“Weren’t they big in the early Seventies?”
That got me another thin smile.
“The universe is filled with microwaves, or short wavelength radio waves left over from the Big Bang,” he said. “We can see it, in interference on non-tuned TV stations. White noise, some call it.”
“Very pretty, I’m sure,” I said. “But as the Big Bang was a wee while ago, I don’t see what I can do about it.”
“This is where we get to the interesting bit,” he said. “Over the past fifty-odd years, people have been recording messages, imprinted inside the white noise. The Prof is regarded as something of an expert.”
I held up a hand.
“If this is headed into the Twilight Zone, you can stop right there.”
“Too late,” he said. “We’ve already crossed over.”
He leaned forward and hit the F3 key.
A line of words started scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
“What you’re seeing is text decoded from the white noise. It took huge processing power to find it, and more again to decipher it, but finally, with the help of some space nerds in Arkham, we got the message.”
I read as he spoke.
“01031923. 32804 days. JLB Derek Adams Glasgow”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You’re the detective. You tell me.”
I looked at it again.
“So what’s the date 32804 days on from 1st March 1923?
“I knew you were smart,” he said. “It’s the 21st of December, 2012. And according to some of what you can read online, it’s the day the world ends.”
“And you came to me because of the name and Glasgow?”
He nodded.
“The Prof sent me.”
Now it was my turn for the thin smile.
“You’re nearly ninety years late,” I said. “There was another Derek Adams, in Glasgow, in 1923. My great-granddad was an electrician. And in his later years he told everybody that would listen that he did a lot of work for an eccentric wee man out in Helensburgh. A wee man who might have been the first to see your cosmic radiation. His initials were JLB … and his name was John Logie Baird.”
From Google
Results 1—0 of 0 for “131923. 32804 days end. JLB Derek Adams Glasgow.”
I looked up from the keyboard after doing the search.
“It was a long shot, but I had to try,” I said. I sat back and re-lit my smoke with the Zippo, putting as much flourish as I could into the task. “So, what exactly is it you think is going on here?”
He shrugged. “All the Prof had was the name and the town. He was curious where it would lead, he talked to me about it—and here I am. Being curious.”
“And the end-of-the-world stuff?”
He shrugged again. “That was just to get your attention. It’s a puzzle. I thought you liked puzzles?”
“Only if I’m getting paid,” I said.
“Ah. That’s the easy bit,” he said and took a billfold of fifties from his pocket. “Will this be enough?”
I tried not to drool.
“So where do we start?” he said.
“In my garage,” I said. “If there’s anything, it’ll be with my granddad’s things.”
Headline from the Newfoundland Herald, March 1st 1923
Forty-five Seamen Succumb to Madness During Voyage off Baffin Island
When my mother died I inherited her jewelry, Granddad’s pocket watch, and a dozen dusty crates that had been in the cellar in our family house for as long as anyone could remember. I’d never gotten round to opening them, merely stacked them in the lock-up in the yard out back. There they had sat for the last six years … rotting, but not quite as fast as the Japanese metalwork that had once been a car.
I heaved the first of them over to the driest patch of floor.
“I’ll get them down and open, and you can have a look through them,” I said.
“It’s just like Christmas,” he said, rather too sarcastically for my liking.
“Only if you like your festivities cold, damp, and dusty,” I replied, and started to heave boxes.
Most of them were filled with old clothes covered in mold, but the fifth box contained a leather satchel, and something heavy bound in thick oilcloth.
I dragged it out into a better light, unrolled it, and found an old projector and several reels of film.
Meanwhile Nardi had opened the first box and taken out a notebook.
“Experiments in photo-vision. JLB 1921 to 1923,” he read. “I think we’ve found what we were looking for.”
Half an hour later we had the projector running in my office. Nardi made up another couple of smokes, and we sat back to watch the show.
From John Logie Baird’s entry on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird
According to Malcolm Baird, his son, in the early 1920s Baird filed a patent for a system that formed images from reflected radio waves and could transmit them across large distances.
