After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  * * *

  To Lovecraft’s disbelief and Bowles’s respectful surprise, Carter said he’d walk back down the mountain rather than be driven down. He waved goodbye to them as they drove away to descend the counterclockwise road that wound around most of the mountain’s upper quarter before turning to zigzags that descended into the glaciated valley below. The snow had stopped for the time being, and the cold wind had diminished to a breeze, but the weather report indicated both would be back within a few hours. Bowles’s last words to Carter had been not to dawdle; there were still four hours of day left, but he would have the better part of ten miles to cover in that time. No matter how tempting it looked to save himself time by climbing down between meanders on the mountainside road, he should stick to the road, and that if he wasn’t back by nightfall, Bowles would come looking for him. He also ducked back into the dome to warn them that there was a pedestrian on the mountain road and to drive even more carefully than usual. All the precautions irritated Carter, who’d just wanted a quiet walk to himself and not this big production of safety theater, but he had to admit it was necessary. When he was finally by himself, it was a relief.

  Mount Terrible wouldn’t have offered much of a challenge to a competent mountaineer from most aspects, but that wasn’t to say it would be a pushover. The ridges concealed sudden steep inclines and more than enough cliffs to punish the unwary and overconfident. Carter wondered if he was in the latter category as he started walking along the access road. The snow had stopped before very much of it had had a chance to stick or drift, but even that short fall had been enough to make the path treacherous. When Bowles had driven away, Carter wasn’t even sure if he’d taken it out of bottom gear. It had certainly taken a while to disappear from view around the first bend.

  Carter paused there for a minute, taking out the binoculars he’d found among his equipment in the security station and looking down toward the temporary settlement below and to the west. He could see the project’s other two Kübelwagens parked by the garage unit, and figures walking by. Beyond the living quarters lay the rocky coast and the cold sea, and beyond that—a long way beyond that—lay Alaska, and then Canada, and finally home.

  Carter had traveled less than he would have liked in his life, but when he’d been abroad there had always been the sense of it being a temporary state of affairs, and that an invisible bungee cord would presently twang him back to his home. That sense deserted him now. He felt adrift, cut loose. There was no impetus to go anywhere except as necessity dictated. Yes, he wanted to keep on walking to the station, but mainly because it was warm and there was food there, not because it was in any sense “home” to him. Nowhere was “home” now. He wondered if Lovecraft and Harrelson felt that way, too.

  He put away the binoculars and continued his descent. At the end of the near revolution of the peak, he found himself at the top of the meanders the U.S. CoE had cut into the mountainside decades before and looked down. It looked a long way. Near the bottom, he could see the Kübelwagen cautiously negotiate the last hairpin and then drive out into the valley before turning west. He was relieved Bowles and Lovecraft had made the descent without problems, less so that he wasn’t with them. It looked a long way to walk, even if it was all downhill. He felt like an idiot for not bringing his walkie-talkie, but he hadn’t planned to be by himself like this. At least people knew where he was, and he had no intention whatsoever of leaving the road.

  He took a couple of steps, and paused again. He’d happened to look to the southwest where the sea glittered darkly in Temnac Bay and, just for a moment, he thought he saw something out there. He took out his binoculars again and scanned the surface. There was nothing. Carter lowered the binoculars and looked with his naked eyes upon the bay, frowning. The sky was overcast, so at least there were no strong reflections from the waves to trouble him, but the cloud layer was thin and the water seemed to glow in the dull light. Perhaps his eyes had deceived him, and he’d only thought he saw something large and dark out where the bay opened into the cold Pacific. He knew whaling used to be an industry in the Aleutians; had he seen a whale? It wasn’t impossible, but something told him he was wrong.

  Something flickered in his mind, and he knew it had been no whale. He hated the fugues that settled upon him now and then, and he especially didn’t want one now, out on a bare mountainside with snow threatening. A sense of a double-exposed world cluttered his vision, yellow and black. The road he was on ceased to exist, though he could feel the smooth camber beneath his feet. Out at sea, there was nothing but the dark waves. He’d been mistaken. He hadn’t seen anything. But there was movement. Without meaning to, he raised the binoculars to his eyes and it was as if they were a kaleidoscope, the world shattered into shards and prisms. There was nothing out there, just jagged lines and blurred tangents. He willed himself to lower the binoculars before the lines cut into his brain and left him with, at best, a migraine, or at worst, a seizure. Just before he did so, he saw the beach of black volcanic sand close by where the Temnac River ran into the bay, and he saw a dark figure rise from the water there and shamble clumsily across the thin strand to be lost in the contours of the land.

