The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

by Paul Malmont

  Gibson smiled to himself. Like any pulp writer worth his salt, Hubbard told his tales well and half-believed his own bullshit. Believing was essential.

  “Tell me all about China,” Gibson said. And as the other writer launched into what was sure to be a wildly entertaining story full of plausible lies, gratuitous distortions, and outrageous half-truths, he ordered another round.

  Episode Two

  HOWARD LOVECRAFT knew he was going to die. It was a horrible thing to know.

  He had always been obsessed with his death. Even as a child he had imagined, in evocatively vivid detail, what his funeral would be like. The eight-year-old Howard had envisioned an open-casket viewing in the small Providence chapel his family attended. There would be lots of candles, an imported pipe organ (the chapel only had a tinny piano), and a tiny mahogany coffin lined with red silk. He would be serenely beautiful in a very adult black suit with long pants, and nestled on a soft, white satin pillow. There would be no wailing or cries of despair, only gentle weeping and perhaps a whispered apology from Howard’s father for the way his choices in life had led directly to his son’s present state.

  In his teens, perhaps to compensate for his growing shyness and awkwardness in all situations not directly involving any family member, Howard had imagined his funerals as grand expressions: New Orleans jazz parades with a solemn procession accompanied by a somber thomp-thomp cadence on the way to Swan Point Cemetery, the citizens of Providence lining the streets, and then a boisterous explosion of music and celebration upon its return. There had been a somber midnight burial accompanied by a distant bagpipe player shrouded in graveyard mist. He had even conceived of an elaborate and very satisfying Viking funeral to be launched in fiery fury from the shores of the Cape; its light would be a beacon to the cod fleet through a long, dark night. In later years, after he had forgotten most of his fantasy scenarios, he still would occasionally recall this one fondly and with approval. He had in the end, however, made other arrangements.

  Lightning was followed, after a count to ten, by thunder. The heart of the storm was five miles away. Wisps of Bing Crosby’s voice reached him like puffs of a gentle breeze from a distant land. Someone had tuned the RCA a floor below to a Broadway song review show and Bing was singing a Cole Porter tune that had been big last year, “You’re the Top.” Howard couldn’t remember what show it was from. It might have been a movie, as well. Howard didn’t go to the theater or the pictures.

  Howard desperately wanted a cigarette. The last bout of wracking spasms had ended and the pain had receded somewhat. He knew the agony would return, worse each time, forcing him to curl up into a moaning ball, but before it happened, he needed a smoke to steady and prepare himself. He forced himself to climb out of the uncomfortable bed. His cigarettes sat on a table on the other side of the hospital room. The green and white tiles were refreshingly cool against his feet. His legs were a little wobbly, but he crossed the room with the stability and dignity requisite of a scion of the Phillips line. His mother would have been proud of how her little boy was holding up under the strain. He had been very proper. A good Phillips. She would have liked to have known that he had risen to the occasion.

  He lit his cigarette and willed himself to the open window, where he exhaled his first lungful out into the night. The cold rain fell in great sluicing torrents, spattering heavily across the parking lot. If he put his hand out into the night air, even if only for an instant, he would draw it back as wet as if he had plunged it into the pitcher of water near his bedside. The next bursting crack of lightning was followed by an ominous flickering in the lights in his room. Dependable as ever—a mere rumor of heavy weather could cause the Providence power system to collapse. He watched, fascinated, as the lightbulbs struggled to regain their brightness for a moment, only to dim again. Electricity delivery in Providence was not an exact science; it was more of a game of chance. The lightbulbs seemed to settle into drawing less electricity than before, and though they flickered erratically, the light they provided seemed somewhat steady. He let the cool, damp air caress the long, gaunt face that children had always taunted him about, calling him “horse” or “Man o’ War.”

  The cigarette tasted good. Great, in fact.

  He wanted his mother.

