Fugitive

The autumn season had been astoundingly cold, and by mid-December the Miskatonic River that bisected Arkham had frozen. A hop, skip, and a jump across the ice from the north bank sat a small island dotted with standing stones. Jessie had been enchanted by the island ever since arriving in Arkham back in late September, and now that it was so easily accessible, she decided to pay it a visit. She thought of the winters she spent as a young girl at her grandmother’s lakeside home in New Jersey, where she would venture out onto the ice to play her violin. Now, away at college and feeling homesick, Jessie had an urge to resume the tradition that had passed away along with her grandmother.

Starting the week of finals, as soon as her classes were over, Jessie made the journey from campus to the river, across the ice and onto the island. Passersby stopped along the north bank or the Garrison Street Bridge to hear Jessie’s melancholy tunes. There was a light applause whenever a melody would conclude. While Jessie appreciated this, she wasn’t really playing to the audience. She liked the cold air and the vast whiteness of the frozen river that stretched out from beneath her feet.

It was the third day of these public recitals. Jessie was mid-performance when she glanced down at the ice just beyond her boots and noticed a dark patch beneath. She studied it for a few moments, thinking it vaguely resembled the shape of a person. Then with a sharp screech her tune abruptly ended. The shape had moved.

Jessie dropped to one knee and leaned over the edge of the island so that she stared into the frozen river. She tapped the surface, and to her horror the shape beneath tapped back. Jessie shot up to her feet and screamed to the onlookers on the bank: “Call the police! There’s someone under the ice!”

Jessie stomped the ice with her boot, scuffing its smooth face. Below, the dark figure knocked against the frozen surface as a visitor knocks on one’s front door. Seeing that the ice would not yield, Jessie stopped and stared at the figure beneath. It was the size of a large man, black skinned, but otherwise hard to make out underneath the frosted barrier. Jessie threw a glance to the people on the shore, confirming that indeed several were now on their phones calling for help. When she looked back, the figure was gone.

A few minutes later, Jessie was back on the shore and detailing the incident to an officer. Despite her earnest account, he eyed her dubiously. “This isn’t another Misky prank, is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know what that means,” Jessie replied. “I saw a man trapped under the ice!” The officer studied her a few moments more, then took her name and contact information, thanked her for the report, and left without urgency.

And that was that. No grand search, no follow up. Jessie returned to her college activities as normal. She finished her finals and, by the end of the week, was on the train home to Boston for the winter break. Never mind there might be a drowned man beneath the ice, waiting to be discovered when the river thawed.

But the officer had left Jessie with a peculiar name: Misky.

Back in her room at her parents’ house, Jessie did an internet search for “Arkham River Misky.” Sure enough, several articles appeared that detailed sightings of a dark-skinned, humanoid figure in or around the Miskatonic River. It was apparently well-known enough that one could buy Misky t-shirts.

Jessie consumed the various articles. The aquatic creature seemed to be Arkham’s own resident Slender Man; a relatively recent urban legend. There were numerous images, though they were all artistic renditions of witness descriptions, some rendered in earnest, others for comic effect.

Hopping from one hyperlink to the next, Jessie eventually discovered a site called Weird Arkham. It catalogued all manner of local myths and superstitions. Jessie knew relatively little about the town where she was going to school, and was surprised to find that it had a long tradition of strange sightings and bizarre folklore. There was Brown Jenkin, a large, human-faced rat that was alleged to be a witch’s familiar; there was alleged evidence that some alien organism polluted the water from the Arkham reservoir; one of the former deans of the medical college was supposed to have been turned into a zombie around the turn of the previous century; even the island that Jessie had favored for her violin practice was said to have been the site of human sacrifices.

There was also an extensive section on Misky. The name seemed to be an homage to Nessie, the affectionate title given to the Loch Ness Monster. Arkham residents began spotting the creature sometime within the last decade, and there were several reports of persons having gone missing near the riverbank, as well as flashes of light occasionally glimpsed under the surface of the water. Around the time of the earliest sightings, the lower half of a dog’s carcass had been found on the south bank--the side nearer Miskatonic University--its insides hollowed out. What really chilled Jessie’s blood, however, were two pictures allegedly taken of the creature. Like those of Bigfoot and all his cryptid brethren, the images were distant and blurry, and yet, unfocused as they were, they looked more like the hazy figure Jessie had seen beneath the ice than anything in focus might have.

