Author: G.D. Penman
Date: 2018-04-15 05:00:00+00:00
Description: A body in the mud by the Miskatonic River is just an average day for Detective Vergil Levard. But when the cadaver shows signs of something more sinister afoot, Vergil is forced to make a deal with the devil and work with the leader of the local bootleggers, Jimmy Hogan, to track down the killers. If Vergil were a normal copper, the strange sigil wouldn't have meant anything to him. If Hogan were a normal mobster, Vergil wouldn't be falling for him. And if the fishing village of Innsmouth were a normal smuggler's front, neither of them would have to fear for their sanity. With darkness closing
Publisher: JMS Books LLC

Moonshine

By G.D. Penman

Published by JMS Books LLC

Visit jms-books.com for more information.

Copyright 2018 G.D. Penman

ISBN 9781634866361

Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

All rights reserved.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States of America.

* * * *

Moonshine

By G.D. Penman

Vergil’s shift was almost over when he caught a case. The sun was poking one lazy eye over the horizon by the time he got down to the riverside to look at whichever Prom-trotter from the university had decided to try and catch a bullet in his teeth. The bull on guard was some poor patrolman who looked like his balls hadn’t even dropped and Vergil had to flash his badge before the kid took his hand off the butt of his gun. It was probably easy to get spooked by one corpse if you hadn’t been in the war.

Every time he left the station, Vergil made a bet with himself that the case was going to come back to the Miskatonic University. If it wasn’t a student pulling the Dutch act over nothing, then it was some scrap between boozehounds that had gotten out of hand. The townies in Arkham didn’t get murdered, except by students, and if they committed any murders themselves then they were tidy enough about it so it didn’t become Vergil’s job to track them down. He was pretty sure he had lost his bet when he spotted the body. None of the rich kids at the university would have been seen dead wearing anything as nondescript as a flatcap and an olive slicker.

The dead mook was lying face-down on the grass, pointed towards the row houses of the town proper, and the only bullet hole Vergil could see was in his back. Blood would have looked almost black on the grass in the dull red of the early morning light, but a spray of it would have sparkled in the beam of his flashlight, which meant all the blood was under the body. Which in turn meant the victim had been on foot, in a pair of rubber-soled sailor’s boots, heading from the Miskatonic River up towards town when somebody shot him in the back.

Vergil strolled over to the river, looking for boot-prints to confirm his theory and he found them in the riverbank mud. First a deep sunk pair—side by side—then a row of them—heavy on the toe and light on the heel. The victim had jumped off a boat and run for it. Commercial traffic didn’t run up the Miskatonic River at night, the depth was too unpredictable, and the turns got tight after town. Which meant smugglers. Bootleggers. Gangsters. Vergil sighed and went back to roll the dead man. He had a drop of tan in his complexion, still showing despite him catching the big one. Thick eyebrows, thin lips, heavy jowls. The clothes under the jacket didn’t shake Vergil’s assumption that he was a sailor. He had no wallet, no papers, nothing to identify him. A smuggler wouldn’t want to carry any of that, would they? The front of his shirt was a bloody mess, the ground underneath him stained dark where his life had gone trickling out. Nothing useful.

He was just about to call it a night when he caught a glimpse of something on the dead man’s hand, a little bird worked into the skin with faded blue ink. Sailors had tattoos. He could work with that. With a quick glance to make sure that the bull on guard was facing the other way, Vergil pushed up the dead man’s sodden shirt. The bullet hole certainly drew the eye, but there were patterns on the skin under the blood. A shape like some sort of fish was splayed over his stomach, under the curly hair. A heart, a flapper girl, and a dog were dotted around his chest. They’d certainly help identify the body, but they didn’t give much else away. Vergil was just about to cover him over when he saw the tattoo hidden in the thick thatch of hair down below the fish.

It was a scratchy jagged symbol that hurt his eyes, barely big enough to be legible but familiar enough that it made Vergil’s stomach heave. He fell backwards onto the dew wet grass and had to scramble to his feet before the uniform turned around. The shirt was still bunched up, but his stomach was churning at the thought of touching the tainted cadaver again, so Vergil used his foot to drag it back down. His heart was hammering in his chest, so hard, he was surprised it couldn’t be heard. A steadying breath completely failed to do its job, so he embraced the panic and started to move. With completely false camaraderie, he slung an arm around the shoulders of the nervous bull and asked, “Where could a man go to get a quiet drink in this town?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“You’re a young man, you’ve got to take your moll somewhere.”

“I don’t have a…That is to say…”

Vergil resisted the urge to shake him. “Listen, I’m not looking to put anyone in a jam.”

There was a long moment where the uniform was conflicted then he finally said, “I’ve heard about a place on Haverhill Street, around the back of the old piano store. But I’ve never—”

“Thanks kid. The coroner will be along soon. Keep your nose clean.”

It was either too late or too early to visit a speakeasy, depending on your point of view, but there was no chance Vergil was going to sleep with his heart still hammering away, so he went back to the station to cause some trouble.

“Who runs the panther-piss racket in Arkham?”

Lieutenant Williams looked up sharply from his newspaper. “You leave mob work to the mob squad. Or the FBI. Preferably the FBI so they catch all the flack instead of us.”

“I’m not looking to pinch anyone for it. I just need to speak to somebody up the ladder to get some dope on anybody that might be passing through in their line of business.”

Williams gritted his teeth but jerked his head in what might have been an invitation to come inside his office. “You go out there causing trouble and I’ll have your buzzer, you hear me? Last thing Arkham needs is war on the streets. Particularly since I’m pretty sure we’d lose.”

When Vergil didn’t say anything, he grumbled on. “There are two outfits in Arkham, but they dance around each other so they don’t step on nobody’s toes. One of them sells local shine and a bit of corn from the fine farms of New England. The other one brings in brown plaid from abroad. Higher class joints.”

“Like the one on Haverhill?”

The lieutenant turned red. “You been poking around there already?”

“No sir.”

“Why is it you always look like you know something everybody else don’t?”

“Asking questions, sir. Isn’t that what you pay me for?”

“Get out of my office.”

“Who runs Haverhill, sir?”

“Did you hear me?”

Vergil smiled placidly. “No sir, could you repeat the name again for me?”

“A skinny mick called Jimmy Hogan. Now get out of my office before I call some uniforms in here to give you the bum’s rush.”

He smirked all the way out of the room. “Thank you, sir.”

* * * *

Sleep proved as elusive as expected, so the two hours in his rooming house mainly involved staring at the crack in the ceiling and wondering how long it was going to take before the bed in the more or less identical room above him fell through and crushed him. He hoped to have moved by then, but he had been hoping to move since before the crack first appeared. At a minute past midday Vergil arrived on Haverhill Street and made a beeline for the piano store. He pretended to look inside the dusty old place, but he was really letting his other senses do their job. He could hear jazz. The speakeasy was open for business. There was a slotted door down a side alley and it only took one rap with his knuckles before the cover was pulled aside and he had to suffer the scrutiny of the lowlife on guard. Vergil knew he wasn’t much to look at, that was the point of cultivating the same slicked hair as everyone else, dressing in the same hat, the same camel coat, and the same wingtips, to blend in, to be forgettable.

The doorman grunted, “What’s the password?”

“I need to see Mr. Hogan.”

“Don’t know nobody with that name.”

“One of his people is dead down by the river, I thought he would like to know.”

The tiny window slot grated shut again. Vergil stood and waited. Spring wasn’t warming up as quick as he would have liked, and his gloves were still sitting in his locker at work. He had just stamped his feet to keep the blood moving when the door swung open. He had expected the bimbo doorman, not a flapper who barely came up to his shoulder. “This way if you please.”