  For a moment he thought he heard her voice, but then he realized with disappointment that it was her sister, his Aunt Annie, in the hallway. She was pleading with the doctor for more information about her nephew’s condition. She wasn’t convinced about the stomach cancer diagnosis. Howard smiled grimly. Of course she was right; no one gets stomach cancer in three days. He had had to lie and tell her that for months now he’d been feeling pains in his gut which he’d been ignoring. She still didn’t understand how he could become so ill so fast. That’s what she was pestering the doctor about in the hallway. Aunt Annie was sweet and good but not the smartest of her sisters, and now she had grown old as well and the afflictions of her age were often upon her mind. She and Howard had lived together in Providence in the devastating years since his mother had died raving beyond the bounds of human sanity in the asylum.

  Howard had given Aunt Annie complicated instructions to be executed upon his death. He was worried that she was nearing a point of hysteria which would incapacitate her when he needed her the most. For the first time in his life, now that he was dying, he had real plans.

  Outside, standing at the edge of a pool of light from a streetlamp, a man was looking up at the hospital. At Howard’s room. His hat was pulled down to conceal his face and his open coat blew around him in the wind. A haunter, Howard thought. A haunter in the dark. From far off he thought he could hear a man laughing wildly; someone must have switched the RCA to The Shadow. It was Sunday night, after all. The man staring at his room was swallowed by sudden darkness the next instant when the lights of Providence dimmed again. The strangest thought emerged in Howard’s mind—that perhaps it had actually been The Shadow. His old friend Walter Gibson’s Shadow, come to pay his last respects. A flash of lightning illuminated the area where the man had been standing, and Howard was startled to see that he had vanished completely from sight. He cursed his imagination, the instrument which he had called upon so many times in the past to deliver him to literary greatness but which had only offered up a dark mythology that the world had ignored resoundingly. So many times, as he sat down at the typewriter, he had begged for the story that issued forth to be about something that was, well, if not normal, then at least something that normal people wanted to read. But in the end, he wrote what he was miserably and helplessly compelled to. And now, as he waited to die, with no more words to write, his own mind did not have even the dignity to offer up hallucinations of his own creation, only The Shadow. Although this was mortifying, he had to admit that in the end, that vision was ultimately preferable to his own creation, the great dark god Cthulhu, with his dripping tentacled mouth and dreams which caused madness.

  Madness.

  His father had died insane as well. For five years when Howard was still a young boy, his father had been locked away in a hospital in Chicago. For five years Howard had been told that his father had been paralyzed in an accident and lay in a dark slumbering coma. For five years while Howard had prayed every night that his father would awaken and return home refreshed, his father had staggered around a gray hospital room, naked and shorn and screaming at phantoms. Aunt Annie had finally told him the truth about his father and the cause of his terrible dementia, syphilis, only in the past year. She could bear the shame alone no longer.

  Howard closed his mind against the sound of Aunt Annie’s voice in the hallway. Stomach cancer. He had assumed he would die in the grip of madness as his parents did, but as another great crashing wave of pain broke over him, he realized he had rarely experienced such mental clarity. He had to protect his aunt the way she and her two sisters, including his mother, youngest of the three, had protected him about his father. He had been able to grow up under the romantic delusion that
his noble father was only trapped in a dark spell like an old king in a legend and that any day might bring his return. His aunts and his mother had given him hope at an age when he had needed hope. When he could still believe. Now he could protect Aunt Annie. By dying.

  The six-minute smoke. That’s how they advertised his Lucky Strike cigarettes, and he was three minutes into it. There was another flash, the bolt of lightning clearly visible across the skyline. The thunder followed quickly—five seconds. Two and a half miles away. The hospital wing was quiet now. Aunt Annie had followed his doctor out of earshot, still pleading with him to help Howard.

  Death would be cold.