Jessie clicked the “About Me” link and found that the site’s administrator was a fellow Miskatonic U student named Andrew Young. There was a photo of a skinny boy with a long neck, huge smile, wild blonde hair, and a nose so prominent it could have been called a beak. Despite the macabre subject matter of his website, the boy looked quite personable, and after some debate, Jessie sent him an email asking if they could talk.

Andrew, it turned out, had remained on campus with friends for the winter break, and as it was only a half hour journey by car back to Arkham, Jessie agreed to meet him at the university. Her parents lent her a car for the trip, and Jessie rendezvoused with Andrew at a café on campus. The young man sat across a two-person table from Jessie, eager to hear her account. His eyes lit up when she told him why she had been on the island. “That’s crazy,” he interjected. “I heard some people talking about you. They saw you playing.” Jessie felt suddenly embarrassed, being recognized for something that was admittedly odd. She relayed the rest of the events to him. Andrew’s arms were folded on the table and he leaned in as she spoke, hanging on every word. When she concluded, he sat back in his chair. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” she concurred. “So, you believe me?”

He shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Do you get a lot of people writing to you with their crazy stories?” she asked.

“Uh, no, actually. I get nobody writing to me about nothing.” He smiled.

“Oh,” she said. “I thought your website was really fascinating.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you from around here?”

“I grew up in Essex, which is only a few miles north of here. My cousin went to school here to study cultural anthropology. She was the one who started telling me all the old Arkham ghost stories.”

“You believe all of them?” Jessie asked.

Andrew paused a moment before answering. “I think there’s a lot of weird shit that goes on in this town,” was his measured response. After what she had seen, it was hard for Jessie to doubt it.

The two eventually left the café and wandered the campus. A natural talker, Andrew quickly fell into the role of tour guide, pointing out places where various anomalies had occurred during Miskatonic University’s long history: here was where a professor had killed himself; there was where a deserted building had inexplicably burned down. It was several shades removed from the tour Jessie had gotten from the upperclassmen during orientation. But she was intrigued by Andrew’s stories, which he chronicled with zeal. The imposing campus grew more enchanting as it became populated with ghouls, occultists, and mad scientists.

As the sky darkened, Jessie commented that she should be returning home. Andrew, clearly thrilled to have someone show an interest in his amassed knowledge of local lore, asked if she’d be back in town at all during the break, and offered to show her around Arkham. Jessie decided that she’d very much enjoy that. Her parents, happy that she had made friends at school, continued to let her borrow the car for trips into town.

Arkham in the winter was quite picturesque. The sheer white snow that blanketed the streets and the gambrel roofs contrasted starkly with the dark walls of the old buildings, so that the whole town seemed to be in black and white. Jessie and Andrew walked up and down the streets, Andrew pointing out such landmarks as the one-time residence of horror author Randolph Carter who had mysteriously disappeared in 1928; the family estate of physicist and madman Crawford Tillinghast; and the apartment block where the home of the child-murdering witch Keziah Mason previously stood. Gradually, Jessie found herself taking in less of the surroundings and more of her companion. The birdlike way his head bobbed eagerly on his long neck as he narrated was increasingly endearing, and even his beak-like nose began to appear as something precious to Jessie.

The daylight was failing on December 29th as the two headed back to Jessie’s car, steaming cups of coffee in hand.

“Do you have any plans for New Year’s Eve?” Andrew asked abruptly.

The question took Jessie off guard. “Nothing special,” she answered. “Why?”

“Just, some friends and I are gonna be hanging out and, if you weren’t busy, maybe you’d like to join us. There’s,” he paused for a moment, “there’s something cool I’d like to show you.”

“Sure,” Jessie answered.

“Awesome.”

Silence followed, during which they each picked something random in opposite directions to stare at for no good reason.

“Can I ask you a potentially awkward question?” Jessie broke the silence.

“Shoot.”

“Is this a date?”

