Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  Yet for a long while those terrible cries still echoed through my brain: “The Armies of the Night! The Armies of the Night!”

  I had barely dressed and made my toilet when Mr. Brady was knocking at the door of Number 66. My visions had completely shaken the thought of him from my mind; so that my usual punctiliousness was confounded. I showed him what courtesy I could in my distracted state and he reciprocated. He seems a most gentlemanly fellow with the clean-cut Aryan features of which I approve. His clothes were enviable, evidently the work of the best tailors in Washington whence, he tells me, he hails. I asked him his occupation and he replied, somewhat nebulously, that he worked for the government, though in what capacity he would not specify. However, all misgivings that I might have had evaporated when he offered to take me to luncheon.

  I told him that there was an excellent hostelry nearby where for $2 a very decent noontide repast was to be had. Moreover, I added, I was not a drinker and never had indulged in the kind of libations with which many of my fellow scribes seek to stimulate their genius. My muse is solitude and the dreadful blessing of dreams.

  My new friend Mr. Brady seemed somewhat dismayed at the prospect of taking luncheon at the Providence Temperance Hotel and Coffee Rooms which is the establishment I favour, but thither we repaired, and, having reconciled himself to my modest requirements, Mr. Nathan Brady proved to be a most delightful companion. I must say he is gratifyingly well acquainted with my oeuvre, as I may term it, but he asked a number of questions whose import I could not entirely fathom . . .

  Extract from FBI report from Agent Nathan Brady, April 20, 1937

  . . . Mr. Lovecraft has been most communicative. He is a good and fluent talker and, as far as I could make out, an honest one. In the light of what he told me, however, this may be questionable. He was certainly well informed about the Innsmouth incident; accounts of events at Dunwich and Red Hook conform with and may even exceed the very confidential information that we possess. Using what tact and discretion I could, I tried to find out precisely how Mr. Lovecraft had gained access to this knowledge. Though he made reference to certain printed or manuscript sources, including the Necronomicon, of which we were led to believe there is but one copy, and that in the library of the Miskatonic University under lock and key, Mr. Lovecraft claims that his understanding of certain events derives from dreams 76 or “visions,” as he sometimes calls them. This may or may not be the case, but it would seem that Mr. Lovecraft is in possession of valuable insights. I recommend that an agent remain in regular contact with him. I suggest myself for this task if only because I have already established cordial relations with this source and a new and inexperienced contact might arouse suspicion.

  I attach an invoice for expenses. The bill for the meal at the Providence Temperance Hotel and Coffee Rooms amounts to $4.75, including a 25¢ tip. The meal itself, foul beyond description by the way, came to exactly $4 but Mr. Lovecraft demanded several extra cups of coffee, under which influence he talked, as he would say, “volubly” . . .

  April 28, 1937

  “Well, Brady,” said the director. “I have read your report. I like it. You’re a smart kid. I gather you’ve been seeing this Lovecraft character on a regular basis. The guy who lives with his aunt?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hoover.”

  “There’s no funny business going on between this guy and his aunt is there?”

  “No, Mr. Hoover. I have seen the aunt and the possibility seems vanishingly remote. In any case, I believe Mr. Lovecraft is largely asexual.”

  “A sexual? What sort of a sexual? A homosexual?”

  “No, Mr. Hoover. Just no sex at all.”

  “Then why not say so? You want my advice? Don’t mess with sex. If you don’t mess with sex, sex won’t mess with you. Note that down, Brady. And you think this stuff Lovecraft is giving you is on the level?”

  “It certainly tallies with the reports we’ve been getting through from other quarters. And in some cases he anticipates them.”

  “Anticipates? How?”

  “He claims that he dreams them.”

  “Dreams? Brady, is he leveling with us? Or is he giving us the phonus balonus?”

  “He has been accurate so far, but we have a way of testing his veracity, Mr. Hoover.”

  “Never mind that. I just want to make sure somehow he is on the level.”