The first reel showed only Logie Baird pottering around in his lab. It was black and white, and jerky, but seeing the young inventor strutting in his preferred environment was strangely compelling. I’d only ever seen him before as a tired old man in BBC newsreels, nothing like the excited intensity on show here.
It was obvious he was trying out several different inventions at any one time. There was a demonstration of a particularly strange pair of shoes that seemed to have pneumatic soles, blown up like a tire; there was a razor blade that appeared to be made of glass; and young Logie Baird seemed particularly pleased with a pair of long internally heated socks.
But the highlight of the first reel for me was a fleeting shot of Great-Granddad. I have one picture of him; a stout old man with a thick beard and a scowl. Now I was looking at the same eyes looking out from a smiling youngster in a flat cap and handlebar moustache. He waved cheekily at the camera before being shooed away by Logie Baird.
I felt tears start but forced them away as Nardi changed the reels. We were getting to the good stuff.
Reel 2 started with a board in front of the camera.
“March 1st, 1923. Phono-vision test 12,” it read.
They were working in what looked to be a large shed. The room was crammed with sputtering valves, spinning discs, and arcing electricity, and Logie Baird darted around excitedly. Finally he stopped and stood beside a flat white screen. He pulled a switch … and a flickering image came slowly into focus.
Logie Baird did a little jig in excitement.
The screen showed an area of night sky as if seen through a powerful telescope. Static almost obscured the image; a white snow that got steadily heavier. Then it started to pulse, in an irregular beat. Suddenly there was a bright flash, and the white screen went blank.
Logie Baird grinned from ear to ear.
The action cut to another card. It showed a crude graph, a wave pattern drawn in thick pen. An arrow pointed at the top of one wave. “NOW” it said in bold letters. Another arrow pointed at the top of the next wave. “Plus 32804” it said, in equally large letters.
Another cut brought another card.
“We send our reply.”
The picture changed to show Logie Baird pointing a camera at yet another card. This one had a message on it, the same one Nardi’s Prof had discovered in the white noise.
One more white flash followed, and the reel ended.
Nardi and I just sat and stared at each other.
“We got a message from Logie Baird?” I finally said.
“Looks like it,” he replied. “But I don’t think it was meant for us. It looks like he discovered something. Something with a period of 32804 days, that was happening on 1st of March 1923.”
“But what?”
“Time to find out,” he said. “The game’s afoot.”
From the research of Dr. Piers Night, Arkham
http://www.oldspeak.com/research.html
A f
orm of rhythm-based communication could work for all life. Should this be the case, then a universal greeting is feasible when we can reach a common rhythm. It is important WHAT the organism does, but perhaps even more important WHEN the organism does something.
We got some coffee going, lit up another smoke, and powered up Google.
“OK,” Nardi said. “I’ll drive.”
I let him. His fingers danced where mine would have sauntered.
“We know that 2012 is the next “occurrence,” he said. “But what about previous ones? Let’s try 1923 first, shall we, before we head back further.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Hopefully we’ll know it when we see it.”
That proved to be a vain hope. Not that plenty of things didn’t happen on the first day of March that year, for they did. It’s just that we couldn’t link anything to what we’d seen on the reel. There was just one snippet that got us thinking, from the Newfoundland Herald, but neither of us could figure out what a case of mass hysteria on a boat had to do with anything.
We gave up after an hour.
Nardi left, promising that his Prof would keep the search going. He took the reels of film with him.
“The Prof’s got the bit between his teeth,” he said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
I didn’t hear from him for a year.
From Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, 7th May 1833
http://darwinbeagle.blogspot.com/2008/05/5th-to-8th-may-1833.html
“The whole country is in a state of confusion, even so that many lives have been lost. The oldest inhabitants have never seen such behavior before.”
The phone rang at 2:00 a.m. I never got a chance to complain as Nardi started straight in.
