Ruby stared at her for a long moment. “Then they’ll resurrect a monstrous sea god. Which will do who knows what kind of damage. Right.” She groaned and put her face in her hands. “You’re trying to appeal to my better nature, Diana. That’s usually like trying to get blood from a stone. But in this case… They kidnapped me. I’d like to give them a black eye for that.”

  “The best way to stop them from hurting you is to stop them entirely,” Diana said. “If we can get our hands on that piece of Asterias, and destroy it, the cult will have no purpose, and with luck they’ll just fall apart.”

  “After we murder their god? You think they’ll leave us alone then? Just say, ‘oh well, you beat us fair and square, have a nice life?’”

  “It’s… well. It’s not a complete plan,” Diana admitted. “But we can talk to Abel. He might have ideas about how to stop the comets, too. I still haven’t heard the whole story of how he went from being their high priest to being…”

  “A drunken heretic? Yeah. I’d like to hear that one myself.” Ruby tapped the side of her mug. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… give me a refill.”

  Diana poured, and then her phone rang downstairs. “Oh, I hope that’s not Berglund,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She hurried down and took the call.

  “Miss Stanley?” a brusque voice said. “I’m calling from St. Mary’s Hospital. We have a patient here who asked us to call you, says his name is Davenport?”

  Chapter Ten

  New Friends and Old Books

  “I’m fine,” the man coming up the stairs grumbled. “They just roughed me up a little.”

  Ruby put down the book she’d been reading and rose, nodding to Diana when she entered, a pale man with shadowed eyes leaning on her. Diana helped him to the armchair, and he dropped into it. Diana said, “I’ll get a glass of water,” and left Abel and Ruby looking at each other.

  “You must be Ruby,” he said at last. “Diana told me you might be able to help us.”

  “Helping myself might end up helping you, is more like it.” She folded herself onto one side of Diana’s small sofa. “I guess you aren’t the muscle of this operation, huh?”

  “It was three against one, and they had a sap,” Abel said. “But… no. Probably not. What I have is information, mainly, and the ability to sense when these people – some of them, anyway – are close by.”

  “I can see how that would be handy,” Ruby said. “How’s your head?”

  “Aching. Makes me wish…”

  “What?”

  He sighed. “My old patron gave certain gifts. Healing. Freedom from pain.” He shook his head. “Price was too high, though.”

  “I hate all this spooky stuff,” Ruby complained. “I’ve heard stories, and seen some things, and I stole a statue once that I was sure was looking back at me, but I always wanted to believe it was delusion, or the opposite of wishful thinking. There’s no denying what I saw in the Berglunds’ basement, though.” She sighed. “No use pretending the world isn’t what it is.”

  Diana returned with a glass of water for Abel and a bottle of something dark brown. “Drink?” she said to Ruby.

  “Always,” Ruby said, and accepted a glass. She sniffed and then sipped. Whiskey, and not the fake stuff colored with caramel. “Canadian?” she asked.

  “Lodge membership has its benefits.” Diana joined her on the couch.

  “I could use one of those,” Abel said.

  “Doctor said no,” Diana replied. “Stick to water.”

  This was a lot to process, but Ruby had always been good at rolling with the punches. Life had thrown enough of them at her, after all, and it was better to get on with difficult things than to sit around and lament the necessity. That didn’t mean she couldn’t complain a little bit, though. She said, “Here I am, sitting with a pair of reformed cultists. Bravo. I’m glad the two of you rehabilitated yourselves.” Ruby looked from Abel to Diana, took a sip of her drink, and then said, “But I’m just wondering. Did it ever occur to either of you not to join a cult in the first place?”

  Diana winced, but Abel chuckled. “In my defense, I started the cult. Or… restarted it. I just didn’t realize right away that I was riding a tiger. Asterias saved my life, and I thought that meant I owed it my life. But not at the cost of other lives. Then I realized people would have to die to bring my god back, and that a lot more people would die after we brought him back. Asterias isn’t going to be in a forgiving mood if it returns. The Ravening Deep will do whatever it takes to make sure it never dies again.”

