Arkham International: Call of the Cursed Sea

Join newly minted Foundation agents Roland Banks and Trish Scarborough as they embark on a mysterious journey to uncover the continued and horrific ramifications of Cthulhu’s rise, marking Arkham as a nexus point of eldritch discoveries. As the Foundation’s machinations ever deepen, Roland and Trish face monsters beyond their wildest nightmares in Arkham International Season 2: Call of the Cursed Sea.

CHAPTER ONE: KETCHIKAN

by Josh Reynolds

It was cold and wet, and Trish Scarborough was unhappy. She shrugged deeper into her coat and stamped her booted feet, attempting to get some feeling back into her toes. Frozen grass crunched beneath her, and the sound further irritated her. “I hate Alaska,” she muttered, not caring who might hear.

“So you’ve said,” Roland Banks said, sipping at his coffee. “More than once.”

“And I will continue to say it, until we leave this icy wasteland.”

Roland eyed her over the rim of his cup. “I feel I should remind you that you’re the one who wanted to follow this particular lead.” He took another sip. Trish had the distinct impression her partner was enjoying her discomfort.

“Thank you for the reminder,” she said, grumpily. Was that a smile on his face? She hoped not, for his sake. She stamped her feet again. “How long does it take to get a boat into dry dock anyway?”

“Depends on the boat.”

Trish shot Roland a warning glare. “Thank you, Roland. Very helpful.”

Roland hid his mouth behind his coffee cup. He was definitely smiling. She decided to be the bigger person and ignore it. It wasn’t really his fault, after all. As he’d pointed out, she was the one who’d insisted on coming to Alaska to follow up on a lead. The Foundation had other agents; it didn’t have to be she and Roland every time. But she’d had a funny feeling about this one, and she’d learned early on in her time with the Cipher Bureau to trust her occasional flashes of insight. She was no longer with the Bureau, of course, but some habits died hard.

As ever, thinking of how things had ended with the Bureau brought some regret. It had been an odd few months since she and Roland had been shanghaied into working for the Foundation. Not that the work itself was much different. Rather, it was the world that had changed, at least insofar as Trish judged such things.

It was as if everything were slightly tilted. The old certainties were fast sliding away, to be replaced by… what? Chaos and confusion? A sure recipe for incipient nastiness. She figured they had around ten years, maybe less, before someone, somewhere, did something phenomenally stupid and one of the brushfires currently burning around the globe became a conflagration. But that sort of thing wasn’t her main concern these days.

No, she had new and, frankly, more terrifying worries to preoccupy her.

Case in point: the Russian schooner, Nikolai, currently being moved – very slowly – into dry dock. The ship had been found adrift by the Coast Guard, somewhere along the Inside Passage, barren of life. Nothing so much as a rat to be found aboard. The Coast Guard had towed the ship to the new base at Ketchikan, on Revillagigedo Island. Said base had only been recently established, and, like the town – like Alaska itself, come to that – was very much still a work in progress.

Trish and Roland stood a safe distance from the base dry dock, watching as the Nikolai was towed into the narrow basin by a tugboat, and guided towards the dry platform that would be its new home for the foreseeable future.

“Think it’ll be like the others?” Roland asked.

“I don’t like to guess,” Trish said. This wasn’t the first vessel to be found abandoned recently; in fact, it was becoming distressingly common in the wake of what the press had taken to calling the Arkham Flood. Only it hadn’t been a flood, not really. More a deluge, in the Biblical sense. An act of God, but not the one most people thought of.

“Any word from our friends in red?”

“About this? No.”

Roland glanced at her. “About anything.”

“Also no. Unless our new boss is keeping secrets.”

“Which she is,” Roland said, draining the last of his coffee. Trish nodded. Commissioner Qiana Taylor was the brain behind the Foundation, or one of them, at least. Whether it had been her baby from birth, or she’d just been a midwife, Trish couldn’t say and sources were fuzzy. She’d done some digging in her off-hours but had come up empty-handed. The Foundation wasn’t the sort of puzzle to be easily solved.

