia with a confused, sullen expression. One looked to the other and said, "Do you ever remember anyone using that payphone?" 


The other elder merely shook his head. "Never in my long years. That's right queer." They went back to smoking their pipes, disinterested again. 


As Amy dialed the phone, eventually an old fashioned dial tone started up and then a voice on the other end. "Arkham City Telephone. What can I do for you?" It was the voice of a seemingly bored teenage girl, probably the last switchboard operator in the country. 
 
"See?" Julia said, extending one hand towards the men and the other towards Amy. "No one uses the phone, so some stupid kid is probably watching nearby, saw us two new people pass by, and dialed the phone to mess with us." She looked around, frowning and glaring at all the decrepid buildings around them. "Don't give them the satisfaction of investigating. Amy!"


Julia dropped her arms and put her hands on her hips. Looking back at Amy, dialing on the payphone. 'Trying to get the number that called it, probably.' She started walking back towards her, with a look of incredulity on her face.  "Really? You're really gonna look into this?"


She had walked back to Amy, now, and looked for a metal box that would have a phone book in it. No one here would mind a missing page. She dug in one pocket for the well-laundered pen she kept telling herself to get rid of. Good thing she hadn't. Hopefully it still worked.
 
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Suddenly, Amy's entire aspect changed drastically.  Gone was the quiet, worried, concentrating young woman, replaced by a vivacious sounding teenager.  It was an act she had performed many, many times and she would have been mortified to tell Julia how she had developed the persona.  She slipped into the familiar role with disconcerting ease.  "Yeah, um, hi!  I was just wondering, can you tell me the number that just called this line?  The guy, he um, well... he didn't tell me his number..."  Amy let it hang at that, no use adding information that might only screw up her chances of getting the number by making the young operator suspicious.


She looked at Julia and rolled her eyes, as if to say, 'Can you believe this shit?'.
 
Olive was directing Miles around, giggling on occasion and speaking of the town's history like a human text book. 


She paused for a moment, looking at something odd on the riverside.


"Miles, do you see that? Those three brown...lumps..." She squinted, trying to see, "I think those might be peopl-" 


Olive's attempt to focus her already poor vision on the three lumps drew her attention away from riding her bike. She moved a little off the side of the road, a bit more into the lane, and 'bam'. It was over in mere seconds. A black Chevy Coupe ran a red light. Olive lay on the ground like a puppet who's strings had been cut, her nose bleeding and her limbs sprawled out around her limply. She was knocked unconscious, her skin already bruising and the scrapes and cuts she accumulated from contact with the pavement begining to bleed. A terrified couple got out of the car, obviously shaken, even more so upon confirming they'd hit a person, none the less a Finch.


@DevilishDoodler 


(took me so long I figured I'd better make it interesting.) 
 
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"OLIVE!!" Miles screamed but it was far to late. The car had already collided with the poor girl. Miles tossed his bike and ran toward her limp frame sprawled in the road as a myriad of curses spewed from Miles mouth. It was all he could say at this point.


He knelt by her, shaking with fear, he didn't know what to do. He wanted to move her, but what if that would injure her further? The couple still stood there in shock.


"JESUS CHRIST! CALL A DAMN AMBULANCE!" He yelled in the couple direction hoping to snap them from their shaken state.


Thankfully, it did stir them enough into rushing them to a pay phone. Miles grabbed his cellphone, it had two bars, thankfully. He fumbled with it as he desperately called Julia or Amy or hell, someone, anyone he knew.
 
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Olive remained motionless, her thick glasses shattered on the ground at her side. Passerby's began to accumulate on the sides of the street and sidewalk, everyone looking towards the unconscious girl critically. 
 
He tired each of their phones and nothing. More cursing spewed from him as he quickly dialed the only medical expert he knew, Mom.


"Hello Deary!"


"M-Mas I got no time to e-explains right now one've ma friends is in troubles, day were hit by ah cah an I-I-I dunno wat ta do!"


"Oh my goodness! Okay okay, okayokayokay aahhh.. has an ambulance been called?"


"Yah da drivahs d-doin it right n-now."


"Now make sure she can't get hurt any further. What what ever you do DO. NOT. MOVE. HER. Okay dear?"


"Y-yes ma.. c-can I keep yas on da phone til day git 'ere?"


"Yes dear of course!"


