After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Carter cut in. “You’ve been manipulating us from the beginning.”

  Weston pursed his lips “Now that is certainly an exaggeration. I simply led you to information pertinent to you. After that, it was all your own doing. And, may I say, you’ve done splendidly. The business with the Waites and that awful fool Colt, sterling work. Sterling!” He was smiling like a favorite uncle applauding enthusiastically from the auditorium during a school play.

  “We don’t want your thanks.”

  “Ah. You feel ill done to.” His expression shifted toward contrition. “If it’s any consolation, if you hadn’t become involved, the Fold would have been destroyed. All those potentialities on the other side lost forever. This”—he gestured around him—“would have become all that has been and all that may ever be, at least within the next few millennia.” He glanced at Carter and an impish smile appeared. “You’re going to ask me why I just didn’t do it myself, aren’t you?”

  Carter was, but didn’t admit it.

  “Well, two broad reasons, which merge into one. Deniability, and personal weakness. I had few allies, so an aspect of avowed disinterestedness was my best armor. The Waites’ … sponsor, I suppose you might call her, would never have tolerated interference from me. From you two, however, she assumed it was the usual bumbling.”

  “Meaning what?” said Lovecraft sharply.

  “To err is human, Miss Lovecraft. Ah, we’re here. I’m afraid I must leave you. I understand you’re both undertaking a long journey?”

  “How did you know that?” asked Carter, though he would have been more surprised if Weston hadn’t.

  “Enjoy yourselves while you may. It will be something of a busman’s holiday, I fear.”

  “And if we don’t go?” said Lovecraft. “We can still back out.”

  Weston regarded her sadly. “Well, then it has all been for nothing.” A bailiff held the door open and he entered the court, leaving Carter and Lovecraft behind.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Lovecraft under her breath, the sound of somebody just realizing that they’ve been outmaneuvered.

  “So we’re still going, right?” said Carter.

  Lovecraft merely sighed, and that was answer enough.

  * * *

  Lovecraft’s friend Petra agreed to look after the bookstore for a couple of months and did so with pleasure; Lovecraft had been right that she needed a job. She also saw them off from Ulysses Airport for the long flight to Alaska, consistently referring to Carter as “your friend Dan” with a significant look. Lovecraft was relieved when the flight was finally called.

  Carter for his part was more distracted by the aircraft out on the tarmac. “Look at that,” he said, pointing out of the lounge window. Lovecraft followed his finger.

  “What am I looking at? Just a bunch of … Wait, is that a Pan American plane?”

  “It is. It is.” Carter was grinning like a kid. “Pan American didn’t go down the shitter here.”

  “Hey.” She slapped him gently in the ribs. “We’re still changing things back if we can.” She turned to see Petra grinning at her. She scowled.

  Carter wasn’t paying attention to the pointed conversation in mime going on behind him. The view outside still had his full attention. “Yeah, yeah,” he agreed, “but…” He looked out at the white-and-blue airliner again. “Wow.”

  * * *

  Their flight took them to Chicago, and then on to Anchorage. From there they spent time between connections at progressively smaller airports, until they became little more than airfields, and finally, thirty hours after they had left Arkham, they landed at Adak, the last island in the Aleutians to have a permanent human population. Earlier Lovecraft might have been unhappy about the last leg being by sea instead of flying, but now they were both glad of a chance to walk on land for a few hours and to freshen up before joining their ride, the RV Frederick Cook.

  Naturally, the settlement on Adak Island was called Adak, not least because it was unlikely there would ever be a second settlement there in the imaginable future. It was on the site of a former army and navy base, and felt vaguely Icelandic in that it shared Reykjavik’s taste in colored roofing—in Adak’s case, red, blue, brown, and white. It did help make the place look happier than a settlement on a bleak island few had ever heard of might be expected to look. The entire enduring population of Adak was less than 350, and they worked mainly in fishing and services. The airport was far larger and more sophisticated than they’d been anticipating, and Lovecraft went off to ask about it. She came back angry.

