It was
Friday, February 11, and Bill “The Hook” Lockwood was shivering on the worn
couch at Cannon, Doctorow and Lockwood, P.I. after his somnambulism. His whisky
bottle had been broken during the burglary yesterday, but it turned out that
both Cannon and Doctorow had whisky bottles stashed away in their desk drawers,
so Lockwood was grasping a well-fortified cup of coffee between his hands.
Bessie Coleridge was already on her way to the office to continue the strange
investigation, and the intrepid investigators were quite certain that the
curious and irredeemable Madame Tekla would show up shortly. However, when
there was a knock on the door it turned out to be a swarthy, tall and stocky
police officer. Doctorow greeted the uniformed gentleman cautiously, but Frank
Cannon leapt out of his chair and greeted the officer with a wide smile and a
firm handshake.
“Rick
Gallo! What the…what are you doing in Arkham?”
“We left
The City, you know. It is not a good place to work as you grow older, and you
know Corinne, my wife, her folks are from Kingsport, so we decided to move here
two months ago, and the Arkham P.D. had an opening. I only realized that you
were here the other evening when that other P.I., Moe Zuckermann, told me about
your agency. Anyway, I thought I’d surprise you. Hey, I see that liquor bottle.
Do I need to report this? Nah, just gimme a cup of joe.”
Rick Gallo
Cannon
poured officer Gallo a steaming cup of coffee, and introduced him to Lockwood
and Doctorow.
“Hey,
Frank, you remember when you worked in the city?” Officer Gallo’s New York
accent was way out of place in bucolic Arkham. “Youi used to work on some weird
cases, right? Like the Doll man homicides? And Rex the Paper Cutter?” Cannon
nodded quietly. There were still too many bad memories from New York.
“Yeah, so
whaddaboudit?”
“I saw
something really weird yesterday. Perhaps not by New York standards, but
still...”
“Ok?”
“I was out
patrolling my beat by the Miskatonic river, by the Old Port, when I heard a
really horrifying shriek somewhere by the Ecclestone pharmacy at around 8 p.m.”
Gallo took a sip of his coffee. “It was a girl. I didn’t recognize her, but she
might have been ten or twelve or so. Her winter coat was splashed with blood,
and the was holding a leash. Her dog walk had ended really badly, since the
head of a mutt was the only thing left on the leash. Below the neck there was
just a mass of tendons, some spine, and torn dog meat. It also seems as if the
torn parts were partially covered in some weird foam or ichor, orange to the
color and emitting a fetid stench. But then, that might only have been the contents
of the poor mutt’s digestive tract. Anyway, thoroughly disgusting.”
Some of the old warehouses by the Miskatonic River.
“I took the
girl to the station, and it turned out that she was recognized by one of my
colleagues as Annamaria Brady, who lives with her parents, John and Carrie, on 22
East Main Street, next to Christ Church. She had been out walking their Chocolate
Lab Rover, when the dog started sniffing something. It apparently then became
furious and tore the leash out of Annamaria’s hand. Annamaria ran after Rover,
and she was relieved to see Rover peeking out from the corner of a building a
few minutes later, but imagine her horror when she realized that the dog’s body
had been torn away.”
Cannon, Doctorow,
and Lockwood were listening intently. Lockwood had stopped shivering, but he
was still all bundled up. “We had
her parents pick her up, and they were terrified as well. Poor people! Now,
Frank, have you heard of anything like this happening in Arkham or elsewhere,
or will this be labelled a car accident?"
That is when Bessie Coleridge and Madame Tekla stepped in to the office.
Annamaria Brady
