Mists of the Miskatonic (Mist of the Miskatonic Book 1) (10 page)

“What are necklaces?” the coroner prompted.

The detective slowly moved the wood beads with the tip of a pen. “Rosary, another necklace, a double-barred crucifix. This one,” he pointed to a six-pointed star. “Star of David. Weird.”

Mason stood up straight and shuffled uncomfortably. “Some type of weird religion or cult? Scientologists? Mormons? Or worse, Unitarians?”

“Star of David is Jewish. Rosary is Catholic. Double-barred crucifix is Greek Orthodox, called a Byzantine Cross. He covered all his theological bases, that’s for damn sure.”

Kelsey’s phone buzzed and he looked at the screen. It was Gibbs. “Yeah, what’s up?”

The patrolman’s voice was muffled. “We got the info on the family. Dad’s name is Rudy Samuels. He works at the mill. Mom is Diana, librarian for the school district. The only contacts we have ever had have been a few speeding tickets and she has an unpaid parking ticket in Spokane. We’ve never even been to this house before today. Nothing else. They’re clean as far as we know.”

“Thanks. Are you eating another donut while you talk to me?”

“No,” was the unconvincing reply before the cell went dead. Kelsey pocketed it before he turned back to the table. Carefully, he reached out for the envelope. The white paper was not sealed, and the detective slowly pulled out a folded piece of unlined white paper. The writing was in the same neat script as the checks in the living room. A suicide note. Kelsey read it out loud as Mason listened intently.

“We as a family have decided to do this our way, rather than try to survive what is coming. I apologize to the police officers who have enough to do, but we took our own lives. We see what is going to happen, and the hell on earth is beyond comprehension. Have a nice day. Rudy, Diana, Michael and Tiffany Samuels.”

“Well, that’s more than a little creepy,” Mason huffed. “Have a nice day. Some weird cult or somethin’? A whole family. Like that one in Georgia a few weeks back that killed themselves. I hope this doesn’t get become an epidemic, weird end-of-the-world nonsense, cults and such.”

Kelsey laid the letter gently on the table. “I hope not either. Let’s check the other rooms, get some photos, some blood drawn, and get these bodies out of here.”

The two worked their way through the rest of the ground floor, and the detective was impressed at the cleanliness. His ex-wife had never been much of a housekeeper.
Someone else’s problem now,
he thought.

A tidy master bedroom and two smaller children’s rooms and a bathroom were the ground floor. A set of steps led into the basement. Kelsey hit the light switch. He and Mason slowly descended.

The basement was a mostly unfinished room: as long as the house with concrete walls and floors. A row of simple wood studs ran down the center of the long room. Against every wall were metal shelves lined with plastic bins. The ceiling was unfinished: long fluorescent lights flickered, and cast shadows that wavered. Against a finished wall on the end of the long room were two large shelves stacked with cans of freeze-dried food.

“Odd that an end-of-the-world believer was so well prepared to survive. There is at least a year’s worth of food, and that box is a water filter,” the coroner said and pointed. “Why bother if you were going to kill yourself?”

Kelsey looked at a door in the end of the long room, against the shelves of survival supplies.

“Maybe they had some type of revelation, some sign that changed their minds. Can a person who shoots their whole family then kills himself really be understood? Who can explain crazy?” The detective opened the door. Dry hinges creaked.

The room was an office of sorts. An old battered desk with a tan laminated top sat in the corner: stacks of papers and books dominated the surface. A laptop computer was hooked to a printer. A stack of papers sat in the tray, and numerous dark photo albums were lined up against the wall.

Several bookshelves stood against the walls, hundreds of books randomly stacked chaotically. A small window lit the room over the desk, and a single ray of the morning sun found its way through the smudged, dirty glass. Every wall had maps hung, and the charts had dozens of marks scribbled in ink. One large map of the world against the west wall had thumbtacks that secured scraps of paper covered with notes.

