by Nick Mamatas
Cob walked over, holding a towel in his hands, with Lucius right behind him, pushing him forward. Colleen glanced over their shoulders—Ginger J was cuffed and Bhanushali was standing in the field, under the light of the rising moon, bereft.
“Check it, they found the cat. Show ‘em,” Lucius said.
Cob raised his hands, flipped open the towel, and revealed a tiny brown skull in three pieces.
Bonner glanced at it. “That’s a fucking squirrel.”
11. The Tomb
They were escorted in one at a time. Ginger J first, since he was having some kind of low-key fit. Maybe they thought he’d crack when he saw me. Why weren’t my parents up to Providence to claim my body yet, to bury me? Why didn’t they come to see me instead of this motley crew of wannabes and weirdos?
“Oh my, oh my,” Ginger J said when they opened my drawer and pulled me out. “This is, this…really is happening, isn’t it, Officer Bonner?”
“Friend of yours?” Bonner asked him, and at that moment the door to the morgue opened again and Thomas said a tentative, “Hello?”
“Hi!” Ginger J said.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” Thomas asked.
“You know one another?” Bonner snapped. “Get out!” There were a few stammered excuses and the door slammed again.
“How do you know our overnight man?” Bonner asked.
“Art camp,” Ginger J said. “Up in New Hampshire. We both liked drawing Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian entities. It was years ago though; I don’t remember his name, only his fa—oh God, face!” He started giggling again.
I can’t say Bonner got much out of Ginger J. After visiting Lovecraft’s grave together—“You Lovecraftians really have a thing for graves, eh?” Bonner interjected—he and I separated and he didn’t see me for the rest of the evening. He spent some time in the bar, and Cob and Hiram could vouch for him, as could Ronald Ranger and even Charles Cudmore, and then he decided to go to bed. His room was on the seventh floor, in the north wing. The room I shared with Colleen was on the third floor, in the south wing, about as far apart as two rooms in the Bierce could be.
Did anyone want to kill me? Of course not; nobody at the Summer Tentacular was capable of murder. Evidently not. But who could do such a thing? That’s what I’m asking you. I can’t imagine anyone I know doing this. What about someone you don’t know? Huh?
It went on like that for a while. Then Bonner asked, “This guy, Panossian, what was he like?”
“He was a very good writer. Kind of an asshole, though.”
“Oh yeah? How was he an asshole?”
Ginger J thought for a moment, and said, “He didn’t really play the social game. Lovecraft fandom is full of people whose social skills are lacking, but Panossian had social skills. He just… weaponized them.” He laughed. “I guess you could say he was a cyberbully, but he’d do it in person too. In person, he wasn’t so bad, because he smiled and nodded a lot, and I don’t think people started arguments so much. But oh boy, on the Internet…he just wouldn’t shut up.”
“Did he ever talk to you about the Internet? Did he get any threatening letters?”
“Oh sure, constantly. But who doesn’t, you know?”
“Do you ever get threatening letters—I mean emails, tweets?” Bonner asked.
Ginger J snickered again. “No no, who would threaten me?”
“You said everyone gets threatened.”
“Yeah,” Ginger J said, “but just little things. ‘Say that to my face’—Panossian got a constant stream of the stuff. Really, it could have been anybody, I guess. Hell, he could have been doing it to himself to get some attention. He always used to make fun of his stalkers because they typed so poorly and made so little sense. I don’t think anyone took it seriously, least of all him.”
Thomas snorted. “Well, he should have.”
“What do you mean?” Ginger J asked.
I imagined that Thomas nodded or gestured toward me. Nobody said anything at all until Bonner spoke to Ginger J: “I’ll walk you upstairs.”
Cob didn’t say anything as he stood over me. No reaction I could hear to the state of my corpse. I couldn’t even hear his breathing, but somehow I felt his shadow on me. Were the smaller bits of my ears decomposing?
Bonner asked him, “So, what was your relationship to the deceased?”