  “It’s a good airport because it’s ex-military. Did you know they have a direct service from Anchorage? We could have got here in half the time and done it in comfort in a 737.”

  “You’d have missed the boat,” said the technician who was loading their bags into a pickup. “It’s got its own schedule, and the 737s only fly twice a week.” He grinned. “We got here a few days ago, so we came in one of them. You’re right. Way more comfortable than island hopping in those crop dusters.” Lovecraft’s mood was not improved by this intelligence.

  Carter didn’t much care about how they’d got there; he felt like a hobo. Thirty hours’ beard growth for a man who was almost obsessively clean shaven was not something to be enjoyed and he could barely tolerate it. He disappeared into the restroom with his shaving kit the first chance he got, and emerged a quarter of an hour later with his hair washed and wet, his chin bare of bristles.

  “You sure you were never in the military?” asked Lovecraft. “Or do you just like feeling a blade against your skin?”

  The wet hair was a mistake, though. The islands were still a good way south of the Arctic and the temperatures were usually bearable, but it was the fall and the air was barely above freezing. Carter found his cabin aboard the ship, and stayed there until they were ready to depart. The ship was awaiting a full research team from the University of Washington and, rather than lie idle, had accepted the commission to carry part of the Arkham ZPE team and most of its supplies out to Attu, returning to Adak in time for its assigned mission. As a result, the ship carried only its crew and a handful of Arkham personnel. This suited them just fine; no having to share cabins.

  Carter and Lovecraft had shared all their flights with Drs. Ian Malcolm and Jessica Lo, the senior Americans on the team. At the ship, they met up with Jerry Rendall, a postgraduate researcher, and, from the German contingent, Drs. Hans Weber and Lurline Giehl, both of whom had arrived earlier aboard one of the coveted 737 flights. Even with the four technicians, they were still spoiled for choice from the twelve double-occupancy staterooms assigned to research crew.

  Carter was grateful that he didn’t have to be polite to a roomie. He had hardly managed more than a few minutes’ sleep at a time during the last two days, and he was expecting to sleep for most of the journey to Attu. The sea was calm, but the ship’s medic handed out sea sickness meds to all the new passengers just to be on the safe side, warning them that they could cause sleepiness. To Carter, this was a feature, not a bug.

  Somehow he managed to stay on his feet for the departure, waving at the few who came to see them off. As soon as the ship was a quarter of a mile out from the dock, however, he made his excuses and went down to his cabin.

  Carter swallowed the meds with a gulp of water and clambered naked into the lower bunk; climbing into the top one looked too much like work. For a few minutes he lay awake, worrying more that perhaps he was too exhausted to sleep easily than any concerns about where the RV Frederick Cook was taking him or the “busman’s holiday” that Weston had mentioned awaited them.

  Then either the meds kicked in, or the exhaustion finally consumed him, or both, because he fell quickly into a deep sleep.

  Deep, but not dreamless.

  Chapter 19

  BURNING BLOOD, BURNING BONES

  Carter missed the days when he dreamt and it was about not knowing where to go on the first day of school, or of his long-dead dog Sharky, or his car ru
nning out of gas and having to walk such a long way to a gas station that somewhere along the way he forgot what he was doing and had ice cream instead. Then the Suydam case had gone south and, after that, his dreams became a minefield.

  Yeah, sometimes they were still harmless enough. Most of the time, in fact. But there was always the nagging little fear that tonight, a dream was going to turn out to be different, to have significance, to drill through layers of reality that were impervious during the waking hours and bring something to him that he really didn’t want to see.

  Lovecraft had warned him this would happen far more often now that the world was unfolded, and that such dreams were important and that he should note them down whenever he had them. “How will I know a normal dream from one of these ‘important’ dreams?” he’d asked. She’d shrugged. He bought a notebook and tried to write out as many dreams as he could remember immediately after waking.

