Back in the B&B, James searched out the water closet on his floor. He shut the door and stayed there for a long time. Now and then he could hear footsteps outside in the hall, sometimes pacing right in front of the door, going away, coming back. He stayed as quiet as possible.
He stared at the electrical outlet on the wall. It was slightly different from ones he had seen before—he wasn’t sure how but wondered if they were now pandering to a new group of foreign tourists. A ticking inside the wall sounded both vaguely electrical and mechanical, but he could not quite pinpoint the source.
Before he left the WC he stood on top of the toilet to get a closer look at the light fixture. He’d never seen a bulb like this before. Something swam around inside it, turning over and over, occasionally resting against the bottom of the bulb. He traced a long narrow tube that led to a star-shaped electrical junction box in one corner by the door. He climbed down from the toilet and gazed at the large ceramic tank mounted on the back of the toilet bowl. Nervously sliding off the heavy lid, he tried not to make any noise as he leaned it against the wall. Something big and furry was fixed to the centre of the tank, with sharp steel hooks piercing various portions of fur and hide. Numerous tubes encircled and entered the mass, which quivered rhythmically. Now and then there appeared to be a quick, violent shudder, and then the rhythm resumed.
Sleep the first night came with the speed of a drawn curtain. He woke into brilliant light, instantly aware that he’d forgotten to take off his shoes.
“You were exhausted after the long trip. Most visitors take a nap right away. I am sure that must explain your, let us say, unusual obsession with plumbing.”
“Then that thing in the toilet tank. That wasn’t real?”
After consulting with the man in uniform, his questioner replied, “We are hardly plumbing experts. You would have to ask someone in the trades. London is an international city. Many household devices from other countries, a variety of engineered solutions, new styles and approaches, all of it ends up here in our buildings and their furnishings. There is much—cross-pollination? Nothing should surprise you here. Nothing.”
IV. The Lovecraft Museum
The next morning, walking with Clarence down the cold grey lane toward the tube station, James smelled roasting chestnuts. A vendor was set up in front of the British Museum, an unusually tall man in a top hat and oversized Elton John glasses. His hands looked swollen in pale gloves, so enormous James wondered how he could handle anything at all. Looking a bit gloomy, he dispensed bags that quivered as if they held something alive. The customers, however, devoured the contents with obvious pleasure and alacrity, surprising when James remembered how hot and chewy roasted chestnuts were.
The bricks and stones of sidewalks and buildings appeared wet and oily, but as far as he could tell it hadn’t rained. The sky was low over the building tops, pregnant with threatening grey masses of shadow. The sun was nowhere to be seen, the ambient light a submerged glow. The air had the clarity of a dirty aquarium. This was basically the kind of weather he had expected in London, yet he found it discomfiting.
The city seemed unusually busy for a Saturday. The streets and sidewalks were jammed with people in all manner of clothing, a good deal of which he supposed displayed a recent European influence, with an increased use of plastics and metals. Some of the outfits looked more like furniture designs than something human beings would wear.
The lady ahead of him wore an outfit which consisted, apparently, of numerous cloth bags sewn together into pants and a voluminous poncho. Objects in some of these bags shifted as she walked, unbalancing her, the edges of metal or cloth or some bit of vegetable matter peeking out of the pocket openings now and then.
Several gentlemen in the crowd wore business suits made out of a stiff-looking, rubber-like material, with moulded lapels, ties, fake buttonholes. They walked with sometimes aggressive, exaggerated movements, sweating profusely. Skin rashes rose up their necks.
The crowd surged into the tube station and through the turnstiles. James struggled for balance. Clarence appeared to be having no trouble at all and led the way confidently, his head visible above the crowd, making James grateful for his friend’s unusual height. The crowd spilled onto the down escalators, where there were more posters of distressed-looking British children embracing not-quite-recognisable pets.
As the escalator descended, James was struck by the varying styles of the collars, and the different relationships between neck and collar. The proportions unsettled him. He might almost think none of these people had worn clothing before, like dogs forced into human outfits.
He found himself drawn to the back of a particular young man’s head several yards below him. The youth had dark, dark hair. James suspected it must have been dyed in order to get it that black. He wasn’t quite sure what about the youth had attracted his increased attention—but people do change, especially after so many years. Other than his small size, was there anything about James that someone who had known him years ago would recognise as undeniably him? He doubted it. Some very serious things had happened to him during his life—he was hardly even the same person.
But he had focussed on this young man for some reason, and that in itself compelled him to take a good long look. There seemed to be a certain glow about him. A bit of scalp peeked through in back. His immediate thought was that he’d been sick, cancer perhaps, and the very idea filled him with dread.
He attempted to will the young man to turn around. Even after so many years, it might be the face he remembered, and he knew if he were to see that face right now he might very well collapse onto this escalator, causing injury to others, not to mention the potential damage to his own body, but he did not care—it would be both the most wonderful and the most awful thing.
