Lovecraft Country

by Matt Ruff

  The Book itself went to Ruth, who spent the next quarter century trying unsuccessfully to collect the money. The surviving members of the white Burns clan felt that their responsibility had ended with the destruction of the plantation, and they ignored Ruth’s letters—as did eleven governors of Georgia and six U.S. presidents.

  Eventually Ruth passed the Book on to her eldest daughter, Lucy, who passed it, in turn, to George. Horace would be the Book’s next steward, unless Montrose, who had appointed himself deputy bookkeeper at the age of five, pried it from George’s dead hands first. As for George and Montrose’s sister, Ophelia, the middle child, she’d long ago removed herself from the line of succession. She’d be there for Thanksgiving, with a pen—out of the three of them, she’d always had the cleanest hand—but the safekeeping of the Book she left to her brothers.

  She knew they would never let anything happen to it.

  George and Montrose met outside the bank at noon, having come by separate routes. This had been standard procedure since 1946, when, driving together to pick up the Book the day before Thanksgiving, they’d been stopped by police and, one thing leading to another, had been hauled to the precinct house, where only a hefty bribe had sufficed to get them out before the bank closed for the holiday.

  Today both their journeys had been uneventful, but as they entered the bank they could tell that something was amiss. The lobby was packed, unusually so even for a lunch hour, with lines snaking from the teller windows all the way to the door. And where ordinarily the bank’s manager, Ben Rosenfeld, would have been out on the floor to greet them, today they were met by a security guard, Whitey Dunlap.

  “What’s going on, Whitey?” George asked. Looking across the lobby, he could see the blinds were drawn on both the manager’s and assistant manager’s offices.

  “Cops were in earlier,” Whitey explained, keeping his voice low. “Detectives from the organized crime squad.”

  “What’d they want?” said Montrose.

  Whitey shrugged. “They had me posted out on the sidewalk, so I don’t really know, but we were an hour late opening and a rumor got started there was a run on the bank. Mr. Rosenfeld’s been on the phone with depositors all morning, trying to calm things down. He said to say he’s sorry he can’t serve you personally, but I can take care of you.”

  The safe deposit vault was in the basement. Whitey unlocked the vault door and ushered them inside, then stooped to pick a cigar butt off the floor. Frowning, he checked the corners of the vault as if the litterbug might still be present.

  George got his deposit box key out. “You mind, Whitey?”

  “Sure . . .” Holding the cigar butt pinched between two fingers, Whitey fished out his own key.

  As George withdrew the box from its slot in the wall, Montrose stood close, ready to leap in if George suffered a sudden stroke or got raptured away. He saw George’s expression change as George realized the box was light.

  “What?” said Montrose. George lifted the box lid. Inside was the leather folder that contained the Berry family’s 1833 emancipation papers, along with other, more recent documents like Horace’s birth certificate. But the Book of Days, which should have been lying on top of it, was missing, and in its place was a terse handwritten note:

  THE WITCH’S HAMMER

  750 W. Berwick Street

  At your earliest convenience.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Montrose.

  The note was signed with the half-sun symbol of the Order of the Ancient Dawn.

  They went together, in George’s Packard.

  “Tell me you brought the gun,” Montrose said as George was getting the car started.

  “Under my seat,” George replied, but when Montrose tried to reach for it, George checked him. “I’ll handle it.”

  “You’re going to shoot him?”

  “I’m going to get Adah’s book back.” He resisted the urge to point out that Montrose had already had his chance to shoot Caleb Braithwhite and it hadn’t gone so well. “You want to help, get my city map from the glove box and find that address.” Grumbling, Montrose complied.

  George tried to be patient with his brother. And that was how he thought of Montrose, how he always introduced him to people: as his brother, not his half-brother. Kinship being, to George’s way of thinking, an in-or-out proposition. Still, the fact of their different fathers was inescapable at times, and never so much as in the matter of Adah’s book.

