Lovecraft Country

by Matt Ruff

  New Orleans laughed. “Like Moses and the wise men of Pharaoh, Mr. Braithwhite? One snake gobbles up all the others? Is that what you have in mind?”

  “I’m hoping for something less confrontational,” Braithwhite said. “But why not? If you think your snake is the biggest.”

  “It’ll be a goddamned bloodbath.” This from Coeur d’Alene, which caused heads to swivel in surprise, for he sounded almost happy. “Snakes! More like wild dogs. We’ll rip each other to fucking pieces before we agree on who’s best.”

  “We might,” Braithwhite conceded. “I agree the chance of failure is high. But when I think of what we might accomplish as a unified lodge, I consider that a long shot worth playing.”

  “It’ll never work,” said Los Angeles.

  “You don’t have to come, then,” Braithwhite said. “But for those of you who are willing, there’ll be an additional incentive. By now you’ve all had a chance to see The Book of Names. There are other versions of the Book extant, but the Winthrop copy is unique—it’s by far the oldest, and it includes material not found in any other known edition.

  “The book was recently recovered after being missing for nearly twenty years. It properly belongs to the Chicago lodge, but Lodgemaster Lancaster has graciously allowed me access to it, and at my own considerable expense, I’m having copies made. One for each of you. They’ll be ready by Midsummer’s Day.”

  “World’s Fair door prizes, Mr. Braithwhite?” New York said, unable to conceal the tremble of excitement in her voice.

  “It’s not quite that simple,” he told her. “You’ll need to do a little more than just show up.”

  “What?” said Des Moines. “What do we have to do?”

  “Try,” Braithwhite said. He looked around the room, gathering them all in, and once again the light shining on him seemed to brighten. “Maybe we won’t be able to agree on a leader or a new set of by-laws. And a merger can’t work without real agreement, so to require success would be unreasonable. But a good-faith effort, that’s not too much to ask. And that’s what it’s going to take, if you want a copy of the book: a good-faith effort.”

  “And who decides—” Los Angeles began, but Braithwhite overrode him.

  “But if you can’t be bothered to even try? If you come in bad faith? If there is a bloodbath? Then you get nothing,” Braithwhite said. “And you deserve nothing. Because then you really are just a pack of alchemists.

  “So that’s the deal,” he concluded, “and I thank you for listening. Before we bring the waiters back in, I’ll give you one more thing to think about.

  “My father liked to say that history doesn’t stand still. The world has changed a great deal since Titus Braithwhite’s day, and it’s about to change a whole lot more. What remains to be decided is what say, if any, you’ll have in those changes. Do you want to choose your own future, or are you content to have it chosen for you? And if it’s the former, what are you willing to risk? Who, and what, are you willing to become?

  “These are the questions you need to consider. But think quickly. Because history doesn’t stand still—and we’re running out of time.”

  Once more Ruby lay on satin sheets, but in a bigger bed this time. Beyond the bed’s foot she could see Caleb Braithwhite, shirtless, seated on a stool at a vanity table, shaving.

  She had Hillary to blame for this. Driving back from the country club, Ruby had found herself strangely spellbound by the way the headlights of passing cars illuminated the planes of Braithwhite’s face, and by the motion of his arms and shoulders as he steered an evasive course through the city streets. She’d recognized that what she was experiencing was an effect of the same glamour Braithwhite had used to sway the crowd during his speech, but knowing the feeling was artificial didn’t make her feel it any less, and while she could have resisted, she decided not to. Instead, as they returned to the house in Hyde Park, Ruby told herself that while she was too smart to be seduced by magic, if Hillary did it, it didn’t count.

  Now, by the sober light of dawn, she could see red fingermarks streaking Braithwhite’s bare back. They’d been in the middle of the act when the potion started to wear off. Ruby had felt the blood well up under her nails, but they were too far gone to quit and so she’d just hung on, shuddering and crying out, while her flesh snapped back into its original shape.