Taylor’s people had shadowed Roland and Trish for the better part of the year previous, watching as they sacrificed their careers – and nearly their lives – to try and uncover what had actually happened in Arkham, and what it meant for the world. The Foundation had swooped in with a last-minute rescue and a job offer. With nowhere to go and no one to trust, Trish and Roland had accepted.

The job came with some perks; money was no longer a concern, for one. The Foundation’s budget was astronomical in comparison to that of the Cipher Bureau or the Bureau of Investigation. It had its limits – they were expected to account for every penny. But there were a lot of pennies to be spent, and that wasn’t nothing.

Influence was another one. The Foundation had a finger in every pie, and not just apple. There were helpful bureaucrats in practically every signatory to the League of Nations, all waiting to grease the wheels on behalf of a Foundation-led investigation. Trish, who’d been trained to keep a low profile, found it all a bit distracting. Roland, more used to busting in doors, was riding high. Or at least as high as a guy like him got.

Roland had never been the sort for skullduggery; he liked a clear line of fire. Now he thought he had one. The Foundation had given him a target, and he was gangbusters to get his teeth in. Only that was proving tricky. The Foundation dealt with uncertainties – anomalies – on a daily basis. Figuring out where said anomalies had come from, and who was behind them, if anyone, was trickier than it sounded. Roland had his theories; Trish had her own. Mostly she kept them to herself.

She and Roland boarded the ship after what seemed an eternity. The Coast Guard left them to it. They’d conduct their own investigation afterward, for form’s sake. The Foundation had a long reach, but there was still a veil of secrecy over its investigations. As Commissioner Taylor often reminded them, there were some things the world wasn’t ready to see on the front page.

The upper deck of the schooner looked like it ought to look, save the lack of crew and the ragged state of the sails. According to the Coast Guard, the Nikolai had ridden out a storm before she’d been found. With no crew to strike the sails, they’d been torn to tatters by the wind. Or maybe something else, Trish thought.

They swept the deck quickly, finding little of interest, save some odd markings on the rails – scratch marks, she thought. Possibly made by grappling hooks. Or claws. The cabins were equally devoid of anything that might have been a clue. “It is just like the last one,” Roland said, flatly. He sounded annoyed, maybe a little bit afraid. Trish figured he had good reason to be. Twelve sea-going vessels over the last three months and counting, each one set adrift, barren of crew. No survivors had yet been found, and no reason for their condition discovered. At least, not by the Foundation.

“And the one before that,” Trish said. There were rumblings that the official line was that one power or another had decided to commit hostile acts in international waters. The smart money was on the Russians. No one trusted them, and with good reason. Trish had spent enough time there to know that there was no predicting who’d be in charge in Moscow a month from now – Reds, Whites, or someone new – or what they might want. She peered down into the hold and then looked at Roland. “Age before beauty.”

“You’re too kind.” Roland pulled a flashlight from his coat and turned it on as he started down. Trish drew out her own flashlight and followed. The hold was dark and damp, and full of crates she assumed contained cargo. She found a manifest hanging on the wall and took it down to examine.

“What were they carrying?” Roland asked, as he let his light play across the interior of the hold.

Trish kept her own focused on the cargo manifest. “Nothing of note. Whale oil, mostly. They could have been smuggling something, I suppose.”

“Or someone,” Roland said.

“Like Tillinghast, you mean?”

Roland didn’t reply. Trish sighed. Tillinghast was Roland’s pet obsession. A dealer in antiquities who Roland insisted had been at the heart of whatever had happened in Arkham, and more unpleasantness besides. Only, Tillinghast had vanished not long after, and they’d had no luck finding him – even with the Foundation backing them. Eventually, Commissioner Taylor had put them onto other cases, other horrors, and the search for Tillinghast had fallen down the chain of priority for everyone, save Roland.