They went down a flight of stairs and stepped out into a completely different building than the one upstairs. The jazz was being played by a band at the far end of a hall that must have stretched the length of the street. There was an honest to God chandelier dangling above them and a fully stocked bar Vergil conscientiously didn’t notice running along one side of the room. This early in the day there weren’t many folks in and the dancefloor was bare, but there was still a hubbub from the students and wealthier townies mingling and sipping bootleg moonshine from fancy cocktail glasses. It looked like a high society party getting into full swing and Vergil wanted to slink right back out the way he had come in. He clenched his jaw and tried to keep up with the redhead in the indecently short dress as she wove in and out of the crowd seamlessly. He was expecting an office secreted somewhere around the edges of the room, but instead the girl stopped at a booth in the back. Once Vergil had caught up she gave him a nod and faded into the crowd.

Sitting in the booth with nobody but a bottle of scotch for company was the most Joe Brooks-looking gangster Vergil had ever seen. There was a hint of red and a wave in his hair. His suit was black and tailored like it had been poured out of one of those foreign bottles on the shelves behind the bar, but it was the little details that really jumped out. The peacock waistcoat. The matching bowtie. The emerald cufflinks peeking out of his sleeves. When he met Vergil’s eyes and gave him a terse smile the hammering of his heart stopped for a moment.

“Please join me. Have a drink, on the house.”

Vergil slipped into the booth, sitting as far from the other man as possible, taking care not to stare. “I don’t drink.”

Hogan let out a huff of laughter. “I’ve got the only dry detective in Massachusetts. Are you a bluenose?”

Vergil shrugged. “I don’t like feeling out of control.”

For a moment the smirk on Hogan’s face faded. “Neither do I, but this is the world we’ve got to live in.”

“A man was found dead this morning. A smuggler running his ship up the Miskatonic in the night. He had been shot in the back. The boat was gone. Do you know anything about it?”

“If I did, you wouldn’t be sitting there right now wagging your chin.”

“You are trying to tell me you don’t know anything about a bootlegger ship running up the river?”

“Why would I?”

“Because you’re a bootlegger.”

Hogan had the gall to look offended. “A bootlegger? Me? I don’t know what you mean. I happen to own the buildings in this street, I’m just a landlord. What people do with the spaces they rent is none of my business.”

Vergil stared at him. “To be clear; on a normal day I would wipe the smirk right off your face and hand you off to the FBI, but today I am willing to go a little bit blind to all the things going on around here because I’ve got a murder to solve and I think you can help me. So today, I don’t see this swanky juice joint. Get it?”

Hogan’s smile made a comeback. “So you don’t agree with the Volstead act?”

“I don’t get to pick and choose between the laws. Good or bad laws, they are better than no laws.”

“Me? I love Prohibition. It has done wonders for me.”

Vergil growled. “The ship running up the Miskatonic last night. It was one of yours?”

“It was mine when it left port, but it doesn’t sound like it was mine by the time it got here and didn’t stop to make its delivery.”

“The dead man was a mook, sparrow tattoo on his hand, more tattoos on his chest and stomach, a fish, a heart, a—”

With a ragged sigh, Hogan worked it out. “Aquino. His name was Louis Aquino. I’ll send his family some money.”

“Where was Louis from?”

“What does it matter. We know where he ended up.”

“It matters.”

Hogan scowled. “One of the little fishing villages up the coast towards Hampton. On Essex Bay. Innsmouth or something. What’s it to you?”

“Maybe nothing. That where your ships come in from Europe?”

Hogan opened and shut his mouth rapidly, then he grinned. “Got some smarts, eh buttons?”

Vergil found himself smiling back. “Like I said, I don’t see nothing, I don’t hear nothing. That is my side of the deal. Your side of the deal is when one of your birds comes cheeping to you with news about this, you bring it to me. You don’t go chasing his killer. You don’t put another body on my docket. Copacetic?”

Hogan’s smile slipped again. “You’re asking me to roll over and take it? How is that going to look?”

“Better than an FBI raid on Innsmouth or the mob squad kicking in your door, I’d bet.”

“You threatening me, buttons?”

“Why would I need to? We both want the same thing, right? Justice for your bell-bottom Louis.”

There was a lull in the music, and a smattering of applause around the ballroom as the band took a bow. Hogan was staring at Vergil with an intensity that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Vergil stared right back and realised his heart had been ticking away slow and steady through the whole conversation.

“I don’t get you, buttons. You look like the most milquetoast bunny to ever hop through my door, but here you are in the lion’s den, not even blinking when I could have you snubbed out with a nod.”

“Where did you serve?”

Hogan scowled. “I was a navy man. Enlisted myself.”

“I was in the trenches, the Hundred Day Offensive. If men with guns could put me off doing my job, I’d still be there in the mud and you’d still be bobbing around in a boat.”

“Bloodied the Kaiser’s nose yourself, did you?”

“Do we have a deal or not?”

Hogan went quiet again, doing the mental arithmetic. He obviously wanted to handle this himself, but it would cost him his smuggling outfit in Innsmouth or a lot of local heat if he bumped off a bull in front of all his egg clientele.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Detective Levard, Arkham Police Department.”

“Not what it says on your buzzer, your name.”

“Vergil.”

“I don’t have no interest in making deals with the coppers. But this Vergil fella seem to be a stand-up guy, so I’ll shake his hand and send him a wire when I hear something.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

Hogan stood up and held out a hand, and despite every bone in his body telling him not to do it, Vergil rose and shook it. He had expected the grip to be soft and limp from the opulent surroundings, but there were hard worn calluses brushing against his palm and Hogan shook hands like he was trying to choke a chicken. It would have been easy to think a cake eater like Hogan was soft, but the creaking of bones in Vergil’s hand was a reminder that the man was a hardened criminal. He gave as good as he got.

By the time they were done, Hogan was grinning again. “Now get out and don’t come around no more unless you’re drinking. The public library, this ain’t.”

Back out on the street Vergil considered his options. The two obvious suspects in any mob murder were the victim’s employer, or his organisation’s competitors. If Hogan had the man killed, it would come out in the next few days as he gave Vergil the run around. So that was handled. There was another bootlegging operation running in Arkham, local boys who didn’t need to import a thing. Could be they were trying to bump off the competition or take over Hogan’s outfit themselves. Of course, if Vergil was being honest, he didn’t give a half a damn about bootleggers or mob wars or anything else except the maddening glimpse of that tattoo.

He left a note on his desk at the station that he was chasing leads out of town and would be back in a day. He swung past the mob squad, such as it was, and got the name of the lady-legger they thought was running the other outfit in town. His last stop was the rooming house; where he packed all his worldly possessions in a suitcase, leaving it half empty, and tucked the miniscule amount of dough he had managed to save into his pocket. He left the case under the bed with little hope of it still being there when he got back and jogged down to York Road where a jitney ran out to Innsmouth. He flicked the frog-faced driver a nickel for the ride and the slumped into the back seat. It was only once the old junker was rolling along the road, rattling his teeth together that Vergil finally pulled his hat down over his face and drifted off to sleep.

