"Anyone you recognize?" I ask, as Sutton kneels down by the side of the lake, his face looking pale under the glow of my Candlelight spell as he studies the corpse sticking out of the water. I know virtually nothing about forensics other than what I've seen on TV and I'm fairly certain most of that is nonsense, but the body doesn't look like it's been down here all that long. It's begun to rot, but it's still recognizable, especially considering it's been submerged in a lake. I think that makes it decay faster, anyway.
Sutton was understandably reluctant to come down here, but he agreed once I pointed out some of his missing friends might be here as well. The strange thing is, I should have been scrabbling to get out myself, considering that I saw.... whatever that was. But I'm not, oddly enough. Once the fear settled, it stayed gone, replaced by a kind of determination instead. A determination to find out whatever is on the other end of all of this.
Heh, or maybe I'm just in denial. Because either I was hallucinating, or dealing with a third-rate mad scientist will look like a tropical vacation compared to what else is lurking down here.
"Nah, doesn't ring any bells..." Sutton says, pulling back from the waterlogged corpse "Pretty sure he was one of the victims through, check this out..." He points to the side of the neck, where several puncture marks are still visible on the decaying skin.
"You sure he's not just a drug addict who overdosed, right?"
Sutton stares at me like I just went on Jeapordy and blew the first round by forgetting to give my answer in the form of a question "A junkie who had enough time to crawl down a sewer tunnel, through an underground ruin, and then dig his way beneath that too just so he could die in a lake? And they don't inject that shit into their NECKS!"
"Okay, okay, sorry, dumb question!" I say, holding up my hands "Just trying to cover all the bases here."
"Yeah, yeah, we done here or what?" Sutton says as he stands back up, dusting his hands off.
I shake my head "Actually, I think we should keep looking down here before we go back up."
There's that stare again "You wanna walk me through that idea?"
"Well, I doubt the psycho doing this tears up the street every time he wants to dump his latest victim, then paves it back over, so there must be some other way down here that he's using. If we can find that, we might even be able to catch him by surprise, since I don't think he's expecting anyone he's tossed down here to come back up."
Sutton sighs "Great, like this wasn't already creepy enough, now we take a scenic tour along Corpse Lake..."
...
Corpse Lake quickly turns out to be an apt description. I'm not sure if this was a naturally occuring underground lake, or if it's an artificial water supply for Old Gotham, but it's big, even bigger than I thought when I first fell down here. A narrow strip of rocky ground between the edge of the water and the rock wall forms a kind of beach that allows us to follow the lake further into the cave. We'd only been walking for a few minutes when we started seeing the shapes out in the water, the ones who have decayed enough to float up to the surface again. It's too dark to make out any details, even with the Candlelight, but the outline of human bodies is unmistakable...
Neither of us feel much like wading out into the pitch-black water to get a closer look, but we don't have to, as simply a glance down at the ground in front of us tell us all we need to know.
"Shit, how many people have this guy done this to..?" Sutton mutters, nudging a rotting, disembodied hand lying on the waters edge with his foot. Macabre flotsam like this litter the rocky beach, some of it seems to have simply come loose on it's own once the decay had proceeded far enough, while other parts seems to have been dismembered. I step over a skeletal leg, showing clear signs of a bonesaw at the cutoff points, and shake my head.
"These are too many bodies to have just been kidnapping victims, even a shithole like Gotham would have noticed these many people disappearing, even homeless ones. This is only a guess, but best I can figure, most of these are cadaver parts from hospitals or medical schools. He must've started grabbing living victims once he got all he could out of the dead ones. The real question is, what kind of research requires these many test subjects? What the hell is he up to?"
Sutton looks like he's about to answer, when the sound of a door unlocking somewhere ahead freezes both of us in our tracks. I snuff out the Candlelight and press myself against the wall, Sutton following me, just as the creak of rusty, ancient hinges echo across the water, and a door swings open a few hundred feet further down the beach. Dim, red light streams out from the opening, and a MASSIVE shape steps through! It's too far away to see much, but it's enormous, almost 8 feet tall, and while at first glance it looks like the figure is hunchbacked, on closer inspection it seems to be carrying something over it's shoulder. The body is covered by a grimy trenchcoat, and in the red glow from the opening, I catch a glimpse of an almost bald head, with only a few wisps of hair, and scarred, brown skin. The figure stops by the edge of the lake, and hoists it's burden into the water, causing a loud splash, before turning around and heading back through the door, slamming it shut and locking it behind it, plunging the cave back into darkness.
