The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2)

by Vin Suprynowicz

  “Your friends have missed you, Worthy,” Matthew explained. “And the girlfriends are particularly worried about Bucky and little Alvin — no one’s heard from them since about the time Judge Crustio died. Marquita came to us to ask if we could help track them down.”

  “And how did you find us, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “A secure facility with armed guards where there used to be an abandoned building? Rhode Island is one big small town, Worthy, you know that. People talk. But it was the sea monster sightings that clinched it.”

  Worthington Annesley glared at one of the engineers at a nearby instrument console. It was clearly the “I told you so” look. “I was afraid someone would work that out. We’ve oriented the resonators so the excess radiation spills out into the bay, shielded it from the landward side. Who knew there was that much boat traffic out there?”

  “We’re just a couple of landlubbers, you and me.”

  “I guess so. Who knows you’re here?”

  The question sounded casual. Matthew rolled his eyes.

  “Worthy, let’s not turn this into a Grade B movie. Plenty of people know where we were heading tonight, starting with the friend who flew us down here in his Cessna. We didn’t walk from College Hill, and this isn’t my first trip to the circus. Chantal was with me at my lawyer’s office this afternoon when we left off the letters with instructions to deliver them if he hasn’t seen me again by tomorrow noon. The cops and the press are generally pretty lazy, but I think a few details in those letters about Judge Crustio’s death will probably get their attention.”

  “Nice office,” Chantal added, smiling. “Great view of the Capitol.”

  Actually, the instructions were that either Matthew or Chantal could reclaim the letters, but Matthew saw no sense mentioning that here.

  “OK, OK,” Worthy shrugged.

  “Worthy, I do not work for the police. Just because I’m not going to actively join in your war doesn’t mean I’m working for the other side; I’m not. If we’d wanted to tell the cops or the FBI where you were, the phone call is free; you’d be chatting with them right now and we’d be safe at home with our kitty cats. Marquita is very worried, I feel somewhat responsible, I told her as a favor we’d find you and try to get her some word about Bucky. You should know enough to take care of the families. No one is returning her calls. A letter from their boy at the front can make all the difference.”

  “I’ve been swamped, Matthew. This whole thing threatens to spiral out of control, you have no idea.”

  “Then maybe it’s time for you to share, Worthy. I suspect you’ve opened up a huge can of worms here, if you not only have the old resonator working but you’re building man-portable versions. Then to actually open a vortex you must have had to develop some kind of feedback amplifier, which is going to create headaches you can’t possibly foresee. No one person can handle something this big, all alone. I assume your first challenge was figuring out how to open up a vortex from the other side to allow someone to get back. And given that Bucky and Alvin don’t appear to be back, I’d bet that’s still a problem.”

  Worthington Annesley was shaking his head, giving Matthew the look. Chantal had seen it before; Matthew jumped ahead down a train of thought and was waiting for you at the next station; people wondered if he could read minds or something.

  “Cory here helped a lot with the miniaturization. Cory used to be in naval electronics. Targets.”

  “Hi, Chantal,” said the handsome guy with the short sandy hair, sitting in shirtsleeves and neatly creased khaki slacks in front of a computer screen at the near end of one of the tables.

  “Cory,” she nodded. “Thought that was you.”

  “Navy?” asked Matthew.

  “It’s not just a job,” Cory smiled. “But I got tired of butting heads up through the bureaucracy every time we wanted to try something new. Electronic games in the private sector turned out to be a lot more lucrative. Worthy and I had mutual friends; you might say he offered me a challenge I couldn’t refuse.”

  “I imagine the next thing you discovered is that the portals aren’t just a screen door to the back yard,” Matthew continued. “If there are multiple dimensions, multiple destinations, you’ve got to be able to do some fine tuning, or you don’t know where the hell you’ll end up. And you’re probably approaching it as a strictly electro-mechanical problem.”

  “What else?” Worthy asked.