  The Berrys had been blessed, their last owner, Lucius Berry, being one of the rare true Christians salted among the ranks of the so-called faithful. Lucius’s parents and siblings had died in the 1832 cholera epidemic, leaving him sole ownership of the family tobacco farm and the seven human beings who worked it. Interpreting the epidemic as divine confirmation of what his conscience already knew, Lucius set out to atone for his family’s sin: He sold off the rest of his inheritance, put his slaves into wagons, and escorted them safely out west, where he gave them not just their freedom but money and land to make a new start. Proving that such an act was indeed possible.

  “Blessed” didn’t, of course, mean free of all suffering. The emancipated Berrys still had their share of tribulations. One of the original seven was murdered by white settlers who objected to sharing a property line with a colored man, and out of the first generation of freeborn Berrys, three sons and a daughter were lost to the Civil War. And then there was George’s father, Jacob Berry, a successful businessman, dead at age twenty-four, his prosperity no shield against the asthma that plagued him all his short life. George had been only three, and Ophelia still a baby, when a cloud of dust stirred up by a passing horse cart sent Jacob Berry’s lungs into their final, fatal spasm.

  After her first husband’s death, Lucy Berry married Ulysses Turner, a man with a very different family history. The Turners, George’s stepfather never tired of saying, had been given nothing: not freedom, not even their name. Ulysses’s grandfather had been born Simon Swincegood on the Swincegood plantation in North Carolina. In 1857 he’d escaped into the Great Dismal Swamp, where he lived as a maroon for six years before emerging to join the Union Army. It was while in the swamp that he’d taken the name Nat Turner—a popular sobriquet among the maroons, and one that had to be earned through feats of prowess, like killing slave catchers and raiding white settlements.

  Or so the story, as told by Ulysses, went. In hindsight, George recognized these tales of Great-grandpa Turner’s exploits as his first exposure to pulp fiction—which was not to say they were fantasy, only that they were more “inspired by actual events” than gospel truth. But Montrose believed every word, and it was no surprise that he grew up thinking a Turner, not a Berry, ought to be the guardian of Adah’s book.

  George knew his stepfather shared Montrose’s opinion. The man made no secret of his disdain for how “easy” the Berrys had had it, or of his belief that George had been born soft. But as a Turner, he was bound to respect certain traditions. And so it transpired that on the last night of May 1921—the night white Tulsa declared war on black Tulsa—Ulysses allowed George, against his mother’s wishes, to go and rescue Adah’s book from the safe in Ulysses’s shop on Archer Street, even as the first wave of white arsonists were crossing the railroad tracks. Because of the other events of that awful night, George never bragged about what he’d done, never tried to hold it over Montrose’s head, but he knew he’d proved himself, and he knew Montrose knew it too.

  “Berwick Street,” Montrose said now, showing him on the map. “It’s up in Lake View.”

  “All right,” George said. “Hang on.” He sped north, driving in a way no colored man should drive when headed into white Chicago. But the enchantment laid on the Packard in Ardham still held, causing traffic cops and patrolmen to either avert their eyes from the car or stare straight through it. Which would have been gratifying, George reflected, if not for the knowledge that he was using Caleb Braithwhite’s magic to do Caleb Braithwhite’s bidding.

  The s
ign outside the Witch’s Hammer showed a tall-hatted Puritan burning a woman at the stake. The building would have been easy to overlook, otherwise: Blank brickface with a high-set row of glass blocks in lieu of a front window. Steel door painted to match the brick. The kind of place that would have, and maybe had, made a good location for a Prohibition speakeasy.

  George got out of the car holding the pistol at his side. Montrose opened the back of the Packard and armed himself with a tire iron.

  A handwritten note taped above the door handle said the Witch’s Hammer was CLOSED FOR PRIVATE FUNCTION, but the door wasn’t locked. With Montrose at his heel, George went inside, into a long low-ceilinged barroom.

  Caleb Braithwhite was seated at a table in the middle of the room with another white man, who was in the process of lighting a cigar. The cigar man was a big, thickset bruiser, with graying brown hair styled in a flattop. His nose looked like it had been broken more than once in the past and the burst capillaries in his cheeks spoke of decades of heavy drinking, but the blue eyes that regarded George and Montrose through a haze of smoke were alert and intelligent.