* * * *

Vergil’s dreams were as deep and dark as the bottom of the ocean. The only shimmer of light filtering down from the distant stars above was tainted by the waters before it reached him. That faint emerald green glow was his only defence against the crushing cold. He woke with a start, sweating despite the chill on the bus. There was a tremor in his hands he hadn’t seen in years and he was silently furious with himself for showing so much weakness. A quick glance around showed no indication that any of the other three passengers had noticed, two were snoring and the other peering intently into his paper, so he took that as a small comfort. Before he had to work out what to do with himself for the rest of the trip, Innsmouth came into view around the bend. It was a wretched, windswept little town, on the verge of collapsing into the sea from the look of it. The wooden shingles coating every roof were salt bleached and enough had fallen or rotten out to make the whole town look gap-toothed. Of course this town was a smuggling front, why else would anybody willingly come here? They disembarked at an overgrown public square in the middle of town, some of them more willingly than others, then the jitney pulled off with a much fuller load of people making their escape from the dreary place.

It took him all of five minutes to find the local speakeasy. It had been the local bar before Prohibition shuttered it, and once the shine started flowing they had simply taken down the signs and unlocked the door. It was the kind of sloppiness that would have had the place shut down in a week in a bigger city, but out here there probably wasn’t much to do except get lit up like the commonwealth. The local bulls clearly didn’t care, which meant they had been bought, or they were useless. Either way, Vergil wasn’t in any rush to go begging them for help. He knew where the smuggled goods were coming in about five minutes later. The Marsh Cannery handled all he fish being brought in, so a ship unloading cargo there would be almost invisible, and they had hay burner trucks rolling out all over New England to move the hooch along. Prohibition had robbed detectives of a great resource when it hid all the mouthy rummys away.

The sun was starting to dip by the time Vergil came out of the bar and while he could go charging into the cannery at night and catch some smugglers in the act, it would defy the point of coming here quietly to gather information. He’d try them in the morning. Nothing like dropping on someone’s doorstep when they were still blinking sleep out of their eyes to get them talkative. He trudged back into town and headed for the looming Gillman Hotel at the end of the square. The place looked as much of a dump as the rest of town, which boded well for how affordable their rooms were going to be. Vergil didn’t mind sharing a room with a roach or two if they paid their share of the tab. Mr. Gillman lived up to his name, smelling and looking like something you’d find at the bottom of a pond, but the price was right on the room, so Vergil took the key and headed up the stairs. He didn’t even bother to ask about dinner; there were some crackers in his case that would keep him going. The lock to the room was stiff with rust and it took some straining to get it open. When it finally did swing open on the dreary, yellow-papered room, Hogan was sitting on the bed waiting for him.

Vergil went for his piece but Hogan already had his up, aimed straight at Vergil’s heart. His hands were not shaking and those emerald eyes were narrowed to slits. “Vergil, you snake.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here? What are you doing here? We had a deal.”

Vergil kicked the door shut behind him and Hogan’s aim didn’t even falter.

“What you thought I was going to let you handle it? It is a murder investigation, I can’t just hand it off to the mob and hope for the best.”

“Horsefeathers. If you gave a damn about the murder you wouldn’t be here, you’d be back in Arkham or heading further upriver, trying to find my stolen boat.”

“Smugglers don’t pick up hitchers and ships small enough to run up the Miskatonic don’t got the space for a big crew. I find out who was on the boat when it left, mark Louis off that list and what is left are my suspects. Your boat is just a thing. Things can be tossed aside. People are what matter.”

Hogan tossed his pistol onto the bedcovers and laughed. “My God. People are what matter. You pinko.”

Vergil quietly let out the breath he had been holding. “What the hell are you doing here, Hogan?”

He slumped back onto the bed with an infectious grin spreading across his face again like cholera. “I’ve got my boys going up the river, looking for my stolen goods. Figured I’d come down here and make sure things were still running jake. Besides, I got an envelope to drop in with Louis’ family to see them right until this is all settled.”

Vergil scoffed, “Yeah, you’re a saint.”

“It’s just business. A man is happy to catch a bullet for you if he knows his family ain’t going to go hungry.”

“You’ve got a sick view of the world if you can turn charity into a vice.”

“Alright then, guess I’m a saint after all. That make you feel better?”

Vergil changed tacks. “I’ll come with you tomorrow. To see the cannery and the Aquinos. Your smugglers will talk with you there to give them the go ahead, and Louis’ family might feel better to know the law is looking out for their dad.”

“I doubt it. Somebody showed up on her doorstep and told my maw I was dead, don’t think any amount of justice would dry her tears up.” Hogan fixed him with a stare. “You got any family, Vergil?”

Vergil kept his teeth from gritting. He didn’t show what he was thinking. He didn’t think about them at all. “No.”

“You don’t seem to have anybody. Arkham police don’t like you all that much. Chicago Police seem to have run you out of town over nothing. Couldn’t find much of anything before you signed up for copper academy.”

“You’ve been checking up on me?”

“You don’t get to be the boss without doing your homework. I’ve got files on all you coppers. Same as you’ve got files on me and my boys.”

“So what, you snuck around checking up on me and couldn’t find anything so now you’re just asking?”

“Seemed like the quickest solution?”

“My private life is private,” Vergil growled.

“That’s a shame, because I’m an open book. Go on, ask me anything and I’ll tell you. As long as you promise not to arrest me afterwards.”

Vergil’s temper was reaching its end. “Why are you razzing me like this?”

“Because I like you. You seem like you could be fun.” Hogan bounced to his feet with a smirk on his face. Vergil crossed his arms and glowered.

“I’m a copper and you’re a bootlegger. My idea of fun is arresting people for your idea of fun.”

“I’m sure we could meet somewhere in the middle.” That damned smirk hadn’t even flickered.

“And what would that look like exactly?”

Hogan stepped forward and planted a kiss squarely on his lips.

Vergil froze in place, too shocked to say anything or do anything. Hogan’s tongue slipped along his lower lip and deep in Vergil’s chest he was surprised to hear a moan vibrating up. Vergil’s arms fell limp to his sides and Hogan seem to take that as an invitation to wrap his arms around him. There was a line of heat where their bodies pressed together and the faintest brush of friction set Vergil’s whole body tingling. His hands drifted up to run over the silken stretch of Hogan’s waistcoat and he heard a tiny groan in reply. That was enough to snap him out of whatever hypnosis he had fallen under.

Vergil pushed Hogan away. “Pervert.”

“What?”

“That was…that is wrong. That was…that was against the rules. That—”

“Rules are meant to be broken, buttons. Hadn’t you heard?”

Hogan reached for him again, but Vergil stepped back. “No.”

“Listen, you’re clearly a cake eater. You didn’t glance at my quiff in the club even when she flashed you an eyeful. I got a sneaking suspicion you were booted out of Chicago for being a shirt lifter and if I spend time looking at your army record—”

“Stop. Stop it.”

“Now if you’re worried about someone finding out…”

“Just dry up, would you.”

Hogan stepped back again and settled on the edge of the bed. Vergil started pacing, trying hard not to look at the other man. To ignore the way his lips were roughed up, reddened and wet, or how his eyes had gone big and dark. “It isn’t right. You have to follow all the rules if you want to fit in. The laws. I have to follow the laws if I want to survive.”

“Surviving isn’t the same as living.”

“What? Don’t—”

There was heat behind Hogan’s eyes. “Surviving is for animals. People need more than food and water. We need things worth living for.”

“I don’t need more of your applesauce right now.”

Hogan smirked and Vergil rushed him. He had meant to hit him. He was sure of it, but somehow he was kissing him again, really kissing him, like he was a last meal waiting to be devoured.