  “You’re activating the pineal gland, which in humans raised in our culture is chronically short of dimethyl-tryptamine. You can stimulate these systems electro-mechanically, but you’re working inside the human brain. In the end, your problem is largely biochemical, your operator has to take charge and direct things internally.”

  “What?”

  “People in other cultures, shamanic cultures, have been training initiates to make these kinds of journeys for thousands of years, Worthy. You think you can duplicate and improve on that knowledge in six weeks with a couple of Intel chips and your Tom Swift Magic Erector Set?”

  “OK, Matthew.” Worthy’s shoulder slumped. “You’ve got our attention.”

  “It’s a damp and chilly night out there, Worthy. We’ve been tramping around in the dark listening to foghorns for some little time. I don’t suppose you’ve got a source of hot tea or cocoa? And I suspect at least one of my companions might like to use the Little Girls’ Room.” Chantal nodded, eagerly. “Then if we’re going to be of any help, you might introduce us around, give us the Cook’s tour of your facility here. It does look very impressive. Based on the main set of the old Stargate TV show, I presume?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Babe, isn’t Cory —?” Matthew started to ask Chantal when she came back from the girls’ room. They seemed to be alone for a moment, he figured no one would hear.

  “Negative, honey,” Chantal smiled, giving him a peck on the cheek as though they were talking about that green-wood Chinese sofa set she’d been drooling over at the Discount Furniture Barn. Lip-readers could always review surveillance videos. “You’ve never met him before. We’ll talk later.”

  “OK, babe.”

  At the far end of the building, a four-member away team was suiting up and going through their equipment checks with another group of technicians, apparently readying to launch into the next dimension on another search-and-rescue for the missing Bucky and Alvin, which meant Worthy and Cory intended to use the big resonator to open another vortex for them right here, and pretty soon. Which in turn explained the level of activity here at this hour of the night.

  Skeezix was fascinated with their personal equipment, asked if he could stay and watch. They all seemed to take an instant liking to Skeezix, his child-like enthusiasm was so obviously spontaneous.

  “You’re sending a team through at this time of night?” Matthew asked Worthy as they ended up back at Mission Control after the two-bit tour.

  “When you’ve got good men stranded on the other side, the 40-hour work week goes out the window, Matthew. With our mil-spec night vision scopes, partial darkness can actually give us an advantage over some of the native fauna. But the main point is, we’re not just working bankers’ hours to try and pull Bucky and Alvin out of there. If they’re alive, which we assume they are, we’re going to find them as quickly as possible.”

  “So let me see if I’ve got this worked out, so far,” Matthew suggested. “You got a look at Marquita’s orb photos, in fact she probably let you tag along and watch her take some, so you knew these weren’t some fakes she was cooking up on PhotoShop. Immediately that brought to mind what Lovecraft had written about Great-Uncle Henry and his resonator.”

  “It sure did.”

  “But how to find the original resonator? We located the missing Lovecraft notebook for you, you set about deciphering where Lovecraft had gone to see his demonstration, and lo and behold, it turns out to be a property your family still owns. You could have found it all by yourself.”

  “P
eople who wear eyeglasses tell me sometimes they can’t find them because they’re wearing them, Matthew, they’ve already got them on. I knew that property was still in the family, but I naturally assumed it had been searched many times, nothing this big could possibly have been left sitting around unnoticed. So I don’t regret your modest fee, one bit.”

  “Glad to hear it. By the way, you should let us give you a bid on the books in that house, before some homeless guy breaks in and uses them to start a fire.”

  “Worth something?”

  Matthew nodded.

  “OK, remind me to have one of the staff open it up for you. Give me a few days or a week, though. A little busy, right now.”

  “I bet.” Matthew moved in closer to the big steel resonator. “Wouldn’t be safe to get this big a piece of equipment up and running without updating all the wiring to modern standards, which would have drawn a lot of attention in a congested residential zone, not to mention jellyfish from the Fifth dimension floating through the neighbors’ walls. So you pulled it apart and hauled it down here and got it running with the help of your former Navy engineers.”