As he stared at this head, praying both that the young man would and would not turn around, he observed that here and there a squiggle of pink appeared in his hair, and he gasped, convinced that these were worms rising out of his scalp, then realised those thick pink marks must be evidence of some sort of scalp disease. And as the raven-black strands moved and separated, wounds seemed to be exposed, and those wounds formed still-bleeding letters, written on the scalp beneath the roots even as James watched. The message might have been meant for him, or might have been the young man’s private thoughts instantly transcribed as a missive for the universe at large. There was no way to know unless this strange young man were to take out a razor right then and there and shave his head, and it seemed indicative of this trip to England that this did not feel outside the realm of possibility.
When the youth reached the bottom of the escalator, James was determined to follow, but he walked among some of those overdressed people with the peekaboo bandages and the floppy hats—and James instantly lost track of him. Was he with them? Was he with them willingly?
“So, why didn’t you shout after this young man? Why didn’t you raise an alarm?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Obviously you thought this young man might be your lost son, correct?”
James stalled, trying to gather his thoughts. Well, of course he had, but that would have been unreasonable. “I wasn’t sure. There was no way to know—he was much older. But his appearance triggered something, I admit.”
“Then why not shout his name?”
“I—I would have been embarrassed. I obviously couldn’t know for sure. I needed to make sure.”
“If it had been my son, if I had had a missing child, I would have been unstoppable! Perhaps I would have been mistaken, perhaps not. But a mistake is forgivable, is it not, when the stakes are so high? Your only child, missing all these years—couldn’t you have taken the chance?”
“You don’t understand. There was a time after he first went missing, I was seeing him everywhere! I was stopping every child on the street who even vaguely resembled him. The children cried out, the parents were quite upset. Police officers were called. I spent a few hours in j
ail—I had to go to court numerous times. Both here, and especially in the US after I got back. Never mind the unlikelihood that he might have made it back to the States on his own—I still thought I saw him everywhere. It was a nightmare!”
“I just think,” the interrogator said quietly. “We just think, you might have behaved differently, if you indeed wished to find him again.”
A hand tugged gently at his arm. At first he thought it was meant to reassure, but then he recognised the impatience in it. “James, we need to go this way.” Clarence led him beneath a staircase and into a large circular opening. They appeared to be the only ones taking this particular exit.
The tunnel seemed no different than any other in the London Underground, tiled in black and white, lined with posters advertising cryptic local events, books, and musical acts he’d never heard of, featuring unlikely combinations of personnel and instrumentation. Scattered among these advertisements were more of the posters with the children and their disturbing pets—sometimes showing just the pets with their disproportionate eyes, large teeth, and asymmetrical heads, and sometimes just the children with their stricken faces. James felt he would weep, although he was not exactly sure where his sadness was coming from. It felt like some sort of virus that had suddenly evolved under the right conditions and now made him unusually sensitive to these images. He struggled to control himself in front of Clarence, whom he knew only through all that correspondence, sharing their enthusiasm for weird fiction, and who seemed completely oblivious to these odd disturbances in their environment.
Which raised the question of whether they were, in any way, odd, or merely the shadow effects of a foreign community as perceived by someone of heightened sensitivity and exaggerated empathies, especially one whose grief had never been satisfactorily discharged.
He had no idea, and no hope of eventually feeling comfortable with any of it. But why should this place be any different? James did not feel comfortable anywhere.
Music had begun to thread its way from around the curve ahead of them, and James was so pleased at the prospect of encountering something as normal as a typical tube musician, he reached into his pocket to make sure he had change to give. But as they made the bend there was no musician in sight, just another one of those men (or women?) in dark, rough clothing that almost completely swallowed them, floppy hat hiding the face as he or she sat slumped over on the floor, back against the wall.
But James could still hear the music, louder than ever, reverberating off the floor and curved walls, entering his abdomen and vibrating inside his body cavity so that he began to feel ill.
As they approached the figure, James could see the surface of the voluminous cloak rising and falling, the chest inflating, deflating, causing the dropped-forward head to nod in time with the music—windy, reedy sounds like sighs and weeping, mournful moans and distant cries, a chorus of loss and disappointment. The music sounded something like a pipe organ out of tune, something like bagpipes with ruptured bladders.
Clarence stopped in front of the hunched figure and studied the exaggerated breathings, and once James saw that the lower part of the figure’s face and mouth were buried inside the folds of material around his neck, he was sure this creature must have been blowing into some hidden mouthpiece, and this was in fact the musician after all.
There was no hat or cigar box or guitar case for offerings, and James was surprised to see Clarence reach out his hand to drop a folded note that would join a number of other notes at the man’s feet, then walk quickly away down the tunnel.
James rushed hard to catch up with the long-legged Clarence. “What was that? Was that a cheque?”
“No, simply a hand-written note, like the others.”
“But what did it say?”
Clarence shrugged. “I’m not sure—I always prepare dozens in advance for just such occasions. Prayers, promises, exaggerations. But primarily good wishes, sympathetic hopes for good luck on life’s voyage, for the most part. That sort of thing. That’s what they expect, or so I’ve been told.”
“You carry them around with you?”
Clarence opened his coat. Hundreds of folded bits of paper were pinned to the lining.