  “Tell us what we’re up against here,” Ruby said. “Diana filled me in on some of your story, the part she knew, but I gather there’s a lot more. I haven’t decided if I’m on board with helping you two or not. I always do my research before a job.” She also wanted to make sure that Abel was truly opposed to bringing this dead god back to life – that he was actually an apostate, and not just another cultist who’d lost his position and wanted to win it back. That moment before, when he said he missed the gifts of his horrible god, made her wary.

  “I’m a little groggy still,” Abel said. “I got a good knock on the head.”

  “The doctors said we shouldn’t let you fall asleep yet anyway,” Diana said. “Talking will be a good way to keep you awake.”

  “If you drift too far off, we’ll shove you back on course,” Ruby said.

  “All right, then.” He held up his water glass to the lamp and looked at the light shining through. “I should start by telling you about Seth, and how we first came to Arkham…”

  •••

  The bookshop was a few blocks off the heart of down­town, tucked away on a side street, with a hand-painted sign above the door: Keene Books * Rare and Antique Volumes * Local History. They went inside, a bell above the door ringing to herald their arrival, and Abel immediately sneezed from all the dust.

  Keene Books was one of those cramped shops with just as many tomes stacked on the floor as there were on the shelves, head-high towers of crumbling paper and boards that created their own corridors and islands, defining the shop’s interior geography. Abel just glimpsed a counter, with a sleepy-looking man perusing a volume with an unlit pipe in his mouth.

  “Afternoon, gents,” he said, not closing the book before him. “Here for a browse, or do you come with intent?”

  Seth got straight to it. “We’re looking for a book called The Ravening Deep by Willum Stillwater.”

  “Old Professor Stillwater.” The bookseller shook his head. “Shame about him. He was bright as a torch in his day. Didn’t used to have that book in stock – they didn’t print too many. But you’re in luck. His daughter is trying to make some room in his apartment since she’s living there full-time now, and she brought in a bunch of things to sell. All the good volumes got snapped up by the university, those vultures, but she did have a few of the contributor copies his publisher sent him, so…” He stood up as he talked and began to make his way through the rows of books, toward the back, Abel and Seth following. “I’m Keene, by the way. My people opened this shop pretty much when the university started up. We still make most of our money buying and selling textbooks and the required reading every year…”

  Seth made interested noises as the bookseller rambled, until they reached a back room with a Local History sign over the door.

  “Now this particular book isn’t really local, but this is also where I keep the local authors.” Keene plucked a slim volume from the shelf – there was a bad drawing of a lighthouse on the cover – looked at the flyleaf, and told them the price. Seth reached into his pocket and handed over the funds right there, then plucked the book from Keene’s hands. The shopkeeper’s bushy eyebrows went up. “I’ve never seen anyone so excited about this book before. It’s a bit dry, you know, for all that the subject matter gets bloody.”

  “It has sentimental value,” Seth said, already headed for the door. “Thank you!”

  They didn’t return to the hotel; they didn’t even return to the car. Seth found a bench by a fountain square a couple of blocks away from the shop and sat down, Abel joining him. He opened the book, scanned the table of contents, and flipped to the page headed “The Ravening Deep”. The two of them leaned their heads in and read together.

  •••

  Abel sighed and looked apologetically at Ruby and Diana. “If Seth were here, he’d be able to recite the whole article, word-for-word, like the page was open right in front of him. But since all we’ve got is me, you’ll have to settle for an overview.

  “Basically, Professor Stillwater was an anthropologist, collecting the folklore of the coast, gathering the stories fishermen and sailors told. As a fisherman myself, I can assure you we have a lot of stories, and most of them are nonsense. Stillwater tracked down one particular old-timer with an outlandish tale and went to his house. The old fellow, who wasn’t named in the article, was quite a character. He had a sort of bulgy-eyed, toadlike look about him, common to certain communities on the coast, likely due to generations of inbreeding. He’d moved inland to avoid some sort of trouble, but he liked talking about the old days.

