by Alan K Baker
He thought again of the ad he had placed in the New York Times and wondered if it would lead to any paid work. Who am I kidding? he asked himself miserably. There was clearly nothing else for it: he would have to consult the paper again, this time to search the situations vacant section.
Once again, he would have to try to get a regular job.
*
It was a little after ten o’clock when Fort got back to his office. His secretary, Penny Malone, stood up from her desk in the outer office as soon as she saw him: the expression on his face told her that something was wrong.
‘What is it, Charlie?’ she asked, her frown echoing that of her employer, darkening her normally bright features.
Fort looked into her cobalt-blue eyes and tried to smile, with limited success. ‘Nothing, sweetheart, nothing.’
Penny placed her hands on her slim hips, dark red varnish camouflaging her nails against the deep crimson of her dress. Her frown deepened. ‘Charlie…’
‘Everything’s fine,’ he lied. ‘I got a new case.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What kind of case?’
‘A customer wants me to track down a stolen item.’
Penny regarded him with unblinking eyes for a few seconds. ‘What customer?’
Fort sighed. ‘Al Capone.’
Penny gasped. ‘What?’
Fort sat on the edge of the desk, his shoulders hunched. ‘And he wants me to track down the Martian Falcon.’
Penny sat down slowly in her chair. ‘Tell me this is a joke, Charlie,’ she said, very quietly.
‘I wish I could, Pen. But it isn’t. Capone’s goons grabbed me this morning…’
‘I thought you smelled funny.’
‘… and took me to the Algonquin. He’s catching some heat for the heist, but says he wasn’t behind it. He reckons it’s down to Johnny Sanguine, and he wants me to prove it.’
‘Oh Jesus. The Diesel-Powered Gangster wants you to go up against the Vampire King of Brooklyn?’
‘Talk about a rock and a hard place,’ Fort chuckled mirthlessly.
Penny shook her head. ‘You said it, hon. So… what are you going to do?’
Fort ran a twitchy hand through his thick dark hair. ‘Not a whole lot I can do… except take the case. I can’t say no to Capone – I’m very attached to my kneecaps, and I want it to stay that way.’
‘And what if you manage to pin the theft on Sanguine? What do you think he’s going to do?’
‘I’ll just have to make damned sure he doesn’t find out it’s me.’
Penny shook her head again, more emphatically this time. ‘You can’t do it, Charlie, you just can’t!’
‘Like I said, angel,’ Fort sighed. ‘I’ve got no choice.’ He looked at his secretary for a long moment. ‘You know, Pen, it occurs to me that you haven’t had a vacation in quite a while. Why don’t you take a couple of weeks off?’
‘Oh no you don’t, Charlie Fort!’ cried Penny, jumping to her feet, hugging him and placing a kiss on his cheek. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easily…’
‘I’m not trying to get rid of you,’ Fort replied, taking out his handkerchief and fussily wiping her lipstick off his cheek.
‘Yes you are! You’re worried about this case, and you want me out of harm’s way. Tell me it isn’t so!’
Fort held up his hands. ‘Okay, okay! Look, things may get ugly, and I don’t want you here if they do.’
Penny shook her head. ‘You’re such a hon, Charlie, but I’m not going anywhere.’
They looked at each other for a long moment.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Penny repeated, her voice quiet and intense, denying even the possibility of further argument.
Fort lowered his eyes. ‘What would I do without you, Pen?’
‘Now, don’t go getting all maudlin on me, Charlie,’ she admonished.
Fort looked at the lipstick smeared on his handkerchief, folded it carefully and placed it back in his pocket. ‘Any messages?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. I took a couple of calls from people answering your ad for an assistant in the Times.’
‘And?’
‘One sounds promising. He’s not from New York. Sounds like he’s from New England, kind of cultured-sounding, actually. I set up an interview.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘He should be here in an hour.’
‘Good. What’s his name?’
‘Howard Lovecraft.’
*
Fort closed the door to the inner office, went to his desk and sat down heavily. He found himself thinking about Penny, and her late husband, Archer Malone, who had been his partner. When Archer had been killed during their investigation of a Cavorite smuggling ring in the Bronx two years ago, Fort had been there to comfort Penny. It had been a rough time for them both – as rough as times come – but Fort had done all he could to see her through it.
When Archer was alive, Penny had sometimes joked with Fort that he was the only other man she could ever have seen herself with; there had been a time, maybe a year or so after his death, when she and Fort might have got together. But something stopped them, something which neither of them could define: maybe it was the memory of Archer and the grief which still hovered in the back of Penny’s mind, or maybe it was the nature of Fort’s work and the dangers it involved, and the fear felt by both of them that one day she might find herself alone all over again.
Whatever the reason, the moments had come and gone until, perhaps taking the hint, they stopped coming altogether.
Fort looked at the hazy figure moving behind the frosted glass of his office door. He sighed. ‘The road not taken,’ he said very quietly to himself. ‘Had to be that way… had to.’
He swivelled back and forth in his chair for a minute or so, like a clerk who’d been given some onerous task and was reluctant to buckle down and get started. He checked his watch, even though he knew the time, and gave another sigh, heavy and miserable.
