After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  “Thule,” said Lovecraft, pronouncing it too-la. Her good mood, mainly inspired by not being dead when she had thought her luck had run out, entirely evaporated in the space of those two syllables. “The Thule Society. I’m glad I knew something about these guys before things changed, ’cos I tried researching them when things started getting weird with Nazis back in Arkham, and now there’s almost nothing. I read about them a couple of years ago in a magazine article, so don’t expect any deep knowledge here.”

  She took a breath. “Okay. The Thule Society. Y’know in the Indiana Jones movies, the Nazis always seem to be hot to trot after anything occult that can be weaponized? Well, part of that’s because of the Thule Society. They were there right from the birth of the Nazi Party because they were all about völkisch.”

  Carter was finessing the car around a gulley, but still found time to say, “What’s that?”

  “There’s no exact translation for it in English. It’s kind of to do with folklore and folk memory, but also with racial identity. Thule itself is a place the ancient Greeks came up with on a slow Wednesday, a mythical land in the north. The society ran with it and—”

  “Aryans. Race theory?”

  “You got it. Hitler embraced all that shit, naturally, but he stayed at arm’s length from the society’s other big obsession: the occult. That wasn’t a problem, though, because Himmler couldn’t get enough of that Kool-Aid. Now, on our side of the Fold, the nice side without so many tentacles, the Thule Society was cut loose. Hitler wasn’t keen on secret societies and freaky occult ones—after all, the shadows are where conspiracies start—so they were all suppressed in the thirties. Same year the Freemasons got closed down, Himmler formed the Ahnenerbe, a new part of the SS that was all about völkisch and the occult and those are the assholes Indy keeps running into in the movies back in the Folded.

  “Now the thing is, rumors that the Thule continued underground were common in our world. Given the materials they have to play with in the Unfolded World, you got to wonder if they’re only rumors. Then our friend in the tight rubber suit says ‘Thule’ and you start to worry. Maybe they did successfully go underground here because the occult shit they knew actually turned out to work.” She looked at her shotgun lying beside her. “Man. It’s still got a shell in the chamber. Can we start shooting stuff yet?”

  * * *

  Once almost off the small plain of stone, Carter stopped the car. “Here’s as good as anywhere. Let’s make this quick.”

  They took the seven empty institutional cans out of the trunk and arranged them in a row running east to west, while they took up firing positions about twenty yards to the north. Both Lovecraft’s guns had ended up in the water during her struggle, but she’d forgotten that the estimable Corporal Barnaby had kindly fieldstripped and dried them, so the shotgun’s chamber was empty after all.

  “So what was he suggesting?” Carter handed Lovecraft earplugs. “That Thule has become like a real-world version of Spectre?”

  “We keep coming back to James Bond, don’t we?” Lovecraft looked up at the dark bulk of Mount Terrible, its peak wreathed in heavy clouds. The snow could not be far away now. “Then again, secret mountaintop bases, sinister societies, spies from different agencies falling over each other.” She looked out toward the bay as she put in the earplugs, out into the deep water where they now knew a submarine lurked. “Ian Fleming used to be with naval intelligence. You know that? I guess there are plenty of parallels. Thing is, Goldfinger was never backed up by aliens.” She racked her shotgun, addressed a can at the end of the line a little over twenty yards away, and fired. A can spun away from them, its side perforated by the swarm of pellets hitting it squarely. “Yep,” she said, smiling a little smugly as she racked in another shell. “Still got it.”

  She emptied the remaining five shells into five more cans and then stood aside while she reloaded and Carter took a stance. “Over to you, Deadeye.”

  Carter stepped into a Weaver stance, reconsidered, and moved into an isosceles.

  “You shootin’ or dancin’, Sheriff?” asked Lovecraft.

  He ignored her, centered himself, drew, and rapidly fired seven times until the slide locked back. Only one of the cans was still where they’d placed it before Lovecraft had her turn, and he shot that one first with a single round, then acquired, double tapped, and moved on to hit three of the others where they lay farther away and on their sides.