  He looked at his reflection in the mirror: his long face, always somewhat equine, was now a skull barely covered by a thin layer of barely living tissue. His eyes were wild circular orbs, gleaming and alive against the dying flesh. He felt the emotion roll up from deep inside him; it rocked his body as much as the pain had a moment before. Tears began to fall onto his cheeks. Sadness. He felt sadness and regret for the moments off his life. He missed ever knowing how it felt to be loved by a father—his father. He wished he had made a success out of his marriage, had been a better husband, had found a way to love Sonia and be loved by her. Why a divorce? There had been love there. Where was she now? Chicago? Cleveland? Back in New York? And how would she find out about him? And what would she think? Would she shed more tears than he was shedding now? She had wanted a different path for them than the one he had chosen and clung to. A writer. As if that career could restore his family name to the station his mother had dreamt of. Perhaps had he risen to the stature of Mark Twain. But what a mess he had made of that. Not even good enough to be considered a second-rate Poe. He had written the worst tales for the lowest of the low—the pulps—and even they had shunned him. If only he had had the sense to stop early on. Become a professor of English or a journalist or anything but a failure to his family. He had always thought there was more time. There should have been. If only his path hadn’t forced him to translate research papers from science to English at the Providence Medical Lab. He never would have discovered that damned island. Never would have made that nightmare trip. Never would have entered the abyss. Never would have had to find himself facing the cold. If only—

  If only his mother were still alive.

  “Howard.” He heard his name spoken aloud and it startled him. He twisted around, the motion painful. The voice hadn’t belonged to his doctor.

  His eyes fell upon the figure of the person who had called his name, his murderer. The man suspended himself in the doorway on shaking arms. Rainwater dripped from his soaked coat. He clutched a dripping felt fedora in one clawlike fist. His head was bare and water drops slid easily over his bald, fleshy scalp. Howard could see that their skin shared the same nearly translucent yellow coloring, arteries clearly visible beneath. The man’s deadening eyes were shining and desperate, like cold, hard anthracite. Jeffords. Howard realized instantly that it had been Jeffords he had seen outside in the flash of lightning, and not any Shadow, and he knew why the glimpse had caused him to shudder. In another instant the thought crossed his mind that the two of them might be mistaken for a pair of syphilitics and he was afraid that people might think he had died like his father after all.

  “You sneak son of a bitch,” Jeffords hissed at him. To Howard, Jeffords didn’t look nearly as afflicted as his own reflection had. Of course, Jeffords had been farther away when all hell broke loose and was a more robustly healthy man to begin with than Howard had ever been. “Where is it?” Why, he might live on for days yet. In agony, Howard pleasantly assured himself. But he would still be able to perpetrate great harm to Aunt Annie in that time. That’s what Howard could protect her from. Jeffords. And Towers.

  Howard sighed. He thought it would be an extremely defiant gesture to light up another cigarette now and have a puff before answering; to show Jeffords that he was no longer afraid of him. But the cigarettes were still on the table and he was still by the window. And he was still afraid of Jeffords. Terrified. He held his hands open to indicate that he had nothing for Jeffords. “Gone,” he said simply.

  “You misguided bastard!” Jeffords took a couple of steps into the room and looked around as if he expected to see what he was looking for just lying around. “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “I’m not,” Howard explained. “It wouldn’t have done us any good anyhow. Don’t you understand that? Look at us. We never had enough time. None of us did.”

  A look of understanding, horrified understanding, dawned across Jeffords’s face. His shoulders sagged as if all hope were being crushed out of him. He looked at Howard as if trying to make sense of this strange, dying little man. He clapped a hand to his forehead. Jeffords always prided himself on being a problem solver, Howard remembered. He was now a problem for the man to solve.

  Howard felt he had to make another attempt to explain himself. “Short of going back to the isle, destroying this was the only thing I could think of.”

  “The only thing! The only thing! Christ, Lovecraft! I might have thought of something.” He took a couple of steps closer.

  “Your thoughts on the matter were perfectly clear.” Howard could see that Jeffords’s despair was beginning to turn into something more menacing. He wished he would hear Aunt Annie’s voice and the doctor’s in the hall again. He swallowed hard; even that was painful. “I was saving it from you.”

  “You’ve killed us both,” he said. “You’re a goddamned murderer.”

