After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  * * *

  The guard just coming off the ten-to-six shift was called Ward, and he looked very glad to see Carter. “Man, I am bushed. Cannot wait to get home.”

  “I’m Dan Carter, the new guy.” They shook hands. “Rough night?”

  “My circadian rhythms are all screwed. Be easier tomorrow when I’m back on the six-to-two.”

  “My shift?” This was news to Carter. Maybe he should have asked the sergeant more questions.

  “My shift. I was just doing this while they got a new hand. Moving forward a shift isn’t too bad, but going back one? Whoa, mama. Painful.”

  “Was the previous guy fired or something? Didn’t they have a chance to get a new hire before he left?”

  Ward looked at him like a man wondering how to couch bad news diplomatically, and then deciding, Ah, fuck it. “Dude, your predecessor went crazy. I found him curled up in a ball at the beginning of my shift two days ago.” Again he momentarily considered diplomacy and, again, decided not to bother. “He’d pissed himself, wasn’t making sense. I thought maybe he was high or something. Tried to rouse him a little bit, pull himself together, right? Didn’t want him to get reported or nothing. Dave was a stand-up guy. Nice guy. So, no trouble. I try, he starts screaming. I mean fit-to-spit-up-a-lung screaming. I saw guys shot and burnt on the job—you’re ex-NYPD, Sarge said. That right?—and they didn’t scream anything like that.” He signed out as he spoke. “Anyway, that was Dave done and gone.” He pointed. “The john’s over there. Otherwise you’re pretty much on your ass at the station from nine till two, so you should get some walking in now while you still can. You’ll miss it later. Have fun.”

  He paused at the door on the way out. “Hope I didn’t freak you out about Dave. It’s not like the lab’s haunted or anything. Take care and don’t shoot the geeks.”

  “Yeah, Sarge told me about that.”

  “Rules to live by. See you, Dan.”

  And Carter was alone in the building. Just him and the lingering ghost of sudden insanity. This, he concluded, was probably not the smoothest induction into a job imaginable.

  What he did like was the general attitude that they were all grown-up enough to just get on with the job without handholding. That was excellent. What was also nearly excellent was, here he was, all alone in the building where he was supposed to be, with a good hour or so before even the early birds might be expected to show up. It was all excellent, but for the minor details that he wasn’t inclined to take the pictures of the detector’s internal components without first having a contract in place, and secondly, he had no earthly idea what the detector looked like.

  Before even settling in at the security station, he went up to the second story and wandered the laboratory floor to familiarize himself with where he would be carrying out a tiny bit of petty larceny, providing the client came through. The contract he had printed off for Lukas’s signature was not quite standard as far as emoluments and expenses went; with some chivying from Lovecraft at his shoulder acting as the anti–Jiminy Cricket, he had upped his usual fee a little before doubling it in line with Weston’s promised payday. “Stickin’ it to the Übermensch,” she had called it.

  Carter had not been convinced. “I’m not sure overcharging one Gestapo stooge is going to bring down the Third Reich.”

  Lovecraft remained optimistic. “Death by a thousand cuts.”

  In any event, he wasn’t going to do any industrial espionage for Lukas until he had his name on a contract.

  The equipment in the laboratory was precisely as baffling as he had expected. He walked around it for a few minutes, looking up into the open atrium formed by the partial third floor and glass roof. The space was dominated by a tall cylinder perhaps a couple of yards in diameter, skinned in gleaming sectioned steel panels and stretching up close to the glass. Assorted pipes and important-looking boxes were attached to the exterior, and Carter gained the impression that it was a pressure vessel of some kind, probably—based on what he had been told by Lukas—one intended to withstand an internal total vacuum. Lukas had said that the measurements were conducted between two plates an almost unimaginably small distance apart. As a result, Carter had expected the test rig to be no more than bench-sized; the great thirty-foot-high cylinder was therefore unexpected. He wondered if it was from a different project and just too expensive to remove for the period that the American-German team would be working in the building, but a glance around didn’t indicate anything else that looked like it might be able to generate and maintain as near a perfect vacuum as human science could manage. He looked up at the cylinder again; perhaps somebody was overcompensating for something.

  At five past seven, the first of the scientists arrived. Carter was relieved it was Lukas, who eyed him with some surprise as he approached the reception counter.

  “Good morning, Mr. Carter. I was not expecting to see you quite so early.”

  “I work quickly.” He produced an envelope containing two copies of the revised standard contract. “But until you sign that, I’m not working for you. I’m on shift until two. Read it and—”

  But Lukas had already taken out the contracts and signed both without reading them. He slid them over to Carter. “Now you sign and we have a deal.” Carter took the pen and, hesitating for longer than Lukas had despite knowing exactly what was in the contracts, he signed both, passing one back to Lukas.

  “There. Now we’re all legal. Now show me the thing I’m supposed to be getting pictures of.”

  Lukas led the way back up the stairs onto the lab floor. “That.” He pointed at a bland unit about four feet high by four wide and two deep painted in gray-blue paint. It bore a flat-screen monitor on its top surface, and an odd keyboard sat by it, half the size of a standard one, the keys labeled with a mixture of numbers, Latin and Greek alphabetical characters, and some faintly mathematical squiggles. He frowned and looked at Lukas, who shook his head. “It baffles me, too,” he admitted.