  Carter lowered the binoculars with a jerk and muttered, “Fuck!” under his breath in a mixture of anger and, he realized a moment later, fear. The fear made him angrier still. He clenched his eyes and forced the Fold to leave him alone for just one fucking second while he tried to ensure his grip upon the here and now. He opened his eyes, and now there was only a gloomy vista across a gloomy bay. There was nothing on the sea and nothing on the beach. He braced himself, and raised his binoculars once more. There was nothing on the beach. He breathed easier; of course, there had never been anything on the beach. The Fold had been fucking with him, maybe seeing something that might have happened in the Unfolded if …

  He’d snorted with contempt when he’d first found the binoculars in his office and discovered they had a zoom function. A martinet to functionality, he preferred single magnification binoculars for their consistency, sharpness, and collimation accuracy. Now, however, he blessed whoever had decided a pair of zoom binoculars was what the sheriff of Attu Station really needed. He went to one of the roadside boulders, braced himself against it to cut down vibration, and looked again, cranking the zoom function to its full fifty-times magnification.

  There was nobody on the beach he could see, but there were tracks. Strange, wide tracks. Something walking on two huge, probably webbed feet had been there.

  Carter thought of the Waite man who he’d spoken to a couple of times back in Providence when it had still existed, the man who wanted to swim. The first time, he had been a man, if a borderline case. The second time, no, not anymore. He had changed into something else, something aquatic or at least amphibious. Something with huge, webbed feet.

  Carter put away the binoculars, checked his pistol, and set off down the mountain as quickly as he dared. He and Lovecraft had talked about this. They knew beyond reasonable doubt that weird shit was incoming. They’d both been sure it wouldn’t happen this quickly though. It would wait for the experiment to go online, obviously. After all, what was the point of all this if not to get the experiment online? It looked like they had been terribly, perhaps fatally wrong; the weird shit had preempted them.

  Chapter 23

  DARK WATERS

  Lovecraft’s reaction when he finally reached the encampment and told her the happy news was predictable. “You are shitting me,” she said, but from her expression it was clear that she thought anything but.

  He’d found her gratifyingly quickly after reaching the prefabs; walking straight into the security office, breathing hard from the “forced march” pace he’d maintained from the mountain, sweating inside his parka, he discovered her with her feet up on his desk, reading a Fortean magazine she’d picked up back in Arkham explaining that—these days—such magazines counted as current events. She’d drawn a breath to make some ironic remark as he burst in, taken on
e look at his face, and instead said, “What happened?”

  After he’d told her what he’d observed out in the bay, he said, “I know what I saw. It was as big as a man and it walked on its hind legs like a man. It wasn’t a seal. I’m pretty sure it was one of those fish/frog bastards like the Waite men turned into.”

  “Deep Ones,” said Lovecraft. “H.P.L. called them Deep Ones.”

  “That is a shit name.”

  “Pithier than ‘fish/frog bastards.’” She glanced down to her pistol in its holster. “If I remember properly, they don’t die easy, either.” She looked back at Carter. “What’s the plan?”

  “We have to get back out right now, out to the bay and see if we can find it. Find it and kill it.”

  “Slow down there, Sheriff. It’s dark and all we got is flashlights. Those fuckers can probably see in the dark if they can see underwater, and we’ll be giving them all the advantages of seeing us before we see them. If they let us see them at all.”

  “But the tracks will be gone by then.”

  “Tracks are already gone. High tide was about twenty minutes ago.” She saw Carter’s expression. “Oh, yeah. I am the queen of the telling detail. Just struck me like the kind of thing a girl should know on a small island. We’ll save our trip to the beach for the morning, tell folks we’re off to scout out the island and maybe do a little target shooting. We’ll take one of the Kraut jeeps.”

  Still slightly stung that he’d been caught out by Lovecraft’s knowledge of the tides, Carter said, “Kraut? Not very politically correct.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Given what I get called out on the street these days, fuck political correctness. Anyhow, these Germans … these Nazis call us shit all the time. I heard it on the ship, I hear it here. I think they think that ’cause I’m black, knowing two languages is beyond me. Well, newsflash, assholes. Back in the Folded, I did a lot of trade with Germany, I got pretty good conversational German going.” She got up and went to the coffeepot. “And that’s another reason we’ve got to get back to the Folded World; I like the Germans, and they deserve better than these Nazi fucks and their joke one-party democracy where there’s always a top asshole who was best at playing the Führerprinzip game.”

  She paused, thinking. “That’s weird in itself, don’t you think? Hitler always talked about a thousand-year Reich, but he never really left a framework for how power was supposed to be inherited. It just happens.” She held up the magazine. “Theory in here that he never really died. He’d be 120, 130 years old by now, but they use weird science to keep him alive and he’s calling the shots from a freezer up in the Adlerhorst. That’s also weird; on both sides of the Fold, the Nazis have got this rep for using weird science.” She nodded in the general direction of the dome. “Like they’re doing up there.”

  * * *

  The site was already running up quite a junk heap after even a few days, all of which was corraled for being taken off the island when they left. Lovecraft helped herself to a few institutional-size coffee and food cans, explaining to the galley chef (nobody was quite sure why the kitchen ended up being called the galley, but it did) that “Sheriff Dan’s goin’ to larn me how to use mah shootin’ iron proper.” The chef said she should have fun, but to bring back the cans when they were done; one of the project’s briefs was to keep the island clean of as much trash as they could.

  Nobody seemed to think it so extraordinary that Carter and Lovecraft should take time out to plink at cans, but then several of the project’s senior members owed their lives to Carter staying cool under pressure and taking the shot only when he had to, not a second later, and making it count.

