The Arcane Gamble of Harvey Walters: Read the First Chapter Now!

Later this month, The Drowned City series concludes with The Arcane Gamble of Harvey Walters by Rosemary Jones, from Aconyte Books – and you can read the first chapter right now…

Chapter One

Harvey Walters snatched a few hours of sleep on an item that Davy Schoffner claimed was a cot. Harvey’s back insisted on labeling it an instrument of torture. But at least he’d slept in Schoffner’s storeroom, which was more rest than anyone in Rivertown expected as the storm grew worse. Since the Miskatonic River began sending waves over its banks in the chilly hours after midnight, the entire neighborhood had been shifting their belongings to higher floors and, in many cases, evacuating themselves up the road to French Hill and other parts of Arkham.

Harvey followed his nose and the scent of coffee through the crowded aisles of Schoffner’s General Store. Although it was barely dawn, the store seemed as busy as midday, perhaps even more so. He caught snatches of conversation from the people sheltering next to the cans of beans and bags of flour. It seemed everyone left in Rivertown had congregated in this one familiar spot, discussing what they should do next.

Harvey’s newest friends, an eclectic bunch of dwellers from the nearby Flotsam Street boarding house, were already gone to his own home. He hoped this put them far enough away from the rising river water to keep them safe. As for himself, he did not regret his decision to stay at Schoffner’s after the eventful encounter yesterday with the malicious Palmer sisters, Columbia and Barbara.

The pair had been attempting a ritual, possibly a summoning, in the Black Cave, using translations of an occult handbook stolen from Harvey. If it had not been for his newest friend, the brave young April May, the two women might have succeeded in unleashing a malignant force as well as harming numerous dogs and a couple of reporters from the Arkham Advertiser.

Harvey remained uncertain about exactly what the Palmers wanted to entice into the Black Cave. Recent stirrings in the Dreamlands proved an ancient entity had risen from its eternal slumber. Another Palmer sister, Augusta, had been caught meddling there, rather like a jackal feeding off the remains of a lion’s kill. Only in this case, she seemed to be stealing magical power created by nightmares spun off the Ancient One’s awakening. Fortuitously, his longtime friend, Dr Carolyn Fern, helped April disrupt those plans too.

Having been thwarted in the waking and the dream worlds, one could hope that the Palmers would take the hint and leave Arkham. Other troubles were clearly on the horizon. The storm and the rising river were terrible enough, but Harvey’s own recent foray in the Dreamlands made it clear that an even greater danger was slouching towards Arkham.

While he might want the evil triplets to retreat at their first defeat, Harvey doubted the Palmers were done with their plots and plans. He had met many practitioners of evil occult arts in his years, but none quite as daunting as those superbly confident women who simply turned and walked away when events did not go exactly as they envisioned.

Having spent a few hours earlier questioning the resident neighborhood experts gathered in Schoffner’s, Harvey learned that the Palmers were both new and well known in Arkham. At least, the Palmer triplets had been well known in Arkham during their childhood, apparently terrorizing most of the children and several adults in the Rivertown neighborhood. But their reappearance this month was the first that anyone had heard of them in years. Which made them a new threat at a time when Arkham was already under siege by the weather and a cosmic entity that Harvey felt he could not name out loud.

“Wicked those sisters were,” said Mawmaw, who had lived in Rivertown for ninety-three years or “from birth until now.” She knew the Palmers, once having worked in their house as a maid. Mawmaw also boasted she successfully faced down the Palmer girls over the drowning of a bag of kittens, an act which led to her dismissal by their less than observant parents.

“Their father couldn’t see anything past his own nose and their mother just wanted to believe they were perfect little girls if she dressed them like dolls. Perfect horrors, all three. Thieves, too. They’d steal any shiny thing, just like a jackdaw, even though their daddy was a rich man.” According to Mawmaw, the Palmer triplets disappeared from Arkham, along with the rest of their family, many years ago. “If they’re back, then it is a sign of evil sure to come,” spat Mawmaw at the end of her recitation.

Given that Augusta Palmer had escaped from imprisonment in an asylum, a punishment for her ritual disembowelment of her stepmother with a hatchet, Harvey couldn’t disagree with Mawmaw’s assessment. While Barbara and Columbia seemed to have led quieter lives, they certainly supported their sister’s highly questionable actions in recent days.

As for their half-brother Ira, who had been foisted on Harvey through trickery, it would be a long time before Harvey could forgive his former assistant’s rearrangement of his books. It was only through luck and a judiciously applied pipe wrench that Ira had been stopped from performing ghastly ritual magic in Harvey’s basement the previous day.