  At the back of the unit were power and data leads, as well as connections to the screen and keyboard. There was also a lock. “Only Giehl has the key. It is ludicrous.”

  Carter quickly audited his lock-picking skills and found them rusty. “I didn’t think the machine would actually be locked.”

  Lukas looked at him blankly then, understanding, shook his head. “No, the lock is not for the cover. It is for the operation of the detector. No one else can use it. I do not think the Americans … our American colleagues have noticed Giehl unlocks it in the morning and locks it again when work is done for the day yet. I hope they do not; it would be embarrassing.”

  Carter was beginning to understand Lukas’s concerns about the numbers the detector was producing; it seems a bizarre level of security for something that was just a fancy ammeter. Farther down the back of the machine, he saw the access cover. “I’ll bring in a power drill. Should make pretty short … Ah, shit.” He straightened. “Nonstandard heads.” He checked his watch. “You ever try to get into this thing by yourself?”

  “I am rarely alone, and the boards will have to be removed for photographing. It is not something that can be done quickly.”

  Carter could see that; his original estimation of ten or twenty minutes to get the pictures was now heading upward toward an hour. He took out his phone and took some quick pictures of the unusual screws. He straightened, looked around, and spotted a poster stuck to a supporting column bearing the image of a red stop sign Photoshopped to read If this sign looks blue, slow down. He went to it and misappropriated some of the generous quantity of Fun-Tak used to put it up before returning to the detector and wedging the lump into the screw head. It came away again bearing a reasonable impression of the shape of the screwdriver head to deal with it. He placed it by a ruler he found on a desk and took a couple more pictures.

  “That will have to do. We can’t expect to have the place to ourselves much longer.” As he squashed the putty into a ball and put it back under the poster, he said, “I’ll
see about getting a tool to undo those screws, although I won’t have a chance to do that until tomorrow at the earliest. Seems I’m back here this evening for the ten-to-six shift as well.”

  Chapter 7

  NECRONOMICON

  Lovecraft liked her sleep. She liked to stop looking at any illuminated screens after 9:00 p.m. Who needed them, after all, when you had books? She liked to be in bed sooner rather than later, and she liked to do so in the company of a good book or, occasionally, an entertainingly bad one. Sometimes work precluded this; she would break her screens rule to check her e-mails perhaps once an hour and once immediately before putting the lights out, but she would only open them if their subject lines piqued her interest. She liked to sleep deeply until the alarm rang at seven in the morning. She didn’t mind dreaming, even if some of the dreams had been disordered and even harrowing immediately prior and subsequent to the world’s unfolding. Yet these dreams had been half-remembered and faded quickly.

  The one she experienced that morning was unusual in that it was as vivid as reality. She dreamt that she was no longer in her apartment, but in her bookstore. This was not unusual in itself—she spent much of her waking life there and it would be extraordinary if that experience did not impinge upon the workings of her sleeping mind. That she dreamt that she was in the bookstore wearing the baggy T-shirt and comfortable pajama shorts she preferred to sleep in was unusual, however. Even in the dream she knew this was odd. Why was she wearing them there? Had she walked the streets dressed like that? She didn’t remember doing that. Had she sleepwalked? On an impulse, she checked the soles of her feet, but they were clean. Okay, she hadn’t walked. Maybe she’d gone to sleep in the apartment over the store and forgotten about it. She never had before, but it was more reasonable than unheralded somnambulism, so she accepted it with the easy assent of dream logic.

  She wasn’t just there to stand around, though. There was something that she was pretty sure she should be doing. She looked around and caught sight of herself in the glass of the Edwardian bookcase mounted on the wall behind the counter in which were kept some nice old volumes, too valuable to go out on the shelves yet not valuable enough to go in the safe. Her reflection had bed head, which even within the dream struck her as a very thorough detail for her unconscious mind to include.

  There she wavered on the edge of a lucid dream, aware she was dreaming, yet too caught up in the milieu to impose her own will upon it.

  She blinked. She was supposed to be doing something. Something important. She realized she was holding a key in her hand and remembered. Oh, yeah. Of course.

  She bent before the safe and unlocked it in actions so reflexive they felt as natural as breathing. She had one of the storage boxes out and on the counter before she knew what she was doing. It was only when she went to open it that she began to wonder why she was doing it at all. Her hands wavered over the lid and she began to form an intimation that all really was not well.

  “I should wake up now,” she said aloud. “There’s going to be tentacles and shit if I open that box. I’ve seen this movie before.”

  Her hands continued to waver. She told her arms to relax, to fall by her sides, but they would not. Unbidden, her traitorous fingers took hold of the edge of the hinged lid.

  “It’s really important,” she said, but she wasn’t sure if they were her words.

  She opened the box.

  There were no tentacles, which was good. Instead, the box contained what it was supposed to contain, and that was bad. The volume of collated fragments of Dee’s translation of the Necronomicon lay before her. She stared at it, and suffered an ugly sense that it was staring back.

