I am Providence

by Nick Mamatas

  Colleen looked out the window, but didn’t see a police car in those moments when the service road was visible. Did DiRonalde really expect her to jump out of a moving train? The commuter rail had stops in South Attleboro, Attleboro, and so on. It would have been easy to leave the train, hop into a waiting cab, and go right back to Providence. A bit more challenging with Amtrak, which was a straight shot into Boston. Once the train had crossed into Massachusetts, Colleen pulled out her phone for some mindlessness. She couldn’t stomach Twitter or Facebook. Even though the inevitable mass defriending was the least of her concerns, it struck her deep. Whatever daydreams of a career as a writer in the Lovecraftian mode Colleen had once entertained, they were dead. When her mind drifted toward the stories in her hard drive that needed revision, she had to remind herself that she would not be published again. Not in this genre, not under this name.

  Once Threes stopped being diverting—games full of opportunities to make simple decisions are the best for annihilating conscious thought—Colleen on a whim decided to Google “David Capobianco” just as had been suggested. Wasn’t that uncommon a name, it turned out. There was a venture capitalist, a hot prospect high school baseball player, and a fairly prominent physician. No sign of Cob in the first several thumbthroughs of results.

  Colleen added “Lovecraft” to a search. All of four hits, to old and defunct angelfire.com pages. The couple of lines preserved by Google were tantalizing, but Google’s cache for the pages was of little help. Doing deep searches was frustrating on a smartphone, especially with the 4G signal occasionally dropping to 3G as the train trundled on toward Boston. Oh, for a world blanketed in wireless, so she could just pull out her laptop, open a dozen browser tabs, and see what she could see.

  It was easier to plan than to do. Go deep—check USENET for ancient material. Lovecraftians never give up any media. The Tentacular even had a panel on the maintenance and sale of ditto, mimeograph, and hectograph machines. It was packed every year. Colleen wished she had known about Cob’s surname earlier; the dealers’ room featured a number of tables that specialized in fanzines of the appropriate vintage. What had Cob been up to when he first entered the fandom?

  It wasn’t even about the murders, not at first. Colleen was just a bundle of unresolved tension and loose energy. Fiddling with her phone wasn’t soothing, but it was something new to focus on. She’d been working on “Capobianco” for almost twenty minutes before she realized that she had been fed the information.

  The cop hadn’t just been shooting the shit; she was trying to tell Colleen something. That had to be it. The only question was which side DiRonalde was on. Smart money was that she was on the side of the police, but even that could mean one of two things. Like Amato, was DiRonalde hoping to use Colleen somehow? But if so, why escort her out of state?

  Too many questions, not enough bars on her phone. It was like opening a book in a dream and seeing the letters in a language she couldn’t read fall off the page and scatter all over the floor.

  Putting the phone away was no better. Panossian’s faceless grimace, all teeth and bulging eyes. Barry’s weight, crushing her tits and ribs against the very curve of the Earth. Phantasia bragging, then bursting into tears, his handcuff rattling against the bench as he cried. Crazy Hiram waddling like a duck. It was an endless montage of horrors and absurdities.

  The cops didn’t need to chase her out of town. One possibility Colleen was dreading was Panossian’s parents, who would have to show up eventually to collect the body. She’d be the only one to greet them had she stayed in Providence, the only one to pretend to have been a close friend, so that his parents could in turn pretend that Panossian ever had close friends. A tearful hug from a fat mother who probably smelled of kitchen spices and chicken bullion, and an awkward exchange with a lanky father wearing a suit for the first time since his son’s baptism. Colleen shuddered at the thought.

  But still, she wanted to know. The cops couldn’t chase her out of town. Providence was still with her, a ghost on her heels hungry for one more victim. There was nothing to do but wait to get to civilization, so she put an elbow up against the window, tucked her head in her arms, and tried to sleep.