Apparently, the return of the Palmers to Arkham, along with other signs and portents, did indicate a major disaster would occur shortly. After a couple hours of sleep, Harvey’s tired brain ticked over a long list of possible allies who might be able to assist him in slowing or even stopping the coming catastrophe from engulfing the city that he loved.

Tracking the smell of coffee to the potbellied stove in the back of the store, Harvey found Mawmaw there. The old woman sucked on her corncob pipe as she contemplated a checkerboard. Although she was two decades older than himself, which put her beyond ancient and into the realm of incomprehensible to his students, Mawmaw’s eyes twinkled as she slammed down the checker and crowed “King me!” to her opponent.

Lefty Googe shook his head at her. “You’re still the terror of the checkerboard, Mawmaw,” said the garbageman. All night long, Lefty had used his truck to haul people to higher ground in Arkham. He’d even shifted eighty dogs rescued from the Black Cave to a safer location than Schoffner’s backroom, much to Davy’s relief. Although Schoffner offered to help, he hadn’t realized how much damage so many dogs could do, especially when confined to a small place. Luckily, several of the Drowned Rats, a gang of young men working in Rivertown, assisted Lefty in loading the dogs into his truck and moving them farther away from the river.

“Did you get any sleep?” asked Harvey as he poured the well-boiled coffee from its tin pot into an enamelware cup.

“A little,” returned Lefty. “I stretched out in Pequod’s cab for a bit.”

Harvey found it amusing that his friend had named his garbage truck after Ahab’s fabled whaling ship. Lefty even painted the name on the truck’s hood. But then his friend was a man of many interests, a former professional baseball player and voracious reader, who had washed up in Arkham some years ago. Although more than twenty years younger than Harvey, the two always found plenty to discuss on the days that Lefty came to pick up Harvey’s garbage. Recently Lefty had brought Harvey’s attention to the Palmer sisters through a series of encounters that would take an entire book to tell.

As much as Harvey planned to write his memoirs one day, perhaps when he was truly ancient, today was not a day to be mulling over his memories. Today was a day for making plans on how to deal with the evil that was rapidly descending upon Arkham.

He was just about to open his mouth to say as much when a boom shook Schoffner’s General Store. An entire pyramid of canned corn rattled to the floor.

“Jupiter’s beard,” said Harvey. “What was that?”

The door of Schoffner’s burst open. A young man rushed in. Another louder boom sounded through the room.

“What’s going on, Sol?” yelled Davy Schoffner as he weaved around his fallen display.

“Dynamite!” said Sol. Like Davy, Sol seemed to be a natural purveyor of Rivertown news. Everyone began questioning him about the explosions shaking the store.

“They started the dynamiting,” Sol told those present.

Lefty rose from his chair, his heavy brow furrowed in concern. As he shouldered his way through the murmuring crowd, Harvey followed in his wake. Behind them, the Rivertown residents exclaimed about the new disaster about to befall their neighborhood.

Another boom, even louder than the first two, sounded through the store.

Davy shook his head. “I never thought they’d do it.”

“What is it?” Lefty asked, peering through the gloom toward the river.

Sol was practically dancing in place, jigging up and down in excitement. With only slight irritation, Harvey noticed the young man seemed unaffected by a long night of hauling boats out of the river or, for those too big to move, securing vessels to the docks. Sol led the Drowned Rats, which Lefty explained mostly acted as couriers up and down the river for the local rumrunners. They used canoes and rowboats, crafts small enough to slip unnoticed under larger piers and easy to maneuver into tight spaces.

“Police spend most of their time looking for trucks or ships bringing large deliveries,” Lefty explained to Harvey. “They don’t look at a box or two stowed under fishing gear on a rowboat. Or what’s inside a picnic basket in a canoe. You have enough little boats going up and down the river and you can deliver a warehouse’s worth of liquor to the gin joints near to the water.”

But over the last night, Harvey had seen Sol use his formidable network to shift boats out of danger as well as help sandbag the neighborhood against the rising Miskatonic River. Then, when a well-dressed man from City Hall showed up at Schoffner’s offering “flood abatement” work before dawn, Sol was the first to volunteer himself and the Drowned Rats. So Harvey couldn’t help but like the young man, as much as he might resent Sol’s unflagging energy.