  Lovecraft whistled. “Five hits, I make it. First time you used that gun, pardner?” Carter nodded. “Not too shoddy.” She slung the shotgun over her shoulder and drew the Webley. “I guess I should try my luck with this thing. Help me out with the legs, would you?”

  Her stance wasn’t dissimilar to an isosceles and he guided her into it with a few words and a couple of gentle kicks to the sides of her boots until she was standing properly. “That feels okay,” she said. “I can live with this.” She fussed over her grip for a moment, but didn’t ask for advice on that, so Carter didn’t offer any. When she was happy, she raised the weapon in a CAR stance, took a second to steady her breathing, then emptied the gun in a series of steady shots, rarely more than a second apart. Not every bullet struck home, but, where she missed, she stayed on target, revised her aim, and tried again until she had scored a hit. When the slide locked back she lowered the weapon and viewed the cans with dissatisfaction.

  “Well, that sucked,” she said. “And why does this thing only hold eleven rounds?”

  “Don’t knock yourself,” said Carter. “That wasn’t bad. None of the cans are at the same range anymore, and that one that took three shots must have been thirty-five yards away. If you have to shoot anyone, they’re much bigger targets.”

  “Yeah, and they’ll be running around and probably shooting back. It’s all swings and roundabouts in the wonderful world of gun violence.” She holstered the pistol, swung up the shotgun, racked in a round, and gave the can that had escaped the Mossberg’s attentions a lead pellet shower. “Okay. Let’s tidy up and head back. I need to change out of these clothes.”

  * * *

  As they approached the settlement, they saw a party of the German scientists leaving the galley, laughing and joking. Carter slowed the Kübelwagen. One of the scientists noticed them and waved, and he smiled wanly, and waved back.

  Lovecraft also waved, saying in an undertone, “If they really are Thule, then they believe I’m untermensch with every fiber of their tiny, withered hearts. What kind of fucked-up world is this where the nicest guy out of the bunch of them was Gestapo?”

  Carter parked by the garage unit and they got their gear together. “You take the radio they gave us, Dan,” said Lovecraft. “All that Secret Squirrel ‘Roger Roger’ bullshit ain’t my speed at all. I need a shower. See you in the galley.”

  Carter shook his head. “I need to swing by the office first. Got some Secret Squirrel ‘Roger Roger’ bullshit to attend to. Come by after your shower and we’ll go in together.”

  As they parted by the car, the first flakes of snow began to fall.

  * * *

  “Need to know” was eating Lurline Giehl up. More specifically that her handlers didn’t think she did need to know. When she had first been attached to the project, her brief had been simple if mystifying. She was to be the guardian and operator of a highly sensitive energy detector for use in the zero point energy project. The detector was quite capable of doing its job perfectly, but its operating firmware held some carefully concealed trapdoors that allowed anyone who knew they were there to subtly influence the readings. Her job had been to cook the results, and make sure the Americans never found out.

  Morally, the task had dismayed her; she was a good scientist and to deliberately falsify results was anathema to her. It was explained to her that no permanent damage to the scientific reputations of either the Reich or herself would be incurred, however. It was simply necessary to progress the experiment to the next stage for political reasons. Then the detector’s man
ufacturer would, in a communication of great professional embarrassment, admit that tests on an identical unit to the project’s had revealed an insufficiently shielded component that caused the detector to give false positives. ZPE would be revealed as a mirage, and the Reich would offer Miskatonic University some very nice sops as recompense. No shame would be reflected on any of the scientists. It would simply be one of those things.

  When the next stage was announced, Giehl had assumed her work would be done and she would be returned to the Fatherland. Yet here she was, carried along with the project like gum on its heel. She had communicated her dismay at this outcome with her contact before leaving Arkham. She had real work back in Berlin that she should be getting on with. The reply had been perfunctory: she would be going where the Reich needed her to be, not where she wanted to be. The Abwehr required an asset on Attu Island, and so she would be going along to act as its eyes and ears.

