“And the cheating with the figures…”
“A German physicist. It is all very unfortunate. My client would like his suspicions confirmed before acting further. There is a time factor involved, Mr. Carter. The intention is that the experiment be restaged on a larger scale and at much greater expense elsewhere if the current round of results continue to be so encouraging. It would be embarrassing to the Miskatonic if those results were shown to be fraudulent only after the money has been spent. As for the impact it would have on future collaboration with the Reich…” An inquisitive flex of the brow. “You seem troubled, Mr. Carter.”
Carter was troubled by the conjunction of “collaboration” and “Reich,” but he doubted that would be explicable to Weston. He was having to unlearn a whole lot of associations and reflexes for things these days. Now, when people wanted a bogeyman to reach for, it was Stalin. The Germans had put out a lot of propaganda about the brutality of Stalin’s regime and it had stuck in the global consciousness as a touchstone for inhumanity in the modern world. They had hardly had to exaggerate, after all.
“So why me? If maybe there could be a diplomatic flare-up, why…” He leaned back. “Plausible deniability.”
“Indeed so. It would never do for an agent of the U.S. government to be found snooping around the project. Also, that would involve actually telling the government, and my client is not ready to take that step just yet.”
“Who is your client?”
“That’s … sensitive information.”
“What? It’s ‘need to know’?”
Weston nodded. “Precisely.”
“I need to know.”
“I would be the one employing you, not him. I truly doubt you need to or even should know, Mr. Carter. Better you simply go in, without prior preju—”
“No. I’m not going to argue about this. I either talk to your client, find out what he knows and get a better understanding of what’s going on in that lab, or I’m not signing up for this.”
“I am empowered to offer you twice your usual fee.”
“Make it ten times as much—”
For once, Weston seemed surprised. Not angry or shocked, but like a man who’s just found the book he was looking for in the wrong place. “I am not empowered to offer quite that mu—”
“—and I still wouldn’t do it. I speak to your client or I don’t feel I can take on the case.”
“Well.” Weston dropped the file back into his briefcase. “I am not at liberty to reveal his identity. All I can do is go to him with your proposal, Mr. Carter.” He rose and offered his hand. “I shall be in touch.”
Carter shook his hand and saw him to the door. “Don’t think I’m being difficult just for the hell of it, Mr. Weston. I just can’t do my job properly without doing the groundwork.”
“As I said, Mr. Carter, I believe I am a good judge of character. You do not strike me as a man given to frivolous gestures. I shall ask the client. I can do no more.”
Carter had closed the door and was halfway to his desk when the brief initial spark of curiosity as to why Weston was even in New York, never mind Red Hook, reignited in his mind. He walked back to the door and opened it out onto the common stairwell all the offices shared.
“Mr. Weston?” He looked over the rail, but the well was empty and silent, with no footfall sounding upon the stairs. “Mr. Weston?” He walked around the stairwell, but could see no sign of his visitor. On an impulse, he went quickly down the two flights of stairs, but didn’t pass Weston on the way. It took him longer to make the descent than the time it had taken him to walk out onto the third-story landing, and he had gone down the stairs pretty quickly. He had not heard the buzz the building’s front door made when it was released.
Once, not so very long ago, he would have just accepted it as one of those things, an inconsequential mystery whose solution lay in some stupid little detail he wasn’t seeing at the moment. Now, he felt differently. Now he had seen things, experienced things that did not fit neatly into that view of the mundanity of all things. Experiences that had started with the involvement of Mr. Henry Weston.
He went back to his office and sat down heavily to think. The sun slanted in, bothering him. Weston was right: he really should get some blinds.
Chapter 4
THE CLIENT
“The fucking Necronomicon. The fucking Necronomicon.” Emily Lovecraft was not in the mood to be moderate. “Right there.” She pointed at the locked safe. “The FUCKING Necronomicon. In this store. In that safe.” She looked at her fingertips. “I touched it.”