  They weren’t dreams per se, but something like them. Like watching TV and reading a newspaper at the same time. The train, the trees rushing past, the squeak of the wheels, they were always there. And so too was the darkened movie theater where Colleen sat, in the middle of the fifth row, virtually alone. The curtain parted and the air over her head lit up.

  There was nothing to the film. Despite the red velveteen seats and the smell of burnt chemical “butter,” nothing on the screen was even close to what one would expect from a commercially driven cinematic experience. There was a speaker under Colleen’s seat—the rumble of the train—and on the screen dark shapes floated and pulsed against a darker background, like floaters in a great eye squeezed shut.

  The train was warm, but the theater of the dream was cold. Not air-conditioned, cold like a meat locker, and growing colder as the film progressed. Something bloomed from the center of the screen, not quite so dark as its surroundings, like veins of slate erupting from obsidian. It felt organic, like a growing thing, or the fossilized remains of something that had once grown, and was being revealed again.

  Wolf’s Blood, she heard, the final word comically extended. Panossian was sitting next to her in the theater. His face was flickering in the light despite the screen mostly showing black on black. He snickered at his own impression of Norman.

  Was it Norman after all? Colleen asked in her dream. Panossian tilted his head and smiled a toothy, crooked smile, and leaned forward to whisper in her ear.

  The voice wasn’t his. It was something else, something ancient, a stone tongue grinding against teeth.

  It doesn’t matter who did it. It is done.

  Colleen jerked awake, like an electric charge had hit her spine. The film still played in her eyes for a moment, till she blinked it away. It was her stop. Outside, summer was blasting Massachusetts, and she walked outside and just let the sun boil away the moisture in her limbs.

  South Station had free Wi-Fi thanks to some sort of sponsorship deal with Google. It wasn’t fast, but it would do. Colleen set up her laptop, ordered a jalapeño pretzel—without butter, they’re vegan—from the Auntie Anne’s kiosk, and got to work.

  The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine had some leads, but not very many. Cob was thinner in his youth, with long hair dripping over his face. He wrote “dark poetry” which was not very good, but there were occasional flashes of interest, and he had published a short story in Ranger’s ’zine, and an essay on Lovecraft and Italian-Americans in the Providence Phoenix. The archived webpage was old enough that the article wasn’t even provided via link—Cob had taken a digital photo of the page and presented it as a full-size long-to-load gif. Colleen couldn’t imagine waiting for the image to show up in the dial-up days of the late 1990s.

  There was also an abandoned LiveJournal, which still hosted entries about gossip and calls for submissions and many references to even older USENET groups, and the “flame wars” that had gone on there. How funny—nobody calls Internet conflict flame wars anymore, Colleen thought. Every disagreement is presumed to be caused by disingenuous trolls, not by passionate people arguing their points beyond all rationality.

  Like killing one another.

  Google’s omnipresence came in handy again. USENET, archived in Google Groups, and fairly easily searchable. The trick was to not get sucked into the conversational threads, the twenty-five-year-old controversies that erupted once, and still informed all Lovecraftian attitudes today. Earthquakes and fault-lines. Luckily for Colleen, everything but the personalities and the controversies was dead. She dove into the deep archives of alt.cthulhu.fan and alt.lovecraft.professional and rec.arts.lovecraftian, glad to be unable to express her views because the conversations she was reading were essentially in a dead language, recorded on a dead medium.


  Then she found a binaries group. Most of the subject headers promised pictures, but the posts were just streams of seemingly random characters. There also seemed to be a ton of automated posts about spam and removal of posts. A glance at Wikipedia explained it all—the code was a way of sending graphics and sound files over the Internet in the bad old days before the World Wide Web. It used to be expensive to do things. USENET was the cyber equivalent of the mimeograph machine, but even the Lovecraftians abandoned it in the end. Presumably, had Lovecraft lived to be one hundred and managed to type a few messages onto his own newsgroups, his fans never would have forsaken the medium.