The coroner followed behind. He looked over Kelsey’s shoulder. “I see three gun safes on the other side of the basement. If they’re full, could be as many as fifty guns total. And at least seven military metal ammo cans stacked on top. If they’re full of small caliber, could be forty or fifty thousand rounds.”

“Quite a collector,” the detective smirked. “It’s Idaho. I’ve seen bigger.”

Kelsey looked at the bookshelf. A collection of books about the end of times. A large one was prominently titled
Empires of the Dead
. He stared at the faded gold embossed on the spine. “What the hell is a matter with people? Who would read this crap?”

“That confirms the end-of-the-world theory,” Mason said. “Got a little too into it, went over the deep end. This whole basement smells like the end of the world, living in this rat hole while Armageddon crashes down up above. Hidden here, eating freeze-dried noodles, waiting to resurface and recolonize. That’s a great plan.”

Kelsey shuffled carefully through the papers on the desk: many were photocopies of pages of various books, and an article about a derelict ship at sea. Undecipherable foreign characters were on many of the pages. “Dammit. I can’t read a lot of this crap.”

The detective opened a drawer and pulled out a shoebox. The box was heavy. Once opened, he could see wads of crumpled newspaper. “That’s about what the Gazette is good for.”

He pulled out some of the paper to reveal a statue of some unrecognized greenish-black substance. It was heavy like stone, but slick. He pulled the eight-inch figure out of the box to the gasp of the Coroner. “What the hell is that thing?”

The solid figure was vaguely humanoid, finely crafted, sitting on a block. Kelsey looked for a seam or cast marks, but could find none. In place of a head was a creature similar to an octopus with more tentacles than it should have on the face. The body was scaly, more pronounced than a snake’s skin would have. Huge claws protruded from hind and fore feet. Long, thin wings were attached. They stretched from the back, to the base of the crouching figure. The bend of the body vaguely reminded the detective of the famous statue ‘The Thinker’ in a satanic sort of way. It was possible that the monster leaned over to puke.

The thing disturbed him deeply, and he stared into the greenish black eyes of the figure. Tiny flecks of shiny material caught the sunlight as he contemplated the demonic creature.

On the base of the figurine was some type of hieroglyphics, a script unfamiliar to him.

“God damn D & D crap,” the coroner grumbled. “That thing is creepy. No wonder he went crazy and shot his family, collecting this tripe.”

Kelsey held up the statue. “It looks expensive. I doubt it’s a D & D figure. And it looks old.”

Cautiously the Detective packed the creepy monster back into the shoebox and put it back into the drawer, much to his relief. There was something
unnatural
about it that he couldn’t put his finger on. He looked through the worn, faded photocopies: he recognized some notes with the name George Gammel Angell written on the top. It was the same script as the suicide letter upstairs.

Kelsey scanned the copied words he made out ‘CTHULHU CULT’, ‘Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse,’ and 1925.

“Well, let’s have all this stuff boxed up. I’d like to go through it some more. If this end of the world nonsense is going to kick into high gear, it seems like all the research is done and in one place for me,” Kelsey said. “Saves a lot of work.”

“We agree that this is suicide then?” the coroner queried. “Seems pretty cut and dry to me.”

The detective avoided the light from the window. Even though the thought of the sun on his face appealed, the bright light would have hurt his hung-over eyes. He wished his throbbing headache would stop.

“I bet we find the ammo in one of those cans matches the rounds in the gun upstairs. Yeah, it’s pretty cut and dry,” Kelsey said quietly.

After the sun went down, Kelsey retreated to the quiet basement of the Tapadera Motor Inn. It was the one bar in not crawling with college students, flush with loan money to blow. It was never too crowded, and the out-of-towners would not recognize him. He sat under a light and nursed an orange juice at the bar. It was the only place in the darkened establishment that he could read.

“Another juice, hon?” the bartender asked, a cute blonde with a bright smile who always worked weekends. “Or something stronger?”

He looked up from the papers spread out in front of him.