She watched him for a moment, not without affection. He was a good man in a bad world, a trait she hoped wouldn’t get him killed one day. She was just starting to get used to working with a partner, and Roland was more tolerable than most men.

Roland stiffened. Trish frowned. “What is it?”

“I thought I saw – ah. There it is.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and stooped to retrieve something from the deck. Crouched, he peered at his prize. “Spent brass.”

“What?”

“Somebody shot at something.”

“Shot at what, though?”

“That’s the question,” Roland said, as he rose to his feet. He kicked at something that clinked. “More shell casings. And I noticed what might have been a few bullet holes above decks. There’s more down here. Small arms, mostly. Unless you’re looking for them, you might mistake them for normal wear and tear.” He turned. “And look at the crates. What do you see?”

Trish followed his gaze. Now that he mentioned it, there was something about the arrangement of the crates in the hold; the way they’d been stacked was reminiscent of trench emplacements she’d seen during the war. “They made a stand down here,” she said, softly.

Roland nodded. “That’s what it looks like to me.” He offered her the evidence, but she waved it aside as she looked around. Her mind, dulled by the cold, had finally warmed up enough to start working. The hold was crowded. Filthy. By design? No. Not smugglers, she thought. She’d met Russian smugglers; worked with them, a time or two. This was a legitimate shipping vessel, filth and all. So what…?

She paused and sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”

Roland sniffed. “I smell bilgewater.”

“No, not that. Remember last year… Mexico?”

Roland’s hand dropped to his sidearm. Trish shook her head. “It’s not here, but it was. That same saltwater stink… like a fish left in the sun, or a boiled frog. I think one of those things was here. Maybe more than one.” She shivered as the words came out. The thing that had attacked them in Mexico had been like something made up of all the worst qualities of a bullfrog and a piranha. It had nearly killed them both.

“It doesn’t make sense.” Roland shook his head. “The thing in Mexico came after us because we were closing in on Tillinghast.”

“Were we?” Trish murmured. The way she saw it, Tillinghast had been a dead end from the start. A snipe hunt. Roland ignored her. She sighed. “Do you remember that packet we got, before we left Arkham?”

Roland frowned. “That weird powder stuff Taylor told us to use?”

“Yes, the weird powder. The powder of Ibn Gazi, to be exact. It makes the unseen, seen.” She reached into her coat pocket and produced the leather pouch they’d been given at the start of this mission. Besides money and influence, the Foundation had access to plenty of other useful tools. The powder was one such.

The pouch was old, the leather cracking. Crumbling. She opened it carefully and extracted a pinch. Her skin crawled. Taylor had warned them to only use a pinch. It’s a risk, she’d said, seeing too much. Trish was only too familiar with that idea. In the spy game, seeing too much was just as bad as not seeing enough.

Taking a breath, she blew the dust onto the air, just as she’d been taught. A soft hum filled the hold, followed by a chilly radiance that sparked and swelled. A vague form took shape; not the thing itself, she knew, but the memory of it. Some things were so unnatural that they left an imprint of themselves on the world – a dark echo, perceivable only through mystical means or to those with psychic sensitivities.

Roland bit back a curse as the form revealed itself. Trish stared. What they saw in the swirling dust was similar to the creature they’d faced in Mexico, but larger. Bigger and more monstrous, there was barely anything human in that stooped form. It had the jaws of a deep-sea predator and lamp-like eyes that bored into them as it moved across the hold. But as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone, vanishing as the powder lost its potency. Trish felt a flush of relief as the sight wavered into nonexistence.

Roland, who’d had his weapon half-drawn, shook his head. “Well, now we know. But why attack a Russian schooner?”

Trish shrugged. “Why attack fishermen off the coast of Nantucket? Why attack a merchantman bound for Lisbon? Why any of it? Until we capture one of these things, I don’t think we’re getting any answers.” She sighed. “I hope they’re having better luck in Arkham.”

Read or listen to Arkham International Season One: Shadow of the Drowned City.