“We were…contemporaries,” Cob said. “In the literary sense. Personally, I’d say we were casually acquainted.”
“Are you online?”
“Everyone’s online now, Officer.”
“Active on social media?” Bonner asked. “Or should I say anti-social media?”
Cob almost never varied his tone, but he sounded confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It just seems like you people enjoy wordplay, so I thought I’d try some. Do you have a Twitter account? Are you a blogger?”
Thomas laughed. “Nobody blogs anymore!”
“I have a blog,” Cob said, so not-pointedly that it felt pointed to me. “I post a new update once every eighteen months or so, when a new book or story comes out. I have better things to do than post photos of my lunch or weigh in on every controversy sparked by some reactionary denouncing women or people of color in fiction,” Cob said, his normal cadence back.
“Better things like what?”
“I write books. It’s time consuming. I write three novels a year. If I can publish one of them every three years I consider myself lucky. I spend a fair amount of time beating my head against walls both figurative and literal. I am also a student of Yin style bagua.”
“Sounds dangerous,” Bonner said.
“It isn’t.”
“You and Panossian ever talk about anything…controversial?”
Cob didn’t say anything for a long moment. “He told me something very interesting once. I used to struggle with alcohol, and Panossian said something to me that really…influenced my behavior,” he said finally, carefully.
“Yeah, what was that?”
“He said that if I were to decide to enter Alcoholics Anonymous or any twelve-step program, that I should keep in mind that the embrace of the ritual is more important than the fact of the ritual,” Cob said. “Officer, he told me that if I started to do the twelve steps, that I could, and should, do them all in five minutes. From admitting my powerlessness to spreading the word in the wake of my spiritual awakening.”
Bonner made a noise that was somewhere between an acknowledgment and a snort. “So, uh, how did you make amends in five minutes?”
“I dipped into my address book and mailed everyone I’d harmed a limited edition book from my library. I am not a very social creature; by extension I’ve never had the opportunity to harm very many people.”
“Opportunity,” Bonner said, rolling the word over in his mouth. “Interesting choice of phrase.”
“What I find interesting is that there seems to be no lead detective on this homicide case,” Cob said. “Every time I turn around, it’s a different uniformed officer asking questions, making comments, threatening people with arrest and even cuffing them but not actually arresting them.”
“Be sure to bring it up with the ACLU when you have the chance, Mister Cob. Write to the mayor too, if you like. You think I don’t know from Lovecraft? I’m born and raised here in Providence, son. I’ve read the stories, I’ve seen the fans down at Swan Point at all hours; the little girls in all black and the little boys in velvet playing Halloween in August. Truth is, we’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for years. We figured that one of you nuts would go crazy and commit a brutal fucking murder eventually. It’s a goddamned demographic inevitability, if you ask me, Mister Cob.”
“So, Officer, what you think when you look down at this dead man is, Finally,” Cob said. “And you are not alone. Is that right?”
I heard the squeak of a shoe. Cob isn’t a large man, really. And he trips over roots that burst free from the pavement and gets tipsy and
laughs like a donkey at dumb jokes like anyone else, but when he turns on the Vincent Price/Boris Karloff routine, the dial goes up to eleven. I’m sure it was Bonner’s shoes that made a little noise as he took a step back, regardless of his baton and his sidearm.
“I agree with you,” Cob said. “This was expected. Inevitable, even. Inevitability is the essence of tragedy. It’s the difference between the horrifying end and a mere twist of the tale. When you see it coming, Officer Bonner, that’s when it’s really scary.”
“Some might call that an admission,” Bonner said.
“It’s an observation. It’s the core of my PhD thesis, which I completed two years ago. I’ll send you the file if you’re interested.”
“Let’s say I’m not.”
“Are we done here?”
“You are,” Bonner said. “For now.”
Bhanushali, when she was brought in, just cried and stammered, swallowing whole sentences that way. “It-it-it is j-j-just so un-un-reasonable,” was about as coherent as it got.
Bonner said, “Was he a friend of yours?”