  It irritated her, not least because she was positive that the whole team was rotten with “assets.” Lukas had turned out to be Gestapo, and she doubted he was the only one. She had heard mutterings that the Ahnenerbe was somehow associated with real ZPE research back in Westphalia somewhere. The Ahnenerbe connection worried her; they might have started out delving into folklore and alternative sciences, but these days the name seemed to be muttered darkly in the context of some very cutting-edge technologies. She couldn’t quite understand how that could be, and what she didn’t understand troubled her.

  So, here she was, on a remote and unfriendly island for two months, spying on a project that didn’t need spying on and expected to send in regular reports that were as brief and unhappy as the “What I did on my holidays” reports she’d had to fabricate after uncomplicated summer vacations in her youth. They knew what she’d been doing. Most of it was a summer camp with the ’Jugend, and what was left was her own time and she didn’t enjoy the teacher’s demands for it to be pinned to a lined page like a butterfly.

  Then, she’d made things up, but she didn’t feel she could play games like that with her unseen Abwehr handlers. They had shown an interest in Dan Carter and that was fine, because so had she. That hadn’t turned out so well. She was relieved that he had seemed more embarrassed about it than her, as it allowed her to withdraw from the battlefield with some arch dignity in place. Now she just kept an eye on him and the black woman he had seen fit to bring along. They seemed very familiar with one another. More than once Giehl theorized that they were probably intimate, too, although there had been no overt signs of affection greater than friendship between them. There had been a few ribald comments mainly among the Americans when Carter and the black woman had gone off to “practice shooting,” but then they had come back with empty brass and cartridges and several shot and bullet-riddled cans. She had seen them herself. The black woman also had a mild head injury and had seemingly fallen in a stream. The innuendo had died down after that. Now a faint sense of disgust that a fine man like Carter might amuse himself by fucking a black had been replaced with a concern that the weapons were not just for show.

  This would have to be the meat of her next report with regard to them. Probably nothing the Abwehr didn’t already know, but hers was not to reason why. She would simply report what she saw.

  She left her room and was walking down the corridor to the galley when she heard the black woman’s voice. Giehl paused and looked out of the edge of one of the high windows in the outer wall. There they were, Carter and the black, apparently walking back from their office. Giehl saw the bandage on the black’s brow, its whiteness thrown into sharp relief against her skin making it plainly visible even in the dying light, and he saw that their faces were serious. Their voices were muffled, though, and the high windows did not open easily or quietly. She shadowed them with the wall between them as they approached the external door—they were surely going to the galley, too—and stepped into the open door to the currently empty rec room next to it as they entered.

  They were wrapping up a conversation that it seemed to Giehl they didn’t wish to hold in public, and she heard just the end of the closing sentence from the black woman. It held a word she did not know, but she memorized it on the chance it held significance. Then they started talking about what they were going to eat and, a moment later, after they shucked the ubiquitous parkas, Giehl lost their voices entirely as they went into the galley.

  She counted to ten, and then followed them in.

  Chapter 27

  COLD BLOOD

  Dr. Giehl had booked her Internet usage for the late evening. Attu base didn’t stretch to Wi-Fi except for LAN messaging and file access, so everyone had to sit in a small office and use the machine there if they wanted to use the Internet. It had been done that way deliberately as a way of policing usage and, while it made sense, nobody liked it.

  As a courtesy, the door was shut while somebody was using it and a door hanger reading Occupied was fashioned. This had been altered—probably by the same genius who came up with the Sheriff’s Office sign—within hours to read Looking at Porn.

