I am Providence

by Nick Mamatas

  Colleen handed over her badge. “Fine. I can’t believe you’re even continuing to run the con—and I do mean run the con—given that there was a murder here last night.”

  “Panos Panos Panossian will be missed,” Armbruster said. “By whom, I know not, but surely by someone. I’m teasing, Ms. Danzig. I believe that dark humor helps us get through trying times in our lives. I’ve had my disagreements with Panossian, but I wouldn’t wish his fate on my worst enemy, which he wasn’t, though he did seem to dedicate his life to climbing the hit parade charts of my antipathy.

  “Speaking of Mr. Panossian, the room in which you are currently booked is in his name, and clearly he isn’t here to present his credit card and check out on Sunday morning, so you’ll have to remove your belongings immediately so that the room can be cleaned and prepared for another guest. I’ll have you know that the Tentacular has the run of the house this weekend, so the Hotel Bierce is at one hundred percent capacity.”

  “So I’ll just check back in to the same room.”

  Armbruster said, “I have already booked the room for myself. Mrs. Armbruster has complained that when I am not in my own bed at home I snore too loudly. Also, the police are concerned about the possibility of lookie-loos and souvenir seekers. Apparently, you shared a theory that Panossian was mutilated after death in order to create a book?”

  “Something like that...but where am I going to sleep?”

  “Ms. Danzig, there are many hotels in Providence. It’s the capital and largest city of the state of Rhode Island.” With that, he lifted her badge, grasped it with both hands, and tore it neatly in half, plastic sheath and all.

  Upstairs, the room had definitely been tossed. The drawers were open, the towels spread out on the bathroom floor, the sheets undone from both beds, and Panossian’s stuff had been rifled through. There wasn’t much spilling out of the small travel bag—a cheap paperback of a book called Zod Wallop, two identical pairs of black jeans and some t-shirts, a toothbrush, and his badge. Colleen was startled for a moment before realizing that it was the badge for the prior year’s Summer Tentacular. That’s how frequently Panossian had occasion to use, or clean out, his overnight bag.

  Her own belongings had been similarly manhandled. Clothes were everywhere, and her undergarments separated from the rest of her clothes and placed neatly on the small desk in the corner of the room. Just one more humiliation, she supposed. The books she had purchased—thankfully none of them all that pricey—were left splayed open and face down, as if some cop had flipped through them one at a time, and then chucked them over his shoulder when he grew bored with the text. And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and...ah, fuck it.

  Colleen smiled despite herself as she packed up to go. She didn’t want to stay in the room anymore anyway, or the hotel...except that the cops didn’t want her to leave. She supposed she’d have to talk to one, and get permission, though if the police worked like any other bureaucracy, one person’s permission wouldn’t necessarily be communicated to the rest of the Providence PD.

  Hell, a cop might say, “Sure, go ahead, check into the Ramada,” just to make it that much easier to arrest her. A thorny problem, one best solved at the bar, Colleen decided.

  The Warwick was still packed, and Colleen instantly came up with a plan. Find R.G. and beg to sleep on her floor. And there she was, with Barry and Raul. For a moment, Colleen stood in the middle of the room, chewing her lower lip, contemplating where the trio might stand. They liked Panossian, or at least tolerated him, and didn’t seem to be very fond of Chloe, but R.G. at least was afraid of the police. Equivocations were useless, Colleen decided, and she strode forward and sat down in the empty chair of the four-top.

  “R.G., hi. I need to stay with you. My room has been cordoned off by the police, and we’re not allowed to leave the hotel.” Barry spoke first. “That seat’s taken.”

  R.G. said, “I already have someone staying in my room, and it’s a single as it is.”

  “I’ll take the floor,” Colleen said.

  “The floor is what’s occupied, Colleen.”

  Raul said, “What did the cops do? I saw you get whisked away with Chloe.”

  “We were questioned; they showed us Panossian’s body again,” Colleen said quickly. Then to R.G., “Who is rooming with you? Uh, just curious.”