  “All correct, so far.”

  “But you must have sensed possibilities beyond orb-gazing. People who spend a lot of time photographing the orbs talk about them coming from and returning to some other place, through these things that look like whirlpools stood on end, these vortexes. The next question must have been obvious. If you could boost your power with some kind of regeneration amplifier, could you open your own vortex? And if you could open a vortex, could someone wearing a portable resonator in some kind of headset use it to go through into another dimension, and come back again?”

  “How did you know about the regeneration circuit?” Worthy asked, evidently suspicious that someone had been talking.

  “They had the same problem with early radio, Worthy.” Incoming signals had originally been so faint the operators had to wear headphones. What made commercial radio possible, the reason you could hear your radio from across the room today, was that Edwin Armstrong had gotten busy and developed a circuit that fed the same signal through an amplifier again and again, re-amplifying it a hundred times.

  “As big as old Henry’s original resonator was, it just allowed some partial vision across the dimensional barrier. If anything really came through it must have been largely accidental. It figures if you wanted to actually open a vortex on demand and cross over you’d need to multiply that field by some really big factor. So since you’re not building a resonator the size of Shea Stadium, since in fact you’re miniaturizing them into those headsets I see your away team adjusting, it figures you had to be multiplying the signal, stepping it up.”

  Cory the Navy guy — former Navy guy, whatever he was — nodded his appreciation.

  “I wish someone could explain to me the physics of how all this works,” Chantal sighed.

  “Me, too,” said Worthy, earnestly. “I think they’ll be hashing out the physics for eighty years. In fact, I keep saying I wish we were in a Star Trek episode, ’cause then I could tell you ‘During our passage through the wormhole our deflector array was knocked out of alignment, which explains how we came to be trapped in this temporal anomaly.’ Everybody would rub their chins thoughtfully and say ‘Ah, that explains it,’ and we could tell Uhura to start sending out distress calls on frequencies the Federation hadn’t used in a hundred years. But unfortunately this is real life, I don’t have access to any slick TV writers to come up with a nifty couple sentences of technobabble to make it sound like everything’s under control, so I’m stuck admitting that for the most part we don’t have a clue about most of this stuff we’re running into. We’re basically approaching it like a bunch of castaways on a desert island trading war stories: I’ve been eating the red berries for a week and I haven’t got sick yet.”

  In the Crosby, Still and Nash original, as Matthew recalled, they’d been “purple” berries.

  “Physics?” Worthy continued. “Physics is a process of trial and error in which real smart guys take decades to try to find patterns in a mass of data which had better be accurately observed and written down in the first place. Your physicist tries out various theories, then they go a step further, proposing experiments that can prove their theory is either right or wrong. Einstein said if he was right about gravity having the ability to bend light then during the next solar eclipse they should be able to see stars appearing along the rim of the sun that are actually slightly behind the sun.”

  “But the proposed experiment also has to be able to prove the theory wrong,” Matthew added. “Einstein acknowledged if there was no bending of starlight around the sun it would be ‘Back to the drawing board.’ Which is part of what finally collapsed the ‘Man-Made Global Warming’ scam. Not only wouldn’t they propose an experiment that could prove their theory wrong, they did just the opposite: No matter what happened they used to say, ‘Oh, didn’t we tell you? That’s just another effect of man-made global warming! More storms? Fewer storms? Weeks of sub-zero temperatures, nine feet of snow, the most blizzards anyone’s seen in fifty years? Any phenomena you can observe just prove our man-made global warming theory is right!’”

  “And they wonder why so many of them are out looking for honest work,” Worthy smiled. He was watching the technicians check the dials on the resonator, which meant it was already turned on, even if they couldn’t hear it yet.