  It took over an hour, but she managed to find some binaries posts that were actually complete, and that hinted at photos of Summer Tentaculars from days gone by. Colleen wasn’t sure what she’d find, but it was almost a pure joy of plumbing an archive at this point. She shivered, opened another browser window, and skimmed Lovecraft’s classic of ancient libraries, “The Shadow Out of Time.” The old Internet was like the archives of the Great Race: In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth’s annals-histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies.

  Especially psychologies. The candid photo was an extinct genre; everything was posed, and all the men and women under the gaze of the camera turned wacky. A toy plush Cthulhu was common headgear; people posed with their eyes bulging and mouths opened wide in rictuses of surprise and glee. Glasses hoisted, t-shirt slogans pointed at, people lifted high into the air by a younger Armbruster who also once had a head full of hair. Everyone was eager to perform some sort of transgression or low weirdness. Colleen tried to imagine Lovecraft without a suit jacket, or performing a handstand, or chugging four beers in two hands. She supposed he was the dour father the children were trying to impress with their juvenile antics, or the aloof schoolmaster an entire school of class clowns wanted to see smile. They were all low-res, most black and white; the collection really felt like cast-offs from a high school yearbook.

  There were a few pictures of Cob, here and there. He was chubbier then, and if Colleen squinted, maybe more ethnic somehow. A John Travolta haircut, furious eyebrows, a baby face with pinchable cheeks.

  And then Colleen actually found a photo of Cob. The chubby, swarthy kid wasn’t him. Except for having a bit less gray in his hair, Cob was Cob, ageless and seemingly immortal. Fashions had changed since the 1990s; mustaches sprouted and wilted, a brief fascination with kilts was superseded by the wearing of simultaneous multiple fanny packs and flip phone holsters, but Cob stayed the same.

  But the false Cob, the chubby Italianate-looking fellow, seemed familiar. The photos were pure files, with no captioning and often with no other details than Tentac1997party or Yuggoth02 on the USENET posts from which Colleen had pulled them.

  The station was getting crowded, noisier. Rush hour. Colleen bought another pretzel to keep the moral rent on her seat paid up. It tasted like cardboard in her mouth; eating was useless and stupid. That guy looked familiar but he wasn’t at the Tentacular, she was sure of it. Had she seen the photos before; had he been at some other convention? Maybe he was local, and she’d seen him on the train, or the doughnut shops, or…

  Antony Amato. The detective that had studiously ignored her during the investigation at the hotel, and who gave her that bizarre lecture at the station. Anything is possible.

  But he didn’t know anything about Lovecraft. What had Amato call the fandom—Lovecrafters? Funny. Almost too funny, especially as he had said something else too. Hey, Ms. Danzig. Earth to Danzig, did you get sucked away by the Mi-Go? I said your ride is here.

  And somehow, Norman had gotten his hands on Panossian’s arrest record?

  And didn’t a couple of people mention someone—something?—named “Tomato.” Tony Amato? Another dumb nickname in a community full of them?

  And then R.G. had shown up, drove her back to the hotel, and told Barry to tackle her when Bhanushali decided that she wanted to play Miss Marple. Amato knew all about the Tentacular. He had set Colleen up, picked her for no other reason than she was Panossian’s roommate for the con, and tried to use her to…what, exactly?

  Another set of theories, simultaneously complex and half-baked. Cob did it alone, Amato covered-up for him. DiRonalde knew about Amato, and fed the info to Colleen for…what reason? Personal conflict with the detective, gender solidarity with Colleen, or did DiRonalde actually do the murder? There’s no reason to exclude anyone, or anything. Anything is possible.

  But some things are more likely than others. Amato arranged events to get Phantasia and Chloe arrested. The real killer was still out there, still among the members of the Summer Tentacular. Was Amato protecting the entire convention—as Hiram seemed to be trying to hint—or just Cob, or someone else? Ronald Ranger had no love for Panossian. Maybe he was the murderer. Perhaps he had confided in Cudmore, who threatened to go the police and so Cudmore had to die too. Perhaps Cudmore killed Panossian, and some other secret fan—Raul?—killed Cudmore and then R.G. convinced Amato to hint that Colleen did it when it became clear to her that the cases against Phantasia and Chloe would not hold up in the long term.