“Let me think a second,” Kelsey said as he pondered and surveyed the bar. It had low ceilings and dark recesses. Kelsey was not as drunk as usual for a Saturday night. Behind the bartender were several rows of hard liquor bottles on a counter. She bent down and scooped ice out of a bin into a glass. There was an impressive flash of cleavage, but he looked away before he got caught. A large flat panel television was on VH-1 with the sound turned down, and Kelsey shifted on the marginally uncomfortable stool which squeaked. He smiled.

“Not tonight, Shelly.”

“I’ll call you the designated driver then. On the house,” she said and gave him a heavily made-up wink.

“I appreciate it,” he said quietly as he considered the possibilities. He looked down at the folder of papers in front of him. He had taken the documents and a photo album from the desk of Rudy Samuels.

The bartender paused, then looked at the papers from her side of the bar. “Working late? Something to do with that shooting in town today?”

Kelsey felt his left eye twitch. “I can’t really talk about an ongoing investigation too much, but yeah. Just making sure all of our bases are covered, but it’s pretty cut and dry.”

“Your little brother still in the Air Force? I haven’t seen him around for a while,” she said and smiled. She poured another orange juice and set it in front of him. “He’s a good kid.”

“Navy. He’s in the Navy. Carrier Strike Group Five, based in Japan. He’s on the
George Washington;
it’s an aircraft carrier. He called a couple days ago. Getting underway again, out to sea within the week.” When he thought of his younger brother, Robert, it made him sad. Deployments went on forever. Then he focused on the papers in front of him.

The bartender wandered off to check other patrons and he opened the photo album. Most of the pictures were old. All were places appeared long forgotten: dark woods, vine-covered ruins, ancient cracked statuary that were destroyed by the forces of weather and time. One of the pictures was older than the rest, a black-and-white photo of a giant statue.

The stone monolith in the photo was eight or nine feet tall, based on a police officer in the picture. The cop had a short buzz cut and held his hat and service revolver. The large statue looked very similar to the greenish figurine he had held earlier in the day.

Kelsey pulled the picture from the album and turned it over. In old ink from a fountain pen, he read the words written on the back of the photo. “Cthulhu Idol, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1907”. Under it, in that now-familiar script of the dead man was scrawled, “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

Another black-and-white photo showed ancient stone blocks, many tumbled and moss-covered ruins with the same policeman. On the back were notes written by Rudy Samuels: “Unidentified ruins, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1907.” Then in Rudy’s writing: “Inspector John Raymond Legrasse.” For several minutes he laid them side by side and just stared. He thought about the eyes of the man frozen in time. Eyes, captured a century ago looked back from the picture.

“What did you know, Inspector?” Kelsey whispered to the photo. “What is this thing?” He opened the folder of papers and flipped through them slowly until he found a photocopy of an arrest report dated November 1, 1907. The report had been prepared and typed by the inspector: the original page count was seven. In this stack of papers, the detective only had the first two: a cover page (1 of 7) that listed the names of twenty police officers. Legrasse and others had responded to a complaint about ‘voodoo rituals’ and ‘naked dancing.’ The second page (2 of 7) had a list of foreign names. They were impossible to pronounce or to divine their ethnic origin. He squinted and tried to make sense of the possible pronunciations, and then he looked to see a list of dispositions. The top forty-seven names had the word ‘arrested’ penned besides the typed list, two more with the words ‘wounded’ and five more with ‘deceased’.

He quickly flipped through the rest of the folder. Kelsey hoped for more of the report, but could not find it. He noticed Shelly observing him. She smiled, and then leaned close. “So whatcha working on now?”

Kelsey shuffled papers, then glanced at part of a journal entry about a captured yacht that arrived upon the ruins of a city named R’lyeh. The photocopy was dark and the handwritten words were hard to decipher as he skimmed, but he learned that the crew found a stone pillar sticking from the sea and investigated. Some of the words were too obscured, but others were readable. He deciphered the phrases
greenish stone blocks, Babylon of elder Deamons, and squid-like bas relief.
Before he answered the bartender,
he made out the words
Great Cthulhu.