“Ah,” said Andrew, still staring off but with his lips creeping into a grin. “What would be the more awkward answer?”

“Probably ‘no.’”

“Gotcha. Then, for everyone’s peace of mind, let’s say it’s a date.”

“Okay.”

So, in the late afternoon on December 31st, Jessie returned to the campus and headed to the Grad Center, where Andrew and his friends were subletting a dorm for the winter break. Andrew welcomed Jessie inside and introduced her to his roommates, Kylie and Steve. Kylie eyed her up and down and then nodded her approval to Andrew. “Nice,” was her appraisal. An embarrassed Andrew offered Jessie something to drink.

They sat around the living room and chatted about everything and nothing for a while. Kylie and Steve were an item, and shared a mischievous sense of humor. They and Andrew were all three absorbed in the lore of the town, and recounted various stories that they had heard. Around nine, there came a lull in the conversation, and Kylie turned to Andrew. “So, we gonna do this or what?”

Andrew looked from her to Jessie and back. “Yeah, I guess.” He got up, went out of the room briefly, then returned with something wrapped in a cloth. Steve placed a small stand in the center of the room, and Kylie, sitting cross-legged on the floor, bounced giddily. Andrew unwrapped a hunk of black stone and set it on the stand. Then he and Steve moved back and sat on the floor.

Jessie realized that everyone was now watching her expectantly. “What?” she asked.

“This is what I wanted to show you,” Andrew said.

Jessie looked from the object on the stand to each of the others. “It’s a rock,” she said. Kylie suppressed a laugh.

“Yes, it’s a rock,” Andrew confirmed with a smile. “Look at it.”

Jessie looked at it. As rocks went, the shape of the thing was nothing special. It was roughly cubical with uneven sides, slightly rounded edges, wider at the base than the top. After a moment’s observation, Jessie looked sideways at Andrew. “Is it going to do something?” she asked.

“Just keep looking at it,” was Andrew’s patient response.

Jessie did as told, with the rising suspicion that she was about to become the punch line to a joke. She did observe that the stone appeared not to reflect light, and the longer she stared at it, the deeper it melted into total blackness, looking like a hole in the fabric of space.

Within that blackness, something began to take shape. It wasn’t moving, but revealing itself, like the image hidden in a Magic Eye picture. What it was, Jessie couldn’t begin to describe. It wasn’t even entirely optical. It were as though something inside that void were reaching into Jessie’s mind and opening passageways of thought that had been closed since she was born. All awareness of Andrew and the others and even the room faded away until the stone was all that was left in all the world. Jessie was inside it, and it was the vast, infinite universe. Jessie felt a swirling kaleidoscope of colors she couldn’t name wash through her; she heard the light of distant stars singing across the cosmos and saw the roar of radio waves pinging between celestial bodies. It was beautiful and horrible and overwhelming and Jessie felt that she might go insane and that if she did she wouldn’t care.

Then a harsh, unwanted, alien word echoed through the void toward her. It terrified her and she tried to withdraw from it until she suddenly recognized it as her own name:

“Jessie. Jessie.”

It was like being torn from the warmth and familiarity of the womb; all at once, the endless cosmos were sucked back into the shape of a six-inch-tall rock, and Jessie was ripped out of the void. She felt confusion and terror.

“You’re okay,” a voice assured her. “Just breathe.” She did, and the disorientation abated. Following the initial shock of awakening, Jessie relaxed into a feeling of utter euphoria. It was like the peaceful rest after a hearty workout, only it was her mind and senses that had been doing the heavy lifting.

The faint sound of many voices drew Jessie’s attention to a television set. There were screaming crowds and a great ball of light descending on a spire. Numbers in the corner of the screen counted down from ten. The ball finished its descent and the skies lit up with fireworks.

It was maybe half an hour before Jessie felt like herself again. She didn’t remember when Andrew had begun explaining everything: “...really know what it is. It was found by another student: Gabriel Tennyson.” On his laptop, Andrew opened a page on the Weird Arkham site. There was a photo of a lanky student with large glasses. His left arm was missing, a fleshy nub poking out of the left sleeve of his t-shirt; apparently a birth defect. Jessie was reminded of The Fugitive, where Harrison Ford was looking for the One-Armed Man who had murdered his wife.