Carter was leaning on the customer side of the counter and not entirely understanding her concern. He saw her reach for the hand sanitizer bottle that any sane store owner keeps around. “No. No, don’t do that. That would be weird.”
She glanced at him and reluctantly put the bottle back. “I touched it.”
“The Fucking Necronomicon. Yeah, I heard. What is that? Some sort of skanky sex manual?”
She blinked at him. “What?” Then she laughed. “Okay. Okay. It’s just called the Necronomicon. It’s … fictional. It was fictional. Now it’s factual. I kind of knew it must be out there since things changed—it or something like it. Just never expected it to be in my place of work. I never expected to touch it.” She looked at her fingers again, and Carter caught the longing glance at the sanitizer bottle.
“So what is it? I think I’ve heard the name.” He frowned. “I have. You said it in passing when you first told me about H.P.L. It’s a book?”
“It’s the book. The one that explains everything you might not want to know, but probably need to if you’re going to have a chance against the kind of cosmic shit storms the Outer Gods specialize in. Outer gods.” She shook her head. “I know it’s all true, but part of my brain just wants to say, ‘No way. Not happening. Not true. Don’t go believing that stuff.’” She looked seriously at Carter. “Did you ever have times, back when the world was folded, when just for a minute or two, you didn’t believe in the world around you?”
“Every time I had to talk to my captain.”
“Ha ha. I’m serious, Dan. I mean moments when you thought about how complex the world is, and how long history is, and how it had brought you to that exact moment, and how incredibly unlikely it all was that you should be there, right at that moment, doing whatever you were doing. That never happened to you?”
Carter thought of his moments of dislocation, the sense that this was not a false world as Lovecraft was suggesting, but one of many, and the problem was that they were all too real. He shook his head. “Never.”
“Wow.” Lovecraft was genuinely surprised. “I thought it was a ‘human condition’ kind of thing. Thought everyone had moments like that.”
“Not me. Maybe I lack the imagination.” He nodded at the safe. “I have to ask, why do we have a copy in the first place?”
“Yeah. About that. Not sure if this counts as good news or bad news.” She reached under the counter and produced a small, black ledger. “This was in there, too.” She slid it across to Carter. “At least it ain’t bound in human skin. Small blessing.”
Carter flicked through it, but it just seemed like a handwritten list of dry book descriptions, dates, and prices. He passed it back, shaking his head. “Your handwriting.”
“Thanks for pointing it out. You have any idea how freaky it was to open that thing and find it full of entries the unfolded me made?”
“You are the unfolded you.”
“Not by choice.” She flicked through the pages and stopped on one particular entry, resting a finger on it. “Here. Abd’ Al’hazred, author. Translation into English, John Dee. Fragmentary. Royal quarto. Four hundred and eight pages. Date uncertain, but probably late sixteenth century, and almost certainly printed in England.” She looked up at Carter and said darkly, “Illustrated.”
“Did you look at them?”
She shrugged. “I’m a curious girl. Yeah, I looked. First couple, I though
t, Not so bad. Next one I looked at it for a full minute, but couldn’t figure out exactly what it was supposed to be. Next one, I slammed the book shut, wrapped it up, put it back.” She leveled a finger at Carter. “Half an hour later, I realized what the third picture was of. Went to the bathroom, brought up my breakfast.”
Carter stared at her. Whatever else she was, Lovecraft was not a delicate blossom. He was suddenly glad he hadn’t seen the pictures himself.
Lovecraft turned to regard the safe, tucked in the shadows behind the counter. “Right then, if somebody had pulled up in a truck and walked in here with a propylene torch, offered to weld the safe shut, drive it to a bridge, and drop it in the river, I’d have let them. I’d have thanked them. I’d have paid them to do it.” She shook her head and turned back to Carter. “But not now. I’ve been thinking about it. If we’re really going to set things right, we need to know what we’re doing. That book’s a sanity-eater, but it also might be a how-to guide to getting things folded up again.”
