by Emby Press
“Pursuing inquiries must furnish you with nearly endless material for your tales.”
“All my characters are based on people I’ve known, or known about,” Hammett nodded. “How about you?”
“Mine often begin in dreams. I draw more inspiration from familiar settings, exploring what horrors and mysteries, what contradictions and contraventions of nature, come back out of space, or out of time, after long centuries to harass Old Providence with her clustered spires and domes.” He laughed. “At least, that is the lofty goal for which I strive, Mr. Hammett. All too often, I fall far short of the mark, and I’m afraid my tales are chock full of cheap and cumbrous touches.”
Hammett laughed along with him. At least he had a sense of humor about himself. He was starting to like Lovecraft.
When they were both silent for a moment, Hammett began to tell this strange little man a story he had never told anyone before. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that was devoid of emphasis or pauses, though now and then he repeated a sentence slightly rearranged, as if it were important that each detail be related exactly as it had happened.
“A woman came to our San Francisco office several years ago, saying that her husband had disappeared. Just went out for lunch one day and vanished. They were happily married, they had kids and he was a good father to them, and they had enough money to last them, he didn’t have enemies, so he had no reason to disappear. But he was gone like that, like a fist when you open your hand. We looked for him, but we couldn’t find him, not anywhere. But a few years ago, we got a call that someone matching his description had been seen in Spokane. So the old man sent me out to follow up.”
“And?”
“And it was him. When I asked him what happened, why he disappeared, he told me that going to lunch that day he passed an office-building that was being put up – just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. He still had the scar. He was scared stiff, of course; a falling beam had just shown him that life was not the sane orderly responsible affair he thought it was. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”
“But life is a hideous thing,” Lovecraft said. “From the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous – a reality in which such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind have no existence at all!”
Hammett chuckled and glanced at his watch.
“So where is this package, anyway?” he wondered.
*
It was almost seven o’clock when it arrived, delivered by a nautical Norwegian who nervously identified himself as Gustaf Johansen when Lovecraft questioned him. He made Lovecraft uncomfortable, a big rough-hewn working man standing there in the parlor. Lovecraft’s only other language was Latin, and Hammett had some halting Spanish picked up from years in California, so talking to the sailor was slow going. As near as they could understand, Johansen had been paid – and paid lavishly, by his own standards – to deliver a package to this address. He handed it over.
It was small and rectangular and surprisingly heavy, wrapped in brown paper and rough string, with a dozen labels and seals plastered all over it.
“This has circled our little globe numerous times, Mr. Hammett,” Lovecraft said, turning it over and over in his hands. There were labels in Greek, French, Japanese, Arabic. The largest label bore his name and address in a firm, neat, slightly feminine hand. “And now it appears upon my humble doorstep in ancient, legend-haunted Providence.”
Johansen had been nervous when he arrived, and agitated when he was questioned, but when Lovecraft untied the string and tore the paper wrappings, the man bolted from the room with a strangled cry and was swallowed by the night.
Lovecraft lifted the contents from the package, brushing away flakes of excelsior and setting the strange thing down on his desk. It was a small idol, a rendering of a monster. The aspect of it was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable, as was the fearsome and unnatural malignancy in its every line. He tore his gaze from it, took a few steps away and shuddered all the way down in his soul. Loosening his tie and half-fainted into a chair.
“You’re quite right, Mr. Hammett,” he breathed heavily. “I should be only too happy to have that – that Thing out of my house as soon as it can be arranged. Take it, please!”
“All right, steady there. Let me get you some water. There, better? Now Mr. Lovecraft, let me ask you this – did you recognize the handwriting on that address label?”
“I … did,” he squinted once more at the handwriting before looking back over to Hammett with a kind of disappointed surprise. He reached over to the edge of his desk to pull the original handwritten manuscript of The Shadow of the Abyss from under the typescript. He scanned back and forth between the label and the manuscript several times before nodding simply and saying, “It’s Miss Gilman’s handwriting.”
“You’re sure?”
“Beyond doubt.”
“And what time is she due?”
Lovecraft glanced at the clock.
“Less than a quarter of an hour.”
“That’s just swell.”
“How can she possibly be connected to this?”
“We’ll have to wait and ask her. Believe me, I don’t like the idea anymore than you do.”
“At the risk of sounding cheaply melodramatic, Mr. Hammett, we can’t let – That – fall into the wrong hands.”
“No, we can’t. That’s why the old man sent me here, Mr. Lovecraft.”
“Howard.”
“What?”
“I’m Howard.”
“And everyone calls me Dash, Howard,” he noddedsaid.
*
Howard opened the front door a short time later to usher Miss Amelia K. Gilman into his parlor. She was tall, with curling red hair and wearing two shades of green chosen because of her eyes, which were too far apart. Her broad mouth made her sharp little predatory teeth seem somehow more dangerous.