They went over with the mobster pinned to the bed. Hogan arched up against him and the bedsprings gave a frightful creak both of them ignored in favour of their other senses. Vergil’s teeth nipped at Hogan’s lip. Hogan’s tobacco scented breath was hot on Vergil’s cheek. Things were getting out of control so fast that Vergil didn’t even have time to panic. Hogan’s hands slipped along the buttons of their waistcoats, undoing what he could in the brief moments when they were far enough apart with fiercely well-practiced fingers. It was only when those fingers grazed across the skin under Vergil’s shirt and he heard another animal moan coming out of his mouth that Vergil’s eyes snapped open and he tumbled back off the bed. He landed in a heap on the dusty rug, then crab-walked away until he hit the wall. He had forgotten to breathe, but he dragged in the mildewed air of the room now like it was his salvation. He had to think. He had to buy time to think.

Hogan was still lying on the bed, staring up at the damp spots on the ceiling and laughing. “And how!”

Gathering his wits, Vergil stuttered out, “Why me?”

Hogan popped back up onto his elbows and grinned down the distracting length of his own dishevelled body. “You’re a handsome fella, and it isn’t like there’s a lot to do at night in this soggy rube town. Got to keep myself entertained somehow.”

“What’s your angle here?”

Hogan’s smile was starting to fade again. “It is just business. I didn’t want you thinking I was going to double-cross you. I know about you. I know you’re…like me. And I didn’t want you thinking I was going to hold it over you later. There’s plenty of folks should be ashamed of themselves for a lot of things and I’m happy to use that instead of muscle to get what I need. This ain’t something to be ashamed of.”

Vergil’s hands were still shaking when he lifted them to smooth his hair back. His hat had rolled across the floor to the washbasin at some point. “You’re the Patron Saint of cake-eaters. Is that it?”

“Somebody needs to be in our corner and the Manassa Mauler ain’t likely to pull his gloves on for fellas like us.”

Vergil finally met the other man’s stare and the heat there was almost enough to have him flinging himself across the room again. “You aren’t stupid. You know I’m a copper and you’re a crook. You know there’s no way this ends well for you.”

“We ain’t even started yet. I’ll worry about the end later. If it’s all the same to you.”

Vergil looked down at his hands. “I always thought this was something that had been done to me. That I was some sort of…abomination.”

Hogan laughed. “You and about half the prom-trotters that come down from the Miskatonic. And a fair cut of the locals too. There’s more of us abominations than you might think.” He paused and looked at Vergil again with just a little more curiosity than lust. “You religious?”

“I’m…I’m a God-fearing man.”

“You go to church? Is that where you got the abomination stuff?”

“I haven’t been in a church since before I can remember. Before the war.”

Hogan sighed. “You can’t fix what ain’t broke.”

“I need some time to think about all this.”

“Listen, buttons—”

“Could you just go?”

Hogan got to his feet, adjusted the front of his trousers with a grumble, and said, “I’ll knock in the morning. Don’t keep me waiting. I’m a busy man.”

Vergil looked up at him and wet his lips with his tongue. “Copacetic.”

He shut the door a little more forcefully than was necessary, but Vergil’s own skin felt like it was about to jump off, so he had some sympathy for the man and the discomfort his thwarted intentions had brought him.

Vergil slept fitfully with the dresser dragged in front of the door. No matter what else Hogan was, he was a criminal and he had proven the lock was no match for him. Vergil didn’t have a chance to dream. Every time he felt like he was finally sinking down into the paper-thin mattress some strange sound would disturb him. In the rooming house he slept easily through folks coming and going at all hours but here he jumped every time a floorboard creaked. It took him until almost sunrise to realise the difference. He wasn’t frightened by the thought of Hogan breaking in, he was excited.

* * * *

He was waiting outside his room when Hogan came swaggering around the corner, the better to avoid temptation. Judging by the smirk on the other man’s face, the move wasn’t as subtle as he’d hoped. “Bless, you were so excited to see me, you sprung up early.”

“Good morning, Hogan.”

“Good morning, buttons. You ready?”

Vergil hefted his case at him, then seemed to realise how silly it looked a moment later. He was acting like a fool. “Let’s go meet your smugglers.”

They never made it to the Marsh Cannery. Hogan had sent a telegram ahead before leaving Arkham and the whole place had shut down for the day. The foreman was a union man, and he seemed to tolerate Hogan’s operation as a necessary evil to keep food in his men’s bellies rather than revelling in it like so many of the bootleggers did. He gave Hogan a bit of lip as they walked along the shorefront, which meant that Vergil was smiling despite himself the whole time. In between gibes about Hogan’s fancy hair and fancy suit, he filled them in on the details and gave them the list of names Vergil had been so keen for. The boat had been carrying the latest shipment of plaid brown, real ritzy stuff instead of the watered-down corn that got passed off as genuine scotch by so many bootleggers. Vergil jotted the names down in his notebook as they came up. Strolling along, forgotten by the criminals the moment they got talking.

Hugo Waite.

Philip Manuxet.

Louis Aquino—victim.

It was a short list anyway, but that last name rubbed Vergil wrong. The Manuxet was a river somewhere around these parts and it seemed almost too obviously a fake name. Distracted by his notebook, he walked right into the back of Hogan and they both nearly stumbled into the carcass on the beach. It might have been a porpoise or a dolphin in life, but now it was little more than ragged rot stuck to some gnawed bones. He grabbed Hogan’s hand involuntarily and hauled him a step away from the stink before noticing his impropriety. Hogan chuckled at his blush. “Watch it, buttons.”

With their business concluded, Hogan shook hands with the foreman and if he hadn’t been so fixated on the other man’s hands, Vergil likely wouldn’t have noticed him slipping an envelope of cash up a jacket sleeve. The foreman scowled and tried to reach for his own wrist, but Hogan shook his head. “Lost wages for today. Got to keep the boys fed, right?”

The Aquino family were natives of Innsmouth, as much as anyone with an Italian surname was a native anywhere in America. They lived in one of the battered looking houses in the midst of the fisherman’s slums, barely elevated above the workhouse down the street. They met Hogan with some confusion but reserved the real distrust for Vergil once he had shown his badge. There was a woman and two children, too young to really know if they were boys or girls, crammed into a house barely bigger than the locker room at the station. Both kids had heavy-lidded eyes and thick lips, taking after their mother’s side. It was with some difficulty Vergil got them off their mother’s apron strings for long enough to be able to talk to her in private.

* * * *

“I’m very sorry to tell you this ma’am, but your husband passed away last night in Arkham.”

She blinked at him. “He’s dead?”

“Yes ma’am. He was shot in the back while smuggling liquor up the river.”

He had expected anger or tears, the absence of any emotion on display was a little disconcerting. “Do you understand what I am telling you, ma’am?”

Hogan rolled his eyes at Vergil’s efforts and shouldered forward to hand the woman another one of his envelopes. “Louis was a good worker, he didn’t deserve what happened to him and you can rest assured whoever did it will get what’s coming to them. That there is to keep you going until things have settled down. Then we’ll see about getting you some work or a little widow’s pension from one of the unions.”

She slipped the envelope onto the mantle above an empty hearth then turned back to the intruders with the kind of placid acceptance Vergil associated more with a fish on a hook than a human being. “Is that it?”

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Don’t have nothing to say to you.”

Vergil gritted his teeth, but Hogan smiled at her. “It’s alright to talk to this bull. He’s on our side in this.”

She looked at Vergil with even more contempt in her eyes than before, but she didn’t seem ready to toss him out. Not yet. “Did Louis have any enemies? Anyone he owed money to, or who might have wanted to do him harm?”

Another languid blink. “Nobody but the coppers.”

Vergil tried to force a smile, but it looked pained. “Did he belong to any clubs or organisations outside of work?”

That seemed to catch Hogan’s attention, but she didn’t let anything show. “No. He tried to join the E.O.D. chapter in town but they wanted tithes and we didn’t have anything to spare.”

“E.O.D.?”

Hogan interrupted. “They’re like the Masons. All over the place in New England.”

