Darkness Below

“Is it true this place was once an insane asylum?”

Still is, Ellen Logan thought as she followed a group of new students onto campus. Even though she was running late, she joined them. She loved hiking up the steep hill that led to Miskatonic University, of reliving the moment she first laid eyes on the campus. A shiver shot through her as she slipped into its shadow. The school was a relic, a medieval fortress that loomed defiantly over the modern world.

She looked back at Arkham. The city spread like a carpet beneath her feet. The Miskatonic River wound through it, splitting it in two. Ellen peered at the sparkling water.

Old Arkham, New Arkham.

Us and them.

“This place wasn’t just any insane asylum,” the guide insisted. “It was Arkham Asylum, run by Dr. Nathaniel West.”

“Arkham Asylum? The Arkham Asylum?” one of the students blurted.

“The one in the Batman video games?” another person asked.

The guide pretended not to hear.

“There were always rumors about the place,” he continued, “about what kind of psychiatry Dr. West practiced. Most of the patients at Arkham Asylum were wards of the state. Poor. Abandoned. No one cared about them. He felt free to put them to, um, good use.”

He paused to point at a building. “See that tower? That’s where Dr. West performed his medical research. He did horrible things. Performed all kinds of experiments. Without anesthesia. At the time the place was so remote that he could carry out his work undisturbed. If patients died under his care, the staff disposed of them. Tossed them out like they were garbage.”

The man’s nose crinkled in disgust. “A disgruntled worker finally tipped off the authorities. When the police stormed the asylum, West was in the middle of drilling a hole in a patient’s skull. They arrested him, but before he was prosecuted, a mob stormed the jail. His body? Never found.”

The guide led them deeper into the campus. “The place was abandoned for almost a decade. In 1850 a mysterious benefactor bought the land and founded Miskatonic University. The school opened its doors five years later. It’s been here ever since.”

One of the students turned away from the group. “Hey, what’s going on over there?”

Ellen followed his gaze. The clocktower was roped off with police tape. People in dark windbreakers scoured the perimeter.

“Oh, that? It’s probably some fraternity prank,” the guide said, dismissing the activity with the wave of a hand. “We get a lot of them this time of year.”

The bald-faced lie shocked Ellen. No campus prank, no matter how outrageous, was severe enough to warrant so much attention.

The guide steered the freshmen away from the clock tower. “Our next stop is the student health center. Trust me, you’ll want to know where it is.”

Ellen stared at what was obviously a crime scene. She wasn’t the only one. Everywhere she looked students milled around in pods. No one stepped forward to find out what was going on. That was one of the strange things about Miskatonic. The school was dedicated to investigating the supernatural, to protecting people from the dark places of the world. But when the time came to put those ideas into action, very few students rose to the challenge. Most people hung back and let others take risks. In that way Miskatonic was like the normal world.

She headed toward the yellow tape. A young police officer stepped forward to intercept her. “Hey, Miss! You can’t—”

A flash of movement caught Ellen’s eye. A ghostly figure swayed on the clock tower. At first she thought the woman was drunk. Or suicidal. Then she saw the smoke rising off her body. Light blazed inside her, so deep and intense that . . .

Ellen gasped as the woman jumped off the edge. She closed her eyes, but it was too late. The woman’s descent burned across her eyelids.

“Miss,” the police officer called out. When she didn’t respond, he grabbed her arm. “Miss, are you okay?”

Ellen opened her eyes, trying not to look at the blood on the concrete. “Yeah,” she lied.

The policeman squinted at her. “You’re psychic, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” she said again, in a quieter voice.

Ellen waited for the sneer, the inevitable blast of skepticism. When she first arrived at Miskatonic she thought people would be more accepting of her abilities. They weren’t. If anything, people at Miskatonic were more resistant. Claims of extrasensory power got in the way of establishing the university as a legitimate center of research.

The officer moved closer. “She was a junior,” he told her. “You’d expect this sort of thing from a freshman, but a junior? She was more than halfway there. They’re usually okay once they’ve passed the halfway point.”

A technician in a Forensics windbreaker looked up from his work. “Officer, your assignment is to stand guard, not flap your gums!” he called out.

Ellen and the campus cop exchanged a knowing look. Even at the best of times the relationship between the university police and the Arkham police was tense. The two forces constantly battled over jurisdiction.

“Nothing but storm troopers,” the officer muttered as the technician returned to his work.

“Don’t let them get to you,” Ellen consoled him as she glanced at his nametag. “Thank you for your time, Officer Collins.”

Collins’s face split into a wide smile. “Any time, miss.”

Ellen wanted to stay. Officer Collins was friendly. Friendly and cute. But she couldn’t linger any longer.

Today she had a date with a legend.

Everyone had to take “Weird Art Through the Ages.” It was required for graduation. The only choice students had was who their professor was. Most chose to get the course out of the way during their freshman and sophomore years, with whatever teacher was available. Ellen held out until her junior year when Andrew Carter taught the class.

Andrew Carter was a local legend: the grandson of Randolph Carter, the occult explorer celebrated in the “fiction” of H. P. Lovecraft. He was one of the few links to the glory days of Miskatonic University. How much Andrew took after his grandfather (and how much Lovecraft made up) was the subject of endless debate. Some claimed he inherited Randolph Carter’s ability to travel across space and time. Other people fervently believed that Andrew Carter was Randolph Carter. That the old man had discovered a technique to jump from one body to another.

By the time Ellen arrived at the auditorium all the seats were taken. Students spilled into the aisles. As she searched for an open patch of floor, she wondered whether she made the right choice. Could Andrew Carter really be that good? Could anyone live up to such high expectations?