  “He told the professor a story he’d heard from his mother, about a giant undersea monster who lived at the bottom of a castle of coral and stone, and was tended by seafaring worshippers who brought the monster things – maybe even people – to eat, in exchange for blessings. I remember one line: ‘These weren’t blessings like you’re used to hearing about in church, promises of future bliss – these were blessings you could make use of right in the here and now.’

  “The old man said the creature had a lot of names, including ‘The Ravening Deep’ and ‘The Great Divider’ and ‘The Seven-Pointed-Star’. It was a thing of terrible appetites and equally terrible power. But the part that had Stillwater the most interested was, the Ravening Deep was supposedly dead, which was unusual in tales like that. Legendary sea monsters make better stories if they’re still out there, alive and lurking, after all.”

  Abel closed his eyes, and Ruby thought he was trying to summon up a memory. The perfect recall of the comets would be a nice thing to have, in some respects… but there were plenty of things in her life she was happy to forget about forever, so, on balance, she preferred being human.

  When Abel spoke again, his tone was closer to a recitation. “For you see there was a great war, between the dwellers in the deep and the worshippers of the Star. The dwellers feared that the Star would grow and spread and overtake the whole of the sea, and swamp their secret city Y’ha-nthlei in its own revolting flesh. The war was long and costly, and much blood mingled with the waters, for the followers of the Star were a multitude that constantly grew. But the dwellers lived long, some say forever, and they were hard to kill, while the thralls of the Star were weak in comparison, and in time the dwellers breached the temple, and set upon the Star with their spears and hooks and claws. They rent the Star to pieces and burned its flesh in secret volcanoes beneath the sea, not even daring to feed the Star to the sharks, lest the monster poison them.”

  Ruby tried not to shiver, but she couldn’t help it.

  Abel opened his eyes. “That’s not word-for-word, but pretty close. Then Stillwater wrote up some bits of speculation, about how the story might be related to tales of the fall of Atlantis and mer-people and such. The important part came at the end. The old man could tell that Stillwater didn’t believe it was a true story, of course. So he said, ‘I have proof. A piece of that dead god washed up on the shore, and my own mother picked it up, and saved it, all those years ago, and I inherited it when she underwent her great change’. The old man heaved himself up from his chair and went into another room and returned holding a gallon jar full of murky fluid. There was what Stillwater called ‘a good-sized hunk of some poor dead sea beast, all pebbled flesh, perhaps a bit of whale skin or a segment of an unusually large starfish’. The old man said, ‘It mayn’t even be all the way dead, for sometimes, when you thump the glass, it opens its eyes, and it has oh so many eyes’. But though the old man banged his knuckles against the jar several times, the bit of dead flesh didn’t stir, and the old man gave up. I do remember the last words he spoke, or at least, the last ones that Stillwater recorded: ‘Mayhap it sleeps. Mayhap it will wake again, in time’.”

  “That lump of flesh sounds like what I saw in the vault,” Ruby said. That fact made his whole outlandish story sound plausible. There really was a jar, and now she knew what was inside it. “Except it did have open eyes. I’m not saying the thing was alive, they looked like dead eyes to me, but it sounds like the same specimen. How did it end up in the Silver Twilight Lodge? How did you find out it was there?”

  “I didn’t, not exactly,” Abel said. “Cain did. And you should know about Cain, because if he realizes we’re trying to interfere with him, he is going to kill us all.” Abel paused. “Or kill you, at least. I fear he has plans worse than death for me, since he’s kept me alive this long.”

  “Keep talking, then,” Diana said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Stillwater

  Abel continued his story. “We went back to our room, and argued about what to do next…”

  Seth paced around the hotel room, annoyed and excited all at once. “We have to find that professor and make him tell us where this old man lived. Our god could still be there, right in his house!”

  “The book came out twenty years ago, and the account is doubtless from even earlier,” Abel said, trying to temper his comet’s expectations. “If the man was already old, he’s probably dead by now.”