“Did Louis spend a lot of time abroad? Was there a particular place he kept going back to?”

“He was in the navy before the war. Came out the same time as everybody else. He’d been everywhere. Are you done?” She was growing more and more surly with each passing moment. Vergil’s time was running out, so he bit the bullet. “What do you know about the tattoo on his stomach?”

By now Hogan was looking genuinely perplexed. The Widow Aquino tilted her head to the side as if she was confused too but Vergil could see tension across her shoulders now. “The fish?”

“The one beneath the fish.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you know about that?”

“What do you know about it?”

Her eyes darted guiltily towards the children where they sat playing with wooden clothes-pegs on the only rug in the house.

Vergil was moving before she could react, crossing the room and hauling on the rug. The children tumbled off it, hissing at him and showing their peg teeth. Beneath the spot where they had been playing on the cold stone of the floor, someone had sketched the symbol from the dead man’s stomach in yellowed chalk. Not just once, but over and over. Replacing it each time it had faded. Vergil went for his gun, but Hogan caught him by the shoulder. “What are you doing, you goon? The woman’s husband just—”

Vergil’s fist caught him in the gut, sending him staggering back to overturn the matchstick furniture. “Are you one of them too? Was this all a trap?”

The woman had started to move, all her awkwardness fading away into an eel-like grace. She didn’t stop coming until Vergil had his piece aimed right at her head.

Hogan heaved in a breath and snarled. “Have you completely lost your mind?”

Vergil didn’t take his eyes off the woman. “How many of you are there?”

Her mouth split into an angler fish grin. “More than you would believe.”

Vergil’s hand was shaking when he pointed to Hogan. “Is he one of you?”

She tilted her head to the side, almost further than a human could, but not quite. “No. But it matters not. Neither of you’re going to be leaving.”

Teeth like needles slammed into Vergil’s thigh. One of the children was latched on there like a lamprey. As hard as he beat at it with the butt of the pistol, its rubbery flesh seemed to pop back into shape. He tried to lever the creature’s jaw open, but it was slick with his blood and he couldn’t find purchase. The other child leapt with preternatural speed and latched on to his shoulder. Another wet crunch drew another strangled scream from his lips.

Hogan—usually so full of swagger—was paralyzed halfway to standing up, whether by fear or confusion, Vergil couldn’t tell. The widow was not. She had drawn a knife from her apron fold—a serrated and stained thing best suited to gutting fish—and she was rushing at Hogan with a blank eyed fury. Vergil didn’t even think, he just pulled the trigger. In the hovel, the sound was deafening, loud as artillery hitting a trench. Her body skidded across the floor to land like a rag-doll by the sigil on the ground.

The children fell away from Vergil and rushed to her side, wailing and weeping. The sudden loss of their weight staggered him and he toppled to his knees beside Hogan and the knife. The bootlegger stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. “What the hell is happening?”

“Nothing good. We need to get out of here before reinforcements arrive.”

Grabbing on to one another they managed to clamber to their feet. Vergil stared with growing horror at the two wailing children as they nuzzled at their mother’s corpse like it was hokey-pokey. He dragged his eyes away and tugged on Hogan’s sleeve. “Get your envelope. We don’t need any evidence we were here.”

Hogan staggered over and retrieved it, then they were out the door and running. “We need to get out of town.”

* * * *

The street narrowed and the shingles of the tilting houses were nearly touching above them. Hogan drew in a ragged breath. “I’ve got my Breezer round the back of the hotel. You going to tell me what the hell all that was?”

“I guess I got to.”

“You’re damn right.”

They slowed to a walk when they reached the central square. The local bulls were skirmishing around and there was nothing that caught a copper’s attention like running. You could get away with murder as long as you strolled out of the place looking bored.

The car was predictable. A Cadillac Phaeton in forest green. Vergil didn’t even care that it was a flash car bought with bad money by the time they reached it, he was just glad it was fast. They tore out of Innsmouth so quick his hat almost blew off.

They were only on the road for five minutes before Hogan swerved off onto a dirt track and parked the car beside a dilapidated farmhouse. Vergil shook off the cold shock that had been settling on his brain as a fresh spike of fear ran through him. “What are you doing? We need to move.”

“I ain’t going nowhere with you bleeding all over the upholstery. Now sit still.”

He drew a first aid kit out from its box on the runner and set about bandaging Vergil’s thigh over his trousers. “I’ve got a croaker who can take a good look at you when we get back to Arkham, but for now we got to stop you bleeding.”

He paced around the car to patch up the shoulder wound, but it was in an awkward spot. “I ain’t trying to turn this into a struggle buggy, but if you take off your shirt I can cover this.”

Vergil heaved a sigh. “I’d rather not.”

“Bit late to be getting shy now.”

Vergil stared at him. “I’m trusting you a lot here. I need you to keep your trap shut about whatever you see.”

“What, you got bubs or something? Come on.”

With no small amount of hissing and flinching, Vergil managed to get his injured shoulder out of his clothes. Hogan grinned. “You ain’t too hideous to look at.”

With a heavy sigh, Vergil let his arm turn over and Hogan’s smirking razzing ground to a halt when the thick ridge of scar running up the inside of the copper’s wrist came into view. Hogan reared back. “What’d you go and do that for?”

Vergil was staring straight ahead. His face trained into a blank expression. “It’s a long story.”

“We’ve got the time, it ain’t a short drive back to Arkham, you know?”

Vergil closed his eyes and let out a sigh so loud it sounded like a death rattle. “Patch me up first. I don’t want to hang around too long. And you might not want to after I’m done talking.”

Hogan grit his teeth and set to work patching up the puncture wounds on the copper’s shoulder. They looked like needle marks more than a bite, but they were oozing dark and steady, so he bandaged them as well as he could.

“You gunning to tell me what the hell was going on back there with the fish kids and the crazy broad too?” Hogan was getting more frustrated the longer Vergil wouldn’t look at him.

“It’s the same story.”

Hogan tugged Vergil’s ruined jacket back over the patch job and grumbled. “Better be a good one.”

They were on the road again by the time Vergil had his courage together, Hogan was practically chewing on the steering wheel with irritation.

“I’ve never told nobody about this before. I’d appreciate if we kept it between us.”

“Just spit, would you?”

“I grew up in a place like that. Not some little backwater nowhere…someplace where things weren’t right. It was meant to be an artist’s commune up in Kingsport. There weren’t many kids there but those who were didn’t have parents, we belonged to everybody, and nobody.”

Hogan’s eyebrows were drawing down lower with every word he heard, but he kept his eyes on the road.

“It wasn’t long before they started trying to get us involved in some of their more esoteric hobbies. They were real religious, but it wasn’t anything like the religions you know about. It was older stuff. Deeper stuff. Folks, likeminded folks, came from all over to bring them stories and old books and tablets and they tried to slot it all together so it made sense. But they could never get it to line up. The things they believed. The things they did for the things they believed! You’d be sick if I told you. But it was all chaos. They needed somebody to guide them.”

He drew in a shuddering breath and tried to keep from shaking. “They started to do these rituals. Blood rituals. Real evil stuff, trying to call something up. For months and months they tried and I tried right along with them because I didn’t know any different. I was one of them. They made me one of them.”

Vergil finally looked across at Hogan, and all he could see etched onto the other man’s face was fury. “That’s why I was scared when you first laid one on me. I thought this thing…This thing we are. It was something they’d done to me. Something they’d put in me.”

Hogan’s face softened a little, but he still looked ready for murder. “Forget about it for now. Keep chinning.”