Her foot snagged on one of the students camped on the stairs. “Watch it, Riding Hood!” a man snarled.

Ellen’s cheeks flared as laughter erupted around her. She ignored the outburst and kept moving. She was used to the sarcastic remarks. Ellen didn’t look like the typical Miskatonic student. She had no tattoos, no body piercings, no unnatural hair color. With her long blond hair, fair skin, and unmarked body, she looked like a victim, someone to sacrifice on an altar. Not the person who performed the dark ritual.

The only hint she belonged were her eyes. They were gray green, the color of a stormy sea, and had an intense, otherworldly glow. When Ellen was in grade school, the kids attacked her because they thought she was a witch. Now, at Miskatonic, she felt out of place because she looked too normal. On any other day she would have laughed at the irony, but she was too tired to see much humor in it. A terrible dream kept her up the night before—of men trapped deep underground, their bodies wedged in the earth. Their grubby hands reached for her, tugging her hair, grabbing onto anything to free them from their tomb.

An excited buzz rose from the front of the class.

A man crossed the stage in long, confident strides. When he reached the podium, his image appeared on the giant screen above him.

Ellen had seen pictures of Andrew Carter. The photos didn’t do him justice. Tall and handsome, with short dark hair and chilling blue eyes, he looked like a vampire from a paranormal romance novel. He was in his midthirties, an age when the demands of Miskatonic usually began to take their toll. Andrew Carter was the exception. He bore only the slightest signs of age—wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, a whisper of gray at the temples. These small flaws failed to detract from his looks. If anything, they gave his chiseled face an added dignity.

“While I appreciate your interest in art, I regret to inform you the class is full,” he informed the crowd in a rich baritone voice.

The girl sitting next to Ellen sighed.

“Students officially enrolled in the class were mailed tickets over the summer. May I see them please?”

The room burst into a flurry of activity as people rummaged for their slips of paper. Ellen flashed her ticket to the woman beside her. The woman glared and yielded her spot. Most of the exchanges were peaceful, but there were isolated scuffles in the back. Some people even tried to rip the tickets away from their rightful owners.

Carter stood at the podium, surveying the scene. His lips curled with pleasure as he watched people fight to stay in his class. Bastard, Ellen thought, he’s enjoying this.

His eyes darted to Ellen, almost as if he sensed the thought. An electric sensation shot through her—a potent mix of attraction and fear. Ellen wondered if he was psychic, too. She dropped her gaze and distracted herself with poetry. “One, two! One, two! And through and through, the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!” she whispered.

“For those of you who don’t already know, I’m Andrew Carter,” he announced once the class settled. “And I am here to take you on a journey.”

The lights dimmed, and a slide appeared on the big screen. Carter quickly flipped through a series of portraits.

“DaVinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Masters of art. They devoted their lives to exploring the human condition. To capturing the glory of nature. They’re not important. We’re not interested in them.” His eyes swept the room. “We are interested in him.”

Another portrait filled the screen. A murmur rose as students struggled to identify the strange, apple-faced man. Ellen smiled.

“Hieronymus Bosch was, by the standards of his time, a strange man. By the standards of any time he was strange. Very strange.”

He cycled through some of Bosch’s major works: Garden of Earthly Delights, Temptation of St. Anthony, Bird-Headed Monster. A strange parade of images marched by. Pigs dressed as nuns. Men with no torsos and insect legs. People condemned to endless varieties of damnation.

“Hieronymus Bosch was a man who lived more than five hundred years ago. Whose surreal work is as modern and shocking as Salvador Dali’s. We know almost nothing about him. He left behind no letters or diaries. He appears only as a glimpse in municipal records. And yet he gave us this.”

Carter hit a button, exposing one of Ellen’s favorite works, Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat. In the painting, the floodwaters had receded and Noah’s creatures had been unloaded. All around him were the drowned corpses of the damned.

A sudden chill swept through her. Ellen knew the murky figures in the painting were lost souls. But if she looked at the painting at just the right angle, one of the underwater figures strongly resembled the dread god Cthulhu—one of H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous “creations.” A godlike monster ready to rise out of the ocean and destroy humanity.

Ellen shifted in her chair.

“H. P. Lovecraft was not the first person to know about the terrible creatures that lurk on the edge of our world. Hieronymus Bosch knew. Henry Fuseli knew. Richard Pickman knew. They kept these secrets hidden, locked in a world of fantasy. To do otherwise would put the artists at risk. Of ridicule. Persecution. Even death. My job, over the next ten weeks, is to teach you how to unravel the hidden messages in art, to teach you the ways we communicate. So, let’s begin at the beginning, shall we? Four thousand years ago. In Australia.”

The nightmare world of Bosch dissolved into a rock wall dotted with ghostly faces. Carter devoted the rest of his lecture to the Wandjina, the Aboriginal cloud and rain spirits who were so powerful they did not require speech. He took the class through time and place, comparing the Wandjina with other elemental creatures.

Andrew Carter lived up to his reputation. He made the connections seem effortless, the hidden language easy to spot. As he lectured Ellen felt like he was talking just to her. His eyes reached out to her, touching her in the darkness.

The moment the lights went up people mobbed the stage, competing for Andrew Carter’s attention. It was only then that she realized she wasn’t the only one who felt singled out. Special.

The whole thing was an illusion. Andrew Carter was just an incredibly charismatic person. Charismatic and cold. Now there’s a lethal combination. She snorted and headed for the door.

Ellen paused long enough to soak in the warm summer day. Then she was off to work.