by Pete Rawlik
It was a state that my face must have betrayed, for Hannah took my hand and asked me about Hadrian. “Have you known Hadrian for long?”
“Eh? What? I’ve known Hadrian for years, since we were both assigned to the security detail in Paris for the treaty negotiations. Sternwood wanted a cosmopolitan team, quite smart actually, given the diversity of people we had to deal with. He recruited agents from all over. Hadrian is from Montenegro. Chan is Chinese, well, he’s from Hawaii but he’s first generation. Charles is from some town not far from here called Sycamore Springs, but he’s Greek on his father’s side. We even had a Belgian, a funny little man named Achille who was the most excellent cook. He taught Hadrian how to make a proper omelet. It takes a bit longer, but it is well worth the wait.”
“Doctor Lydecker says the treaty is nonsense. He says that a second war in Europe is inevitable. That the negotiations and reparations will be the root cause.”
“Who is Doctor Lydecker?”
“Roman Lydecker is a new addition to The Hall School. He serves as both a physician and an instructor of sciences, biology, chemistry, and the like. He’s quite an intelligent man. He was injured in the war, needs a cane to walk around, and speaks rather hoarsely due to a throat injury.” She smiled. “The conversations we have in the staff lounge have become quite lively since he joined us.”
“Your fellow instructor seems quite pessimistic,” I retorted. “President Wilson and the rest of the Peace Conference have worked hard to negotiate the treaty and make it fair for all involved, not just the victors. I’m sure once it is ratified, the treaty and the League of Nations will help form a roadmap to a new age of peace and prosperity for the whole of the civilized world.”
“Not if Senator Lowe has his way,” chimed in the precocious Megan. She carefully watched to see how we would all react to her suddenly joining the conversation.
Vargr scoffed, “That blowhard, why would he oppose the treaty?”
“From what I’ve read in the papers,” Megan spoke hesitantly at first, but picked up steam as she found a rhythm, “he fears limiting the powers and independence of the United States. He is something of an Imperialist, and an adherent to the Monroe Doctrine. He wants Europe out of the Western Hemisphere, and wants the States to have a free hand to deal with Central and South America as we see fit. Binding ourselves with the treaty and the dictates of the League of Nations would prevent that. It might also limit our military prowess, and force us to rely on allies such as Great Britain and France to bolster our forces. In the Senator’s opinion these allies have not proven themselves reliable. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the proposed alliances and automatic military support might in the future create another chain reaction like the one that started the Great War. Some minor offense between two nations with unpronounceable names might draw in greater powers aligned with both and then escalate out of control, plunging the world into war.”
“Surely there are men wise enough to prevent such things from happening,” proffered Hannah.
Megan shook her head. “There are always men wise enough to prevent such things; they tend to be executed or imprisoned or banished by others who would rather rush headlong into conflict. It would be nice to let calmer heads prevail, as they say, but often there is little time for such things and louder, more passionate voices rule the day.”
“Perhaps,” Hannah interjected, “what we need are fewer men in power, and more women.”
Vargr dismissed the concept with a wave of his hand. “There are some things that I have found to be true in my time. First, when it comes to food, there is such a thing as too many cooks; second, when it comes to work, there can be too many clients; and, finally, though many would disagree, no matter what the issue, there can always be too many women.”
Megan pressed the issue. “Are you really that much of a throwback, Mr. Vargr?”
A wry smile came across his face. “You must understand, in my home country of Montenegro, women are raised to be harridans. It is a country with a rich culture and history rife with difficulty. To survive, and to see their children thrive, the women must be strong and ruthless, as strong and ruthless as men. It does not endear them to the opposite sex, nor does it allow for the development of what Western society calls ‘a ladies’ man’. It is not that I dislike women, but rather that I find no need for them, and that things would be simpler if they weren’t around.”
“Professor Higgins once expressed similar ideas.” Megan snorted. “He’s married now, with three daughters.”
Hannah raised her glass in a sarcastic toast. “To Hadrian Vargr, unapologetic misogynist.”
