“Recent,” Matthew said, dropping to one knee.
“Before the last rain,” Skeezix responded, pointing to where some water had gathered in one of the tracks. “Two, maybe three weeks ago.”
The back door was locked, of course. There was a doggie door, but that was also locked. Skeezix squatted for a closer look.
“Multi-position lock,” he said. “Metal pins, not plastic like the new ones. But I shouldn’t even have to break it.” Opening one of the blades on his pocket knife, he slid it underneath the hinged door, working the little metal levers that kept the doggie door from swinging in either direction — it could be set to “double lock,” or “in only,” or “out only” — until they were both flipped down to the horizontal. The little wooden doggie door now swung freely, in or out.
“Perfect,” Chantal said. “Now if we’d just thought to bring along a really smart dog.”
Smiling, Skeezix folded his knife and pocketed it, lay down on his side, and shoved one of his arms through the freely-swinging doggie door. Then, shifting his shoulders so one was much higher than the other, he half pulled and half scooted his head and the top half of his body in behind his leading arm, wriggling as he went. Finally, bending from the waist, he pulled his legs in after him.
For a moment, Chantal just stared. It was like a magic trick, or something you’d see at a carnival sideshow.
“If I hadn’t seen that …” Chantal sighed. “Remind me not to leave any valuables lying around the house.”
From the inside, Skeezix threw the deadbolt, opened the back door and waved them in.
The ground floor was in a permanent state of twilight, lit only by the few dust-laden yellow beams that found their way down the big staircase in the middle of the house. Dusty sheets had been thrown over furniture that looked like it could date from before the Great War. The plumbing in the kitchen and the little hall bathroom had a quaint, 1920s look to it, as well. In the silence of the place, every creaking floorboard sounded like a pistol shot. Matthew opened a closet door and they all jumped as something came flying out at him and banged to the floor — an old wooden rolling pin.
They all stood stock still for 20 seconds, at that point, waiting to see if the noise had awakened a guard dog, a sleeping watchman, or the Ghost of Christmas Past.
“So, how much truth do you think there really is in that Lovecraft story?” Chantal asked, keeping her voice down to a hoarse whisper as she started systematically exploring the closest rooms.
“Quite a bit, it would appear.” Matthew, of course, made a beeline for the living room bookcase as soon as he spotted it, was soon tilting his head to scan the spines. “Why?”
“Windsor and Worthy’s great-uncle disappeared within a few months after Lovecraft wrote it,” Chantal explained in a more normal tone of voice as she moved from room to room. Her purse slung from her shoulder and her right hand wedged tightly into her purse to draw the strap tight, Chantal would put her back to the wall beside each doorway, then kind of roll around the edge of the doorway into the next room, purse held down at her waist but slightly in front of her, checking each room for night watchmen, sleeping dogs, whatever. It could be awfully embarrassing to relax and get shot in the back because you forgot to clear all the doorways.
“Yeah?” Following Matthew’s example, Skeezix was gingerly sliding a few books out of the lower shelves of the living room bookcase to examine their title pages, blowing off a layer of dust.
“Why would he have made such a quick exit, and where did he go?”
“I don’t know.” Matthew sounded distracted, already. She’d soon lose him for good if they didn’t get moving.
“Currer Bell,” said Skeezix, in an unusually reverent tone, holding out the first volume of Jane Eyre so Matthew could see the author’s name on the title page. The Bronte sisters had been advised, perhaps wisely, that their stuff would be an easier sell if they used men’s names. Their masquerade as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell had been so successful that critics insisted they were all the same man, till in the summer of 1848 Charlotte and Anne actually had to take a train to London (Emily stayed home) to convince their publisher, George Smith of Smith & Elder, that they were three separate authors, and of the female persuasion, at that.
“Yes. And the Waverley and the Rob Roy are anonymous,” Matthew replied. Most of Walter Scott’s early novels had been published anonymously in the three-part first editions, except the ones that used pseudonyms like Laurence Templeton or Jedediah Cleishbotham. That made these six volumes 1814 and 1817, probably, figure the Rob Roy at $500 in nice condition, the Waverley more. Much more.
“We could borrow a few of these, just to treat the leather.”
“No, no. We’ll ask Worthy when we see him.”
Skeezix sighed, returning a book to the shelf.
“In the story, the police decide old man Annesley murdered his household servants, since no one could find them,” Chantal continued, from the adjoining dining room. “But that’s not what Lovecraft says really happened to them.”
“What really happened to them?” Skeezix asked.
“Monsters from the Fifth Dimension came through when the resonator was running, saw them moving around, and ate them,” Chantal explained, rejoining the lads after completing her tour of the ground floor.
“Ate them?”
“After biting their heads off, from the sound of it.”
“Oh.” Skeezix grimaced. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“Did you want me to find some boxes so we can pack up all those books, or were we here for something else?” Chantal smiled, batting her eyelashes.
The grand staircase creaked all the way up to the second floor. All three of them kept waiting for monsters from the fifth dimension to come trotting down the second floor hallway, turn the corner, and launch themselves onto this unexpected taste treat — three unarmed humans.