  R.G. made a face. “Chloe. Bhanushali asked me to watch her while you guys were, uhm, away. She’s a pretty sensitive type. She was rooming with Phantasia, of course, but they had some kind of argument.”

  “He probably stretched out her fishnets or something,” Barry said. R.G. rolled her eyes.

  “Do you think you’ll be safe, staying with Chloe?” Colleen asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” R.G. said.

  Colleen hesitated for a moment. She had started the altercation, but was honestly taken aback at how quick Chloe was to fight back, to escalate. There was something about the look on Chloe’s face when she said fuck you up and held up that clawlike hand that frightened Colleen more now than when she had actually been under Chloe in the restroom.

  “You know, uh, Ms. Phantasia banging on the door or something. He’s a pretty big guy,” she said.

  “He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” R.G. said.

  Raul spoke up. “You can stay with us, Colleen. Right, Barry?”

  Barry shrugged expansively. He had very broad shoulders. “Yeah, I think we can squeeze her in.”

  “Great. I’m fine with the floor,” Colleen said.

  “There’s even a pretty nice chair with an ottoman in our room. It’s a double, and it can almost be a bed. You’ll be able to stretch out a bit more comfortably than on the floor.”

  “Yeah, the floor is where Barry keeps his socks. He changes his socks three times a day.”

  “I have sweaty feet!” Barry said. Everyone laughed.

  For a moment, Colleen forgot about Panossian, forgot about the raw meat under his face, forgot about the altercations in the restroom and the elevator, forgot about everything. It was a dumb little joke, but it was enough. There’s a moment at every convention just like this one, for every member. Lovecraft, Star Trek, or Comic-Con, tradeshow or swap meet, it happens. For a candy-coated split second it happened to Colleen: why not just stay forever? Go from con to con, Thursday through Sunday, every week of the year, picking her way across the country and living out of a bag. Write on her laptop in the late evenings, and collect the paltry sums short stories and small press novels pay out via her PayPal account. She was a professional writer now, in some small way, and that meant that she could attend the conventions for free, and that she could eat most of her meals in the panelist green room. A billion people on Earth survive on much worse diets than baby carrots and Skittles and soda pop and oh-thank-God-they’re-vegan Oreos, and when a real meal was necessary, there was always a fan or two with no idea how to spend the money they made as sysadmins for third-tier public universities except on dinners with the real-life genuine writers they admired. Monday through Wednesday would be travel days—Amtrak, Greyhound, Craigslist carpools. Hotels had fitness centers, laundry facilities, Internet, maids, free coffee. She could get some airline credit cards, join a rewards club, rack up hundreds of thousands of points. That was sure to be more remunerative than the Roth IRA she couldn’t afford to open anyway. There would be gags and jokes and good times and a fair amount of being fawned over; there would be rivals to engage, controversies to weigh in on, selfies to snap. All Colleen needed to do to make it all happen was give up. No partner, just flings. No kids, just publications. No breakthrough into the real world of literature–bookstores and college speaking gigs and reviews in the Sunday papers. Just con after con, a long long con, until she either choked on a pretze
l at some party or drowned in a hot tub or…until someone killed her and took her face.

  She remembered that she couldn’t leave the hotel, not even for another hotel over the border in Massachusetts, where the fans were dressed like buff, sexy Klingons instead of grotesque Hefty bag Shoggoths.

  “Oh God, I need some air,” she said.

  “—what, and quit show business?” Raul finished his joke, and Barry and R.G. laughed. Colleen faked a titter and excused herself. On the way out of the bar, she grabbed an unguarded drink and gulped it down. The chances of it being a bullshot were pretty slim now that Panossian was dead. Instead of heading through the lobby to the front entrance, Colleen snaked past the elevator banks, down the hall, and took the rear entrance to the parking lot, where she thought she was more likely to be alone.