Suddenly they were at the platform, and despite the fact that they had encountered no one along the way but that lone busker, it was crowded. Several people stared at them with what James felt was suspicion, but since the majority of these people appeared to be foreigners, he couldn’t be sure of their body language. He hoped this was not a racist perception—certainly he did not want to be racist, but at times like this he was painfully aware of how little he knew about the rest of the world and its customs.
The signage here was older than what he had seen in other parts of the Underground, with missing letters and words and everything overlaid with an obscuring scrawl of graffiti. The platform itself appeared to have been recently repaired—cracks filled, exposed pipes mended, one large section of concrete resurfaced. Almost all the signs were illegible, except for a small poster pasted on the wall near the middle of the platform. It mostly consisted of a pen-and-ink sketch depicting a peaceful lake scene with a futuristic tower erected nearby. And at the bottom:
VISIT THE LOVECRAFT MUSEUM
The train arrived screaming into the station. James had to struggle to maintain his balance against the crush of the crowd, aware of Clarence’s head floating above it all, seemingly unperturbed. No one spoke. For its size and aggressiveness, the crowd settled surprisingly quickly. People went right into their seats. And still no one was talking. James squirmed a bit to get more comfortable, then stopped, aware that he was the only one moving.
The car rocked through a series of flashing lights, alternating periods of heat and cold, but at no point could James say he felt comfortable. For a while there was dust in the air. He was aware of faces staring at him through the haze, but as the fuzziness dissipated no one met his eye.
He was shocked at how quickly they reached the outside edge of metropolitan London, the train emerging from a hillside tunnel into light and grass and sky. He wondered at the flatness, and the sparseness of structures—only a house or barn here and there. It looked more like the American Midwest than venerable English countryside.
The train picked up speed, whipping around an extended curve, which allowed him to see the landscape ahead, or the lack thereof—bright mist with cooler, bluish fog hanging just over the grass. Like a blind spot in the eye. The passengers were more active now, turning their heads, stretching, murmuring to one another as if they had just risen from the same bed. James was surprised by the number of young men in this car, most of them heavily made up, punk-looking, exhausted, disappointed. He didn’t recall seeing such a collection of men on the platform, and he wondered if they’d already been on the train—and why hadn’t he noticed them before?
One of the men was paying particular attention to him, it seemed, and it was difficult to look at anyone else while this man was staring at him. He found himself looking for something familiar in his eyes, in the chin and set of mouth. But so many young men that age seemed to resemble each other, he couldn’t be sure if he’d seen this one before or not. Did he recognise something in him?
James wasn’t quite sure what to make of the fact that, after that initial trip from the airport, Clarence had had very little to say to him, had become more than taciturn—he had practically turned to stone.
As if to deny the observation, Clarence spoke to him now. “You can see it,” he said, and pointed.
James actually thought his companion was deliberately lying, for some reason, as he could detect no change in that distant bright vista. But then a shiny crack in the brightness materialised, like a sudden flaw in his eye, which quickly resolved itself into a distant tower, and that stretch of blue-grey around it could only be the lake he’d heard so much about.
Most of the passengers transferred to buses at the next station, labelled LOVECRAFT in tall red letters. But a few remained on the tr
ain. “What’s the next stop for them?” James asked.
Clarence shrugged. “I had no idea there was one.”
It was another half-hour before their bus arrived at the actual facility. They travelled through several groves of increasingly abundant trees, their views of both the sky and what was ahead of them almost completely annihilated, until the trees suddenly ended and an apron of knee-high grasses swept the eye, leading downwards toward the huge concrete mandala with the spire rising so sharply at its centre it seemed a violent assault on the sky. It certainly did gleam. A particular combination of metal and glass caught the sun and sent it away, painful to look at for more than a few seconds, making it difficult to fully grasp details.
Most of the tower consisted of twisted stretches of some sort of cast material, iron-like but definitely not iron. James suspected this might be some sort of recently developed synthetic, and certainly nothing he’d ever seen as a building material before.
The patterns appeared vaguely organic, like segmented stems or perhaps spinal columns, with occasional branching, or reproduction. Here and there he spied a gill-like structure, a segmented leg, an ocular organ. The effect of the structure as a whole was of a slight asymmetry, as if the tower were a stalagmite built up from the floor of the world.
The tower compelled him to trace its upward progress into the sky far above it, where he would have sworn he saw flying creatures the size of double-decker buses, flapping their sail-sized wings with stop-motion rhythms, their gigantic cartoony googly-eyes keeping track of everything going on below. Quickly he became convinced it was some sort of live special effect. Still, he looked away, sensing that to make eye contact might have terrible consequences.
A narrow lane bordered by sculptured shrubs led up to the ornate gate. It was covered by a variety of asymmetrical characters cast in brass, resins, aluminium, and iron. “Sculptured” was a theoretical term used in regards to the shrubbery—the trimming looked purposeful, but James had no idea what these figures were meant to represent. Everyone seemed a shape in transition, halted or frozen by exhaustion or death or a petrifying fear.
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