After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  He paused on the stairs. Why was it taking him so long to get to the third floor? Hadn’t he already gone past the landing? He looked back; nope, there was the door from the second floor. He must just have got distracted and not noticed where he was up to. So, up to the landing …

  There was a piece of paper in the corner, a dropped receipt.

  He remembered that, remembered thinking the cleaners were goofing off if they’d missed that. He must have noticed it on his last patrol, and yet the memory of seeing it was so fresh, as if only seconds old. He grunted, impatient with himself. Just check the floor, go back to your damn desk, and keep on reading about web sockets.

  He opened the door and entered the third floor. He usually liked it up there, but the glitched memory was making him angry. He didn’t understand the glitch, and he didn’t know why it would make him angry, and that made him angrier still.

  Koznick walked to the handrail of the walkway around the open area and leaned on it, breathing deeply while he regained his composure. Below him was the main laboratory floor, before him was the upper part of the test rig, and above him …

  It can sometimes be a mistake to look up when in a high place, but Koznick was used to the building, used to the glass roof, used to looking up and seeing the moon, or ragged clouds, raindrops smashing against the glass or even snow collecting on it. He wasn’t used to seeing the stars. Even the dim green glow of the emergency lights on the lab level and around him was enough to give the roof a mass of ghostly reflections of the building’s interior bright enough to hide the stars. Even if they hadn’t, while Arkham’s light pollution wasn’t as bad as some cities, it was still enough to bleach the sky and obscure all but the brightest points of light.

  That was what he was used to seeing when he looked up but, this time, he saw them. He truly saw them. The glass of the roof may as well not have been there. All Arkham’s streetlights may as well have been turned off. Earth’s atmosphere might as well have been gone, such was the stark, penetrating, unadulterated, unmediated light of the stars upon him. The light-years that separated him from them may as well have been inches. There was no sense of him seeing the stars as they appeared three, seventy, six hundred, ten thousand years ago; he knew—somehow, he knew—that this was how they appeared that very instant, against a sky so black it hurt to look upon it. The darkness crushed him, and the light speared him like needles of frozen helium.

  He couldn’t bear to look at it, so he looked down and saw the laboratory floor a story below. It wasn’t a long drop, and he’d never felt vertigo looking into it before, yet now it was its very lack of distance and scale that horrified him.

  It all looked so fake, like a set for a low-budget sixties science fiction movie. The computers, the instrumentation, even the mass of the test rig felt no more real than plywood and aluminum foil props. It seemed fake, pathetic, and small. So small. Unimportant. Barely worth the effort of looking at it. And around him, an inconsequential city raised in a laughable country on a mote of a planet by a joke of a species.

  Koznick’s legs gave out. He fell to his knees, and then onto his back, and so he could not help himself, but could only stare up at the hungry stars as they fed upon him.

  * * *

  Carter was at his desk the next day at around noon when he received the call. It had not been a good morning; it was a dreary day in New York, and Red Hook, not the most charming corner of the city at the best of times, looked surly after half an hour of heavy rain. That had passed, but the sun was sullen and barely visible behind the banks of cloud that mired the city in a dismal place.

  The gloom extended to his casebook, as he liked to call it on the off-chance that somebody might mistake him for Sherlock Holmes. He’d been promised … well, not exactly promised a retainer to be on call by the hotel where he had so brilliantly solved The Adventure of the Purloined Bedlinen, but now the manager had told him that the chain had some deal with a major security company and weren’t interested in freelancers. Given that the possibility of a retainer was what had tipped him into taking the job in the first place, Carter was not pleased. If he picked up the casebook and gave it a good shake, nothing remotely like a steady cash flow poured out of it.

  Given the silence of his phone, and the dearth of anything useful in his e-mails, he was concentrating on putting together ideas for a cheap media blitz. Looking at his budget, he figured he might just be able to stretch to stapling flyers on poles. If it wasn’t for the steady income that Lovecraft’s running of the shop brought in, he would barely be getting by at all, he realized, and he didn’t like that feeling. He needed work, and he needed it urgently. He glared at the desk phone, willing it to ring, but it ignored him, like usual. Carter returned his attention to the free poster design software he’d found online. He couldn’t remember if it was a good idea or a bad one to use lots of different typefaces. Good, surely? It must be. People like variation.