  The summer night was sultry. Wasn’t that a line from a movie about a writer and his horrible mother? Something like it anyway. Colleen pulled out her phone to check up on social media and the #sumtent hashtag on Twitter. She was relieved to see that she wasn’t the news—nobody had @ed her, or even alluded to a “Danz” or CD. Of course, they could be talking about her off-tag, or on locked Facebook posts. She tried to find Chloe’s FB page, but realized that she didn’t know Chloe’s surname, or even if Chloe was her real first name. How did Bhanushali even know that she and Chloe would be released, and that Chloe would need a room? Someone at the police station must have called her, Colleen decided, though that answer just begged more questions.

  Online, Panossian was the news. There were some RIPs, and a line from his book had been repurposed as an epitaph of sorts: If I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all...don’t be fooled. There’s no aeon strange enough for me. A few photos dug up from Tentaculars past where he stood awkwardly with Cob and Ginger J, hoisting a glass. One where he was frowning in front of a lectern, reading from a large sheet of paper. And a pic of Norman, who was a bit slimmer and linebacker buff back then, military-pressing a smiling, stick-thin Panossian overhead.

  There was no discussion of the actual murder that Colleen could find, but given the users involved it was unlikely to be a matter of discretion or good taste. Were people worried about attracting the attention of the police, or the killer himself? Google News had a few wire reports about Panossian, all with the same ridiculous lede: Homicide investigators have now concluded that a man found dead in Providence’s Hotel Bierce during a horror convention on Monday was murdered.

  “Good job, Holmes,” Colleen muttered to herself.

  Whatever Colleen had drunk was snaking its way back up her esophagus. She hadn’t eaten all day, and had no appetite for it, but was feeling a little light-headed. She had some almonds in her purse and snagged a handful to munch on. She looked absently into the parking lot as she swallowed. The Tentacular really did have the run of the house, as Armbruster had put it. Almost every car in the lot had some kind of window decal or bumper sticker referencing Lovecraft, Cthulhu, or at lest the Goth scene. MY OTHER CAR is A MI-GO BRAIN CANISTER and CTHULHU ’08: WHY VOTE FOR THE LESSER EVIL? were especially popular. Odd, she thought, that there were no 2012 Presidential bumper stickers on the cars in the lot, though plenty of stickers stamped 2016 were in the dealers’ room. Then she remembered something she had read in a ’zine once—Panossian had claimed that the bumper sticker was racist as it somehow implicated President Obama as a worse choice than the world-consuming Cthulhu. It had led to a major debate about satire and racism and politics and Panossian’s personality, and the community had drawn a number of collective conclusions: satire good, racism bad, politics bad, Panossian’s personality obnoxious. For his part, Panossian had admitted to just “trolling” the community, though he did hasten to add that the bumper sticker, which he had first seen as a teen in 1988, really wasn’t getting any funnier. There was universal disagreement over that.

  But none of the cars featured the 2012 bumper sticker. Panossian had had more influence than anyone would admit.

  The Hotel Bierce had two wings and two rear exits that led to the parking lot. The door to the other exit opened and out came Bhanushali and Cob, Ginger J and Charles Cudmore, his big pointy head cutting through the sea of cars like a shark’s fin. Had they received permission to leave the hotel? The group stopped at the curb and Bhanushali looked at her watch. Then the hotel fire alarm started ringing, nearly sending Colleen jumping out of her skin. Bhanushali and her crew ran to a large SUV, one without any Lovecraftian accoutrements, and then Colleen was knocked aside by the exit door behind her swinging open. Evacuees spilled out in the parking lot, nudging Colleen along. She lost sight of the SUV until it had left the parking lot, but held up her phone and started snapping pictures randomly, trying to catch an image as the big car rolled past her.

  She bulled her way out to a traffic island under a lamppost. Nobody wanted to talk to her anyway. One of the photos she had randomly snapped had captured the SUV in pretty decent detail. Zooming in didn’t reveal the exact plate numbers, but it was a boatlike Tahoe with a five-digit Rhode Island plate.

  It was obvious that Bhanushali had arranged for a fire alarm to slip out of the hotel in the confusion. Cob was a local. Were they going for the book, or traveling with it now? Colleen needed to follow them, and didn’t have the time to run around to the front entrance and try to hail a cab, and that was assuming that the cabbie wasn’t true to his word and had called for an embargo against the hotel.