“You are unarmed, right, Chantal?” Matthew asked.
“I most certainly am not,” said Chantal, who still kept her right hand shoved deep in her purse.
Matthew just sighed.
The orange light of the sunset was pouring down the second floor hallway from the westernmost windows.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Chantal asked, after they’d poked around to no apparent purpose for a couple of minutes, marveling at how uncomfortable all the furniture looked.
“The attic stairs.”
Skeezix looked at them like they were both certifiable morons, leading them directly to the only bedroom wall that lacked a window where it would normally have been. Instead, close to the corner of that room, that wall held a closet door. Skeezix opened the closet door and stepped in.
“Good work, Skeezer,” said Matthew. “You’ve found the closet.”
Inside the closet, Skeezix pushed past some coats hanging in ancient garment bags and pulled open another door, hidden to his right. There was a slight but sudden breeze. He started up the attic stairs.
The attic stairs were narrow, and dark. Matthew was just wishing they had indeed brought a flashlight when Chantal turned on the little LED light she carried on her keychain.
The wooden stairs and the plaster walls to either side were gouged. Matthew watched Skeezix stop to inspect the damage.
“Recent?”
“Yeah. Somebody muscled something heavy down these stairs,” Skeezix said.
“Down, or up?”
“Down. Look at the direction of the splinters.”
Matthew was surprised he could even see the splinters.
At the top of the narrow staircase was another door, this one set horizontally so when closed it would form part of the attic floor. This thing had once been locked with a heavy hasp and padlock, but now it lay flopped open. As Skeezix led them up and through, into the attic proper, they could see the hasp and lock showed a thin coating of rust from long disuse. But there was no rust on the cut that had sliced through that steel hasp. It was shiny clean.
The attic was large, steep-sided, with a floor of wide, rough boards, laid down but not nailed. The illumination was from ventilators at each end, in one of which a small fan was now being turned by the breeze — though it wasn’t enough to keep the space from feeling hot and stuffy. Attached to the underside of the roof were some old electrical circuit boxes, with steel pipes running down through the floor. And some old-fashioned electrical cables — insulated with what was probably gutta-percha and ending in big old-fashioned plugs made out of black-painted wooden blocks — lay strewn around the floor, which also showed some deep and relatively new gouges, from something heavy being dragged toward the stairs. Other than that — and some bent and broken old bolts, and a few brand new empty soda pop cans, several of which were 7-Ups — the attic was empty.
“I smell oil,” said Matthew.
“WD-40,” Skeezix corrected him.
“Something big was here, all right.” Matthew was examining a rectangular patch of lighter-colored floor boards near the center of the attic, which had been protected from the settling dust for many years. It was marked with a number of small oil stains. WD-40, whatever.
“The resonator,” Chantal figured.
“It must have been a hell of a job, undoing the bolts that held that thing together for a hundred years, working the pieces down those stairs, getting them all out to the truck in the back yard.”
“Worthy?”
“Worthy and a whole bunch of his Cthulhian buddies, I presume. ‘The Miskatonic Notebook’ would have led him right here, almost two months ago.”
“But his family still owns the house. Why move it?”
“None of this wiring is up to current codes. He would have had to re-wire the whole place, which would have attracted attention, city inspectors asking why he needed all those circuit boards and breakers in a residential zone. Then, assuming he can get the resonator working, cranking it up here could have created all kinds of other problems, neighbors complaining about strange, suddenly visible creatures from the Fifth Dimension drifting down the hallways and through the walls, whatever.”
“And what’s he doing with the resonator?” Skeezix asked.
“Hard to know for sure. Just at a guess, though, I’m thinking maybe he’s figured out a way to have someone with a shotgun pop into the courthouse from the Fifth Dimension, blow away a very nasty judge, and then disappear into thin air.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
PART THREE
“It’s the sheer power of hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that’s because they dissolve worldviews. If you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you — if you think that’s a thrill — you’ll probably love psychedelics. On the other hand, for some people that’s the most horrible thing they can possibly imagine. They navigate reality through various forms of faith, whereas with the psychedelics the doors of perception are cleansed and you see very, very deeply.”
Terence McKenna, interviewed by Michael Toms for his “New Dimensions” radio show sometime in 1985.
“We have had a mind-programming exercise, that’s called “the war on drugs,” for the last 40 years, which has been designed to create an internal enemy in our societies and convince people that there are these evil, wicked groups who are doing these terrible, sinful things, smoking these drugs and doing this and that. A very dark image has been created around this and people get very upset irrationally about this whole issue. And actually what’s been forgotten in all of this is that when the state sends us to prison for essentially exploring our own consciousness, this is a grotesque abuse of human rights. It’s a fundamental wrong. If I as an adult am not sovereign over my own consciousness then I’m absolutely not sovereign over anything, I can’t claim any kind of freedom at all and what has happened over the past 40 or 50 years, under the disguise of the war on drugs, is that we have been persuaded to hand over the keys of our consciousness to the state. The most precious, the most intimate, the most sapient part of ourselves, the state now has the key. And furthermore they have persuaded us that that’s in our interests. This is a very dangerous situation.”