“We loaded the explosives,” Sol told them. “Crates and crates of dynamite. Even had some Arkham Advertiser reporter there asking questions and writing it all up for the newspaper.”

“Hope you got paid,” Lefty said. “City Hall should be thanking you Rats for everything you’ve done this night.”

“We made out fine,” Sol said with a twinkle. “Better than I expected.”

Another boom shook the neighborhood. “That sounds too close,” Davy muttered. “How far outside of city limits were they going?”

“They planned to dynamite a mile or so past city limits, to lower the banks and spread the water into the fields,” Sol said. “But it sounds closer.”

“Won’t blasting a hole in the banks make the flooding worse in those areas?” Harvey asked. He remembered reading about a similar venture down in New Orleans, and the results nearly wiped out two parishes.

Davy shrugged. “Mayor figures losing a few farmhouses is worth saving the city. If the river backs up, we could have a king-sized lake covering Arkham. If dynamiting drops the water levels, the city might be spared the worst.”

“Going to take an awful lot of dynamite,” said Lefty, sounding as skeptical as Harvey felt.

“They took enough to blow a mile-long hole in the banks,” Sol said. “Thirty crates in a bunch of boats. None of the captains wanted all of it on their boat, so they divided up among them.”

“Where did they find thirty crates of dynamite?” Harvey asked, pondering the intersection of dynamite, floods, and, if his calculations were correct, a corporeal manifestation of a cosmic entity. He assumed the mayor was not counting on the latter as City Hall always ignored the supernatural, blaming it on delusions of the populace. In Harvey’s opinion, they should have kept a few sticks on hand in Arkham rather than using it all on a riverbank.

Harvey never believed that the mayor’s plans solved the true problems of the city. Perhaps the local government was good at certain civic endeavors. But they sadly lacked imagination and ingenuity when it came to occult disturbances. Which was why people like Harvey, with decades of experience in dealing with the diabolical, tended to avoid the local government when planning a response to the latest otherworldly cataclysm.

“Do they amass crates of dynamite in the basement of City Hall for possible emergencies? How did the mayor acquire today’s quantity of explosives?” he asked. “And wouldn’t TNT be safer?” His own understanding of the contributions of Julius Wilderbrand, Carl Häussermann, and, of course, Alfred Noble to demolition was limited. Just what an educated man might know through his casual perusal of a few scientific texts while waiting for the latest shipment of occult volumes from Sweets and Nephew.

“Dynamite was requisitioned,” said Davy. “They put out the call yesterday and took every stick in town from a variety of suppliers. Farmers use it for clearing land, blowing up stumps and such. Just had an order come in recently, so I had some to give them.”

“You stock dynamite here?” Harvey said, distracted by this vision of what might be found in a general store. Of course, they stored dynamite at Miskatonic University, purely for academic field work such as polar expeditions, but he never thought about how others might use it. Also, he thought it was more likely to be TNT these days rather than dynamite or black powder. Davy shrugged. “Special orders for certain customers are part of my trade.”

Another boom sounded and Sol sighed. “I wish I could have gone with them,” he said. “But they had all the crew that they needed.”

“You wanted to go in a boat filled with dynamite? In a storm?” said Harvey and immediately knew he had asked a foolish question. What man wouldn’t want to make such a ride? If he had known about it earlier, he might have been tempted. Except he had a much more dangerous foe to consider. The Ancient One did not awaken and invade the dreams of an entire city every day. This alone was far more dangerous than a flooding river and dynamite, if only for the cataclysmic ripple of negative energy which must now be swamping all of Arkham.

If he understood Mawmaw’s recitation of the many youthful crimes of the Palmer triplets, such occult miasma infecting Arkham would lure them into further misdeeds, much as catnip attracted cats. Also, they might want their umbrella back. Harvey had acquired Barbara’s green umbrella from his friend, Carolyn. It most definitely added to his problems, as he knew it was no ordinary bumbershoot. Another boom shook the windows and Davy looked distressed. “If they blow out my glass, I might as well be flooded too.” Then he turned and waved to the crowd behind him. “It’s all fine, folks. They’re just doing what they can to lower the water levels.”

“Sounds to me like they are trying to blow up Rivertown,” said one belligerent voice from the back ranks. In Harvey’s experience, there was always one old coot, often himself, who raised objections to whatever was going on.

“Nothing to worry about!” Davy shouted back. Then, over his shoulder, he said quietly to Sol and Lefty, “Maybe you should go down to the wharf and see how it looks. It might be time to get the rest of them out of here.”