“He completely vanished eleven years ago,” Andrew went on. “The college acquired the stone and a whole bunch of notes he’d written on it.” Andrew pointed to the stone, excitement bubbling. “This thing is so frickin’ weird. I mean, you know that already. But he’d run a whole battery of tests on it. It retains neither cold nor heat. It has over ten on the Mohs hardness scale. The university’s mass spectrometer found that it has no isotopic history--”

“Basically,” Kylie interjected, seeing Jessie’s eyes glaze over, “it’s tougher than a diamond, impossible to date, has chemical elements no one’s ever seen before, and is generally the most unrock-like rock in the history of rocks.”

“So, how did you get it?” Jessie asked.

Andrew threw a look to the other two. “It was kinda just collecting dust with Gabriel’s notes in a storage room.”

“You stole it?”

“Stole, borrowed,” shrugged Andrew, as if the two words were interchangeable. Then he looked at her expectantly. “So? You wanna try it again?” In spite of the stone’s dubious history and the fact that Jessie still had no idea what it was she had just experienced, she kinda, sorta, totally did.

This time, Andrew sat beside her. The other two watched as they peered into the stone together. In a few moments, Jessie was back among the stars. As her senses reawakened, time became something that she could see, like a great river. She glanced upstream to watch stars being born and downstream to see them die.

She felt Andrew’s presence. It was if they were strolling side-by-side through infinity. His aura drifted toward hers and their essences touched as though he had reached out and taken her hand. Jessie could sense his thoughts, specifically his thoughts towards her, and she felt her astral self blush.

The next few weeks, Jessie practically lived with the trio, and they spent long hours being absorbed into the miraculous stone. Someone was always allocated the role of spotter, sitting the session out and watching the others as they sat entranced by the stone. With each successive journey, Jessie became aware of new wonders: the space-time tunnels between wormholes, the bending of light around black holes, and the auroras that radiated from pulsars. The so-called empty space between the planets was filled with the movement of other astral beings. As they flew past her, Jessie caught glimpses of alien thoughts and emotions, and speculated that there may be strange black stones scattered across the universe.

Taking advantage of the heightened senses that lingered after using the stone, Jessie would play her violin, and she and Andrew delighted in perceiving the intricate dance of the strings and watching the hum of audio waves bounce across the room. Kylie and Steve, meanwhile, put their heightened senses to different use: they would fuck.

Between their celestial journeys, Jessie and Andrew would walk the campus together. The 140 acre university seemed so small now. Looking up with her awakened third eye, Jessie could see the previously imperceptible motion of the stars twinkling across the sky and felt that she could identify them by age.

One night toward the end of January, as the new term was about to begin, Jessie, Kylie, and Andrew sat mesmerized around the stone, Steve assigned to spot. Jessie was swimming the ether, caught up in currents of gravity and solar winds, when something intangible drifted toward her.

It was a type of consciousness she had yet to encounter in her venturing. As it closed in, Jessie became anxious... frustrated... cruelly impatient...

There was something she needed to find--something or someone that had eluded her seemingly forever. Her mind’s eye began to probe deep space for this target, and she was filled with thoughts of violence. The image of her prey flickered across her brain: a dark, hulking amphibian like nothing seen on Earth; its lower jaw extended forward like that of an angler fish, its tall sloping head crowned with a ring of black eyes. Its thick, wriggling body and its head were connected without a neck, like an eel, and it had several thrashing limbs tipped with suckers that folded into the body for easier movement through liquid. This ugly, immoral, inferior thing had been the bane of Jessie’s existence for ages, and she longed to throttle the life out of it. Her hatred for it was so pure and so sharp and so alien to anything that Jessie had ever felt that it frightened the hell out of her, and she reeled from these terrible thoughts. She thrashed and squirmed like someone who knows they’re trapped in a nightmare, trying to awaken themself. It’s close, the alien mind was thinking. The bastard is close...