  So far, he hadn’t had many, and the ones he was pretty sure meant something were really difficult to understand. He’d been expecting something Freudian like in Spellbound, all vistas designed by Salvador Dali and willful symbolism, but it wasn’t like that, if his experiences during the Colt affair were anything to judge by. These dreams felt brutally real and showed things in far too much truth to be easily taken in. Lovecraft told him he was a dreamer from a line of dreamers and that he’d be able to handle whatever was thrown at him, but it didn’t feel that way sometimes, not all the times when he’d awoken in a pool of sweat from having seen something his memory censored.

  He was kind of glad about that, although he would never have told Lovecraft as much. She was envious of his ability to “dream” and for it to mean more than the random babblings of most people’s unconscious minds. She was adamant that it was a gift, and he didn’t want to disappoint her by failing to use it when it might be their ticket to setting things right. Still, sometimes when he awoke with just the last vaporous memories of what he’d experienced beyond the wall of sleep, he very deliberately didn’t note down what he remembered in the hope that his mind would obliterate the memory all the sooner.

  On these occasions, however, he was in something like normal REM sleep. As he lay sprawled across the bunk aboard the Frederick Cook, he was bone tired and drugged. He sank through the stages of sleep quickly, enduring some momentary anxiety dreams about missing plane connections, and down, down into deep sleep, much too deep for dreams and nightmares to exist.

  Not conventional dreams, at any rate.

  * * *

  Carter wasn’t sure where he was, but was pretty sure he wasn’t meant to be there. It was a round stone room with twelve columns around it, and he was confident that he’d never been there before, nor even seen it in pictures. The day was fading outside the tall windows set into thick walls, but he could feel that this was a place that never slept. He had a sense of conversations being held just out of sight, and of footfalls on stone floors.

  The thought of the hard floor beneath his feet made him look down and he saw there an intricate design worked into the stone, a complex symmetrical shape consisting of an outer circle and a much smaller one set concentrically within it, and twelve lines emanating out from the center, each performing a sharp right and then left turn before finally reaching the outer circle. The kinked arms made it look like some sort of superswastika, and no sooner had the thought occurred to him than one of the several doors that led into the room opened.

  Two men entered, chatting in German. One was in a suit, the other in a military uniform. Carter had no idea what rank he was, but he seemed pretty senior. He wasn’t so badly informed about the Third Reich, however, that the fact that the uniform was black and bore a double-lightning-flash insignia on the right-hand side of the jacket collar didn’t tell him he was looking at an SS officer. The uniform’s design wasn’t exactly like the wartime ones he’d seen in a hundred movies and TV series—the modern Third Reich had lost its obsession with jodhpurs, for one thing—but it was still clearly a descendant of Hitler’s personal paramilitary army.

  Carter couldn’t understand a word they said, yet he still had a sense of what they were talking about. They walked over by one of the tall windows set into alcoves between each pair of columns on—he guessed by the angle of the sun—the northern side of the room, and there, by the fading light, the man in the suit showed the uniformed officer something on a clipboard. The officer nodded, checked his watch, and Carter understood him to say something of how he couldn’t believe they were still having to do this shit after all these years. His plainclothes colleague said something reassuring. “Not long now.” Something like that.

  They moved on to exit by a different doorway, unlocking the door to do so, and Carter felt he should follow them, so he did, out onto a spiral staircase that looked like the sort of thing Errol Flynn would’ve enjoyed fighting Basil Rathbone on. The door locked itself behind the men as they closed it.

  They went down the stairs and Carter felt like a ghost as he followed them unseen. The staircase seemed to descend forever, yet they arrived at the end of it too soon for his liking, and then they were in a chamber that was mostly subterranean, judging from how small and high the windows in the wall were. In the center of the round crypt—Carter wasn’t sure if that was the right name for it, but it seemed fitting—was a shallow recessed stone-sided pit in the center of which burned a flame. It was clearly fed by gas, and he wondered if it was an eternal flame of some kind and if maybe this was some sort of war memorial.