Miles kept is Mom on the phone as he could hear the ambulance making its way toward them in the distance.
 
The ambulance eventually showed, looking like something out of a dated TV show rather than real life. She was quickly picked up and whisked off to some place or another, with no regard to Miles at all, leaving him on the sidewalk and no trace of the incident except for her bike and a shattered pair of Coke-bottle glasses. 
 

Arkham Riverfront
​


 
​


"Last connection was with local number 661-2621. Does that answer your question?" was the curt reply. 


Around Amy and Julia a small crowd of dock workers and fishermen, their dilapidated wives and dirty children in tow, was gathering while attempting to not seem as though they were staring and failing miserably. They all looked like they had a sense of urgency about them, like they needed to ask an important question or tell them some vital information. 


Arkham Sanitarium
​


 
​


The Sanitarium, which was used to treat both the physically and mentally ill alike, was an old institutional building on the outskirts of the French Hill neighborhood. On the inside, although it was mostly white like a hospital, it didn't carry the smell of antiseptic or the sterile feel of a modern hospital. It was warm inside and strangely homey. At the desk, a petite nurse was typing out patient reports on a typewriter and manning the phone. 


The doors burst open to two paramedics, one a man in a white coat and the other a nurse. They were carrying a battered young woman on a gurney. As the desk nurse rose from her chair, the male paramedic started talking. 


"Son of a bitch hit her with his car, she's lucky to not get impaled on the hood ornament. Those things are like little spears. Bruising to the legs, face, arms, and torso and appropriate swelling. She's unconscious now, that's good. Looks like she didn't see it coming so no shock. Help me get her up into a room." 


As they carried Olive to a room on the first floor, the desk nurse took a small syrette from her smock and placed it on the bedside table. Morphine to be administered at the patient's request upon regaining consciousness. For the next hour, they all worked on stopping the bleeding and bandaging Olive's wounds. When the desk nurse confirmed this was indeed Olive Finch, she telephoned the family who in turn telephoned Aldous who in turn showed up at the hospital thirty minutes later with a hastily purchased boquet. 


By then, the nurses had left her to return to consciousness and Aldous was alone in the room with her. 
 
Julia's nose crinkled slightly and the corners of her mouth turned down in a gesture of disgust. She had heard false cheer like that enough in her own lifetime. She turned around, resting her back on the phone booth, and realized they had an audience. She watched them warily, the scenario here had put her off balance; she knew she could learn valuable things, but didn't want to abandon her act as a spoiled rich kid. She hovered near Amy, instead, waiting for either her or the collected crowd to make a move.
 
Olivia Finch blinked a few times, slowly coming out of her haze.


"Miles...I think those are bodies..." she paused, grumbled, then sighed. "I didn't get to finish my sentence..." she felt around her face, then her hand shot out towards the bedside table. She swept over it, searching for something with nimble fingers despite her current state. She moved to sit up in an attempt to aid her search, only to flop back down with a pained hiss and an "oof!"


she rubbed her eyes again, blind as a bat without her glasses. 


"Al...dous...?" She squinted, trying to distinguish his face from his neck from his hair. "I-I feel like I've been hit by a truck..." she mumbled, rubbing her sore abdomen like a pregnant mother would.


"...and I never got that milkshake." 
 
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"Thank you!" Amy cheered into the phone and hung up.  She looked to Julia, her expression mirroring the other girl's disgust.  "Six six one, twenty-six, twenty-one," she said when she saw that Julia had already equipped herself with pen and paper.  Her eyes narrowed at the sight of the gathering crowd, "Do you have your phone?" she asked again, very quietly.


Again she whispered the lines, thinking it important to remember them, while she scanned the crowd.  Several of the men were big enough to be very dangerous and she knew that the presence of children in a crowd that had gathered this quickly would not inhibit the more aggressive types.  So she watched their faces - it was already too late to not make eye contact - looking for the tell tale signs of brewing violence.


She took Julia by the wrist, her small hand surprisingly strong, and led her toward the largest gap in the crowd.  Now you might think that the largest gap in a crowd of people would be exactly that, the largest space between any group of people.  But that was not what Amy was looking for.  She ignored the children and more or less dismissed the haggard-looking women.  They could be bowled over with relative ease.  No, she was looking for the gaps between the bigger men.  Her heart was racing and she was breathing deeply, getting ready to run... and drag Julia along if necessary.
 
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