  Reflected in the vanity’s mirror she could see another set of red marks: a circle of letters tattooed on Braithwhite’s chest, letters from the same strange alphabet used to compose The Book of Names. My mark of Cain, he’d told her. It keeps me safe.

  It keeps me safe. So he knew his Bible, at least. Ruby recalled another white boy she’d been with briefly, Danny Young, who one day had begun expounding on a theory he had, that the mark God put on Cain was actually dark skin and that everything bad that had befallen the Negroes—slavery, lynching, Jim Crow—was a result of their being Cain’s descendants. You’d be a better Christian if you learned how to read, Ruby had told him. Cain’s mark was a protection; if the mark was his skin color, then God must have turned him white, not black.

  Braithwhite was watching her in the mirror now. “Having second thoughts?”

  More like seventh or eighth. “You were going to tell me about the job, after,” Ruby reminded him, her tone saying: You’d better not expect this here to be a regular part of it.

  “Playtime’s over, huh?” He put down the razor, wiped his face, and turned around smiling. “I admire your work ethic, Miss Dandridge.”

  “Never mind what you admire,” Ruby said. “Get to the point.”

  “All right. I assume you understand what I’m about, now.”

  “You want to be the Al Capone of warlocks.”

  “More like the Frank Costello, if we’re going with a Mafia analogy,” Braithwhite said.

  “Abbott or Costello, I don’t care,” said Ruby. “But your friend Lancaster, he thinks he should be the big boss. And maybe you promised you’d back him on that?”

  “‘Promised’ is a strong word. Let’s say he takes it for granted that he ought to be the man in charge, and I try not to contradict him.”

  “You need to try harder, then. After your speech last night, even a stupid man would know you want the crown for yourself. And Lancaster’s not stupid.”

  “No,” Braithwhite said, “but he believes he can slap me down whenever he chooses, so he’ll keep me around as long as I’m useful. He’s got his men watching me. I know they’re there, and I can slip away from them when I need to, but it’s not always convenient—and if I do it too often, he’ll start worrying. So what would be very helpful to me, over the next few months, would be to have someone I can call on to run errands for me.”

  “Someone who can be white or colored,” Ruby guessed, “as the need arises.”

  “As the need arises. Does that sound like something you could do?”

  “Depends on the errands. But supposing I say yes, how would it work?”

  “Lancaster knows more about me than I’d like,” Braithwhite told her, “but he doesn’t know about this house. And if for some reason he were to investigate the property, he’d find that it belongs to a Miss Francine Chase. Miss Chase is a shut-in whose neighbors never see her, but recently she’s been advertising for a new live-in maid.”

  “Hmm,” said Ruby. “So I move in here, and then what? Just wait around in case you need something?”

  “We’ll prearrange times for you to be available in case I call or come by. Generally no more than two or three hours on any given day. The rest of your time will be your own, to do with as you like—and as who you like. The only other rule concerns how you come and go from the house. As Ruby, you’ll always use the front door. But as—”

  “Hillary.”

  “As Hillary, you’ll go up to the roof. There’s another empty townhouse around the corner from here that you can reach by walking along the rooftops. Hillary will come and go through there.”

  “And how long is this arra
ngement supposed to last? Until you get your crown?”

  Braithwhite nodded. “I’d say six months to a year, depending on how Midsummer’s Day goes and what happens after.”

  “And then?”

  “Then, unless you decide you want a continuing relationship, we go our separate ways. And you get this, as severance.” He opened a drawer in the vanity and handed her a copy of the deed to the townhouse. “It’s not as grand as the Winthrop House, but at least it’s not haunted. And it comes with a supply of the elixir. So what do you say, Ruby?”

  She stared at the deed, feeling scared and trying not to show it. She thought: I know what I’d say if somebody else told me they’d been offered a deal like this. “Tell me something. What you said in your speech, about changing the world—what is it you’re going to do, exactly, if you get the kind of power you want?”

  “Nothing you have to worry about. You and your people will be protected.”

  “My people?”