  New York was saved from a horror of six fonts by Carter’s cell phone ringing.

  “Mr. Carter? This is Torsten Lukas. We spoke the other day, if you recall?”

  “I do, Mr. Lukas. How can I help you today?”

  “You turned down the commission I offered you on the grounds that you would need access to the site, and there was no way to do that discreetly, yes?”

  It wasn’t the only reason, but it was the main one. “Yes.”

  “A situation has developed here. A post for a security guard has opened.”

  A rent-a-cop? Carter didn’t like the idea of that at all. “Sir, I’m sure you can find—”

  “I brought it to the attention of Weston Edmunds, who apparently have some influence at the university. The job is yours for the taking.”

  Carter was just wondering how to say “No” with sufficient diplomacy given how much trouble had already been made over this when Lukas added, “Obviously the university will just think that you’re an ex-cop who needs the work, and will pay you for the role. This will be in addition to the fee I shall be paying you.”

  A rapid monetary calculation rattled through Carter’s mind, adding the security guard fee to his own—no, wait, double his own—and then his share of the receipts from the bookstore. He suddenly felt pretty well off. Or, at least he would be, providing he accepted the job. He weighed the fact that he’d be taking a Nazi’s money along with the faint sense that something was a little hinky about the job, and then set that against the emaciated state of his casebook. It was not a complex equation, and the result did not surprise him.

  “Okay, Mr. Lukas, you have yourself a detective. I’ll send you a contract and we can get started.”

  “Bring the contract along tomorrow, Mr. Carter, and I’ll sign it then when I’m unobserved.”

  “At the university?”

  “At the university. It will be your first day on the job.”

  Chapter 6

  CONSTABLE CARTER

  Lovecraft was not sympathetic. It was way, way too funny to be in any way diluted by sympathy. When Carter had arrived at the bookstore wearing a sky-blue shirt with navy-blue pocket covers, a belt bearing a flashlight, a stun gun, and a holster for a Walther PPQ M2 in .40 caliber, her delight had been uncontained. The pistol itself was sitting in a weapons safe at the security building at Miskatonic University.

  “They gave me a German pistol,” he complained. “Why couldn’t they buy American?”

  Lovecraft really didn’t care about that. “Put on the hat! Put on the hat!”

  Carter looked sourly at the peaked cap with a Miskatonic security logo on the front of the hat band. “I’m not putting this thing on.”

  “Aww, come on, Dan. You’ll have to wear it on duty. Might as well get used to it.”

  He looked stonily at her. “Right. Fine. Don’t laugh.”

  She adopted a very sober face that didn’t fool either of them for a moment.

  “Fine.” Carter put on the cap.

  Lovecraft’s composure disintegrated immediately. She whoop
ed loudly at him from a range of less than a yard, making him flinch. “Strip-o-gram! Strip-o-gram!” She opened the till and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Make momma happy and I’ll tuck this in your thong.” She leaned expectantly on the counter, her grin broad, the bill dangling between two fingers. Carter glared at her and went to remove the offending cap. Lovecraft whooped again. “Take it all off, baby!”

  “Are you finished?”

  “Sure.” Still smiling, she replaced the bill and closed the till drawer. “Like it would be worth ten bucks to see your action. I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t push me, Lovecraft.” Carter dropped his hat on the counter. “I’m carrying a stun gun. You really don’t want to provoke me.”

  “So you’re undercover? Or are things just tough in Gumshoeville?”

  “Both. Not enough people walking through the door looking for dirt on their significant others. Still, been a long time since I was last undercover.”

  “Weird kind of undercover where you’re pretending to be a security guy.”

  “I’m not pretending. They’re paying me to do that work, so I’ll do it. It’s just, I might be doing a couple of other things while I’m there that they’re not paying me for. Somebody else is.”

