CHAPTER TWO: ARKHAM
by Josh Reynolds
Commissioner Qiana Taylor sat back in her chair and tried to massage the growing ache out of her temples. Too many long nights and not enough sleep. Too many problems and not enough solutions. Her desk was shrouded in paperwork; field reports, witness accounts, cargo manifests, and telegrams made up the bulk of it. All of it said the same thing: the world was on fire, and no one knew why.
She stared at the ceiling, absently counting the pencils that hung from the tiles like stalactites. During the day, one would occasionally plummet down, startling her from her ruminations. She sighed and straightened in her chair. The papers were still on her desk. She gave them an accusing stare and then sighed in resignation. As her mother had often said, soonest started was soonest done.
Taylor started with the telegrams. Most were fresh from dispatch, dated no later than the day previous. She flicked through them but paused as one caught her eye. Sent from the London office. A simple string of numbers and dashes; not Arabic numerals, however. Enochian numbers, devised by John Dee on behalf of Francis Walsingham during the reign of Good Queen Bess. A cipher with only one key, currently in the possession of the Foundation codebreakers. Taylor had memorized it, as she had every other cipher in the Foundation’s toolkit. Her memory was a lockbox second to none; like an elephant, she never forgot.
She read it, processed – read it again. She cursed under her breath. Bad news – although, it was always bad news these days. Another agent AWOL. That was happening more often these days as well. They’d lost five in the past two months, from Lisbon, Shanghai, Vienna, San Francisco, and Amsterdam. All good agents, all now missing.
And now this latest one – London. Pickell, that had been his name. She remembered meeting him during her last trip overseas. He’d had a pale, watery look to him, like he and the sun weren’t on speaking terms. Even so, he’d been diligent. Dogged.
And now he was gone.
She set the telegram aside and rubbed her temples. There was growing pressure to find an answer to the current climate of uncertainty; ships were vanishing or turning up empty of life, international trade was disrupted by odd weather phenomena and sightings of unnatural sea-life and all the rest. The British wanted to blame the Russians, but she knew that the Russians were too busy killing each other to pay any attention to the rest of the world. No, the truth was, it all traced back to Arkham.
What they couldn’t figure out was how, or why. And without that, there was no way to convince the various presidents and prime ministers that it wasn’t the work of whatever political bogeyman they favored. Right now, it was Russia; in a month, it might be someone else. Maybe Germany again. Maybe Italy. Maybe even the United States.
She picked up a report from agents in Spain. They were on the trail of someone who fit the description of Carl Sanford, former high magus of the Silver Twilight, a now defunct occult society, based in Arkham.
Sanford was high on the list of people she wanted a sit-down with, right behind Randall Tillinghast. Sanford had recently been sighted with a known member of the Red Coterie, which was annoying. Theoretically, the Coterie and the Foundation were on the same side at the moment. So why hadn’t they mentioned Sanford? Maybe they’d assumed she already knew. Even so, it was rude, not to mention suspicious.
“Wheels within wheels,” Taylor murmured, as she set the report aside and reached for a letter. The postmark said Oxford, and the letter had been handwritten rather than typed. She smiled fondly as she recognized the elegant penmanship. “Mabati, you sly old devil. What are you up to now?”
Nkosi Mabati was the one who had gotten away; she’d tried to bring him into the Foundation as a permanent consultant early in its existence, but he liked playing hard to get. An occultist of no small skill, he kept his ear to the ground and knew more about paradimensional matters than most amateurs – or, at the very least, he knew when to sound the alarm. She scanned the letter briskly. Mabati was concerned about certain oddities on Orkney, though he didn’t provide much in the way of detail.
What he did do, however, was mention Pickell, the missing London agent. Apparently, he and Mabati had been working on something – only Mabati hadn’t heard from him for some time. And Pickell certainly hadn’t mentioned anything about Mabati in his most recent reports. “What were you up to?” she murmured.
With the other missing agents, there’d been nothing to hint at what might have happened to them. No open cases, no messages – nothing. One moment they’d been there, and the next, gone. But if Pickell had been working with Mabati, that meant there was a trail, however faint, that they could follow. It might lead to answers.
She went to the door of her office and leaned out, studying the bullpen. The Foundation had commandeered a disused part of the stacks in the Orne Library on the Miskatonic campus as a new field base. No, she thought, not a field base – a forward base, in the heart of enemy territory. Arkham had been the epicenter of a major paradimensional incursion – perhaps more than one – and the effects of said incursion were still rippling outwards in unpredictable ways.
The bullpen was newly populated with old desks and fresh faces. Most of the new agents had been brought in from around the eastern seaboard to replace those lost in the Arkham Flood. Few, if any, had any real experience with the sort of nastiness the Foundation had been formed to deal with. But they’d learn soon enough, more was the pity.
The hum of the office was muted at the best of times. A dueling buzz of murmured conversations competed with the steady rattle of the library radiators. Taylor cleared her throat, and silence fell, save for the radiators. “Are Scarborough and Banks back yet?”
“Tomorrow, I think,” one of the new faces piped up. A youngish man, with the stiff bearing of someone who’d been to boot camp and found it formative. “Is there anything I can help you with, ma’am?”
Taylor studied him for a moment. She didn’t know him, though that wasn’t surprising. Once upon a time, she’d known them all. Handpicked each and every one, including foreign agents like Pickell. Now, there were too many faces and names even for her memory to handle.
It’s become a war of attrition, she thought, glumly. It hadn’t started as a war at all, but something rather different. Or maybe that was wrong. Maybe it had always been a war, and the human race was just the last to figure it out. A chill ran through her. Too little, too late, she thought. She realized everyone was looking at her. She shook her head.
“No. Just let me know when they’ve arrived. I want to see them.”
Read or listen to more of Arkham International Season Two: Call of the Cursed Sea.
Read or listen to Arkham International Season One: Shadow of the Drowned City.