  Seth waved that objection away. “Maybe so, but it’s a place to start. This is an actual lead, Abel, can’t you feel it? Asterias is shifting the current in our favor.”

  It was the only clue they had, and in the end, it wasn’t hard to track down the professor. Seth called the anthropology department, claiming to be a former student who wanted to write a letter to his favorite professor, and the secretary obliged without hesitation. The address was in the tangle of residential streets around the university, and they set out the next morning – a compromise, since Seth was in favor of charging over that night.

  Abel wasn’t expecting much. He’d noticed the bookseller’s comments about Professor Stillwater’s mental decline, and wondered how Seth had missed it. But then, Seth was probably just choosing to ignore it, and hoping for the best. Abel believed in the power of Asterias – the god had saved his life, after all – but Seth seemed to believe the dead god would make fortune fall in their favor, and Abel had his doubts. It was called The Ravening Deep, not The Solver of Problems. Abel’s initial wonder at his new powers had ebbed, and he was beginning to wonder what sort of god he’d pledged himself to.

  After a breakfast in the hotel’s opulent dining room, where Seth drank too much coffee, they set out in the car. They parked on a steep hill, and Seth leaped from the car and hurried up the cracked sidewalk, Abel at his heels. The professor’s house was narrow, dark, and tall, with an unkempt front lawn, but overall the structure was not in visible disrepair. Seth was already hammering away at the brass door knocker by the time Abel stepped up beside him.

  The door opened a crack, pulling the knocker out of Seth’s hand in the process. A woman with dark hair and shadowed eyes peered out at them. “Yes? How can I help you?”

  “We’re old students of Professor Stillwater’s, in from the coast,” Seth said. “We’ve been following up on some of the research he did, and we have some fascinating information to share with him.”

  The woman looked at them for a long moment, then sighed. “My father is… retired. He doesn’t do that kind of work anymore. He doesn’t do much of anything anymore. I’m sorry.” She started to shut the door, and Seth stuck his foot in to stop her, like an overzealous salesman.

  “Please, miss, we’d really love to see him. It’s been years, and he was such a profound influence on us. He set us on our whole path.” Seth had begging-puppy-dog eyes and such an earnest tone even Abel found it plausible.

  She cocked her head, looking from one to the other. “Are you brothers? Brother… folklorists?” She almost smiled. “Like the Grimms?”

  “Seth and Abel Davenport,” Abel said, putting a little gravel in his voice, so its uncanny resemblance to Seth’s would be less noticeable. “And sure, just like Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, only a lot less famous, and instead of the Black Forest, we gather stories along the New England coast.”

  She snorted, then eased the door open. “Sounds like my father did influence you. I’m Ellen Stillwater. You can come in and say hello, but I warn you my father is no longer the man you knew. He has good days and bad days, and it’s too early to tell which one today will be, but even on his best days…” She shook her head. “He doesn’t recognize me most of the time. Don’t expect him to recognize you.”

  Miss Stillwater led them into the foyer, past tall bookshelves with just a few leaning volumes gathering dust among candle-ends and forgotten coins. She took them into a small room off the hall, where a man with patchy white hair sat hunched in a chair with a blanket over his knees, facing an immense landscape painting that depicted crumbling rock formations arcing out of the ocean. Or… were they formations? The structures looked more like fortifications, with the suggestion of arrow-slit windows, and were those tiny figures climbing up the sides, or just darker sections of the paint? They didn’t look human, though Abel couldn’t have said how the artist conveyed that in just a few brushstrokes. The piece unsettled him.

  The old man didn’t respond to the three of them entering the room. Miss Stillwater said, “I used to put him by a window, but he seems to like looking at that painting more. He bought it in Boston from a painter named Pickwick or something. Said the painting showed the reality beneath the reality.” She shook her head. “He was getting a little fuzzy even back then. Papa?” She stepped forward and touched the old man’s shoulder. “Papa, some old students are here to see you.”