With a groan, Jessie tore herself from the thrall of the mystic stone and fell onto her side. She breathed heavily for a moment. Steve peeked his head in from the kitchen, the smell of microwaved ramen wafting into the room. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Jessie lifted herself from the floor and checked her two companions. Andrew and Kylie were still entranced by the stone. Their expressions were twisted somewhere between hate and agony, their bodies shaking. Jessie crawled to Andrew while Steve rushed to Kylie. “Andrew,” Jessie called, rubbing his leg. “Andrew, wake up. Wake up, now.”

Steve shook Kylie, gently at first, then more violently. When she still didn’t respond, he screamed in her face, “KYLIE!” She jerked out of her trance, limbs flailing, and Steve collected her in his arms. “You’re okay,” he assured her.

“What the fuck happened?” she asked.

Jessie was still struggling with Andrew. Taking a cue from Steve, she screamed at him, but he did not awaken. His body convulsed and his mouth frothed. She slapped him hard across the face, to no effect. Then she grabbed the black stone off its stand and removed it from his sight.

It was like Andrew had been shot in the chest. He slammed backward onto the floor, back arching impossibly. Jessie didn’t need her residually heightened senses to hear his vertebrae snap. She and the others backed away as Andrew flopped on the floor, bones rearranging beneath his skin. He clawed at his shirt and tore it to shreds. The air in the room began rushing toward him as if into a vacuum. Dust and bits of small debris swirled through the air, and Jessie’s hair reached for Andrew.

The boy stood up. His body was surrounded by a field of crackling energy. Jessie’s enhanced eyes made out the air molecules being absorbed into his increasing mass. His arms thickened and lengthened. His stomach pulled itself inward while his back swelled upward, dotted with large throbbing growths. Somehow, recalling the consciousness that had briefly merged with her own, Jessie recognized the thing that Andrew was becoming. His organs were shifting into his upper back (where they’re supposed to be, Jessie thought for a moment).

The Andrew Creature lunged suddenly across the room and seized Kylie out of Steve’s arms. Instantly, the meat on her bones liquefied and was assimilated into the invader, aiding in the transformation. The beast’s now-empty abdomen spilled open in a cluster of squirming limbs like living spaghetti. The face, which hitherto had retained some resemblance to Andrew, now split open--destroying, Jessie thought, that precious nose--and birthed a new visage that was like hate and hunger taken shape.

Jessie tugged the dumbstruck Steve’s shirt and they ran for the door. As she threw it open, Jessie heard a scream behind her, and with a glance back saw that Steve had met Kylie’s fate. She dashed out into the hall, where heads were poking out of dormitory rooms. “Get back inside!” she screamed as she shot past them. The roar of the creature echoed behind her. She slammed into the door to the stairwell and flew down the steps to the ground floor. Hearing the door explode off its hinges above her, she cast her eyes upward just long enough to see the demon plummeting down the center of the stairwell.

Jessie burst into the lobby, and from there out into the freezing night air. She still carried the black stone in her hands, and she had a very definite destination: the Miskatonic River.

The prey that the monster sought was there.

She heard screams around her as she neared the campus parking lot; the beast was following her. Jessie saw her car up ahead and felt her pocket with her hand. Thank Christ, she thought, sensing the bulge of her keys. She tore them out, beeped the car unlocked, ripped open the driver door and leaped inside. She risked a glimpse behind her. The creature was in hot pursuit, ignoring the terrified students that fled from the sight of it. Compared to its swollen upper body, its leg remained stunted, hindering its movement. Still, it would be on top of Jessie’s car in a few seconds. She jammed the key into the ignition. The engine roared to life.

The beast punched through the back windshield. Jessie hit the gas. The car hopped onto the sidewalk that separated the lot from the main road, and the creature was thrown off.

Jessie drove like the devil. In her rearview, the creature was bounding along on its great arms like a gorilla. Jessie swerved around other cars, scraping against the side of a truck and sheering off her side mirror. Behind her, the creature gained.

The river was now just up ahead. Jessie jammed the foot pedal into the floor, no idea whether the ice would take the weight...

The car flew off the road, over the southern embankment, and onto the river. Jessie heard the ice crackle beneath her as the car skidded across it toward the infamous island on the far side. Grabbing the black stone from the passenger seat, she threw open the door and rolled out onto the ice as the car smacked into the island. The ice broke beneath it and the river swallowed the vehicle up, leaving an open pool.