  Two more white men stood leaning against the bar. They’d removed their jackets, exposing matching shoulder holsters, and police stars pinned to their vests. Sandwiched between them was a Negro man with his head bowed, hands cuffed in front of him. George almost didn’t recognize his nephew, who was supposed to be in Iowa today on a research trip for the Guide.

  Atticus looked up, embarrassed.

  “Hi, Uncle George,” he said.

  “George Berry and Montrose Turner,” Caleb Braithwhite said, “these are Detectives Burke and Noble”—he nodded at the men bracketing Atticus—“and Captain Lancaster of the mayor’s commission on organized crime. Captain Lancaster also heads the local chapter of the Order. We’ve been negotiating a merger of the Ardham and Chicago lodges, and as part of that, we’ve decided to pool our resources on a research project—one that I’d like you to help us with.”

  George barely heard the words. Atticus’s presence had caught him off guard, as it was no doubt intended to. In his confusion he let his thumb stray to the hammer of the pistol he was holding. It was the tiniest of gestures, but the detectives reacted by reaching for their own guns and Captain Lancaster slipped a beefy hand into his jacket.

  “Gentlemen,” Braithwhite said softly, making everyone pause. “Let’s not be hasty . . . Captain Lancaster, I think I saw a bottle of forty-year-old Dalmore in the back room. Why don’t you and your men go help yourselves while I explain matters to Mr. Berry and Mr. Turner?”

  “You sure?” the captain said.

  “We’ll be fine.” Smiling: “We’re all friends here.”

  Captain Lancaster stood up and pointed a warning finger at George. Then he nodded to the detectives and the three of them left the room.

  “So,” Caleb Braithwhite said. “Let’s get the ground rules out of the way. Violence won’t work. I have immunity.” He looked George in the eye. “You can’t shoot me. Or hit me.” He shifted his gaze to Montrose, who was straining fruitlessly to raise the tire iron above the level of his waist. “And even if you could, it wouldn’t get Adah’s book back. Now, if all that’s clear, let’s see if we can deal with one another like civilized people.” Turning finally to Atticus, Braithwhite unlocked the cuffs with a wave of his hand.

  “What is it you want?” George said.

  “A trade,” said Caleb Braithwhite. “A book for a book. What I was saying just now, about merging the two lodges? This isn’t the first time that’s been attempted. In the 1930s, my father tried to reach a similar arrangement with a former lodgemaster of Chicago.”

  “Hiram Winthrop,” Atticus guessed.

  Braithwhite nodded. “It didn’t work out. And it ended the way things usually do, when powerful men can’t come to terms.”

  “What’s that got to do with a book?” said George.

  “Winthrop was an explorer. He traveled to some very interesting places and brought things back with him. One of the most valuable was a book, written in the language of Adam.”

  “A magic book?”

  “A treatise on natural philosophy. A rough English translation of the title would be The Book of Naming, or The Book of Names.”

  Atticus raised an eyebrow. “The Necronomicon?”

  Braithwhite smiled. “That would be a book of dead names. The Book of Names is just the opposite. Its subject is life. Transformation. Genesis.”

  “So what happened to it?” George asked.

  “After Hiram Winthrop’s death, my father managed to acquire a number of his former possessions. But the book wasn’t among them. My father assumed Winthrop had hidden it somewhere. Unfortunately, Chicago had become unsafe for him by that point, so he wasn’t able to conduct a thorough search.”

  “But your new friends, they know where it is?”

  “According to Captain Lancaster, the book is in the Museum of Natural History. Hiram Winthrop was on the board, and he apparently had a secret room installed.”

  “So why not just go get it, then?”

  Braithwhite glanced over his shoulder at the door to the back room. Then he said in a low voice: “The captain’s being cagey about it, but I know he hasn’t been lodgemaster for very long. And nobody wants to talk about what happened to the previous lodgemaster . . . Anyway, the deal is, he shows me the entrance to the secret room, and I go in and get the book . . .”

  “. . . or find someone to get it for you,” George concluded. “And if we say no—”

  “Then you’ve got till Thursday,” Braithwhite said shrugging, “to decide how to break the bad news to the rest of the family.”