Hadrian raised his own glass, one that had somehow been filled with beer instead of tea. “Present company excluded, of course.”
“Of course,” nodded Megan, smiling as she sipped her water.
“Just one question,” said Hannah as she put her glass down on the table. “If General Sternwood was working for the staff putting together the Versailles Treaty, and Senator Lowe is opposed to it, why are Sternwood and Lowe meeting?”
I looked at Vargr, and he at me. We both realized that we didn’t know the answer to that particular query, but we wanted to find out.
It was a short time later, our extended luncheon finished and the four of us strolling through the hall, that Max Kellerman, in a heavy coat covered with a dusting of snow, burst through the front doors and shouted for the desk clerk to fetch Doctor Houseman. Our interests piqued, we all made our way to the entryway and watched as the sleigh arrived back from its afternoon trip, but instead of Kalley, the regular driver, at the reins was Doctor Copperpot with Kalley slumped over to one side.
Ignoring the cold and what appeared to be a startling accumulation of snowfall, Vargr and I ran out the doors and with Kellerman met the sleigh. We gently picked up Kalley’s limp body and carried him inside to the couch in the lounge, where a roaring fire was going. I stripped the man out of his winter coat and gloves and tried to rouse him, but with no success.
Copperpot came in just a moment later with an explanation on his lips. “We were about halfway up the mountain when he just slumped over. I’m not sure why. He’s too big for me to have manhandled into the passenger compartment, so I just left him there on the seat and held on to the reins. The horse did most of the work.”
Kellerman dashed back out to tend to the horse while Vargr and I searched for a pulse. By the time Doctor Houseman arrived his only act was to confirm what my friend and I already knew: Mr. Kalley was dead, most likely from a heart attack or stroke; his body was already cold. With Houseman and Kellerman on one end and me and Vargr on the other, we carried the lifeless corpse from the resort’s main building to a small wooden cabin nearby. The building was a poorly insulated summer home, and therefore sufficiently cold enough to preserve the body. The county coroner would come, claimed Houseman, but with the snow continuing to pile up when he would arrive was anyone’s guess.
Back at the lodge we found the girls in the lounge, talking with Copperpot, who was trying to warm up with a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He was regaling them with tales of the legends of the surrounding mountains and valleys and I saw no reason not to join them. He spoke of the stone house that sat on the storm-beset Tempest Mountain, and the Martense family that lived there. About how they cut themselves off from the world and then vanished from it entirely. He mentioned the Howe Caverns, which were said to honeycomb great portions of the mountains in the area. He even mentioned the tale of Old Man Zumpe, who wandered the hills around Bishop’s Falls and spoke of a treasure hidden in a hollow. He had disappeared years ago, but the legend of the treasure lived on. Some said it was gold, others a meteorite that had fallen in the area centuries earlier, even fewer claimed both. Dozens searched the valley for Zumpe’s treasure, but no one ever found anything and when the area finally flooded, the chance of finding Zumpe’s gold became just about zero.
He then told us about Joe Slater, a murderer who was confined to the asyl
um in Albany back in 1901. He suffered from weird visions of unearthly vistas and related them as best he could using words far beyond his normally feeble mind. Imprisoned, the doctors monitored his madness, which seemed to be inexplicably linked to his deteriorating health, a situation no one could explain. One young intern took an unhealthy interest in Slater, and one night in a lapse of judgment connected Slater to a machine of his own design, one that he had built years earlier while at college. It relied on the theory that thought itself was a form of radiant energy and could be transmitted from mind to mind—a radical theory, but not unlike the work being carried out by Nikolai Tesla. Unfortunately, the intern and his friend with whom he had experimented were unable to get it to produce any results. All that changed when he hooked it up to Slater.