  Howard stared at him. Then he shrugged. “I didn’t take us to the isle.”

  Jeffords leapt at him. Howard was so surprised he could only blink. Jeffords’s hands wrapped around his throat. Howard was still so uncomprehending of the actual events unfolding upon him that he had time to think that Jeffords’s hands were soft and smelled like Ivory soap and Burma-Shave. This was in the time that it took for their bodies to fall, ungainly, to the floor. Howard’s elbow cracked upon impact, bearing the full weight of his own sickened body, and Jeffords’s. The shock and knowledge of the imminent awesome pain made him open his mouth to gasp in air. That’s when he understood he was being choked to death. He found his body’s urge to struggle. The pain in his chest grew. He could feel his body panicking; his legs began kicking. His arms began pawing at Jeffords. Something exploded in his chest. Still his mind resisted.

  “I’m going to hunt you down in hell, Lovecraft.” Jeffords’s face was turning red from the exertion. It made his sickly skin glow orange, like that of a deranged jack-o’-lantern.

  Howard’s gaping mouth began to turn up at the edges. He was trying to grin. Saliva drooled from the corners of his mouth. His chest began to convulse. Jeffords pulled his hands back, unsure of himself. Howard sucked in a gale of air, which instantly escaped from him in a whooping laugh.

  It was the best he had ever felt. Jeffords was looking at him queerly. Howard owed him an explanation for his good humor.

  “I’ve got other plans,” he whispered, his voice a croak. There were red spots floating in his vision. He could barely see. He couldn’t breathe well at all. It wasn’t even his windpipe; some mechanism in his chest was not drawing air. He could feel his grin, though. He had a lot to look forward to.

  He heard a scream which sounded as if it came from the bottom of the deepest ocean. Aunt Annie. She was so far away. He could feel Jeffords lift himself from his body. His body instinctively tried to draw itself into a fetal position, trying to find some kind of protection from the pain without and within. Some of the redness cleared from his vision. He saw Jeffords’s feet running away from him. He saw Aunt Annie and the doctor, their faces aghast, in the doorway. Saw Jeffords push past them. The doctor in pursuit. Aunt Annie’s hand in his. She looked like his mother. His mother should have been here when he died. He should have been with her when she died.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven,” she began softly. Tears were beginning to fall from her eyes. He could feel his writer’s mind
, ever present, struggling to preserve all the little details of the moment. There were shouts down the corridor. Aunt Annie smelled of lavender. The floor needed grout in between the tiles. Agony was beautiful. “Hallowed be thy name.”

  He shook his head at her. She stopped praying. His mouth moved, trying to form words. She leaned in. She was weeping now; it would be hard for her to understand him. He knew she felt as if she had failed her sister and failed their entire family line. He clutched her hand harder, trying to reassure her, staring into her eyes. From far away he heard music. She understood that he needed to communicate and stifled her sobbing.

  “Is it cold?” he asked her, desperately. “Is it?” Everything depended upon that.

  She nodded. “It’s very cold.”

  A moment before he died, he wished the moment of death would bring some clarity or enlightenment or revelation. But there would be nothing.

  That was his last thought.

  It was cold.

  Episode Three

  WORD ON the street was John Campbell had work for writers. And that was the word The Flash needed to hear.

  The Flash paused by the newsstand at the corner of Seventh Avenue at the edge of the Street & Smith building to look for Campbell’s mag. This particular newsstand, run by a set of old Italian twins, had all the mags put out that month—not just by Street & Smith, the biggest publisher in the world, but Popular, Frank A. Munsey, Clayton, Thrilling, Culture, and Pro-Distributors Publishing. There were over two hundred mags decorating their stalls this month. Two hundred titles. The newsstand looked like an ink truck had crashed into it. A sharpster could tell instantly how well any given mag was selling by where it stood on the racks of this newsstand. If that same sharpster knew whether or not a certain mag was hot, said sharpster might have an angle on squeezing more than a penny a word out of that mag’s ed. The Flash considered himself a sharpster.