“Well, you’d be the one using it. I’m not much of a reader.”
“Ignore him, boys and girls,” Lovecraft said to the thousands of volumes around them, “he doesn’t mean it.” Then to Carter, “The full Necronomicon is supposed to be in seven volumes and over nine hundred pages altogether. What we’ve got in the safe over there is either whatever fragments of Dee’s translation were recoverable, or maybe just the edited highlights. Either way, this is the light reading version.”
“The Reader’s Digest condensed edition.”
Lovecraft laughed, a sound of gratefully released tension. “Yeah. Imagine ‘It Pays to Improve Your Word Power’ would be full of stuff like ‘fhtagn’ and ‘Y’Golo…’” Her smile faded suddenly with her voice. When she spoke again, it was in hushed tones. “Have to be careful even about what we say now. Some things literally must not be named.”
“Why?”
She glanced up and off to one side, as if hearing something that he could not. She looked back at him, all traces of humor gone, replaced with great seriousness, and perhaps just a little fear. “Because they might be listening.”
* * *
Carter tried to raise Lovecraft’s mood a little by joking about what else she might have found in the safe, suggesting Captain Kidd’s treasure and Capone’s hidden millions. The attempt backfired badly when it turned out that, along with the Necronomicon, she’d found a copy of something called Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten and another book she admitted she’d never heard of before called Principia Necromantica that a brief examination revealed to be at least as worrying as its title.
“We’ve been selling these fucking things,” she said, distressed at the culpability and weak morality of her unfolded self. “To collectors! Carter & Lovecraft actually has a rep in the business for being the go-to place for forbidden tomes. How could we? It’s like selling assault rifles to kindergartens!”
“Now it is, but maybe…” Carter paused. “No. You’re right. All the magical shit exists on this side of the Fold. Those books are dangerous.”
“I’ve got a buyer who wants the Kulten book. Offered a small fortune for it when I called to tell him we might have a copy. Dumb move, but what was I supposed to say? What am I supposed to say now?”
“Say no. There was a mistake, it was a private sale and an intern advertised it without asking. You can’t let those things out, Emily. They’re not like assault rifles. They are way worse. They’re more like a biological weapon. They contain thought viruses. You know what they say about stuff falling into the wrong hands. I’m not saying ours are infallible, but we can’t just send these things out to people whose sole qualification is that they have some green.”
“It was a lot of green,” said Lovecraft, but didn’t argue beyond that.
Carter leaned forward over the counter and nodded at the safe. “So…”
Lovecraft regarded him somberly. He half-smiled, decided that wasn’t appropriate, sobered again, and looked steadily at the safe on the chance that this might communicate his meaning without him actually having to say anything.
“So?” said Lovecraft. She plainly knew exactly what he was intimating, and had no intention of letting him get away with not saying it.
“So, when are you going to sit down and … read those things?”
Lovecraft continued to look steadily at him for several moments longer before saying, “So, when am I going to risk my sanity and life reading those things so that you don’t have to?”
“I don’t—”
“You don’t read much. Yeah, I heard you.” She sighed, as much in resignation as exasperation. “I don’t know, Dan. They’re kind of a big deal. The necromancy book is just going to be gross for the sake of it, and I’d guess it’s too specific for us. Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten is supposed to be a trap book anyway, I think. Shit’s pretty much bound to happen if you read it. I guess I’ll try to focus on the Necronomicon. Besides, my German and Latin probably aren’t good enough.”
“You speak German and Latin?”
“Latin’s damn rusty, but yeah. No practice for years. Not that Tudor English is going to be a walk in the park. I think I’m going to have a look around to see if I can find any glossaries for the English of the period. It’s Shakespeare’s time—pretty much exactly, in fact—so there should be a few. I’ll see what I can find before embarking up the river toward that particular ‘heart of darkness.’” She drew a deep breath. “Who knew reading could be so hazardous?”