“The Prof found the pattern,” he said. “It comes every 90 years or so. And it causes hysteria and delusions … 1923, 1833, 1743, back as far as he can trace. Always on the period of 32804 days.”
“But does it mean anything?”
“We’re still working on that.”
He hung up.
From 21.12.2012 Prophecy: End of the world
http://www.endoftime2012.com/
21.12.2012 is the end not of one but of two recursive cycles. It means exactly that—the end, two times over! … Earth will turn inside out and upside down. The old lands will sink below and the new lands will rise above. It has been done many times before and it will be done yet again on 21.12.2012. It is an apocalypse.
The next call came a few months after that.
“The Prof now thinks that the pattern is a definite rhythm … an attempt to communicate. The paranoia and hysteria are just a nasty side effect on anyone who happens to be too close to the signal.”
“And Logie Baird discovered it?”
“Yes. And sent a message back.”
“Now what?”
“Now we wait and see what it does on the next beat.”
From Google
Results 1 of 1,354,632 for 2012, Cthulhu, End of the World
So we waited.
Two more years rolled by, and the crazies grew ever more vocal as we got closer to the date. I sat with the TV tuned to white noise. When it finally came it was just after ten past eight in the evening. It came, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a slightly disappointed fart.
The Prof is ecstatic at having his theory proven right, but Nardi says his cop-gut tells him it’s not good news. It’s not good news at all. Something is out there. It has been trying to communicate.
Now it’s waiting for our next reply.
MISKATONIC CONTRADANCE
Konstantine Paradias
Miflin’s is the only place in Arkham where you can order a bouillabaisse without getting the stink-eye. Across the table from me, Frank Nardi is dipping his spoon into the broth, struggling to make a Moebius strip out of cold fish-meat and oyster-tissue.
“Man with your history ought to stay the hell away from that stuff by now.” I tell him, between spoonfuls. Nardi does his best to stifle a little chuckle.
“A woman with your background ought to have retired” he says, dicing through the lukewarm grime in his bowl with his spoon. “No offense meant.”
“None taken.” I smile back, understanding. Nardi looks tired, barely awake. Spending the entire night trawling through the seedier part of Arkham looking for some teenaged junkie is no small feat. He should be glad I was here, even if our clairvoyants had let us know about the coming disaster way ahead of time. As far as Frank is concerned, my being around these parts has been nothing more than a fortunate coincidence. “You still don’t want to do it my way?”
“Projection, detection, dissection? Out of the question. Not as long as I can help it.” Nardi says, shoveling a mouthful of bouillabaisse, wolfing the entire thing down in a minute flat. He shoots out of his seat across the booth from me, tossing a wad of crumpled bills from his back pocket.
“I’m done. You coming?”
Nodding, I push the bowl aside and head for the door. Once again, we step into the Arkham October air, all humid and choked with strange, wriggling currents, as the penny dreadful preached. There is magic here; runoff from Algonquin words of power and occult waste-heaps from the time before Columbus, sunk deep into the primordial sediment. The ebb and flow of Miskatonic River practices strange geometries, weaving mandalas out of two hundred years’ worth of flotsam. Even the moon’s great idiot face spurns Arkham: it turns its pock-marked visage from the city, shines Diana’s light from its rear on the rain-slick roads of the city. People like to badmouth Innsmouth, with its scores of inbred degenerates and its clumsy little cult and its grim coastline. Five will get you ten that not half of those people ever had to sift through Saltonstall’s red-light district at two o’clock in the morning, trailing a nasty little pervert with a thing for phocomelic prostitutes.
“Where are we off to now, boss?” I ask, in my best Brooklyn beat-cop accent impersonation. Nardi doesn’t seem to appreciate the joke. “Onward, to more pointless trudging of the seedy underbelly of Ye Olde Arkham Towne?”
“You’re awful chipper, for a dead woman,” he snaps.
“You know me: started off with some regulation denial, got mad at everyone, made some bum deals in the process and then realized I can’t be depressed all the time.”