  The speculation was useless. Maybe Cudmore threw a rock straight up in the air and dropped to the dirt to do a push-up and killed himself. Maybe Panossian tied a razor to an elastic band, tied the other end to the agitator of one of the washing machines, put in a dollar’s worth of quarters, and used it to slice his own face off just to make sure that the Lovecraftian community would never forget him.

  “Fuck, if anything is possible maybe I had a pair of black-outs and killed both those nerds,” she said, aloud. She slapped her hand over her mouth, but none of the several people who had turned to look at her went back to their phones or newspapers or upmarket trade paperback novels about unhappy young men from Manhattan who meet happy young women from Cape Cod until somebody gets cancer or something.

  Colleen shut her laptop with a smack, stood up, and walked right to the Silver Line, the computer in the crook of her arm like an important book she wished to be seen with. It would be easy to go home, to decide that Phantasia and Chloe were the killers. If the court found them guilty, great. If the court found them innocent, then courts make mistakes. Forget the universe, Colleen couldn’t correlate the contents of one simple roomful of murder suspects without toeing the edge of reason and deciding to go over.

  There was a plane waiting for her. She was going to take it home, by way of Chicago, then a layover where she’d eat tres leches cake—the vegan kind with soy, almond, and coconut milk—at that little place in Midway Airport, and then another flight and she’d be home in Oregon where she belonged. It would be late at night, but Portland is safe and her car would be fine, so maybe she’d scrape the WW^(;,;)^D? bumper sticker off right in the airport parking lot, or maybe she’d wait till the next day, when it was bright and sunny, to do it.

  WW^(;,;)^D? That is the ultimate allure of Lovecraftian fiction. All the ratiocination the human mind could muster; all the piecing together of disparate documentation from ship captains, from academics, from harried witnesses; the collections of artifacts and ancient codices; even the revelation of ancient cities and alien species; none of it mattered, ultimately. No matter what was discovered through application of logic and reason, it wouldn’t be enough to forestall doom. Cthulhu wasn’t the antagonist of “The Call of Cthulhu,” and the doomed sailor Gustaf Johansen wasn’t the hero. Cthulhu’s eventual rise and the utter destruction of humanity—as an epiphenomenon of some machinations we couldn’t possibly comprehend—wasn’t a threat, it was a promise. Like Judgment Day without the Christians, the apocalypse without salvation. No hint of an afterlife either. Lovecraft was a materialist. His right-wing bullshit was based on deep psychological problems, not traditional social conservatism. Cthulhu’s momentary defeat in the famou
s novella didn’t come from a prayer or a spell, but from ramming a steamship through his fat fucking green head.

  Colleen was fuming, fists tensed. The T was packed with typical Boston trash. Pig-faced Irish and Italians with Red Sox caps, black kids braying like donkeys over some idiot joke. Old ladies who took such poor care of themselves when they were young and fuckable that now they were shaped like the letter C. For a second, she felt it. That endless swirling black hatred of all existence. She was a fucking Elder God…or an obnoxious loser racist like H. P. Lovecraft.

  Or was she just fucking crazy now? How did Lovecraft describe Johansen’s descent after he took that desperate chance and turned his stolen ship, Alert, around and rammed it into Cthulhu’s bulbous head? There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

  Mocking imps. The train was full of them. She stood there, computer in one hand, pole in the other, baggage between her feet, as the train circled Logan airport, disgorging passengers at the terminals, at the rental car center. It rolled back through the World Trade Center stop, the Courthouse stop, to South Station. Colleen got off the T and walked back to the main concourse, to Amtrak and the commuter rail. A desperate chance… There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly.

  Colleen bought a ticket back to Providence. One way. She was already mad; she wouldn’t have to wait till after her encounter to go insane and die. She would leave that town a blasted heath if she could.