* * *
Carter left Lovecraft to run the business while he went upstairs to the small apartment over the store to look after the private investigation end of things. He’d warned her that a potential client was going to turn up soon, Weston having called to say the client had agreed to meet Carter, and to call him when they did so. Then he set up his laptop on the table in the apartment and started clearing a stack of paperwork he’d allowed to build up while acclimatizing himself to the new scheme of things Lovecraft, Harrelson, and he had found themselves thrust into.
He heard the bell chime a few times downstairs as customers came and went, the mutter of conversation, and—his personal favorite—the sound of a sale being rung up. He’d grown used to the ambience of a reasonably successful independent bookstore in action for about an hour when he heard the door at the bottom of the stairs open and Lovecraft call up. She did not seem pleased.
“Mr. Carter!” She said his name like a disapproving teacher. “There’s a Nazi to see you!”
Carter made his way downstairs quickly, finding Lovecraft standing by the lower door with her arms crossed and wearing a judgmental expression. She nodded into the middle of the store at the counter. Standing there was a man of around forty years, lean, sandy-brown thinning hair, wearing a dark wool suit and a horrified expression.
“Emily…” Carter muttered warningly.
“What?” She walked with him to the newcomer. “Look. Swastika lapel pin. What’s a girl to think?”
“Please,” said the newcomer, his German accent evident, “don’t use that word.”
“Which word?” said Emily, looking forward to using it again, and repeatedly.
“The ‘N’ word.”
Lovecraft froze for a long second, her eyebrows up, her lips slightly agape. She looked at Carter, not quite able to process what she had just heard.
Carter said quickly before she would recover her equilibrium, “I’ll take Mr.…?”
“Lukas,” supplied the man. “Torsten Lukas.”
“… Mr. Lukas upstairs where we can discuss business. I’ll … ah. Thank you.”
He led Lukas to the stairs, although he was pretty sure he heard Lovecraft mutter, “Make yourself at home. I’ll make you a nice cup of Buchenwald, you Nazi fuck” in his wake.
Upstairs, Carter bid Lukas sit and offered to make coffee, which Lukas accepted. As he busied himself in the kitchen area of the open plan apartment, Lukas said, “Who is that black downstairs?”
“T
hat’s my business partner, Mr. Lukas. I’m sorry if Miss Lovecraft was less than respectful, but she has her reasons. Please don’t respond in kind, or I won’t be able to work for you.”
Lukas looked confused as he accepted the coffee. “What did I say?”
Carter sat down and wondered how to explain, or even if he should bother. The Unfolded World really could be a pain in the ass. He decided that talking a Nazi (the guy really did have a party pin on his lapel) out of reflexive racism in one sitting was not something that was going to happen. Instead, he said, “I gotta admit, Mr. Lukas, I’m surprised to see you. I got the idea I’d be dealing with a member of the American side of the project.”
“Mr. Weston said that?”
“No, but he didn’t mention you’d be a German, plus he told me the trouble was from one of the Germans, so I drew what seemed like the natural conclusion. Okay, that was wrong, but you can see why I thought what I did. How do you know Mr. Weston?”
“Weston Edmunds handles our patents in the U.S. I was discussing one such with them when I mentioned some possible … troubles with the project at the Miskatonic.”
“And Weston himself took an interest?”
Lukas nodded. “That surprised me. He is the owner, yes?”
“Yeah. He’s kind of eccentric, though. So, you have doubts somebody on your team is playing straight with the results? Why don’t you take it up with them? Or, I don’t know, do you have some sort of governing body?”
“This would be considered a security matter. It’s Gestapo business.”
Carter laughed. “I can see why you don’t want to get them involved.” Lukas didn’t even smile. If anything, Carter’s amusement made him uncomfortable. Carter stopped laughing. “Oh. I see.”
Lukas shrugged slightly. “I am Gestapo.”
After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft) Page 4