  “You realize we’re going to have to find somewhere to massacre some cans now, don’t you?” said Lovecraft as they drove away from the settlement in one of the Kübelwagens. “We can’t go back with virgin cans after telling them that story.”

  “I could just tell them you’re that bad a shot.”

  “I could just shoot you and tell them it was an accident.”

  Bowles had told them that the vehicles had excellent off-road characteristics, and they shouldn’t have any problems driving out to the bay. The first part of the route was easy anyway, simply following the road to Mount Terrible along the Ukudikak River. Attu was too small for any rivers to get much above ten or twenty feet wide and, on the rocky terrain, they flowed shallow. That was just as well, as the Kübelwagen would have to ford the Ukudikak and the smaller Namada Creek a little farther to the west before they reached Temnac Bay.

  Carter was driving, both because he was the only one of them with off-road experience and because Lovecraft had a license but had driven only rarely in the previous couple of years. She also didn’t enjoy driving much, regarding it as a chore, and was content to let Carter take the wheel. As a bonus, riding shotgun (literally, her Mossberg twelve-gauge lying alongside her) allowed her the luxury of looking around the terrain as they traveled, and this she definitely did enjoy.

  “I’m glad I came,” she said as they drove in the shadow of Mount Terrible. “The ship and those little planes, and all this. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “We don’t know what we might find in the bay. You might change your mind real suddenly.”

  She snorted dismissively. “If we don’t seek the weird shit out, the weird shit does it to us. It’s why we’re on Attu in the first place. We’re never going to get to sit any of this out, you know? Not until either we flip the world somehow, or the weird shit kills us.”

  He glanced across at her. “That’s fatalistic for you, Emily.”

  “Nah.” She was looking up the slope of the mountain. The dome was invisible from that angle, but the access road was obvious as it switchbacked its way up toward the peak. “Realistic. It’s cool. The existential dread doesn’t bother me like it used to. We’re lucky; humans are so stupid we even get used to cosmic horror given half a chance.”

  “You think that’s true? H.P.L.’s stories were full of people going crazy, weren’t they?”

  “It’s still happening. There was the guy near the store Harrelson was talking about.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve been asking around about the guy whose job I got at the U. He had a ‘breakdown.’”

  “Sure he did.”

  “I’ve asked Harrelson to pull his background security check and e-mail it to me here. Anyway, the insanity that seems to be part of all this, it’s like a sickness. Like something you can catch. You think in reality we’re resistant because we’re too dumb to take it all in?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I think maybe we are, specifically us, because we’re wrapped up so close to all this that the supernatural scary shit is no more likely to drive us insane than any other scary shit. We both saw the Fold. We saw other stuff, too, and I don’t feel any crazier.”

  “The insane never know they’re insane.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not in soft rooms being told we’re wrong about reality. We’re still rational, logical human beings and we’re still buying into the consensus of reality … apart from the stuff about godlike aliens controlling the world from behind the scenes, which I admit would get us thrown through the nut hatch if we went public with it. But three of us having exactly the same delusion—”

  “Four, if you count Weston.”

  Lovecraft fell silent. A minute or so later, she said, “Yeah, about Weston. Just who the fuck is he?” Carter didn’t reply and, when she looked at him, she saw his lips were drawn tight, as if considering an unpalatable possibility. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I think, too.”

  * * *

  The Kübelwagen crossed the Ukudikak easily. It looked like the military had deliberately created a fording point just off where the road turned up toward Mount Terrible, and it was still in good condition. Certainly the Kübelwagen’s high clearance made easy work of the short, rugged span of rocks. Navigation subsequently became more complicated. Carter was using GPS to guide him to the eastern end of the b
ay. First it led them across a rugged table of exposed rock, crossed here and there with small gullies formed by erosion, many of them deep enough to tear off the car’s wheels if they drove into one too quickly. They could be negotiated if taken at an angle, and driven through slowly, but it was a painstaking business, and there were many of them. Then, when they finally arrived at the southwest side of the stone plain, they found there was a steep slope that ended in a cliff where the Namada Creek had eaten away the volcanic rock.

  Carter swore. Lovecraft said, “You did plan this all out on a map before we left, didn’t you?”

  “No. It’s only a few miles and we have a car. What do we need a map for?”

  “Dan, don’t take this the wrong way, but you can be a real jackass sometimes. You ain’t in Red Hook now.” She pulled a map from her jacket and unfolded it. “Give me our coordinates from the GPS, would you? I figure we’re about there”—she tapped the map—“but we’d better be sure before we start moving again.”

  “Look, we just drive south until we find a slope and can get to the beach.”

  “Or we find it finishes with another cliff. Coastlines do that kind of shit. Just give me the goddamn coordinates, would you?”

  They were very nearly where Lovecraft had reckoned their position. She traced farther south until the land gave way in a steep slope.

  “The car could handle that,” said Carter, aware that whatever small reputation he might have as an outdoorsman was already in the process of burning to ashes.