  “Well, Mr. Hoover. He has been talking to me recently about some disturbances beneath a theater, which seems to be a Broadway theater in New York. It would appear that, according to him, that this is the site of the next intrusion of these—phenomena . . .”

  “Yes, yes. I get it.”

  “Now we have yet to have any report of this from other sources, so I suggest we investigate this to see if—”

  “I got it! We investigate this, and if it turns out to be true we know our guy is on the level and not the phonus balonus. And we get to burn these dam bums before they get really dangerous. What do you think of my plan, Mr. Brady?”

  “I think it is excellent, sir.”

  “It is excellent, Mr. Brady. And I am appointing you to investigate. You leave for New York tomorrow. Young man, allow me to let you into a big secret, which on pain of having your ass diced and then fried on the hot plate you will keep under your Stetson. After nearly a decade of trying to get those so-called politicians on Capitol Hill to agree with my plans, I’m finally going ahead myself and forming a secret body of men to combat this new threat to our great country. I’m going to call this covert organization the Human Protection League, or HPL for short.”

  “How very appropriate, Mr. Hoover—”

  “Appropriate, my ass! It’s the right thing to do, for America, Brady. And when America’s ass is on the line, J. Edgar Hoover is there to defend that ass at all times. I am appointing you, Nathan Brady, as Agent Number One of the HPL, and you will be directly answerable to me alone together with my assistant director, Mr. Clyde Tolson. Is that clear, Brady?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Good man! You want to know something, Brady? The commies are at the bottom of all this somehow. I’ve got a feeling in my water. You mark my words. This is a plot masterminded in Moscow to undermine our American way of life.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind, Mr. Hoover.”

  Most agents knew that the director could under no circumstances be contradicted. If he said anything with which they could possibly agree, they replied with a smart: “Yes, Mr. Hoover, sir!” If the director, as he was prone to do from time to time, made a remark so wild and fantastical that a self-respecting agent needed to distance himself from it, the response would be: “I’ll bear that in mind, Mr. Hoover.” But the director, for all his faults, was a shrewd man, and one could never be certain that one’s evasion had not been noted and filed in that voluminous and vindictive brain of his. Like the Bourbons, Mr. J. Edgar Hoover very seldom learned anything, but he forgot nothing.

  “Oh, yes. It’s the commies all right. Brady—I’m going to call you Nathan—”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And you can go right on calling me, Mr. Hoover. Nathan, I want you to nail these commie bums for me. Nail them! See my secretary Miss Gandy in the outer office. She will furnish you with all the requisite travel passes, weapons certificates, and expenses forms. Nail those goddamn bums, Nathan!” Hoover’s fist banged emphatically on the tooled leather surface of his Bureau, and with that the meeting was at an end.

  In the outer office Miss Gandy was at her desk, a large, pleasant middle-aged blonde woman, puffy and powdery and wreathed in smiles. She appeared to know exactly what Brady required before he even asked for it.

  But the room had another occupant. A tall man stood silhouetted at the window, gazing out toward the Capitol. At first he seemed to take no notice of Brady, then he turned and advanced toward him. Brady noticed that, as he did so, Miss Gandy’s manner became at once more flustered and more formal. He immediately recognized it to be Hoover’s assistant director, Clyde
Tolson. They had never met before but Brady knew him by sight and reputation. He was a good-looking, impeccably dressed middle-aged man with a fishy eye and a glacial smile.

  “Ah, Mr. Brady, isn’t it?” Brady thought Tolson was going to put out one of his hands to shake; instead he clasped them behind his back. It was as if he was out to disconcert his subordinate.

  “Yes, Mr. Tolson.”

  “I hear you are a coming man in this Bureau, Brady.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Oh, don’t thank me, Brady. For that you must thank our lord and master, J. Edgar, eh?” He winked conspiratorially. Brady sensed that this was a trap, and that if he responded with too much familiarity he would be rebuffed, so he merely bowed his head. Tolson seemed both gratified and frustrated by Brady’s ritual submission. As he came closer, Brady caught the distinct smell of peppermint on his breath. Was it to disguise the alcohol perhaps?