  “Anyway, the reason we don’t have any explanations from any bona fide physicists for what we’re running into is that when I call anyone I know in a Physics department and start to tell them what we’re encountering they laugh, they say, ‘Hey, good one; try me again on April Fool’s Day,’ and they hang up. I mean, poor Marquita couldn’t even get these characters to look at her orb photos, you can imagine how they respond to what I’m describing here. They think it’s a prank, all their buddies are gonna jump up from behind the couch and shout ‘Gotcha!’ So if they won’t even come out and check the data, we’re still way short of the point where any of those guys are going to venture a theory. That’s how we always get stuck with some well-meaning grandma identifying one of the orbs as the spirit of her dead cat Fluffy, which is all these guys need to hear; they just laugh and say it must be a full moon.”

  “Meantime, it must not have taken long to work out the practical application,” Matthew figured. “I assume a few of your more radical Cthulhian brethren saw your work here as a way to pop through a vortex to the other side, where they’d be essentially invisible except to someone else with a resonator, triangulate themselves to the right geographic position, pop back to our side for a minute or so into a courthouse corridor where they could whack a judge, then reactivate their headset resonators and make their escape the same way.”

  “Actually, Matthew, the decision to do selective assassinations represents a victory by the forces of moderation — which is to say, my side — on the party’s executive council.”

  “The moderates favored assassinations?”

  “Selective, targeted assassinations, yes.”

  “What the hell did the radicals want to do?”

  “The more radical position — and I’m not denying its logic — is something you heard Windsor mention as one of our options, in the first video.”

  The more radical position, Worthy explained, was that since this was a war over whether people had a right to determine their own state of consciousness — by doing psychoactive drugs, or by deciding not to do those drugs — and since evidence and persuasion had been tried and failed, the Cthulhians should adopt the approach of the Fearless Drug Warriors, that the use of force was appropriate.

  “So the radicals were in favor of …”

  “Spiking the courthouse water supplies with LSD. The courthouses, the police stations, the prosecutors’ offices, the U.S. Capitol. Their argument was that it would demonstrate just how wrong it was to take away the liberty of people to make this decision for themselves, with the benefit that it woul
d be non-fatal — there is no toxic dose of LSD.”

  “Instead of the assassinations.”

  “Yes.”

  “But they were outvoted?”

  “Our side convinced them that plan would backfire,” Worthy explained. “Our attempt to explain the point we were trying to make would immediately get outshouted by the bad guys’ control of the mass media. They’d immediately make a big deal of setting armed guards over the reservoirs and the drinking fountains in the elementary schools, contending we were planning to poison the whole populace with bad hallucinogenic drugs, make everybody crazy. It would become an issue of the good police helping fearful mommies protect their precious children from these insane drug pushers, trying to poison the babies. If we had any defenders left they’d be shouted off the stage. We’d become Lunatic Public Enemy Number One, people wouldn’t want to hear a word we had to say.

  “Besides which, LSD is non-toxic if used sensibly, voluntarily, by people who know what it is. The chemical itself won’t kill you, you always eventually come down. But dope up a young mom with a toddler who happen to be visiting the courthouse that day — someone with no connection to the War on Drugs? Let’s say it’s hot and she drinks three glasses of iced tea while she’s waiting for someone in the courthouse cafeteria, gets an unusually high dose, has no idea what’s happening. Her visual field starts to break down, she grabs her kid and runs out into traffic and gets killed. Try to explain that.

  “Believe it or not, it’s easier for people to grasp shooting a judge or a prosecutor. They’re self-righteous assholes, completely corrupted by unlimited power. They laugh at the Ninth Amendment, they toss out any juror who won’t swear in advance to follow their orders, they prosecute anyone who tries to inform jurors of their real power, not a one of them ever spends a day in jail for anything they do, and anyone who’s been through the legal meat grinder knows it. They announce they want to fight a ‘war,’ and after a hundred years their victims finally start shooting back? Americans can understand that. Even shooting a Drug-War Congressman. I can stand up and own that. But poisoning moms and babies with LSD? A non-starter.”