“A colleague.” The stammer vanished. “I even published an excerpt of his novel in a collection of Lovecraftian pastiches.”
“You seem really torn up over it, but went to go dig up a racist cat? Pretty brief mourning period there, wouldn’t you say?”
“We’d been planning our…adventure for months. Most of us live nowhere near Rhode Island, or in proximity to one another. We’re a community of correspondence. Panossian was with all of us last night, to visit Lovecraft’s grave. He was a bit of a prankster. I am sure he would have wanted us to go forward with our attempt to determine whether I’d truly located the final resting place of Lovecraft’s cat.”
“I’m going to do something extremely irregular,” Bonner said. The morgue was a long rectangular room, with the refrigerated cold chambers along one long wall. Bonner walked over to the other near wall and then came back to stand over me. “We’ve been recording all these encounters. I’m going to play back what you just said so you can see yourself, and hear yourself. Take a look, ma’am.”
I am sure he would have wanted us to go forward with our attempt to determine whether I’d truly located the final resting place of Lovecraft’s cat sounded tinny and ridiculous when played back, but Bonner had overestimated Bhanushali.
“I stand by my claim, and every claim I make,” Bhanushali said. “Panossian embraced what Poe called the imp of the perverse. That was his charm, and frankly, it was probably his downfall on some level. Certainly this wasn’t the work of an itinerant serial killer, or a random attack. My understanding is that men aren’t often attacked arbitrarily like this. You might think my work is ridiculous, but museums the world over are filled with artifacts and ecofacts originally dug out of the ground by treasure-seekers, antiquarians, and yes, even grave robbers. Archaeology only became respectable in the twentieth century, and nobody cleared out the exhibit halls and put the purloined materials back into the ground for the sake of fair play once it did. If we were in Key West and I had excavated the tomb of one of Hemingway’s polydactyl cats, we would not be having this conversation now.”
“No ma’am, no we would not be,” Bonner said. “I am glad I remembered to press record again after playing back your prior statement.”
“Forgive me, Officer Bonner. It’s been a pair of long and traumatic days. If there is anything at all you think I know, or should know, about Panossian’s murder, please feel free to ask me. I want to cooperate and place myself above suspicion.”
“All right. Who did it?”
“What?”
“Who do you think killed Panossian?” Bonner said. “You’re right; this isn’t a serial killer’s work. We’ve never seen anything like it, nor heard of anything like it, and we’ve talked to the police in Massachusetts where Panossian is from, and we have the FBI blueskying ideas and whipping up profiles and emailing us every hour on the hour. We’re stumped, but we’ve narrowed it down—the killer has to be a member of your convention. So, who at your convention is capable of doing something like this?”
Bhanushali paused, which was extremely unusual for her. She was the type to launch into an answer even as she formulated one, happy to fill the discursive spaces with hemming and digressions till she came up with something that sounded clever, even if it wasn’t even close to true. Finally, she said, “Charles Cudmore.”
“Charles Cudmore. And who is that?”
“You saw his photo—he’s…”
“Asparagus Head?”
“Yes, him. Something about his manner and his fiction have always set me on edge. I’ve never published him. As far as I know, he has never been published, though not for lack of effort. Some writers become more famous in small circles for what they cannot publish than what they can. Most importantly, he revealed to me, just as we thought we had located the grave of…the cat, that he planned to use his skills in taxidermy and book-binding—which are well-known from his social media footprint—to turn the poor cat into a book somehow. That’s when I dismissed him. And to be honest, I suspect that he has some sort of brain damage based on his cranial shape.”
“Zippy the Pinhead was a peaceful man,” Bonner said. “Phrenology is an outmoded nineteenth century discipline, sort of like grave-robbing antiquarianism, you know. But Cudmore, if you say he’s a killer, I’ll make sure Amato questions him again. And we’ll take you in too, since you may have just named the name of the man who abandoned you at the poor lost cat’s gravesite as an act of petty revenge.”