  Lovecraft’s smile faded to nothing. “The Nazi the other day.”

  “His name is Lukas. I’ve been asking around about the ‘Nazi’ thing. It really is considered impolite to use it these days.” He didn’t like the look evolving on Lovecraft’s face and added, a little weakly, “Go figure.”

  “The ‘N’ word? Really? He stood right there and … holy shit. What did he call me when you two went upstairs?”

  Carter was reasonably confident that telling her would be a mistake, so he said, “We talked business. It doesn’t all have to be about you, you know.”

  “What do we call the Nazi fucks if we can’t call them Nazis? I need to differentiate my common, workaday fucks from the Nazi ones. How?”

  “They prefer to be called ‘the NSDAP,’ or ‘the Nationals,’ or just ‘the Party,’ if it makes sense in context.”

  “Do they?”

  “They do.”

  “You looked that stuff up.”

  “I did.”

  She considered the options. “The NSDAP, huh?”

  “Yeah. It means something in German.”

  She picked up his cap, put it on, gave herself an impromptu toothbrush moustache with her left index and middle fingers against her upper lip, and threw a Nazi salute with her right. “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,” she said in guttural little barks. Her attitude softened as she took the cap off and dropped it back on the counter. “Out of all the things that are fucked up in this world, the last one I was expecting was Nazis marching around as a superpower. I’d kind of managed to brace myself for all sorts of supernatural shit, but this … this I was not ready for.”

  Carter went to the door, put up the Back Soon sign, and pulled the blind. “We have to talk about what we’re going to try and do.”

  “About? About all this?” Lovecraft spread her hands to encompass the Unfolded World in all its profound disorder. “What can we do?”

  “Whatever Randolph and H.P.L. did. The Fold isn’t destroyed. It’s still there. Somewhere. We can reverse it.”

  “How? Waite’s Bill has gone. Your cop friend—”

  “I have lots of cop friends…”

  “Harrelson says the spit’s gone. According to city records, it was deliberately dug out to make a marina in the late forties. Then the owners—the … Waites, I’m talking about here…” She hesitated as she said the name, a sudden vision of what the Waites truly were flickering across her mind’s eye before she could shoo the image away to somewhere in her memory where it would do less harm. “… changed their minds. Sure they did. They knew we might fix their shit and they took away a piece of the coastline to stop it happening. Every day, Dan, every day I half-expect somebody to walk through that door and kill me.”

  Carter nodded at the counter. “You’ve got the Mossberg.”

  “Whoever they send will laugh at a Mossberg. Whatever they send. I keep going through what I can remember of H.P.L.’s stories in my mind, just thinking about what might come after us. If they want us dead, we’re dead. Fuck, we’re worse than dead.”

  Carter shrugged. “Well, they obviously don’t want us dead or we would be by now.”

  Lovecraft sighed, unsmiling. “Mr. Sunshine.”

  “I have an optimistic disposition.”

  “Let’s be real about this. They haven’t come after us because we are beneath their notice. Like, bacterial level to them. Don’t be going making us out to be occult-sassin’, eldritch-slingin’ badasses who they’re afraid of, ’cos we ain’t and they ain’t. We’re alive because those fuckers forgot about us. I thought I could live with that. Arkham’s prettier than Providence ever was. Wiser. More character. I like this town way more.”

  Carter wasn’t sure what to say. He’d taken it for granted that Lovecraft would want the Folded World back, just like him. When she put it that way, though, maybe she had a point. So this world had a background hum of weirdness emanating from the deepest recesses of space. He’d been born under the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction, had lived in a world of religious terrorism, antibiotic failure, and anthropogenic climate change. What was a bunch of Elder Gods and Old Ones on top of that? If they wanted to bring an apocalypse upon humanity, they could just take a ticket and wait.