Vergil shuddered. “I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what they did different, but one night when they were calling out to nothing and something answered them back. The adults, they didn’t see it. They just heard the voice. Oh God, Jimmy, that voice.”

There was silence for a few miles as Vergil clawed back some of his composure. “They didn’t see a thing. But I got an eyeful and that was enough. I knew right then what they were doing—what I had been doing—was wrong. I knew I had to get out. Those scars you saw. That…that was my first time trying to escape.”

“Jesus,” Hogan hissed.

“He wasn’t in the building.” Vergil tried to force a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Anyway, they took me to a croaker and he saw what I’d done and didn’t listen to a word I said about cults and rituals. They tossed me in the sanatorium. Left me there to rot until I learned to lie about what I’d seen. What I’d done. The day I walked out of there Wilson declared war and I hopped on the first boat out.”

Hogan slowed the car from the breakneck speed he’d been using since they set off and turned to look at Vergil. “You sure you ain’t off your nut?”

Vergil let out a wet laugh. “Wish I was.”

“So what is this all about then? What did Louis and his weird kids have to do with…all that?”

“He had a tattoo. A sign of one of the old ones. Some ancient Babylonian cuneiform fish symbol. Devoting him to…to his god. It was the same sign doodled on their floor.”

They rolled along until the silence felt liable to deafen them both before Vergil blurted out, “If you’re smart you’ll forget all about it. Forget all about me. Go on with your life pretending you didn’t see none of this.”

Hogan faked a sneer. “I ain’t a copper. Never been much good at turning a blind eye.”

Vergil laughed despite himself then reached out his hand, staring at Hogan the whole time. He didn’t know what he expected. He knew he didn’t deserve any comfort for dragging the other man into what he had always considered his own personal hell. When Hogan’s fingers interlaced with his he had to bite back a sob.

“Listen kid, you’ve had to carry a lot and I can see you’re all sorts of messed up about it, but you ain’t alone no more. I know we don’t see eye to eye on everything and I can’t promise you much but a shoulder to cry on, but the way you tell it, that’s more than you’ve had before.”

Vergil gave his hand a quick squeeze before letting Hogan return to the gearstick. “Thank you.”

Hogan smirked. “Thank you—I’ve never been in a car with somebody with weirder secrets than me before.”

A careful smile crept onto Vergil’s face. “Who knew you could top Cake-eating bootlegger?”

Hogan barked out a laugh.

They rolled into Arkham just before sundown and with no idea if they had been followed or not. The arguments had started up again before they made it onto paved streets. Hogan was growling. “My place is like a fortress, you sleep in a doss-house. If those froggy looking bastards come after us, I know where I’d rather be holed up.”

“How’s it going to look for a copper to bunk with a known bootlegger?” Vergil complained. “You trying to get me fired?”

Hogan dried up for the half second it took him to swerve into a driveway. “You can come back from fired. Can’t come back from dead.”

Vergil scrambled for more excuses. “What about your people, how is it going to look if you bring me home with you?”

Hogan grinned. “Sheik like you? They’ll think I got lucky?”

Vergil blushed despite everything and he could see Hogan’s smirk getting wider with each passing second. “Guy like you must have the pick of every prom-chaser in town.”

“Ab-so-lute-ly. And out of all the fellas in the all the world, I picked you.”

When Vergil laughed, it came out as an unexpected bark and he looked as surprised to have made the noise as anyone else was to hear it. “You been running that line for long?”

“You like it? You can keep it. I’ve got plenty to spare.”

“I bet you do.” Vergil was still smiling, still staring at Hogan’s face as laughter twisted every part of it until he barely looked like the same man. Vergil could get used to this. He could get used to spending his time in flash cars smiling at handsome men and laughing along with their jokes. He supposed that was why men like Hogan were so insidious. You let everything slide because you wanted them more than you wanted things to be right.

* * * *

Their smiles vanished abruptly when Hogan slammed on the brakes at the top of the drive. There was a huddle of bodies outside of the front door of what Vergil was forced to call a mansion. Out in front of them one of the flappers from the club was waiting for them with a tommy-gun aimed right at Vergil’s chest through the windshield. Vergil’s first instinct was to go for his piece, but somewhere between baring his chest and bearing his soul, he had slipped his holster off so all he could do was grip the upholstery and hope Hogan had been right about how tolerant his outfit were of his proclivities. Hogan was out of the car before the engine even turned off, talking in that low growl of his to the girl who had the gun turned down to point at the gravel a second later.

Vergil started to breathe again and contemplated the shimmer of metal wrapped in leather down by his feet. Probably wasn’t worth the risk right at that moment. When he looked up Hogan was back at the door with his emerald eyes sparkling by the light of the mob’s flashlights. “My boys have found the boat, but we’ve got to roll if we want to catch them before they ship out again.”

Vergil nodded. “Alright, if we swing by the station I can get us a crew of bulls to knock the place down.”

Hogan rubbed at the back of his neck and grumbled. “Might be better to handle this without any interference from the clubhouse. Just in case it goes south.”

Vergil scowled. “You mean you want to be able to murder them without comeuppance?”

Hogan pitched his down his voice so only Vergil could hear him. “I mean that if we got trouble like we had in Innsmouth, I’d rather not have to explain it all to some palookas with buzzers.”

Vergil open and shut his mouth a few times before snapping. “Alright, let’s roll.”

“You don’t want to think about getting stitched up first?”

Vergil rolled his shoulder and felt each hypodermic tooth jabbing right back into his flesh again with every movement. “Some pretty nurse patched me up real good. Besides, I’ve had worse.”

“You’re a real Bruno, you know that?” Hogan snorted.

“Been called worse than that too.”

After another swerve to get refuelled they went tearing up the road alongside the Miskatonic, heading further and further from the coast and the distant nightmares of the fishing village by the sea. A car full of Hogan’s heavies was following along behind them, but no car in Arkham had as many hogs as Hogan’s roadster so they were out of sight before the lights of civilisation faded behind them. The silence didn’t last long. “What you so glum for? Didn’t you want to catch your killer?”

Vergil’s smile shone in the moonlight. “Just thinking how I missed my chance to sleep in a fancy bed in a fancy house.”

“If you think I’m letting you out of my sight after all this, you’re in for a shocker. I don’t care about the kidnapping charges, if I need to carry you in that house slung over my shoulder, you’ll be going in.” Some of the growl had crept back into Hogan’s voice, and while Vergil knew he should probably have felt worried, he was more relieved that despite everything that had happened—despite everything that he had let slip—this man could still want him. He patted Hogan’s hand. “Watch yourself, I’m not going to go without a fight.”

Hogan’s grin took on an almost sinister cast in the deep shadows now that the car’s roof had been pulled up. “I bet you ain’t.”

Bits and pieces of the story were filtered through to Vergil with all the overwhelmingly illegal parts carefully clipped out. There had been some questions asked with some degree of forcefulness and several gentlemen who were known to keep an eye on the river for no particular purpose and certainly not in the employ of any sort of gang, spilled every secret they’d ever had. They mentioned a boat passing in the night, couldn’t be certain if it was the boat in question. After some more forceful questions they also mentioned that it was running silent, with the motor turned off, which made sense when it came past Arkham but didn’t make a jot of sense out here in the sticks. Particularly with some of the white waters they were driving past on the way to the lost boat’s final resting place. The boat itself had been spotted by one of Hogan’s other smuggling ships as it made the safe journey back down to sea with an empty hold. Only luck had them passing the willow-shrouded bay where the lost boat had been lazily hidden and only luck had them stop in Arkham to resupply with tobacco. Vergil hated luck. He didn’t trust it any more than astrology or fortune cards. If it went one way it would go the other just as quick and with just as little reason.