Suddenly recalling the events of earlier that morning, he took the library index card from his pocket and quickly read the notes he had written following the poltergeist visitation at the drugstore, then stood up and went over to the enormous bank of file cabinets which covered one entire wall of his office. He opened the drawer marked P and placed the index card inside, then opened a larger drawer and withdrew a thick folder, which he carried back to his desk.
With an hour to go until this Lovecraft character showed up for his interview, Fort decided that the best thing would be to re-familiarise himself with the details of the X-M expedition. The folder contained press cuttings, magazine articles, public information from the National Committee on Planetary Exploration and photographs of Rocketship X-M and its ill-fated crew, along with stunning images of the surface of Mars.
Fort took a leather pouch of Bull Durham tobacco and brown papers from his jacket pocket and rolled himself a cigarette. He lit it, inhaled, blew out a thin stream of smoke, and began to read.
The ship had blasted off from the rocket complex at Cabo Cañaveral on Florida’s Atlantic coast on April 16th, 1920. Powered by the latest atomic motors, the X-M had made the flight to Mars in a little under three months – itself a triumph of human ingenuity and endurance. The onboard electro-telescopes provided a huge amount of astronomical data, including the discovery of the strange dark bodies drifting through the plane of the ecliptic between the planets, for which science had yet to come up with an explanation.
It was on Mars itself, however, that Captain Thorne Smith and his crew made their greatest discovery. From high orbit, they detected peculiar regularities amongst the mountains, plains and impact craters which covered the planet’s surface. When the ship’s telescopes were directed at these features, they were revealed to be the time-worn remains of buildings. Fort remembered the excitement that had spre
ad across the world when the newsreels reported the X-M’s discovery of the relics of a long-vanished civilisation on the Red Planet; he remembered waiting, along with millions of others, for news of each new radio dispatch from the expedition. Even now, two years after the X-M’s triumphant return, he still felt the same excitement at the thought that there had once been another civilisation out there in the vast interplanetary night.
The ship had landed in the region called Cydonia by astronomers, after the ancient city-state on the island of Crete. She came to rest on a flat, level plain a few miles from one of the larger collections of squares, circles, triangles and pentagons which were scattered across the landscape. It quickly became apparent to the crew that these curious shapes were actually the roofs of large structures which had been buried millennia ago by the constantly-shifting sands of Mars. When the astrogator, Felix Bukowski, discovered a means of entry into one of the structures, Captain Smith immediately decided that the expedition program should be altered so that their planned month-long stay on Mars could be devoted entirely to the exploration of the ruins’ interiors.
That the city had been dead for millennia, perhaps millions of years, there could be no doubt. The alien necropolis was vast in extent, and the crew of the X-M had little doubt that their exploration was barely scratching the surface of what had once been a sophisticated planetary civilisation.
For the next four weeks, the crew explored the ruined city, naming it Cydonia after the region in which it lay, mapping it, taking the most interesting-looking artefacts and storing them carefully on the rocketship.
It was in a gigantic vault several hundred feet below the surface that the artefact which came to be known as the Martian Falcon was discovered, sitting serene and inscrutable upon a cylinder of black basalt. With no thought as to the consequences – for what consequences could there have been in that aeon-dead place? – Captain Smith ordered the artefact to be taken back to the X-M, for they saw nothing else like it during their necessarily brief stay, and Smith thought that the way it was displayed implied that it was unique – or at least of extreme importance to the beings who had fashioned it.
The world listened breathlessly to each excited dispatch from the Red Planet; and everyone agreed with Captain Smith when he said that what they had discovered on Mars would keep scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists busy for decades to come.
No one gave any thought to the fact that they were, in effect, vandalising the most important archaeological site ever discovered.
At least, no one human…
Of course, Rocketship X-M’s homecoming hadn’t turned out to be quite as triumphant as the world had thought. Not that there weren’t celebrations and ticker-tape parades through the streets of every major American city, radio and magazine interviews and congratulatory messages from pretty much every government on Earth. There was all of that, naturally, at first.
And then… then something strange happened. The public appearances by the X-M’s crew dropped off suddenly, and requests for interviews were declined – always with the same excuse: that Captain Smith and his crew were busy planning the next expedition to Mars, and could no longer spare the time to talk to journalists. The excuse was logical enough: Smith and the others were spacecraftsmen, and their job took priority over their inevitable celebrity; but the suddenness and completeness of this turn-around was perplexing to many. They were no longer seen in public at all, and even their families became disinclined to speak to anyone outside the rarefied community of the National Committee on Planetary Exploration.
That was when the rumours started, with some journalists working for the less reputable papers suggesting that something strange might have happened to the X-M’s crew while on Mars, while others noted that the Falcon was the only Martian artefact to be sealed within a lead-lined casket prior to its transfer to the Metropolitan Museum…
Fort leaned forward over his desk, examining a photograph of the Falcon – although he knew every line and feature of its beautifully-sculpted form. It was about fifteen inches tall, its wings folded behind it, its head facing forward, its eyes of obsidian so highly polished that they looked real… looked like they were actually observing you.
‘Where are you?’ Fort whispered. ‘Are you with Sanguine? Is it really that simple?’