Next to me, I hear Sutton letting out the breath he was holding in "What... the fuck was that?!"
"Well, we've only got circumstantial evidence, but I'd say there's a decent chance that was our kidnapper..." I answer as I conjure up a new Candlelight. Not that seeing him in person told us much. Whatever that thing was, it was really fucking big, which we already knew. Though from the small glimpse I got, it didn't look like it had scales, so that probably rules out Croc. And the skin wasn't all white and sunken, so it wasn't Grundy either. Not that I seriously expected it to be either of them. We begin moving slowly towards the door, listening closely for approaching steps, but nothing else happens, and it seems like whoever that was, he's finished his job down here. At least, for now.
Sutton hangs back as we reach the door, and I step in for a closer look. It's old, maybe even older than the ruins above us, but solid, made from what I think might be oak, and reinforced with iron bands. It's secured with an old-fashioned lock, and while I could break it down with my Wrecker brass knuckles, that'd put an end to any kind of attempts at stealth. Luckily, I do have another option. I reach into my pocket-
"Fuck, Walter... look what those sickos have done to him!" Sutton says from behind me, and I turn around to see that he's discovered just what the figure was dumping down here. The body of the same dark-skinned man I remember from my first vision of this awful place is lying face-up on the beach, Sutton kneeling next to his now deceased friend. Walter is in even worse shape than when I saw him last, which is saying something, considering he was in the process of being put down like a sick dog. Cuts and incisions line the filthy skin, the blood long since dried up, while an ugly scar forms a circle around his bald scalp. For a moment, I'm reminded of the intensive care patients from the first Arkham Asylum game, though somehow, the sight of this is even worse...
"Damn... I'm sorry, man. I know you two were close..." I say, trying to come up with anything more comforting to say, and failing at it. I never got the impression that Arnold Sutton had a lot of people he considered friends, and seeing one of the few he did have in this state must be hell on him.
"I knew he was probably already dead, like you said, but... I don't know, I guess I just thought there might have been a chance..." He shakes his head "God, I'm such a fucking idiot. When do people like us ever get that kind of break?" He pulls Walter's body the rest of the way out of the water, before crossing the arms over the chest, and closing the eyes, giving Walter Gibbons as much dignity in death as the circumstances allow.
"When all this is over, I'm coming back for you, old pal." Sutton says as he gets back to his feet "Least I can do is give you a decent burial, I ain't gonna leave you down here to rot like old meat getting thrown out with the trash. But first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to get the sick bastard who did this to you!" He turns back to me "Look, Flagg, I'm grateful for getting us here, but when we find this guy, don't get in my way, alright? I ain't asking you to help me, but-"
I shrug "I'm not the police, man. You do what you gotta do."
"Good." He nods and looks at the door "Shit, I've picked my share of locks in my day, but I think this might be a bit beyond me. Any ideas?"
"Luckily, I thought I might run into this problem at some point, so a while back, I procured this!" I reach into one of the pockets of my jacket, and pull out a large, ornate brass key, a stylized silhouette of a bird carved into the handle. Sutton just stares at it, confused.
"The hell is that?"
"This my friend, is the President's Key, which can unlock any lock in the United States!"
Well, it's the next best thing, of course, since as far as I know, the actual key only exists in a future cartoon. A few weeks back I stumbled across an old-timey padlock and key in a thrift store, and the idea came to me. The lock is still in my office desk, waiting for me to come up with a use for it, but the key became the basis for my own version of Quentin Trempley's President's Key. The bird symbol I carved myself, while the magic it carries is a skeleton key spell imbued with the concept of the President's Key itself, allowing me to open doors and locks the key shouldn't fit into.
"What on Earth is a President's Key?" Sutton says, utterly lost "Never heard of it."
"Well, like I said, it can open any lock in the United States of America, and it's been passed down from the 8th And A Half President himself, Quentin Trembley!"
"The...who..?"
"Oh, I'll explain later, it's this whole... crazy thing..." I kneel down slightly in front of the lock, and push the key inside. It fits perfectly, like it was made exactly for this door, and with a twist, it unlocks with barely a single sound, like the rust and grime of centuries had never tainted the mechanism inside. I stand up, sliding the key back into my pocket, before putting my hand on the doorhandle, taking a deep breath.
"This is it, Arnold. Time to pay Doctor Death a home visit..."