Most of the people gathered at Schoffner’s were stubbornly holding out hope that the flooding would fail to materialize. A few, like Sol and Lefty, planned to stay until the very last minute as able-bodied men might be needed to rescue others. Others, like Mawmaw, were reluctant to abandon the only home they had ever known. As poor and rundown as Rivertown was, it was their neighborhood, and they hated to leave it. Further, there weren’t many places for them to go. Harvey had opened his own doors to as many as he could. The city police said Rivertown, the Arkham Merchant District, and even the woods were unsafe.

“Get as far away from the river as you can,” suggested one tired young officer who had been patrolling throughout the night. “There are some stations set up at South Church and Miskatonic University. Even the Palace Movie Theater is taking people in.”

But how folks were supposed to get there, he couldn’t say. Lefty kept piling people who wanted to leave into Pequod and driving them to safer locations. Most of the city buses and streetcars serving the neighborhood ceased their runs during the night’s persistent storm but there was talk of the service starting up again in daylight. Very few in Rivertown owned cars, but those who did volunteered to take people where they needed to go. But even as the gutters overflowed and the lower lying streets held standing water, a number of people continued to wait to see how bad the flooding would be.

“I will go with you to survey the scene,” Harvey told Sol. The coffee helped but perhaps a quick stroll down to the river would assist him in formulating his plans.

“I’ll come too,” Lefty said, and Harvey knew he had acquired a guard dog. Apparently young April had been worried about him and asked Lefty to look after him, which was sweet. But Harvey Walters had been taking care of himself in far more dangerous situations for as long as Lefty had been alive. Still, he had been rather touched when Lefty mentioned this was one of the reasons that he had appeared at Schoffner’s earlier.

The sound of the river remained a persistent roar throughout the night. Walking down the street to the nearest pier, it sounded even angrier, like a freight train rushing out of control. Small waves were cresting over the boards as boats tied off along the sides banged against the wharf.

“Be careful, professor,” Sol called out as Harvey shifted from the road to the pier, gazing toward the sound of the explosions.

“It’s not dangerous,” Harvey said as Lefty came up behind him. “I have my stoutest boots on.” He shifted a few more feet down the pier, trying to see if there was anything in the water.

“Don’t get so close to the edge,” said Lefty, which again was kind but truly ridiculous. Harvey could walk on a dock without falling into the river.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Harvey replied, wishing people wouldn’t fuss at him just because he was older than them. He’d climbed mountains! He’d faced off with evil cultists! He wasn’t going to be defeated by a slick pier. He waved his friends back as he sought a better view of the center of the river. He spotted movement out there, a bobbing shape which could be an uprooted tree or overturned boat. Or it could be a creature from another world sporting fins and tentacles. Anything was possible now, Harvey knew. To better understand the situation, he needed to see exactly what was spinning down the Miskatonic River.

At that moment, one of the fishing boats banged into the pier again as a wave of water ran over Harvey’s ankles. The pier shook.

“Get away from the edge, Harvey,” Lefty yelled. He made a grab at Harvey as if to pull him back, but Harvey dodged with the dexterity of a man used to sidestepping students who wanted to discuss their term papers with him.

“Yes, yes,” said Harvey, keeping his eyes on the shape in the center of the water. What was the shadow shifting under the turbulent waters, coming closer to the pier? He had to know. So many possibilities, so little time, and the shouts behind him were an annoying distraction. He moved closer to the end of the pier as the river surged forward.

As the debris-laden water struck the pilings, Harvey felt the entire structure tilt as boards cracked under his feet. Mooring lines snapped and loose ends flailed. A huge black cable reared up from the river, almost like a giant tentacle. The cable or whatever it was smashed down on the fishing boat, sending splinters flying into the air.

A shiny trace of slime trails streaked across the boat. At the same time, the pilings shook as if hit by a crushing force. Freed from its mooring lines, the big fishing boat gyrated strangely in the water. Harvey moved closer, ignoring more shouted warnings from his friends, as he tried to figure out why the boat twirled as if caught in a waterspout. It twisted as if an immense hand was reaching up through the water and spinning it like a toy.

The river roared, or at least sound echoed under the pier, vibrating in the wooden structure. The dock timbers began to crack under his feet.

Retreating from the boat banging into the pier, Harvey Walters, much to his disgust, tipped backward into the Miskatonic River as his friends yelled at him to be careful.

The Arcane Gamble of Harvey Walters Available will be published in paperback and ebook from October 28 and is available to pre-order now.