  She saw Hiram Chandler, his knapsack heavy on his shoulders, walking toward a beat-up Honda with a Lovecraftian Jesus fish—the famous unicursal flank and tail, but with feet and a sort of large fin, and tentacles on one end and the word CTHULHU within the body of the fish—and took off after him.

  “Hiram, hi!” Colleen said, reaching for her wallet. “I’d like to buy a copy of your book.”

  “My book? You mean…”

  “Death of the Mad Sun?”

  He smiled. “Madness of the Death Sun. Close enough.” He swung his knapsack off his shoulder and got to digging.

  “I’m also interested in another book. One bound with human skin. I have money,” Colleen said.

  “You don’t have that much money, and I don’t have any such book,” Hiram said. He proffered a spiral-bound copy of his book, which Colleen snatched up. She shoved a handful of bills into his hand.

  “I think I know where we can find one, but we have to get into your car and drive right now!” Colleen said. Hiram just stood there and blinked at her, his face ophidian.

  “Bhanushali and Cob! They just left. We can still catch them,” she said. He didn’t move. “They left you out!” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a fob, and unlocked the doors with a tweet and flash of lights.

  “Get in!”

  Traffic was light and the Tahoe the largest thing on the road. The Honda was only four or five car lengths behind it.

  “You think they have a copy of Arkham?” Hiram asked.

  “Yes. Or they’re going to get one, right now.” Colleen wasn’t sure how much she should share. Hiram seemed harmless, but only in the way a heavily medicated inpatient at a lunatic asylum seemed harmless.

  “But…why wouldn’t they invite me along? I’ve been friends with Bhanushali for years, and I’ve known David Cob for nearly as long. She’s a great scholar, he’s an excellent writer. They know how interested I am in unique books as well.” At the stoplight, he turned to Colleen, his lips pursed. “Is this a prank of some sort?” he asked.

  Colleen smiled what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “No, no prank. Honestly, I think they even set off the fire alarm just to find a way to leave the hotel under the nose of the cops.”

  “Oh, that’s right. We weren’t to leave the hotel grounds without permission. Perhaps we should turn back, or call the police and simply give them the license plate of Bhanushali’s car. That would serve her right.”

  “Hey now, we don’t want anyone to get arrested,” Colleen said. “Plus we’d be impl
icated too, I bet. Don’t traffic lights around here have cameras?”

  “I suppose they must,” Hiram said. “Why do you think they have a copy of Arkham?”

  Colleen hadn’t though that far ahead. She only knew not to mention Panossian. “You know this is my first Summer Tentacular, right?”

  “Sure.” Hiram said.

  “And you know how sometimes people who are nervous or upset are more likely to make some admission to or confide in strangers? I’m basically a stranger to everyone. People have been acting very strangely toward me all weekend.”

  “Ah, so someone spilled the beans!”

  “Yes, exactly. I just had to find a way to take a look.”

  Hiram smiled as he maneuvered his car through traffic, bringing it to only three car-lengths from the SUV. “You understand.”

  “How else would I ever see a book bound in human skin, right?”

  Hiram shook his head curtly. “No, that’s easy enough. As I mentioned today at our panel, there are several examples in university libraries and in other collections of fine books open to the public. You can just go in and ask to see them at any time. But…”

  “But…?” Colleen said.

  “But…” Hiram turned on his indicator and prepared to make a right turn off the highway and into a residential district, “people think that you’re some weirdo for wanting to see these books, to hold them in your hands. Even librarians, even bookmen.”

  “Don’t get too close,” Colleen said. “They might see us. They probably know your car.”

  “We’ll have to get close eventually, Colleen. We’ll need to introduce ourselves, think up some clever way to invite ourselves in.”

  “That’s…true. Got any bright ideas?” Colleen said.

  “If I’m honest, I’m nonplussed. It’s like crashing a party, isn’t it, except we’re known to the hosts who clearly have decided to go off on their own, even risking getting in trouble with the cops…are you sure this is about Arkham?”