  “But”—Lovecraft angled her head and looked Carter in the eye; he saw her old fire rekindling there—“I am not putting up with fucking Nazis. White supremacist jerk-offs are a big enough pain in the ass without them forming friendly societies to cheerlead for the real and actual motherfucking Third Reich.” She shook her head adamantly. “No. Not happening. I could not physically care less about Cthulhu and all that shit as long as they keep leaving us alone. But Nazis? I can’t be cool with that, Dan. I can’t be going, ‘Oh, Arkham in the springtime. So nice, I don’t mind the planet’s sticky with all this Mein Kampf bullshit.’ I do mind. I want to refold the world. I want to crush those fuckers like ants in origami.”

  Carter nodded. “Nice image.”

  “Yeah. I should send it to Reader’s Digest.” She leaned on the counter and looked seriously at Carter. “One thing I’m wondering is, can we do the Fold just so and come out the other side still with Arkham? I mean, Arkham instead of getting Providence back?” She shrugged. “I really love this place.”

  * * *

  Campus security at Miskatonic had some interesting foibles. The senior officer was dubbed “the Sergeant,” while his subordinates were all “constables.” There was nothing contractually that said anything like that, but it was tradition and Arkham loved its traditions, the more “olde worlde,” the better. Under the circumstances, Carter was relieved he just had to contend with a peaked cap and not a Keystone Kops–style helmet.

  Constable Carter arrived at the security building—a grandiose sort of name for a small one-story structure by the main road entering the campus—in plenty of time to start the six-to-two morning shift. Sergeant Graves was just finishing up signing off some expense claims when he entered.

  “Good morning, Constable,” he said. Graves had seemed okay on their first meeting when Carter had gone through the formality of an interview for a job they both knew was already his. A big man carrying some weight he didn’t seem in much of a hurry to lose, Graves was marking time before retirement. Carter had made a guess from his accent that Graves was maybe ex–Detroit PD, but—beyond confirming he was a former cop like all of campus security—hadn’t asked right then.

  “Good morning, Sergeant. Thought I’d come in a little early and learn the small stuff.”

  “That’s good.” Graves put away the papers and smiled at Carter, and Carter realized with a small shock that Graves actually liked him. He had somehow got it into his head that there would be some fencing since he
was the new guy. “Sign in here, then come through and I’ll issue you your weapon.”

  Carter signed the entry log, then went behind the counter area into the back room were the gun safe was. It used a key and code combination, and Graves waved Carter to the safe to open it himself. He’d be expected to put the gun back himself at the end of his shift, so it made sense to make sure he knew how to open the thing. Once he had done so, he stepped aside while Graves removed a Walther from the interior, checked its serial against the weapon log, gave it a quick field strip and reassembly on the desk while talking Carter through it, and formally handed it over to Carter. He signed it off as issued, and then passed the log to Carter to sign it as accepted.

  “In the future, you only need to sign it in and out of the safe,” said Graves, loading a clip with hollow points and handing it to Carter.

  “What are these things like? I don’t have any range time with a Walther.”

  “They’re nice. Reliable and really flows well when you aim, if you get me. Say what you like about the Germans, they make good firearms. You should get some shooting in with one, though. What are you used to?”

  “A Glock.”

  “Ah, you’ll have no problems. They handle pretty much the same. Must admit, I prefer the Walther, though. More natural in the hand.”

  Carter slammed the magazine home, chambered a round, checked the weapon was safe, and holstered it. “Just the one clip?”

  “University policy. To be frank, I’ve been here eight years and rarely even had to draw. Had to fire a warning shot once a while back when some idiot came on campus with an assault rifle. Otherwise”—he reached down and tapped the stun gun and pepper spray on his belt—“these are your weapons of choice. Remember: shooting students is bad for the university’s reputation. The regents frown upon it.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. I hate to upset regents.”

  Graves smiled again. “That’s the attitude. Okay. All easy stuff. Hourly patrols, but try and be unobtrusive when people are actually in and working outside normal hours. Keep it to public areas, the foyer and a circuit of the outside in that case. From nine to eighteen hundred, somebody has to be at the security station, so that’s you from nine to two. Keep your rest breaks as short as you can, because somebody will always bitch if there isn’t a uniform at the station every goddamn second.” He took a breath. “Anything else you need to know?”