  That night was the scheduled monthly meeting of the Prince Hall Freemasons. With the holiday coming up, attendance was expected to be light, but the lodge secretary, Abdullah Muhammad, was required to be there. And Abdullah—his given name was Percy Jones—had a cousin who worked as a night watchman at the natural history museum.

  George and Montrose showed up early, hoping to talk to Abdullah before the meeting. But Abdullah arrived only just on time, having stopped to pick up the lodgemaster, Joe Bartholomew, who everyone called Pirate Joe for the eyepatch he wore.

  One member who did show up early was Mortimer Dupree. Mortimer was a dentist who had, in the words of Montrose, got hypnotized by the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill. Of course there were a lot of people with romantic misconceptions about Freemasonry; those who joined learned to embrace it as the social club, charity, and mutual-aid organization that it actually was, or quit in disillusionment when they found out they weren’t going to become secret masters of the universe. Mortimer had chosen the former course, but still clung to the hope that there was a Masonic inner circle that ordinary Masons weren’t told about, and that one day he’d get a tap on the shoulder. Meanwhile, he did what he could to demonstrate himself worthy.

  Lodge meetings typically included a lecture for the edification of the membership. In the past, George had spoken about the practicalities of growing and expanding a business, and Montrose had given a talk on genealogical research. Mortimer’s lectures tended to more occult subject matter, like the mysterious moving coffins of Barbados, or the Nazca lines of Peru. Tonight when George and Montrose arrived, he was setting up a scale model of King Tut’s tomb, complete with figurines of Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon.

  Ordinarily George would have been happy to hear a story about the mummy’s curse, but tonight he had other priorities, so as soon as the meeting got under way, he moved to suspend regular business so he could make a special appeal for aid. The motion was granted, but soon enough George realized his error: For though he spoke of Caleb Braithwhite in as mundane a way as possible, he could see Mortimer getting more and more excited. And when he got to The Book of Names, Mortimer immediately drew the same connection Atticus had, and blurted it out, to the confusion of those present who were unfamiliar with the works of H. P. Lovecraft.

  “The Necronom
icon?” said Pirate Joe. “What’s that?”

  “A book of black magic,” Mortimer said enthusiastically. “Written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred . . .”

  “The stuttering Arab, more like,” said Abdullah. “It’s ‘Abd al,’ not ‘Ab-dool.’ Abd means ‘servant’ and al is ‘the,’ so Abd al al-Hazred would be ‘servant of the-the Hazred.’”

  Pirate Joe blinked his eye. “What’s a hazred?”

  “A white guy from Rhode Island trying to be funny,” said Montrose.

  “Forget the Necronomicon,” George said impatiently. “This is about a real book.”

  “A real magic book,” said Abdullah.

  “Well . . . Supposedly.”

  “Meaning what? You don’t believe it’s magic?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me.” Abdullah pressed a hand to his chest. “Abd Allah. Servant of God. There’s a lot I’ll do for a lodge brother, George, but one thing I won’t be party to is making an evil man more powerful. It sounds like this Caleb Braithwhite is bad enough already.”

  “He is,” George said. “Which is why we’re not actually going to give him the book. The way it’s supposed to go, Montrose, my nephew, and I meet Braithwhite and his friends on Wednesday, after the museum closes. They take us inside, show us where the secret room is, and we go in and get this Book of Names. But what I want to do is go in early—tomorrow night—and find the room and The Book of Names ahead of time. And then—”

  “And then,” said Mortimer, “you swap in a decoy—a fake Book of Names, which you ‘find’ on Wednesday and give to Braithwhite in exchange for your great-grandma Adah’s book!”

  George looked at him crossly. “Yeah,” he acknowledged.

  “But where do you get a fake Book of Names from?” Pirate Joe wanted to know.

  “I’m still working on that,” George said. “The thing is, we know that Winthrop, the guy who hid the book, was serious about keeping Braithwhite’s father from getting his hands on it. So who’s to say this whole secret room isn’t a decoy? The way I figure it, it’s OK if Braithwhite realizes the book we give him is fake, as long as he believes the fake came from Winthrop.”