Ghouls of the Miskatonic (The Dark Waters Trilogy) by Graham McNeill Page B

right, keeping his gun out before him and checking each doorknob as he passed. One was locked, the other led into a small bedroom that clearly hadn’t been used in decades. Sheet-draped furniture was scattered throughout the room like oblong ghosts, but one look at the undisturbed dust told Finn that nobody was hiding underneath.
    He moved on. The last room was a small bathroom, and he was about to close the door and catch up with Jimmy when he noticed the door in the corner of the room was open a fraction. He’d thought it an airing cupboard, but the hideous droning noise seemed louder here, like there was some kind of generator or transformer up there.
    Finn backed out of the bathroom and looked across the landing. Jimmy was puking his whiskey in the corner, and Finn waited until he looked over before beckoning him with a curt wave of his gun. He looked back into the room and he smelled Jimmy before he saw him.
    “Christ, you stink,” he said. “Come on.”
    Without waiting for a reply, Finn eased open the door in the corner of the room, smelling a stink worse than Jimmy’s vomit-spattered shoes. The buzzing sound was louder now, like a hive of angry bees poised to drop on him from a great height. It took an effort of will to peer around the doorframe. A narrow set of stairs led toward the attic, and with his gun stretched out before him, Finn took a hesitant step upward.  
    He turned back to Jimmy and whispered, “Keep to the edges, Jimmy. It’ll make the steps creak less.”
    Slowly Finn climbed the steps, his heart in his mouth, thudding like a great kettle drum and sounding unfeasibly loud. His breath echoed in his skull and a suffocating fear arose in him, as though his entire body were fighting against his ascent. Behind him, Jimmy stumbled and let loose a loud curse. Finn bit back an angry retort. Any hope of surprising the attic observer was now gone.
    If he couldn’t have surprise, he’d have ferocity. Though fear attempted to keep him rooted to the spot, he charged the rest of the way with a battle cry worthy of Cúchulain himself. He burst into the attic, a vast space enclosed by exposed rafters and the underside of the roof. Moonlight painted bright strips on the floor, and in the center of the arched space, suspended above a slender pedestal of brass was an irregular silver sphere that spun like a whirring globe. Finn took in all this sensory input as soon as he entered the attic, but the strange, hybrid… things hovering above the pedestal and working on the sphere with clicking, chitinous, multi-jointed limbs, those took him a moment longer.
    His raised gun lowered as he struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. Grotesque, with bulbous insectoid bodies and crab-like pincers, the monsters flew on ragged, bat-like wings that seemed not to flap, but simultaneously coexist at each stage required for flight. Where Finn might have expected a head or some form of sensory apparatus, there was nothing more than a gelatinous blob of glistening meat, like a brain shorn of its enclosing skull.
    Finn tried to rationalize what he was seeing with what he knew of the world, trying to shoehorn these creatures into a neat box where things made sense. It wasn’t working, and the sheer alien horror of these beings threatened to unhinge his mind.
    Then Jimmy blundered into the attic, tripping over his own clumsiness to fall flat on his face. He landed hard and his pistol went off with a deafening bang, blowing out the remains of a window. Finn jumped at the noise, his descent into madness momentarily stalled. The creatures swung around in the air, the meaty lumps of their heads spinning through a kaleidoscope of color. The buzzing increased in intensity, and Finn raised his pistol as one of them swooped toward him.
    His pistol boomed and his bullets slapped into the pulpy mass of the creature’s body, but didn’t appear to harm it in the slightest. Finn dropped to the ground as its slashing pincers clawed at