He rolled another cigarette, his eyes never leaving the photograph as he did so. ‘Where are you?’ he repeated. ‘And what are you?’
CHAPTER 4
The Science of Anomalistics
There was a knock at the door.
‘Come in,’ Fort muttered distractedly.
Penny Malone opened the door and leaned in. ‘Mr Lovecraft is here, Mr Fort,’ she said.
Fort smiled at the formality. ‘Shoo him in, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Shoo him in.’
The man who walked into the inner office was tall, a shade over six feet, and thin in an awkward, gangly sort of way. His suit, while clean and pressed, had clearly seen better days, and his expression as he clutched his Homburg in both hands against his chest reminded Fort of a child who had grabbed a bag of candy and was refusing to let it go. His face was long, thin-lipped and a little gaunt, and there was a slight sallowness to the skin, which suggested that he hadn’t had a decent meal in quite a while. But the man’s eyes were quick and intelligent, and Fort detected a kind of decency in his bearing.
A good guy who’s fallen on hard times, he concluded. But where have I seen him before?
The answer came to him almost immediately. Of course – he was the fellow who had sat next to him in the drugstore that morning.
‘Come in, Mr Lovecraft,’ he said, standing.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Lovecraft replied, stepping forward as Penny closed the door behind him. He offered Fort his hand, which Fort shook while he noted the look of recognition on Lovecraft’s face. ‘And thank you for agreeing to this interview.’
‘Miss Malone arranged the interview, not me. But still… have a seat.’
Lovecraft sat in the high-backed wooden chair which faced the desk. Fort noted that he was still fiddling with his hat, and gestured for him to put it on the desk. Penny was right, he thought: his accent was that of a New Englander.
‘Sorry about your breakfast,’ he said.
Lovecraft gave a small, diffident smile. ‘It was hardly your fault. And in any event, I wasn’t particularly hungry.’
Fort doubted that. He rolled himself another cigarette, and offered the pouch to Lovecraft, who shook his head. ‘I neither smoke nor drink, Mr Fort,’ he said, a note of pride in his voice.
‘Good for you,’ Fort said.
‘I… er… that business with the zombies… I do hope it was nothing… unpleasant.’
‘Much as I appreciate the sentiment,’ Fort replied with a humourless grin, ‘did you ever hear of any business to do with zombies that wasn’t unpleasant?’
Lovecraft lowered his eyes. ‘Ah… I suppose not.’
‘So… what made you reply to my ad?’
Lovecraft looked up again, clearly relieved at Fort’s reluctance to discuss the morning’s events, and replied: ‘I believe that we find ourselves at a fortuitous confluence of circumstances, sir.’
Fort paused in the lighting of his cigarette, the match held halfway to his mouth. He raised his eyebrows. A fortuitous confluence of circumstances?
‘That’s quite a turn of phrase you’ve got there.’
Lovecraft gave a quick, embarrassed laugh. ‘I’m a writer… an amateur, to be sure, but a writer nonetheless.’
‘What kind of stuff do you write?’
‘I have written many travelogues and a great deal of journalism – I am an active member of the United Amateur Press Association,’ (Fort smiled at the renewed pride in Lovecraft’s voice) ‘but my greatest love is for the weird and the fantastic…’
‘You’re in the right town for that,�
�� said Fort.
Lovecraft’s mouth twitched, and a slight frown crept across his brow as he continued: ‘In any event, I consider the weird tale to be my primary mode of artistic expression.’
Fort nodded. ‘Published anything?’
‘I’ve had the good fortune to see my work in print on occasion.’
‘Really?’ said Fort, who had never heard of Howard Lovecraft. ‘Books? Magazines?’
‘Er… Weird Tales, mostly…’
‘Ah, the pulps, eh?’
Lovecraft lowered his eyes and gave a brief nod.
‘I’ve seen Weird Tales on the newsstands. Can’t say I’ve ever read it. Real life is weird enough.’
‘Indeed,’ Lovecraft replied quietly.
A pulp writer who can’t make enough to live on with a typewriter, thought Fort. So he’s come looking for a job with me. Yeah, real life is weird enough.
‘So… let’s talk about this “fortuitous confluence of circumstances” you mentioned. What do you think they are?’
Lovecraft replied: ‘Your advertisement stated the following: “Charles H. Fort, Private Investigator, requires research assistant to aid in the investigation of criminal and other cases of a supernatural or otherwise paranormal nature. Long and irregular hours guaranteed, but pay highly competitive. Only those with an in-depth knowledge of such matters need apply”.’
‘Good memory,’ said Fort.
‘Thank you.’
‘And you think you’re the man for the job.’
Lovecraft glanced at his hat, and Fort guessed that he’d have liked to fiddle with it some more. ‘A bit nervous, aren’t you, Mr Lovecraft?’
‘My apologies, sir, but I am not exactly in my element. I am descended from a New England family of means… although the world of business and finance has not been particularly kind to us. I have been able to survive in modest comfort on the residue of earlier successes, but…’
‘But your funds are running out,’ nodded Fort. ‘Yeah, I understand. So tell me, what qualifies you for this job?’