  Looking up at the walls made him doubt it. There was a swastika there, but it was part of a larger, complex design on a wall hanging. The upper part was an oval with a sword running vertically down it, the blade caught in a loop of something that might also be meant to be a blade, Carter wasn’t sure. The oval had what he guessed were runes running around it, but whatever they meant was beyond the sympathetic translation the dream lent to speech. Beneath this design was a smaller one of a swastika held within a square diamond with tails running off the lowest point. Written on the square in the same kind of chicken-scratch script as the runes he could read “Volk” and “Sippe.” He knew “Volk” meant people, as in “Volkswagen,” but “Sippe” meant nothing to him.

  Electric lights were mounted around the wall, each over a rounded stone bench, presumably meant to seat one, and on each lay a folded black cloth. Carter counted twelve of them, and twelve wall hangings, one above each bench. Carter spotted one more swastika, although it had curved outer arms and was the backdrop to a weird-looking T shape that looked like a stylized moustache on a stick, although he doubted that was the intention. The whole thing was surrounded by a wreath picked out in golden thread, and he had little doubt that the thread was real gold. Every one of the hangings looked handmade to very high standards, hand-stitched with gold and silver on luxuriant fields of dense velvet, even if what was on them just seemed like an endless stream of Nordic bullshit.

  The door opened. Two more men and a woman, all dressed as if they were highly placed executives—perhaps they were—entered. Then came another SS officer, followed immediately by a couple of soldiers pulling the sort of large trolley Carter had seen in warehouses.

  The trolley was stacked with bodies, two deep. Carter counted eight, both sexes, and all of them white. The two soldiers lifted the bodies from the trolley like sacks and hefted them over to lie by the pit of the flame. As they were laid down, one of the plainclothes men went around, placing a finger to the throat of each in turn, and Carter realized they were unconscious, not dead. The man stopped by one body and checked for a pulse for longer than the others, then with obvious irritation summoned the soldiers to remove it. That one was dead. They carried the corpse out, and Carter knew they would return with a live replacement.

  Carter did not want to be there anymore. He did not want to see what was going to happen. But struggle as he might, he could not walk out and, even though he knew he was sleeping, he could not force himself to awaken. He could only stand
and watch, an unwilling witness.

  Things started to happen quickly. The soldiers left and returned with five more unconscious people. Carter could see they bore Slavic features, and he remembered what Lovecraft had said about how the West had never really cared about what the Nazis did in the former Soviet Union, how one holocaust had been exchanged for another, more politically acceptable one. All of them showed signs of a hard life, but—while thin—were not emaciated. Nor were their clothes the uniforms of a prison or a concentration camp; they were work clothes, aged and patched. These were people who had been snatched from their everyday lives of working the occupied lands of Greater Germania in the East, growing wheat that they saw precious little of once it was harvested.

  Each was dumped around the edge of the central pit on the raised bench-like lip that surrounded most of it but for a break at one point that seemed to be there to provide access to the flame. As Carter watched the twelve unconscious people being crammed almost shoulder to shoulder, hoisted to lie over the bench like bags of potatoes, he saw the room had filled with more people. The two soldiers, sweating from their exertions, pulled the empty trolley from the room and closed the doors behind them. They looked to Carter to be relieved to be leaving.

  Now there were twenty-four people other than him in the room, twelve unconscious, and twelve conscious. Twenty-five if he counted himself, but he didn’t feel as if he were really there, or only as an observer at some avant-garde dramatic performance in the round. None of them looked familiar to him. He had half-expected Führer Richter to be there, but no. Some political observers said he was just a figurehead. Perhaps they were right.

  There was that odd dreamlike sense of time not running quite as it should. He looked at a wall hanging for a moment that featured a black tree picked out upon a silver circle, but as he watched it, he started to doubt it was a tree and, just perhaps, was the image moving slightly? Did the branches move, not as branches on a tree might in a high wind, but as the tentacles of a sea anemone, swaying blindly in a slow tide?