And she wasn’t alone. With her was a fat man with a bald head and a dark suit. He smiled at Lovecraft and then to Hammett, who both noticed his skin had a morbid dryness, and seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. With the fat man was a shorter, slighter man in a dinner jacket and spats, with a pistol in one hand and a perfumed handkerchief in the other; the smell of nameless decay wafted through the room as he closed the door behind them. His languid manner, Hammett thought, was hiding a bad case of nerves.
“Well, no, this is quite the little party, Howard,” Miss Gilman said. “I didn’t think it was going to be so crowded.”
“Nor did I,” Lovecraft said petulantly. “Why in Yuggoth did you send that Thing here?”
“You don’t think I was going to send something that dangerous to my address?” she laughed harshly. “There are some … men watching my house, so I can’t go back there. Not that I need to. The sooner you hand it over, we’ll be on our way.”
“Where did you ever find such a thing?”
“When I was in Europe a few years ago, searching for some forbidden tomes and piecing together some forgotten lore – you’d know all about that, Howard. And that’s where I first encountered these … gentlemen.”
Lovecraft looked into her eyes and wondered how he ever could have missed the fathomless madness there.
The fat man turned to Lovecraft.
“Well, now, sir, it seems you have something which belongs to us?” he said, in a hoarse and disturbing whisper. “You have been kind enough to take delivery for us, but … if you please, now.”
“Get it,” the other man said, coming forward with the gun.
“Get it,” the man repeated.
As Lovecraft stepped out of the room, Hammett asked, “So what makes you think we’re just going to hand it over?”
“And who are you?” the fat man asked.
“I’m a friend of Howard’s.”
“Well, sir, I don’t see that you have any choice or even say in the matter.”
“Well, don’t you think we should talk about it first?”
“All right, sir. I’ll tell you right out, I am a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.”
“Swell. We want ten thou for that thing.”
The fat man’s laugh rasped around the room.
“Come, sir, you’re in no position to bargain. And the simple fact that you view such a thing in terms of mere cash means you have no idea what it is.” He snapped his fingers to the man with the gun and motioned him to the door to the other room. “Check on him.”
He’d only taken a couple of steps when Lovecraft reappeared, holding the package at arm’s length.
“Here it is, here it is,” he said, setting it down on his desk and backing away from it.
The weird trio gathered around it. The fat man pulled the package apart and scowled as he examined the strange contests.
It was a rough stone carving of a leering, grimacing figure, blocky and primitive; a bust carved from some dark mineral, depicting the shunned denizen of a forgotten continent. It vaguely reminded Hammett of some of the totem poles he’d seen in the Pacific Northwest.
He sneaked a quizzical look over at Lovecraft.
“That’s not it,” Miss Gilman hissed. She turned on Lovecraft. “What the hell?”
“This unwelcome thing arrived on my doorstep not an hour ago,” Lovecraft said dismissively. “Aside from that, I know nothing of it whatsoever, nor do I care to. You are more than welcome to take it away with you, as was evidently always your intention.”
“Come now, sir, this is surely some crude attempt at deception on your part,” the fat man said.
“Where is the real idol?” the man with the gun demanded. He leveled the gun at Hammett and stepped close.
Too close.
Hammett smiled wolfishly as one hand grabbed the man’s gun hand and wrenched it upward. His other hand sank a solid punch into the man’s soft face. Another punch and the little man wilted to the floor with a shriek. Hammett took the gun away from him and swung around to face Miss Gilman.
She had fished a small gun of her own from her handbag and pointed it back at him.
“Well, now we are in a jam, aren’t we?” he asked.
“I rather think our visitors have overestimated the strength of their position, and the weakness of our own, Dash,” Lovecraft said in a high, excited voice. He had taken the ancient flintlock from over the mantel and now looked down the long barrel at Miss Gilman.
“That old relic won’t fire,” the fat man scoffed.
“I very much doubt that Miss Gilman would care to put that conjecture to the test,” Lovecraft replied.
Hammett slowly removed another pistol from under his coat, pointing this one at the fat man.
Miss Gilman dropped her gun; Lovecraft lowered the flintlock and stepped forward to kick her pistol under the horsehair sofa.
“It was the Russian,” the man on the floor breathed. “He knew it was valuable – he knew what it was. He took the money and sent this instead. He still has it, or he’s sent it to someone else by now, and—”
“Shut up,” Amelia Gilman snapped.
“So if this isn’t the dingus you’re after, I guess you can be on your way,” Hammett said.
“Everybody errs at times and you may be assured that this is as severe a blow to me as it is to anyone,” the fat man said. “Yes, it was the Russian. But what are we to do? Shed tears and point guns at one another or –” He turned to his strange partners. “Shall we go to Constantinople?”
“He’ll be there,” the girl said. “And it will be there with him.”
“So it’s settled, then?” the fat man nodded. “Mr. Lovecraft, I thank you for a most … diverting evening.”
Lovecraft turned to Miss Gilman and said, “Your story – The Shadow of the Abyss. It’s hack work of the most arrant and unmitigated sort. I did my best with it, you understand, but I found myself severely hobbled by the original material ….”