  She had been through the records to find where the books in the safe had originally come from. She was not surprised—indeed, she was relieved—that the unfolded her had not bought them. They had been her uncle’s purchases, and he had never tried to sell them himself. She knew why; these were for reference, not profit. Besides, as she had said to Carter herself, she’d as soon sell these as she would anthrax bombs to a teenager. God only knew what they might inspire if let loose in the world. Better they stay here, contained and impotent in the safe.

  The Necronomicon wasn’t in the safe, though. It was lying there being indefinably malign, and she hated the sight of even its closed cover. Suddenly she realized why the unfolded her had decided to sell Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten. She didn’t believe in what these books contained. They were just a valuable curio like an early edition of the Malleus Maleficarum. The Necronomicon hadn’t been sold not because it was an apocalypse in handy take-home form, but because she had never found the right buyer.

  The folded version of her knew better, though. Maybe being so close to the Perceptual Twist, or Fold, or whatever the fuck it was when it did its thing had put the folded her and Carter and even Harrelson in control over their unfolded variants. She didn’t know. Maybe the answer was in the black book before her, but she was damned if she was going to open it and find out. She had a concrete sense that she would be damned just by opening it right then.

  Lovecraft noticed her right hand was on the edge of the cover. Her eyes widened.

  “No! No no no no no no! Don’t do that!”

  Her hand might as well have flipped her the bird. Instead, it flipped the book open.

  * * *

  Carter’s guess as to how much time he and Lukas had for his in situ briefing was about right. He was barely back at the reception desk when the scientists began to arrive. Most ignored him as they came through in dribs and drabs. Some flashed IDs at him, while others just made a point of having them clipped to their shirts or dangling from lanyards. This saved him the hassle of demanding to see IDs just to show enthusiasm, as there was nothing in his list of standing orders to cover it beyond “Ensuring only authorized persons are on site at all times.” If he hadn’t been aware of the political dimensions of the project up to now, the dithering nervousness of the security protocols would have made him wonder. They bore an air of “This is a scientific institute, but I suppose we should make an effort.” The result wasn’t the tightest site imaginable, but intruders would still be spotted fairly quickly. It was astonishingly fortuitous he was being paid to be there.

  The serendipity of his predecessor’s sudden breakdown was becoming more suspicious by the second, the more he saw of the project’s functioning. Any other way in here would have had him pegged as an intruder in five minutes flat. Instead, he was invisible under a peaked cap that he wore with perfect legality. He did not have to pretend to be a security guard; he was a security guard, and he would be earning his paycheck and fulfilling his contract, except for the minor detail of covertly opening and examining a piece of equipment that might as well be filled with pixie dust and tumbleweed for all he understood of its working. He was pretty sure that, at least, fell above his pay grade.

  It was easy to tell the German contingent from the Americans, although not quite as easy as Lovecraft had implied. It was true that the Germans were homogeneous in their whiteness, unlike the Americans, who almost reached parity between Caucasians and Asians with a handful of African Americans in the mix. The Germans, on the other hand, were doing much better with regard to sex, with a fifty/fifty split between male and female. Nor, Carter observed, were the women in subordinate roles; he watched as a covey of six German physicists entered the building, five trying to convince the woman at the center of the swarm of some eldritch point of abstruse physics in terms made further obscure to him by their being couched in rapid German. She listened with an expression of distant interest until abruptly stopping in the middle of the foyer, turning to her chief interrogator, and briefly replying in a couple of sentences—both of which were, however, heavily laden with syllables. The other physicist asked her a new question, although it was clear from his face that he’d just had the carpet pulled from beneath his feet and was just realizing it. The woman smiled at him, shook her head, and said something short and, it seemed, devastat
ing to his argument. The other scientists betrayed a mixture of enlightenment at her answer and amusement at their colleague’s discomfort as his carefully constructed theory augured into a field in Ohio with no survivors, to judge from his face.

  As she led the party to the fire doors leading into the stairwell, she glanced at the reception desk and saw Carter watching them. A small frown crossed her brow, but then she looked away and she and her group were gone. Slightly discomfited by the meeting of eyes himself, Carter sat down and tried to reconcile his knowledge that every one of that group was a paid-up member of the Nazi Party, and that he had found the woman attractive. He decided instantly and reflexively that he would not mention this observation to Lovecraft at any point, for fear of subsequently dying a slow death by scorn and derision.

  * * *

  Carter arrived back at the bookstore at half past two and was surprised to find it closed. Letting himself in, he almost fell over Lovecraft who had stationed herself close by the door on a stool.

  “What the hell?” he demanded, startlement making him loud. “What are you doing, Emily?”

  She gave him a look he had seen before, and that never boded well; she was afraid, and angry about it. His surprise changed to concern. “What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

  She was silent for a moment, looking for the words. Then she said simply, “It’s started again.”

  “It” was a wide and generic term that had arisen unconsciously in their conversation before and after the unfolding of the world. “It” meant a variety of things, but all of them could be brought under the umbrella of “weird shit.”