It was an hour’s drive up from Arkham in Hogan’s car to the little shack by the waterside and probably a half hour longer in anyone else’s. The plan was to stake it out in case the killers tried to make a break for it before the cavalry arrived, but even so, Vergil stripped off his tattered jacket, tightened up the bandages on his leg and fixed his holster back in place. Every moment of their last drive together had been full of chatter, even though most of it had been on miserable subjects Vergil would rather have pushed out of his mind for the rest of his life. This time it was filled with the companionable silence of men heading off to war, whether they were willing to admit it or not.

By design, they overshot the turn-off for the dirt track that would lead them to the water’s edge and nestled the Breezer under another copse of trees. Vergil had always lived in cities, the only willows he’d ever come across were the prim and proper ones you found in public parks. These ones were half-rotten wretched things with water, sap, and the slime of corruption dribbling off their trailing branches and staining the leather of the roof, much to Hogan’s muted dismay.

Vergil and Hogan crept forward through the long grass with hands barely touching so they wouldn’t get parted. The darkness here was deeper than you ever saw in Arkham, even in the city’s most shadowed places it couldn’t match the true darkness you found out here in the places beyond mankind’s reach. The warmth of another living person was the only respite. By the time they reached the shack, their fingers were entangled. As far as bootleggers’ hideouts went, Vergil couldn’t fault it. It was well hidden from both road and river, and even if somebody did happen by they would assume the place had been long abandoned from the way it was toppling towards the water and overgrown. Hogan leaned in close enough to kiss and growled. “You see my boat down there?”

Vergil shook his head, then remembered where he was and whispered back, “I couldn’t see the hand in front of my face.”

“We need to get closer.”

“They might run.”

“They might be running already. We need to get closer.”

This wasn’t the place for a long drawn out argument, and even if it was, Hogan was already moving.

The dirt track, already barely wide enough for a rabbit, turned to mud in the last stretch and in his wingtips Hogan was sliding all over the place. If it were any other time, Vergil would have been laughing at the slick gangster trying to stay on his feet, but here and now every time he heard the slapping of Hogan’s feet on the mud he flinched and waited for the storm of bullets to come flying. The closer they got the heap of rotten wood, the less it looked likely to have anyone inside. Up against the backside of the hut, hidden amidst the tangle of pussy-willows, Vergil paused. From here he would have been able to feel the heat of a stove, no matter how well the smugglers had muffled the glow. Maybe Hogan was right. Or maybe this whole thing was a trap and Vergil had been a fool all along. He stared at Hogan in the dark, trying to pick out the details of his features in the mass of black. Even when he was staring right at him in the daylight he couldn’t be certain.

Hogan whispered, “I’m going around front. Watch my back.” Then he leaned close enough to brush his lips against Vergil’s. It was a casual thing, the kind of kiss Vergil figured husbands gave their wives when they passed each other in the kitchen. It pinned him in place for the moment it took Hogan to slip away. “Damnit.”

Vergil’s piece was in his hand almost without a thought and he took off running after the bootlegger. Hogan’s silhouette was nowhere to be seen down the length of the collapsing shack. Vergil grumbled to himself. “Where has that heel gone?”

He spotted movement further out and it drew his eye up to the ship that had set this whole mess in motion. He took a step out towards Hogan before he heard the unmistakeable sound of a gasp behind him.

The moon chose that moment to break through the clouds and time seemed to slow. Vergil saw the smuggler with a shotgun pointed at Hogan. The piker looked like every other Innsmouth goon they had met in the past day. Bug-eyed and jowly. He saw Hogan with his pistol pointed right back at his old employee in a Mexican standoff. The door of the shack hung open. One of the suspenders on the smuggler’s waders was hanging off his shoulder. He’d come out to take a piss and caught Hogan coming around the corner. Someone was missing. Vergil heard movement behind him and spun again, back to the silhouette he had first mistaken for Hogan down by the water. The third man on the boat.

Vergil wished the moon had blinked out. He wished he couldn’t see the thing in front of him. The third man wasn’t a man at all. Vergil’s eyes refused to make sense of it at first, then he started to pick out shapes. Elements of real creatures had been melted into this horror. The ridge above the eyes was unmistakably amphibian. The shape, underneath the contortions and scales, had at least started as human though now the arms hung long like an ape’s and terminated not in hands but in claws that shone wet and ready in the moonlight. Vergil understood he should shout out a warning, that he should grab Hogan and run and never come back. Instead he levelled his pistol on the abomination and fired.

The muzzle flash blinded him. The acrid sting of gunpowder filled his nose. The sudden explosion of sound in the dead of night left his ears ringing. All of Vergil’s senses abandoned him except for touch, and though his hands trembled he could still feel the trigger against his finger.

He pulled the trigger again. And again. With each flash he caught a nightmarish glimpse of the thing getting closer. Where his bullets bit into its flesh there was little more than a mark. A scale out of place. Nothing more. He emptied his piece but it kept coming.

Still night blind, Vergil staggered back a few steps before he hit Hogan. Waite was on the ground at their feet dead or unconscious, Vergil didn’t care. He snatched up the shotgun and unloaded both barrels down towards the river. Buckshot scattered off the fish-man’s scales. Hogan cursed, but whatever instinct had made Vergil rebel against the very existence of that evil thing was present in him too. He opened fire.

Something beyond panic crept back into Vergil’s head. He ducked under Hogan’s arm and caught him around the waist. “Run you fool. Run.”

He dragged Hogan back up the path, slipping backwards with every other step as the bootlegger roared and fired shot after shot down into the beast that followed. The car was just up ahead. Vergil could see the willow that hid it in the moonlight. Hogan threw his empty pistol with a grunt and it bounced harmlessly off the thing. A little whimper escaped his throat and he started to go limp in Vergil’s arms.

With one last burst of effort, Vergil threw him towards the trees. “Run, you idiot. Get the car going. I’ll be right behind you. Run!”

It was a funny thing the war had done to men; no matter how paralyzed with terror they were, when someone barked an order their bodies still moved to follow it. Hogan started to sprint. Vergil turned to face the beast in the moonlight. The moment his eyes were set on it again his throat started to clench in terror, but fear was like any other reaction of the body, you learned to manage it with time. Vergil slurred out. “Philip Manuxet?”

With nothing to chase, the monster had slowed and hearing those words it’s head cocked to the side. A golden eye the size of a saucer blinked at Vergil. It understood him. Now that he had a moment, details his mind had rejected in their horror started slipping through to Vergil. There were tatters of sodden cloth hanging from the creature’s ridged back and from its jagged joints. “You were a man once, weren’t you?”

It let out a keening whine and lumbered forward another step. It didn’t understand why Vergil wasn’t afraid and the confusion was keeping it at bay. “You were a man, from Innsmouth, like the rest. You are just…further along.”

The thing cocked its head the other way and a long trail of clear liquid started to dribble from between its needle teeth.

“But Louis, he wasn’t local, was he? He married into it. I saw his body. He didn’t have the look like one of you. Like any of you. So when you finally changed, he panicked. He saw what the future held for those kids of his. He saw the true face of the thing he had been kneeling and praying to all those years and he ran. That is why Waite shot him.”

The creature was close enough to touch now, close enough that the reek of the deep ocean rot seeping from between its scales was enough to choke Vergil. It raised its claws above its head, looming up as though it could tear down the moon, and it let out a hiss. The message was clear. Vergil’s next words would be his last.

“Dagon?” It froze.

“Cthulhu?” It flinched.