  “Yes,” said Tolson almost in a whisper, “A coming man, but—a word of warning, young Brady: don’t try to come too far.”

  At that moment the door of Hoover’s office opened a fraction and the familiar rasping voice was heard.

  “Is that you, Clyde? Get your ass in here. I want you!”

  Tolson looked furious for a second, then disguised his rage with a sickly smile and went in to his “lord and master.”

  Brady and Miss Gandy heaved a sigh of relief at almost exactly the same moment and smiled at each other in mutual sympathy.

  II

  April 29th, 1937 (from the diary of H. P Lovecraft)

  I am become a martyr to dyspepsia. Aunt Annie wishes me to see a doctor, but I have no wish to commit myself to the costly and generally futile ministrations of the medical profession. However, the other day I found a bottle of Dr. Ogmore Van Bogusteen’s Patent Gastric Preparation in the secret drawer of my escritoire. It may be rather old, but my esteemed grandfather Whipple Van Buren Phillips always swore by it. Well, I took a tablespoon full of the greyish glutinous liquid for my stomach ache yesterday afternoon. At least, I think it was yesterday and the afternoon—I cannot be positive on that—but whenever it was, it did wonders for the pain, despite tasting like the pus from a diseased reptile. Shortly after taking it, however, I fell into a deep sleep, then, waking of a sudden at some remote hour of the night or the morning, I lay on my bed incapable of motion but without any discomfort save a certain mental agitation at my incapacity. Having lain like this for I do not know how long I began to dream. “Yet ’twas not a dream neither,” or if it was, it was such a dream as I have never had to this intense degree, and I am a man prone to such things. It was more like a waking vision. I seemed to be fully conscious throughout my reverie and was able to reflect on my being an unwilling witness to the events I must describe. It was as if I were a prisoner in my own body, trapped, unable to move so much as a finger and yet able to see and hear with a distinctness that rivals or even supersedes my current awakened senses.

  I am back in the basement of that infernal theatre again. The workmen I had seen before are having an altercation with some men. These men are all wearing dark double-breasted suits with a wide chalk stripe and those vulgar two-toned shoes. One of them has a knife. They are swarthy of complexion and I have no doubt they are of Italian extraction and “hoodlums”: dago vermin from the lowest stews of Naples or Palermo. One of them has a missing finger, the other a pencil moustache so thin it looks like the gash from a knife. I can hear their voices but cannot tell what they are saying, even though I suspect it is English, of a kind, and not some greasy foreign tongue.

  In these visions, I am endowed with a supernatural understanding, yet the language I understand is not my own, but a deep remote tongue that comes from the stars, a language of aliens.

  It seems to me that the workmen and the hoodlums are in some dispute over working conditions and pay and that the hoodlums are threatening them. All but one of the workmen maintains some defiance in the face of threat and eventually put down their tools and leave the basement where they have been working. The one who remains behind is a young man, tall, but not very well set up, and he seems fearful. Perhaps, I divine, he has a wife and young children to support and cannot afford to leave, much as he might like to. When the others are gone the hoodlums give this man a cursory nod, as if they approve of his conduct, but also secretly despise him for it.

  The young man continues to work. He is wielding a pickax to the floor of the basement when there comes a rending and cracking sound, and then the sound of large pieces of masonry falling down a deep chasm. The man surveys his handiwork and sees that a large black hole has appeared in the floor at which he had been hacking. He stares in wonder at it, then, seizing a lantern, he lies on the ground next to the hole and shines the lantern into the black depths. I cannot see what he sees but something makes him drop the lantern accidentally down the hole.

  Then I see the man in a quandary. He hesitates. Finally he takes another lantern and gingerly descends a flight of rough stone-hewed steps into the darkness beneath the floor. It seems that in my vision I follow him. The sense of dread is now magnified and palpable, but I cannot escape. My body is trapped, held in a vice by my own paralysis.