  “The people you care about,” Braithwhite said. “Your family. Your friends. They’ll all be looked after, I promise . . . So what do you say, Ruby?”

  “Was it Jekyll or Hyde who was the bad one?” Ruby asked.

  Noon of a Sunday, and she was eating lunch at the Winthrop House with her sister and Atticus, having invited herself over after church. Letitia’s obvious pleasure at the visit had Ruby feeling guilty.

  “Mr. Hyde was the alter ego,” Atticus said. “The one who went out and did all the things that Dr. Jekyll was too respectable to do.”

  “Yeah, but they were both bad.” This from Mr. Fox, one of Letitia’s tenants, playing chess with his daughter at the other end of the dining table. “They were the same man.”

  “But didn’t . . .” Ruby struggled to remember the story, which she’d read a long time ago in school. “Didn’t the two of them end up fighting, or something? Mr. Hyde killed someone, right? And then Dr. Jekyll tried to get rid of him.”

  “Hyde got out of hand,” Atticus said. “Hyde was Jekyll, but Jekyll with all the good bleached out of him, and most of the self-control. That’s how come he beat Sir Carew to death. Jekyll stopped taking the potion and tried to go straight, but it was too late—Hyde started coming out on his own.”

  “The thing people overlook, though,” Mr. Fox added, “is that that whole part of the story describing the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde, that’s all Dr. Jekyll talking. And you can’t trust Jekyll.” As Mr. Fox spoke he looked away from the chessboard, and his daughter took the opportunity to sneak her queen onto a different square.

  “So what are you saying?” asked Ruby. “You think Dr. Jekyll was lying about what Mr. Hyde was really like?”

  “I’m saying people can be real creative when it comes to ducking responsibility. You got this guy who confesses to a murder, plus a whole bunch of other bad stuff he won’t even describe, but he’s got this complicated explanation for why it technically wasn’t him. And he says he’s remorseful, but right up to the end he’s trying to escape being held to account for what he did.” Mr. Fox shrugged. “Maybe Mr. Hyde was pure evil. But Dr. Jekyll would want to believe that even if Hyde was just Jekyll with a different face.” He turned back to the board, and with a firm gesture moved his daughter’s queen back where it belonged.

  “What do you want to know about Mr. Hyde for?” Letitia asked.

  “No reason,” Ruby said.

  Two days later, Ruby sat alone in the kitchen of the house in Hyde Park, waiting on Braithwhite’s call.

  Since taking the job, she’d run four “errands” for him. Twice, as herself, she’d gone downtown on shopping trips for the nonexistent Miss Chase, each time making her way to a second-floor window in Carson’s department store. The window overlooked one of Lancaster’s favorite lunch spots, and her mission was to see who, if anyone, he left the restaurant with. (On the first occasion he’d been alone, but on the second, he was with that lodgemaster from the village in Wisconsin.)

  For her third errand she’d gone, as Hillary, to a downtown parking garage, exited a certain stairwell at quarter past two, found Braithwhite’s Daimler, and driven to a service garage in Oak Park that specialized in exotic foreign cars. The mechanics were expecting her, so she didn’t even have to crack a window; she just sat tight in the Daimler while they changed the oil and checked the tires and performed several other time-consuming maintenance procedures. Then she drove back to the Loop. She did have one bad moment when the unmarked police car that had tailed her to and from Oak Park looked as though it might follow her into the parking garage, but that proved to be a false alarm.

  Up until yesterday, the worst part of the job wasn’t the errands themselves, or the waiting, but the uncertainty of the scheduling. It was true, as Braithwhite said, that much of her time was her own, but never being sure when she’d be free placed limits on what she could do when she was, even as a white woman. She’d quickly realized that a second job was out of the question, let alone a career. She consoled herself with the thought that this was a temporary situation—just a few months, a year at most. And at least she wasn’t doing anything bad.

  Then yesterday she’d had a new errand. Once again she’d gone as Hillary, but Hillary-in-disguise: Before setting out, she’d pinned her hair up under a kerchief, donned sunglasses, and put on Ruby’s coat over a drab tan dress.