Bhanushali yelped and fussed, and I heard the click of handcuffs. She bargained and complained all the way out the door, and probably upstairs as well. If Bonner did the Miranda rights thing from television, he waited until after he got Bhanushali out into the hallway.
When nothing is happening, I have next to no idea how much time passes.
Next to no idea, because there is a slight and dreadful inkling. Chemical reactions are taking place. The rigor mortis has finally set in, despite refrigeration, and my limbs are growing stiffer. This I can still sense, even as the power of my ears and nose wane. Why can’t I see? Because I can’t blink. What’s left of my brain can’t handle the constant input. All I see is the man looming over me.
And Thomas, just a broad colorful blob, like a floater in an eye. And he said to me, peering down at me, “You look better now than you did in your mug shot.”
I almost blinked out of existence right there. Was Thomas my third stalker? He was clearly a Lovecraftian of some sort. Did he somehow get my legal information from some underground cop network? If that’s all he knew, why taunt a fucking corpse? He started moving a few things around—equipment, or his own junk, maybe—and went back to muttering to himself. “Thomas, I cannot believe this is all happening...” he said. A door slammed shut, and I was alone.
For a long time, it felt like, nothing happened. Eventually, Colleen was brought down, yet again, to view my body. There was an edge of desperation in her voice this time. “Look, I don’t even care this much, really. Dragging me down here over and over again won’t change my story, won’t help your case, won’t reveal anything more about Panossian’s killer. Why do you keep doing this to me?”
“Because you keep showing up in the wrong places,” a cop said. Bonner must have been upstairs, booking Bhanushali. This one was the guy with the Italian-American accent that had previously accompanied Colleen. “You were the last person to see him alive.”
“Whoever killed him was the last person to see him alive,” Colleen said. I would have cringed if I could.
“Exactly.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Who was it then, Nancy Drew? You’re water cooler material around here. We call you Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If I put you in custody for the rest of the weekend now, you’d be signing autographs for the boys and eating vegan meals in a holding cell.”
“How did you know I was a vegan?”
“Even dumb c
ops know how to Google. You’re all a bunch of famous weirdoes. What’s the old saying: In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people?” the cop said. Then he laughed.
“Warhol said minutes. It was Momus who made it people,” Colleen said.
“Who’s Momus?”
“I guess you’re his sixteenth person,” Colleen said.
“I bet your late friend here will be famous to more than fifteen people once the newspapers draft a story. You too. Do you want to be the Mystery Woman at the Center of the Intrigue, or the Girl Who Helped Solve the Case?”
“Funny,” Colleen said, “how can I help when I’m demoted to girl?”
“Women are dangerous,” the cop said.
“That’s sexist.”
Maybe the cop just shrugged or something. Maybe he didn’t respond non-verbally at all. “Think hard, Colleen. Is there anything at all—anything that isn’t ‘Find the book’ that can help us? Maybe even something that can help us find the book?”
Colleen exhaled deeply. Was she breathing through her mouth now? A lot of air moved over me. Then she said it.
“Holy shit, I know exactly who did it,” she said. “It’s been a crazy weekend, and sometimes I felt like I was going crazy, but I saw it. I saw a tall man, who looked like H. P. Lovecraft. But that wasn’t just a guy in Lovecraft cosplay. It was Ms. Phantasia. He’s bald; he has a tattoo of Lovecraft’s head on the back of his own head. I didn’t see Lovecraft coming at me; I saw Phantasia walking away from me. He’s local too—search his house, I bet you’ll find the book!”
“Do you know Ms. Phantasia’s real name?”
“Google it,” Colleen said.
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll get you back to your hotel now. No side trips, no night-jaunts. Heh, you like that? Wasn’t that what Lovecraft was afraid of—night-jaunts?”
“Night gaunts,” Colleen said. And she left without saying goodbye to me.
It couldn’t have been long after that, as I am still sufficiently cognizant to have experienced it, that another corpse was brought in. There was some confusion regarding the cause of death thanks to a birth defect.