“Thinking about moving into acceptance anytime soon?”
“Of what? I’m just fine, thank you.” I say and tug back at the edges of my vessel’s lips, in a crude semblance of a smile. The end result is a kind of dead-eyed rictus that causes Nardi to break into a trot. He’s never been much for possessions, this one. Not after his run-in with that old leech Mortonson, the cultist who nested in living men and women, drained them until they were but shriveled old husks. All told, despicable and pretty base magic, even for the rock-bottom standards of a necromancer. Sorely lacking in respect for the integrity of the living. Much better to use cadavers, like myself. The departed don’t really mind, and junior morticians end up with a story to tell their grandchildren.
“One last place we haven’t looked.” Nardi says, pointing toward the gibbous moon.
“Junkyard.”
“You think the little bugger tried to scrap the thing?”
“None of his pushers had seen him and Nancy-”
“The amazing flipper-girl?”
“Nancy hadn’t gotten her regular visit, either. Which means that the kid either hasn’t pawned the car yet, or that he’s in the process of getting rid of it. If we hurry along, we’ll probably manage to get to old Jeb’s yard in time and maybe get the little punk while we’re at it.”
“Also, save the world from doom.”
“That too.” Nardi grumbles and we board the Arkham midnight tram heading down Rossiter, toward the rust-red expanses that used to be the breadbasket of good ol’ Massachussets back in frontier days. Nardi is barely holding it together on the way, his exhaustion getting the better of him as he’s rocked to sleep by the tram’s gentle swaying. I bl
ink to pass the time until the bag lady is done setting up her makeshift trashbag pillow, wrap my vessel’s fists around the rail and abandon it so I can have a look around the city.
From the ground level, seen with the naked eye, Arkham is a parade of brick-red and soot-grays, neatly packed and quartered in city blocks. As I send my consciousness hopping from the tiny brain of a fly into the gullet of a particularly bold pigeon, the entire city shifts into a jagged vista of model buildings infested with artificial stars. The Miskatonic River is an open wound, flowing freely down the skin of the world. As soon as I am high enough, I let the dove glide helplessly on an air current and reach out for anyone that might listen. A lazy smog-spirit, belly filled to near bursting with freshly harvested exhaust from the industrial strips is hijacked with ease, — and I watch Arkham through its own augmented perspective. It pulses below me, like an abscess ready to blow its poisonous load. Arkham squats on the skin of the world, a great beast that gorges on occult energies, force-fed into it by virtue of ley lines distorted long before the time of Columbus. It bellows painfully as things push up against its skin, leaving alien imprints against the flesh. Tracing my way down the pulsing veins, I look for aberrant shifts in the network of energy. Beneath me, the smog-spirit bucks and heaves like a rodeo bull, so I coil myself around it like a snake, give it a good squeeze to let it know who’s boss. The smog-spirit thrashes a fraction of a second more before it goes limp. From the corner of its borrowed vision, I see it: the epicenter of the disturbance, the point where the frayed ley-lines converge, collapse into each other and finally fold into an origami manifold. The disturbance ripples across the skin of the city, blossoms outward to the heavens. Across the length and breadth of the spiritual manifestation of Arkham, there is a plague of cancer-trees, exploding into bloom before withering away as soon as the aberrant energy dissipates.
Beneath me the smog-spirit is panicking again, fighting me harder than ever. I grow fangs to sink into the spirit-form, but it’s too terrified to care: raw otherness cascades across the firmament, washes over both of us with a torrent of hungry, clicking teeth. The smog-spirit panics, attempts a clumsy feint and is caught. Descending into the safety of my vessel, I watch as the mouths meld into a shimmering, bubbling, chanting thing from somewhere beyond the confines of the Universe. Someone’s screaming in the tram. Nardi hisses under his breath, lets out a string of New York beat-cop babble.
Arkham Detective Agency: A Lovecraftian-Noir Tribute to C. J. Henderson Page 8