The girl said two words. The first was a short verb, and the second was “you.”
They slammed the door behind them as they went.
Lovecraft doubled over laughing.
“Oh, Dash, you have given grandpa an awful fright,” he said, straightening up to dab delicately at his forehead with a monogrammed pocket square.
“Where did you get … that?” Hammett asked, pointing to the carving.
“I maintain a broad and far-flung circle of correspondents, with a great number of fascinating and bizarrely talented individuals,” Lovecraft replied. “Such a one is Clark Ashton Smith. He writes weird narratives, crafts otherworldly verse, paints fantastic canvases … and sculpts things that no human eye has ever glimpsed – except perhaps his! This is his work. He sent it to me several Christmases ago. He calls it The Heretic of Zothique.” He wrinkled his nose at it. “Not quite to my taste, but it is the thought, we are told, that counts …. It was a simple matter to switch one figure for another when I stepped into the next room.”
“I underestimated you, Howard.”
“As did Miss Gilman and her cohorts, evidently.”
“And the other one is ….?”
“Under the sink. I am only too happy to relinquish it to you and your employer, your old man.”
“I’ll take it off your hands,” Hammett nodded. He smiled uncomfortably and noticed that his own hand shook a little at the thought of carting the thing back across the country. “I could really use a drink, Howard.”
“Under ordinary circumstances, Dash, I am nauseated by even the distant stink of any alcoholic liquor. However, tonight has been … anything but ordinary,” Lovecraft said. “There is a discreet little establishment a few streets away. Let me get my coat.”
*
The strange dreams followed Hammett on the long train trip back from Providence. He didn’t mention it to the old man when he arrived in San Francisco, just showed him the weird idol – a blasphemous thing, all tentacles and bat wings and clutching talons – and asked if there were further instructions, and there were.
The next day he stood at the rail of the Oakland ferry as it chugged across the Bay. With a cautious glance around him, he slowly unwrapped the thing from the newspaper he carried it in and, with a final shudder, heaved it overboard and watched as it sank beneath the chilly waves. He tried to tell himself the water wasn’t darker where the thing had splashed into it.
He half-wanted to ask the old man what it was, and how he’d known about it, but decided against it. Knowing wasn’t his job. Instead, he took a few days off and spent the time in a deep, dreamless slumber.
THE INUIT BONE
William Meikle
Old Joe was downstairs singing at the top of his voice but he was the only thing to disturb the quietness of the morning. I needed a client, but none were forthcoming, and yet again I was down to my last bottle of Scotch.
I had just started to reach for it when there was a cough across the desk from me.
A short swarthy man sat opposite. His skin was as tanned as old leather, white crows-feet radiating from the corners of his eyes and lips. He looked straight at me, unblinking, his eyes a milky grey that seemed almost misty.
I hadn’t heard him come up the stairs, and he certainly hadn’t knocked, but there he sat, squat and smiling, like the cat that got the cream. At first I took him for Asian, but when he spoke his accent was North American, with that peculiar twang that only Canadians can muster.
“Derek Adams?” He leaned forward to shake my hand with a grip that told me he was much stronger than
he looked. “I am Toolemak, and I’ve got a job for you.”
He sat back and the old chair tried to swallow him.
I took out my cigarettes and offered him one. He took it as I searched for my Zippo, and he watched me try every pocket and come up blank. He smiled, and rolled his eyes up in their sockets. He started to gurgle and blow, like a seal diving and surfacing. Then he popped out a series of saliva bubbles before slapping both palms, hard, on the table, one after the other in rapid succession in a fast drum beat. He let out a deep groan that seemed to come from somewhere around his feet then put a clenched fist out to me. He opened his palm and dropped my Zippo onto the desk.
By the time I lifted the lighter his eyes had returned to normal and he was smiling again. I lit us both up and offered him some mock applause.
“Nice trick,” I said. “First you get in without me noticing, then you steal my lighter. What’s next? Sawing me in half?”
He laughed long and loud, and instantly I knew I was going to like this job. That feeling was reinforced when he slapped a wad of notes on the desk.
“I’ve heard you have, shall we say, contacts that can find things that have been lost for a while?” he said. “What I am after has been lost to my people for over a hundred years.”
I laughed back.
“Why don’t you just use one of your wee tricks. You found that Zippo fast enough didn’t you?”
I didn’t get a smile in return.
“Tomga can only see what has been shown. That which is hidden is hidden for a reason.”
And right there and then I wanted nothing more than to throw this strange little man out and get back to the whisky—somebody had just walked over my grave, and now they had started dancing on it. But my gaze fell on the money and couldn’t be dragged away. I sat back and waved for him to continue.
He settled far down into the old chair and blew three perfect smoke-rings one through the other.
“It is a longish tale,” he said. “It would be nice to have something to wet my throat?”
I gave in to the inevitable and got the Scotch from the drawer. I poured two large ones and we both settled again as he told his tale.