  He descends from the floor above until he reaches an uneven pile of rubble and debris at the bottom of which lies the lamp, now extinguished. I see him stop several times during his cautious descent to listen. His features are taut and white. The man reaches the bottom and is in the long barrel-vaulted chamber or passage that I have seen before. Its walls are slicked with a damp wetness from the green lichen that spreads over it like a disease. On it are incised signs whose meaning I cannot fathom and carvings in bas relief of monstrous ichthyoid forms whose heads sprout long and fibrous tentacles and whose vast saucer eyes look out at me even from the stone in which they are graven.

  He stoops down to pick up the lamp, though as he crouches he looks round in wonder at his surroundings. He starts at a single sound, like that of a large splayed foot stamping in a puddle, innocent in other circumstances perhaps, but hideously disconcerting here and now. He calls out hesitantly and such is the strangulation that his nerves are causing him that his voice is a shrill pipe in the throat. The voice is answered by a deep boom, and then terror absolute and unadorned seises the wretch.

  He turns and, abandoning both lanterns, begins to scramble up the rubble incline towards the steps above. In his terror and desperation he begins to slide and stumble amongst the fallen masonry. He cannot get a firm grip; his hands are slick with sweat. I watch paralysed, unable to move or even cry out. I am present in his agony and at the same time I know that I am miles away.

  It is pitiful indeed to watch a man so abject with terror, but this is nothing to what happens next. As he struggles helplessly among the sliding scree, trying to gain some purchase and reach the floor above, dark shapes are seen moving in that subterranean chamber. I do not see one of them whole-mercifully I am spared that!—just a limb here, the misshapen outline of a head, a tangle of lank, coarse hair. Their shapes are anthropoid, but neither are they wholly human, their skin being hard and squamous, like that of a reptile. I sense that the creatures are of both sexes with perhaps the females predominating, for they are the ones who now surround the workman, pawing and caressing him with their powerful scaly arms. Their fingers are long and prehensile but are webbed together by a translucent skein of skin. It is hard, thankfully hard, to see clearly in the subdued light, but it seems to me that the hue of their flesh is vilely iridescent, like a slick of oil on stagnant water.

  Then all at once they pounce and engulf him. He gives a despairing cry and for a moment it is as if I am one with him, suffocating under a sea of slimy, scaly possessing flesh. I am struggling now to escape not from my body but from his. All goes dark and I hear again the voices pounding against me.

  “Rghyyeloi fo Xhon! Rghyyeloi fo Xhon!”

  “The Armies of the Night! The Armies of the Night!”

  Then I am lying on my bed,
every item of clothing on me soaked in sweat. I know I am once more in Providence, but what day or what hour it is, I cannot say. There is daylight, of a sort, to be seen through my curtains.

  I had barely recovered from this hideous adventure when there was a knock at the door. It was my new acquaintance, Mr. Brady, come to pay a call. Fortunately by this time I had found myself a fresh shirt and a reasonably clean collar, so that I was “clothed and in my right mind” when I answered the door, but he could see that all was not well.

  Mr. Brady was most solicitous. He took me out to dinner— Yes! It was the hour of the evening meal!—but not, alas to the Temperance Coffee Rooms, but to the Arkham-Biltmore Hotel where he had a couple of highballs—not, it goes without saying, available at the Temperance Coffee Rooms!—before we both partook of a sumptuous repast which was a little too much for my delicate digestion. He asked me to describe my dream (or vision?) in the greatest detail and I was happy to oblige. He seemed highly gratified by my account though I cannot quite fathom why. Is he perhaps an aspiring writer looking to plunder the resources of my perfervid subconscious? This seems to be the only probable explanation.

  At all events, his pleasure in my society seems to know no bounds and he asked me if there was anything he could do for me. I immediately said to him that I would be much obliged if he could secure me some more bottles of Dr. Ogmore Van Bogusteen’s Patent Gastric Preparation as my local pharmacy seemed unable or unwilling to sell me same.