Copperpot paused and took a sip of his coffee. “In his official report on Slater’s death, the intern described communicating with a being of pure light who was engaged in a conflict with another entity near the star Algol. Slater’s prosaic descriptions were actually the poor man relating messages from the alien itself.” He let that sink in. “Of course, nobody believed him. He had no evidence, and only cited the discovery of the star GK Persei as corroboration. He was censured by the medical community, and nearly lost his license to practice. Thankfully, the intern’s mentor stepped in, pulled a few strings, and found for him a position as a doctor in an isolated community that didn’t care so much about his past indiscretions.”
“And how is it that you know about all this, Doctor Copperpot?” There was a tone of incredulity in Megan’s voice.
Copperpot lit a cigarette. “How do I know this, Miss Halsey? How is it that you don’t? I know this because I went to school with that young intern, I was the friend on whom he experimented, and it was your father, the famous Allan Halsey, that was his mentor and who found him a place to work when no one else would hire him.”
Megan chuckled. “So where is he now, this disgraced physician? Someplace in Alaska? Florida? The Hawaiian Islands?”
The cigarette turned to ash as he took a long drag off of it. “Nowhere as severe as that. In fact, the poor man only had to relocate fifty miles.” He smiled knowingly. “That young intern is here in this hotel. He’s worked here almost two decades, tended to staff and guests alike, without any of them knowing his secret past.”
“You’re talking about Doctor Houseman!” Hannah exclaimed.
Copperpot put a finger to his nose and smiled. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Vargr looked at me, knowing what I had been through, but I couldn’t bring myself to say much about my experiences. “No,” I finally stuttered out, “I don’t find it hard to believe at all.”
With that we bid Doctor Copperpot farewell for the evening and went in search of better company, or at least less puerile conversation.
The hours passed quickly and soon the four of us along with Lowe and Darrow were all gathered around a single table as guests of General Sternwood. He made a perfunctory speech and then dazzled us with an assortment of courses all prepared by the Kellermans’ fine staff. There was even a wine, though nothing worth mentioning compared to the selections we had sampled in Paris. Vargr raved about the meal, and called the chef a genius, and as he finished his coffee he stood up, and marched into the kitchen and congratulated the man personally.
Despite my expectations, Lowe and Darrow were actually quite charming, but we avoided politics and the treaty negotiations. Darrow it seems had been a student of Halsey as well, which seemed highly coincidental to me. That Darrow and Houseman had both been students of Halsey, and Copperpot had been at Miskatonic, coupled with Megan, Hannah, and I with our links to the university, all seemed too convenient. As I realized this the wheels in my head began to turn, and I realized that we were being played, manipulated, like puppets. We had been brought here, all of us, not just myself, Vargr, and the girls, but Geiger and Copperpot and the others. I just couldn’t figure out who was pulling the strings; was it Sternwood or Lowe?
Or was it both of them?
After dinner the girls and Vargr retired for the night. I couldn’t blame them. It had been a long day’s travel for all of them. Kalley’s death just added to things. I, on the other hand, was being fueled by suspicions. I found the invitation that Geiger had given me, ran my thumb over the green carnation that was stamped on it. I thought about what that symbol meant and how in some ways I despised it. I thought about Paris, and about London, and about Arthur Valentine, the man who took care of me after Ylourgne, the man with whom I had fallen in love, the man whom I had left behind. I went back to my room, shaved, showered, and dressed.
By nine o’clock I was in the lobby looking for the Buchanan Room, which turned out to be a rather innocent-looking cabin a few yards behind the lodge. The inside, however, was something entirely different, as there was a complete bar stocked with a selection of fine liquors and expensive cigars. Milling about were some two dozen or so men all smartly dressed, but not overly so. This is not to say that they were all dressed the same, indeed the style of dress was as varied as the men themselves, who ranged from the relatively short to the tall, from the thin to the corpulent, from the pale to the swarthy, and from the masculine to the effeminate. They were as varied as the flowers in the fields, which is the thing I, and the rest of the men, had in common, for we all wore the green carnation, and because of it we all knew what we were.