Graham Hancock, Joe Rogan Podcast 142, Sept. 25, 2011.
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
Terence McKenna
CHAPTER NINE
“This is Brittany Watson with Action News. Is there a sea monster in Narragansett Bay?” Beside the lovely, pouting Brittany on the split screen came up some 19th Century engraving of a giant sea serpent.
“Two fishermen reported to the Coast Guard last night that a large creature swam alongside their boat right about sunset in the waters off Hope Island, Dave, and then actually passed through the hull of the craft, without doing any substantial damage. Lieutenant LaRiviere of the Coast Guard says the report is being investigated, though there are indications alcohol may have been involved.”
“Thanks, Brittany. Party on, gentlemen.”
“Yes, Dave. I’d like to have a couple belts of whatever they’re doing.”
The members of the Cornish Horrors had gladly seized upon his discovery of “The Sign of the Sixteen Oyster Shells” as a welcome excuse for an evening of Italian food and merriment. As guest of honor at the special summer awards dinner, Matthew had foolishly allowed his fellow Sherlockians to convince him to drink the traditional toasts to the queen and to Brenda Tregennis (heroine of the Holmes story from which Rhode Island’s chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars drew its name, in whose honor Les had composed and tonight declaimed a highly skilled and slightly bawdy piece of verse) not in ginger ale or Mexican Coca-Cola, as he would normally have preferred, but in a pitcher of some concoction they knowingly dubbed “dirty martinis.”
The things tasted like brine — indeed the only parts of the brew that really had any taste were the green olives and the salt water in which they’d been preserved. It was only as he rose to weave his way past the bar of the Italian-American Club in the general direction of the men’s room that Matthew realized more than 95 percent of the contents of that pitcher — allowing for some small amount of vermouth and water from the melting ice — would have been pure Bombay Sapphire Gin.
He could thus be excused if he did nothing but smile and shake his head as he paused to watch the lovely Munchkin newsgal deliver her cheerful sea monster report on the wide-screen TV above the bar, wondering how on earth the station management defined little Brittany’s beat: “Hey, this is cute, where’s Brittany?”
A sea monster off Hope Island, wherever that was. He seemed to remember some Indian chief had made a gift of Hope Island to Roger Williams, which probably meant it had been a worthless piece of rock from Day One, out in the bay somewhere.
The Italian-American Club’s Venus de Milo Room was done up in Early Seaport Whorehouse — gigantic crystal chandeliers, red-and-black figured carpet, red-flocked wallpaper, and of course your phalanx of identical four-foot-high white resin Venus de Milos, cast to resemble white marble and arrayed on pedestals in their little recesses along the walls.
Back at the head table, Matthew accepted with appropriate good cheer the memorial plaque they had prepared to honor his book-sleuthing achievement. Les and Richard St. Vincent, the university’s plenipotentiary of rare books and special collections, had enlisted the group’s best cartoonist, proprietor of a comic-book store in North Providence, to depict Matthew as Quincy Magoo, the near-blind cartoon character voiced for TV by the sainted Jim Backus, fumbling his way with the aid of a white-and-red cane down a forest path, alongside which the bushes and trees were festooned with lost bibliographic treasures to which he was obliv
ious, including Shakespeare’s Cardenio and Melville’s Isle of the Cross. Mr. Magoo was depicted as about to stumble over a huge tree root labeled “The 16 Oyster Shells.”
It was all in good fun. At the tail end of his acceptance address, however, Matthew had decided he couldn’t forego the chance to ask the assistance of the region’s foremost literary and investigative minds in his current quest.
“And now I’d like to take just a moment, gentlemen and ladies,” Matthew said, after a pause, “to enlist the aid of this most august group of investigative minds on a small challenge that’s currently occupying me and my associates at Books on Benefit.”
He had their attention.
“I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Howard Lovecraft’s story ‘From Beyond.’ In it, he purports to describe a machine called a resonator, which is capable of exciting the Pineal Body and thus allowing his mad scientist — all scientists being presumptively mad —” a few appreciative chuckles from the representatives of the harder scientific disciplines, “to see objects, creatures, which exist in a parallel dimension, but to which we residents of this dimension are usually insensate. A device which not only makes them visible to us, but us visible to them.
“I don’t ask anyone here to debate whether such a device is possible. I merely take the opportunity to report we believe a group of men is in the process of attempting to build such a device, now, here in Southern New England. A secret project, at a secret site. And we’d like to talk to them, about literary matters, of course.”
A few smiles.
“So I’m just seizing on this convenient opportunity to expand the number of eyes we have watching out for a new, unexplained, secure facility, probably on one of our islands or at least out in one of our rural areas. If you have any information you think we might find of use, about a new secure facility where none existed two months ago, or particularly of a new facility generating strange humming noises, or even unexplained apparitions, I’d welcome any news; you can of course contact me in confidence.”
The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) Page 12