Some wall within Vergil crumbled and it all came back in a tidal wave of horror. He took a step closer and he smiled. “You think your little gods frighten me, fish-boy? I have looked through the keyhole of the silver gate. I have met the eye of Yog-Sothoth.”

The towering monster stumbled backwards under the weight of his words. The last whispered word reverberated out through the deafening silence of the night.

“Run back to your brothers. Run back to your Dagon. Tell them who watches over Arkham. Tell them the next time one of you comes crawling up the Miskatonic River, you will all have to answer to a higher power.”

The monster turned tail and ran.

Vergil heard it splashing back into the river a moment after it was out of sight, and once he was certain it was gone, he collapsed onto the grass, gasping for air. He hadn’t eaten since his crackers the previous night, or he was sure he would have been sick. The darkness when his eyes were open was little different from when he crushed them shut and seared into his mind were the awful glimpses of the creature he had just seen. The proof that a lifetime of nightmares had not been the product of his own sick mind. He knew he should be afraid, and from the way he quivered and wept, he knew no small part of what he was feeling in that moment was absolute mind-numbing terror at the fundamental truths of the universe he had learned to be truth, but deep down in his heart there was a seed of something else. Vindication.

He went with Hogan easily when the other man came to fetch him off the ground and nestled in his warm embrace in the car while they waited without complaint. When the other bootleggers arrived, neither one of the men who had borne witness to what happened said a word. They despatched the mob to fetch the stolen liquor from the boat neither had the stomach to get too near, and then turned back to town. Hogan had driven like a maniac before his world was shaken to the core, now he drove like he could outpace his memories. They were almost back to Arkham before he finally spoke. “What did you say to…it?”

Vergil wet his lips. “I told it there were bigger fish in the pond. And that I wasn’t scared of it.”

Hogan laughed, and it was like music. “You lying bastard.”

“Guess nobody ever taught it how to bluff.” Vergil grinned back at him.

“Jesus, remind me never to cut a deck with you. You even had me fooled.”

* * * *

They got back to Hogan’s mansion before sunrise and there wasn’t even the hint of a suggestion that Vergil was going to go somewhere else. As they walked from one opulent room to the next Hogan snapped on the electric lights until his whole house, from hallway to bedroom was illuminated. Like he was trying to drive out any hint that there might have ever been darkness there. So there were no shadows for something to be hiding in. Vergil trailed along behind him, taking it all in and marvelling that anyone could possibly need so much stuff just to live a life.

Hogan had passed through the doorway into his bedroom before he stopped and turned to Vergil with a look of some embarrassment. “I’m sorry. We ain’t even spoken since before…I know you don’t want to be here. Not with me. But I…I’d rather not be alone tonight. I know your job—”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s just a job.”

“And I know you don’t want any capers. You were clear as crystal. I can keep my mitts to myself. This is just business, see. I just need you here to watch my back in case anything else happens.”

“There you go again, turning virtue into vice.”

Vergil closed the distance between them with a step and he kissed Hogan like he had wanted to the moment he first laid eyes on him. He ran his fingers through Hogan’s hair and luxuriated in the feeling of his curls coming loose and tickling across his palms. He caught Hogan’s lip between his teeth and dragged out a groan before he let it go. Vergil’s hands moved without any input from him. They didn’t need his thoughts when they had his hunger to guide them. Fancy buttons from Hogan’s waistcoat scattered across the polished wood of the floors and he let a little yelp into Vergil’s mouth. Vergil was surprised at the sound of his own voice when it came out, deep and growling; it drew a shiver from Hogan. “You can’t afford to get some buttons stitched?”

“Jesus, let me do them if you’re just going to rip everything off.”

Vergil rolled his eyes and gave him a push to sprawl him over the end of the bed. As Hogan struggled valiantly with his shirt buttons, Vergil dropped to his knees on the bearskin and unsnapped the bootlegger’s braces. There was a little gasp from further up the bed when he hauled the trousers and underwear down in one motion, but it didn’t compare to the noises Hogan made a moment later when Vergil’s lips found him.

“Jesus Christ! Where did you learn to do that—” His voice caught a hitch when Vergil’s tongue darted out on his way back up.

“I never said I was a saint. That was your job, remember?”

He fell on Hogan again like he had been starved half his life and for a few blissful minutes the other man let him have his way. Vergil liked this, he had always liked it, even when it had to be done in secret on your knees in the trench with the other man keeping watch. It was more than just the heat and the taste and the unique sensations. He loved the moment when he had complete control. When the other man was on the edge of reason. The point Hogan was a few seconds away from reaching when he hissed. “Get up here. I ain’t done with you yet.”

With some reluctance, Vergil drew back. Despite the frequency of the encounters he had experienced before deciding that this part of his life was another artefact of his upbringing, he had never really seen a man like this before. Reddened and ready. It had always been in the dark. He looked up at Hogan, who had finally managed to get his other clothes out of the way, and he realised he was still wearing everything but his hat, which had fallen off somewhere during the running earlier in the night.

Hogan struggled up onto his elbows and grinned down at him, love-drunk and sinister in equal measure. “Will you get out of those damn clothes?”

Vergil forced himself to shed his shirt and trousers. He waited for the hiss, for Hogan to draw away from him again like he had with the last scar. Instead, Hogan was raking him up and down with an appreciative stare. “Now get up here, buttons. I’ve got plans for you.”

Vergil fell into the bed on top of Hogan and almost immediately he realised how much he had been missing. Feeling the other man moving beneath him, the heat rolling off his body, every fine hair of his body trailing over his skin; Vergil felt like he was coming back to life.

He kissed Hogan again and this time it didn’t stop. They found a rhythm as they writhed against each other. Hogan’s hands had drifted down to his ass to keep pulling him in closer. With each movement, however tiny, they brushed against each other. With each touch the lights blazing all around the room seemed to grow brighter. The electric light inside him grew brighter too. When Hogan came beneath him Vergil was almost too far gone to notice. It was only when the bucking of his lover’s hips grew frantic and drove him over the edge that he could remember his own name.

They cleaned themselves off with Hogan’s shirt once it had been pulled out from underneath them, then they settled in the bed under some fancy under-down that must have cost more than Vergil made in a year. This felt stranger to Vergil than anything else he had seen or done all night. Sex made sense. Monsters made sense. But this strange intimacy, wrapped up in the warmth of another person, that was frightening in a way he wasn’t ready to face up to. Hogan drifted off to sleep promptly, snoring like he was ossified in a couple of minutes.

Vergil didn’t sleep so easily with the glimpses of everything that had happened still gnawing at him from his memories. He could try to forget again—it had kept him sane for a few years at least—but he found he wasn’t so willing to part with these memories. He rolled over to stare at a gap in the curtains. There was a big bay window in Hogan’s bedroom and on the far side of the bright lit panes there was flat darkness. Vergil stared out into the night with the warmth of Hogan at his back. He closed his eyes and slipped down into a dreamless sleep.

THE END

ABOUT G.D. PENMAN

G.D. Penman writes about queer monsters for a living. He is the author of Call Your Steel, the Witch of the Empire series, Apocrypha, and many other books. He is also a full-time freelance writer and has ghost-written more than 50 books on a wide variety of subjects, although of course he can’t tell you what any of them are.

He lives in Scotland with his partner and children, some of whom are human.

In those precious few moments when he isn’t writing or parenting, he enjoys watching cartoons, playing games, reading more books than should logically fit into a week, and complaining about his diet.

For more information, visit gdpenman.com.

ABOUT JMS BOOKS LLC

JMS Books LLC is a small queer press with competitive royalty rates publishing LGBT romance, erotic romance, and young adult fiction. Visit jms-books.com for our latest releases and submission guidelines!