  At noon she entered the central police station and asked the front desk sergeant where she could find the burglary division. She climbed the stairs to the third floor, turning left rather than right as she’d been directed, and came to a door marked SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS, ORGANIZED CRIME UNIT. The room inside was unoccupied just then, as Braithwhite had intuited it would be, but she didn’t have much time. As she moved to an interior office whose door said CAPT. JOHN LANCASTER, she felt in her coat pocket for the charm Braithwhite had given her.

  It was a disk of polished bone, about the size of a half dollar. Engraved on one side was the image of an owl with eyes so large and round they seemed more like binoculars. The obverse was marked with more of those strange letters, stained with what Ruby pretended was red ink.

  Braithwhite hadn’t said what this token was for, only that she was to hide it somewhere in or near Lancaster’s desk. Finding one of the lower drawers unlocked, she stuck the charm at the very back, behind a rack of hanging files.

  She’d made it back out to the stairs and had just started down when she saw two men coming up. One of them was Burke, the mean-spirited security man from the party. Hillary stayed cool and didn’t react, trusting to her disguise, and Burke, who was talking to the other man, didn’t even glance at her as he went by. But as she reached the half-landing, she heard Burke fall silent and sensed him looking back, and it took all her self-control not to look back as well. She continued down the stairs and across the lobby, hearing footsteps behind her the whole way and expecting any second to feel a hand on her shoulder. She went out onto the street and hailed a cab, still not looking back, not until the cab was several blocks from the station—and then, recognizing that she had gotten away, she proceeded to go into shock, shaking uncontrollably and nearly passing out.

  In the evening Braithwhite came by the townhouse in person to congratulate her on a job well done. He took Hillary out to dinner, and afterwards he made a point of restocking Ruby’s supply of elixir, bringing up seven fresh vials from his workshop in the basement. Then, with the lights in the kitchen shining on him just so, he asked whether, perhaps, she might like him to stay the night.

  No thank you, Mr. Braithwhite, she’d said, I think I’ll sleep better on my own. She hustled him out, taking a fleeting satisfaction from his look of disappointment. Once he was gone, though, she started wondering whether he’d made the offer precisely so she could have the pleasure of refusing him. So she’d feel more in control. She thought: Six months to a year of mind games and nervous breakdowns, what’s that going to do to you? Assuming you don’t just get caught.

  This morning she felt better
about it. She told herself that if she didn’t have another errand today, maybe Hillary would drop by the Lightbridge Agency, just to browse. In the meantime, she sat at the kitchen table in the sun, reading from the book that Atticus had lent her.

  Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size: It was large, firm, white, and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.

  Of a dusky pallor, hmm. Ruby studied the backs of her own hands: straight-up dusky, hold the pallor, and thankfully hairless.

  The teakettle began to whistle. She got up and turned off the flame and went into the pantry to get a box of tea bags. When she came back out and shut the pantry door, the basement door popped open on the other side of the kitchen.

  Ruby hadn’t been down to the basement yet. It wasn’t off-limits—Braithwhite had told her to think of the house as if it were already hers—but the one time she’d been in a mood to go exploring, she’d found that door locked.

  She set down the tea bags next to the stove and crossed to the basement door. There were two light switches on the wall inside; she flipped them both. A yellow bulb flickered to life directly overhead. Below, around a corner at the foot of the stairs, harsher, brighter white lights came on.

  The basement was very cold, and there was a low hum of machinery that made it seem not just unheated but refrigerated. As Ruby came around the corner at the bottom of the stairs, she saw faint wisps of vapor eddying across the bare concrete floor, and her eye followed them back to their source at the center of the room: a gray, oblong pedestal, wrapped in metal pipes fuzzed with frost.

  Resting on top of the pedestal was a glass coffin. A woman lay inside it: a white woman, with flowing red hair. She lay on her back, head resting on a red satin pillow, a red satin sheet covering her body.