At the bar I ordered a glass of white wine and smiled as the bartender overpoured and emptied the bottle. Geiger was at my side, his hair slicked back and his mustache waxed. He wore a gray silk suit in a European cut with a thin burgundy tie. He looked at me with deep blue eyes; I hadn’t noticed those before, and they smoldered as he looked me up and down.
He put a hand on my arm in a gentle but not—altogether—casual manner. “I’m so glad that you could join us, Mr. Peaslee.”
“Call me Robert,” I offered.
“Robert, yes of course,” he stuttered, “and you should call me Arthur.” As he said this, I quickly swallowed my surprise at him having the same name as the man I so cared about. “Have you been to one of these before?” I admitted I hadn’t, and he offered to explain things to me. “Everyone is wearing a carnation; some are on the left side, some on the right. This is not by random chance and actually symbolizes orientation.”
I was just about to ask him to explain what he meant by that when a bloodcurdling scream pierced the night. It was distant, but not that far, and it brought the entire party to a halt. It was a sound I had heard before; it was the sound of a man being killed. I took a swig of my wine and turned to apologize to Geiger. Before I could say a word his mouth moved toward mine. For a moment I wanted to respond—to greet his gesture with one of my own, but only for a moment. He wasn’t Arthur, and no matter how much I wanted this to replace what I once had, that simply wasn’t going to happen. I pulled away, apologized, and dashed out the door.
The snow slowed my pace, but the whimpering cries that carried through the night drew me to the source, a cabin not far from the lodge, a cabin that I had been to earlier in the day. It was the cabin in which we had placed poor Mr. Kalley’s body. As I approached I noticed that the freshly fallen snow had been disturbed by the passage of several different boots. Closer still and I saw that the door to the cabin was wide open, and not just open but unhinged and with a shattered frame as well. Another set of tracks, these leading away from the cabin and into the woods in a wild and strange manner that seemed as if a man had stumbled or perhaps loped out into the night.
Inside the cabin there was a whimpering sound, in a voice that I recognized, a voice that had for years issued me commands and demands. There on the floor was the body of General Sternwood, bent and broken in a manner that was unnatural to the human anatomy. His legs were twisted almost completely round and blood was weeping from a gaping wound on his thigh. I ran to his side. He was barely conscious; the pain must have been overwhelming, and he was crying and begging for help. I b
ent down and tried to stop the bleeding.
As I did a shadow suddenly appeared, a thin and frail form stood in the doorway blocking the pale light of the moon. She was a slip of a girl and wore only her nightclothes and a pair of boots. What Megan was doing there I didn’t know, but she stood there in a daze, her eyes glazed over and staring out into the void. The wind was blowing from behind, her hair swirling about her head, and her nightgown like a sail caught by a breeze. She was an angel, a Muse, a Grace, a goddess of the night, but why she had come to me here and now I could not understand. Still, she was here and I could use her help.
“Megan,” I called out, but she just stood there entranced and entrancing. “Megan!” I yelled, and that got her attention. She snapped out of whatever daze she was in. “Go back to the hotel and tell them we need Doctor Houseman in cabin number six immediately. When you’re done go wake Vargr and send him here as well. Then go back to your room and lock the door.”
She faltered, hesitated really, and then in a confused voice spoke. “I thought I heard a baby.”
“There’s no baby here, Megan, quite the opposite really. Now focus and go get Houseman and Vargr.”
She left, but it seemed to me that there was no particular speed or motivation to her movements. She moved like she was in a dream, like a gossamer thing tossed about on the currents of a fairy breeze. One moment she was there, and the next she was gone, and I was left alone with the dying General Sternwood.
I kept him still and tried to quiet him down while I kept pressure on his wound. In the darkness, as I waited, I looked about the cabin and surveyed the damage. There were signs that men had come to see Kalley’s body, to sit with it, for there were now two chairs, or at least what was left of two chairs, arranged around the bed where the body had once lain. I assumed one of those men was the General, and from that assumption leaped to the conclusion that the other was either Darrow or Lowe. Given the relatively small size of the chair I thought Darrow for sure.