Jessie rose painfully. A split appeared in the ice between her feet, and she shuffled to one side of it. Then she looked in the direction of an unearthly howl and saw the frenzied creature barreling across the ice toward her. Jessie made for the island, but the ice all around her was quickly shattering into white fragments. She leapt from one to the other and nearly slid into the dark water as the fragment of ice teetered beneath her. She fell backward onto it.

The thing that had once been named Andrew slowed as it grew nearer, navigating the fractured terrain. It stepped from one block of ice to another, now feet away from Jessie. She scooted backward as far as she could without falling into the water.

A sinewy arm reached for her.

Then it stopped. The creature looked around itself, at the ice and the water beneath. It paused, then started to whoop and growl and shriek in a terrifying display of excitement. It leapt several yards away onto more stable ice and began to examine the frozen river, sliding hither and thither. With a tremendous roar, it made several muscular jabs at the ice, punching a sizable hole, and dove in.

But for the lapping water, all else was quiet. Jessie got back onto her feet slowly, keeping her balance on her frozen raft. A larger body of ice floated nearby. She jumped for it. Her boots slid as she came down and she almost pitched right off the edge. She managed to steady herself, and was about to leap to another slab, her end goal being the island, when she was halted by a noise that came bubbling from the river below. It wasn’t unlike recordings she had heard of whale calls, but deeper, throatier, and altogether more horrifying.

There was a flash under the ice, like the burst of light from an antique camera bulb. Then another. More hellish cries rose from somewhere below.

Then there was silence again. Jessie was turning to make the next jump when something erupted out of the ice a short distance away. The startled Jessie lost her footing and plunged into the frigid river. It was like knives going into every inch of her skin. One arm around the black stone, she reached for the surface with the other. Her hand smacked against solid ice. Opening her eyes, she could see nothing. Panic raged in her chest. She was lost in the blackness of space again, this time without her friends to guide her home.

She felt along the barrier above. Any second she would blow out the little air that screamed to be released from her lungs, and then the water would come rushing in...

Her hand broke the surface. She kicked her way up, returning to the world above and sucking in oxygen. Her limbs were numb and shaking, but with effort she swam to the island, threw the stone up onto the beach, and clawed her way onto solid ground.

People had gathered on the north bank, but their eyes were not on Jessie. She rolled onto her back and observed two figures on the ice.

There was the No-Longer-Andrew, and there was its opponent: a melding of the creature she’d envisioned in the void and a human being. Whereas its proper form was eel-like, this hybrid still had some semblance of a neck, its head able to bend forward, teeth gnashing at its foe. On its right was a long, wriggly arm, tipped with suckers.

But on its left was only a flapping nub.

The Hunter from the Stars pounded its prey with its apish limbs. The Fugitive coiled its long body around its attacker, and an electric pulse discharged from its skin. The hunter screamed, grasping its enemy’s skull in a crushing hug. Together, they tumbled back through the ice and disappeared.

Jessie stared at the ice. There were no sounds, no flashes. Her teeth chattered, her rapid breaths escaping in little vaporous clouds. She heard sirens approaching.

Then the ice shattered upward and the hunter launched from the water back onto the surface. It panted, slammed its fists against the ice, and roared in what Jessie interpreted to be triumph.

Then its eyes settled on her. It strode toward the island.

Hands shaking, fingers numb, Jessie reached for the black stone. She rose onto her knees and twisted her whole body in order to throw it as far as she could. It barely passed the open water that surrounded the island and slid along the ice toward the abomination. The creature picked it up...

Looked at Jessie a final time...

Then stared into the stone.

A moment later, it collapsed. The stone bounced across the ice and splashed into the water. Jessie watched as the creature’s body ejected steam into the air. It shriveled up like a mound of rotten fruit in the sun, then liquefied into a viscous ooze that spread across the ice.

Jessie was still staring at the steaming blot when police arrived and carefully made their way from the embankment to the island to collect her. Bystanders would talk about this for the rest of their lives, and whole new stories would be told about Weird Arkham.

Misky, however, was never spied again.