  Before Giehl logged in, she stuck a thumb drive into a SDS port and waited while it scanned the setup for keyboard loggers and other potential security risks. She waited a little anxiously while it completed its scan, checking her watch and glancing at the door repeatedly. This all felt so ridiculous, yet the sort of ridiculous that it turned out came with a body count. She hadn’t liked Lukas much, but when that Polish madman shot him down like a dog, her slightly blasé attitude toward her intelligence work had been shattered. The only one she felt she could even half-trust on the base was Carter, and he was a foreigner. She felt foolish about the whole business aboard the RV Frederick Cook. She’d gone to him, full of self-confidence and more schnapps than she was used to, fancying herself as some sort of Mata Hari, and then he’d turned out to be essentially unconscious throughout the whole encounter. She felt sure he’d told the black. They were as thick as thieves, those two. Giehl wasn’t sure if they were a couple, exactly. She hoped not. The thought of him lying with an atavism like the Lovecraft woman made her gorge rise.

  A pop-up appeared on the screen to tell her the machine was secure. She launched the Triole client. She quickly selected the only address on the program’s list and then typed in a request for connection. She wasn’t sure exactly what this stage did, but she presumed it would get her from a secretarial desk to the computer screen of somebody who mattered at Abwehr headquarters.

  The message “Please wait” appeared on the message screen. Giehl did so, because she had no choice, but the two minutes she had to wait crawled by. Finally a new response appeared. “Go ahead Tamfana.”

  Giehl had been unfamiliar with the name “Tamfana” when it was assigned to her, and she had looked it up while still in Germany. It transpired that it was a goddess about whom very little was known, which suited her. Indeed, there was the possibility that it was not a goddess at all, but a misunderstanding of a phrase from Tacitus; it might just as easily be a temple or a place. She felt childishly pleased with the code name for a few days, until she fell to wondering how many others had borne it before her, given the predilection of the Reich to recycle Nordic code names as they became free. What happened to the previous Tamfanas? she wondered. Were they even still alive?

  She typed in, “Stage 3 Seidr confirmed. Project proceeding ahead of schedule. Anticipate operational”—she checked her watch and worked out shift patterns—“in 30 hours.”

  It wasn’t much of a report, but she was obliged to make one. She waited. She was just wondering if her connection had failed when a reply appeared.

  “Thank you. Report when implementation imminent. Status subjects 434 & 435?”

  Giehl blew out an unhappy exhalation. She felt foolish for ever mentioning Lovecraft to her controllers. “Carrying out assigned tasks. Nothing unusual to report.” Of course, she was in the dome up to twelve or sixteen hours some days, and now that the weather had closed in, it was useless as a vant
age point. Not that being able to see the encampment in the distance was very helpful, even on a clear day. She’d only heard about their shooting expedition after the fact, but had seen the bullet-and shot-riddled institutional cans in the recyclables containment herself when she was dumping some drinks cans in there.

  She racked her memory for something else to report. A small thing leapt to mind, the thing she’d heard Carter mutter to Lovecraft in the galley when they thought they were alone.

  “Please advise. Meaning of FOMORIAN.”

  * * *

  Over five thousand miles away as measured through the Arctic Circle and across the frozen northern seas, the request appeared on the screen of Director Mühlan in Wewelsburg. If he had been able to see him, Carter would have recognized him as the man in a suit from his dream. He quickly read the line of text, but when his gaze swept across the capitalized word, his eyes widened. “Verflucht,” he said aloud. His secretary Irmgard looked over in surprise; the director never showed anger. “Verfluchte Scheiße!”

  He started to type furiously in response.

  * * *

  Dr. Giehl watched in astonishment as the Triole chat box started to fill with new demands for clarification. She answered what she could and promised to try and find out the rest. It had been subjects 434 and 435 who had been talking. No, she hadn’t overheard any more. She had only reported it because she didn’t know what they meant and wondered if it might be important. After the demands came new directives and orders. One in particular stood out. Giehl muttered “What?” with growing horror. They couldn’t be serious. She typed back for confirmation.

  “Confirmation. Stage 4 Seidr must be attained as soon as possible. American interference must not be tolerated. Speak privately with Dr. Weber. Tell him this exact phrase: ‘Case Rosweisse is in effect. Contact immediately.’ Obey Dr. Weber in all matters subsequently. Confirm your understanding.”