I am Providence

by Nick Mamatas

  17. Re-Animator

  Thomas, the squirrely intern, talked to my parents. My mother was escorted from the room. My father decided to stay and take a peek. I never heard a sound like the one he made, not from him, not from anyone human. One time, in Armenia, my grandmother slaughtered a goat for me. She wanted to show that she loved me, the spoiled American grandson, by offering me meat for dinner. But she was old and her fingers stiff from arthritis, so the cut wasn’t as clean as it could have been, and the goat ran screaming and howling and stumbling up a hill, where it stumbled into a bush. In the bush lay a sleeping porcupine.

  The goat at that moment was what my father sounded like. Yes, we finally killed the goat, my grandmother and I working together, by chasing it until the arterial spray was a trickle. Then I threw a rock and it bounced right off its head. My grandmother snatched it up and hammered the goat’s skull in. Her only complaint was that the head makes for some decent soup, and she’d have to go without.

  Of course we ate it, the next day. Goat takes forever to tenderize.

  I was surprised that nobody had come for Cudmore. He always talked about his famous friends, so I figured he had a loving family as well. Most people who are inexplicably confident despite being talentless and more than a little stupid have warm, affectionate parents.

  Maybe they’ll still come. Maybe they’ll scream their lungs inside-out, as my father did. I’ll feel better if I hear that howl from somewhere else. He was mutilated too, though not as obviously, as painfully, as me.

  Thomas is muttering to himself again. He’s singing, actually. That song about the girl who shot up her school because she didn’t like Mondays. I’m pretty sure the lyrics are wrong, but I couldn’t tell you for sure as my brain is collapsing. I even used to know the name of the girl. I can still picture her. She was a redhead with an almost featureless face and those large glasses that were popular in the 1970s and that have just come back into style now thanks to hipsters. But maybe I’m just remembering Amy Carter, or Chelsea Clinton.

  “Thom-as Dumas/it’s time/to take/pho-tos,” Thomas sings and I come out of my drawer. I can’t believe that someone named Dumas would call their kid Thomas. Another drawer opens too. I presume it’s Cudmore’s. The camera sounds artificial, like what TV taught us cameras sound like when someone takes a snapshot. I realize that he’s taking photos with a smartphone of some sort. Thomas is in business for himself. Whether I’m going to be a 4chan Internet meme or part of some art school project I don’t know, but I don’t like it.

  I am losing track of time.

  Time and senses are tied together. Without them, any of them, you’re divorced from the universe. If I count “One, two, three…” I barely experience the moments between numbers, except that sometimes, when it’s loud, I can still hear. I have to work to keep my thoughts separate from my experiences. What’s left of my brain is eager to fill in the latter with the former. When I daydream, it feels as real as anything else I experience.

  I hope this is all over soon. I never quite embraced the idea of death. That’s part of why I’m so interested in fantasy and horror. What’s a worse horror than extinction? I had a friend in college, who died in a car accident after the release of the first Lord of the Rings movie, but before the second one came out. I spent the entire three hours sniffling, because Rich would never see the movie. I didn’t even like The Two Towers that much. The undead, ghosts, at least they live on, even if tortured, even if in Hell. They won’t be forgotten. I won’t be forgotten…if only I were a ghost and not just the final thoughts of a man who is already dead, a mind that’s nothing but cinders.

  Thomas is still there when the next thing happens. It’s a new voice in the room, a New Englander. Or maybe I had heard it before. He says, “Hey, Jace. I brought in some company.” More footsteps, a shallow gasp from Thomas.

  “Good evening,” Ms. Phantasia says. He sounds desultory, defeated.

  “Hi,” Thomas says. Then he says, “You, I’ve met.”

  Chloe says, “Hiya.”

  “This unlikely duo has a problem, Thomas,” the man said. “They’ve been accused of murdering and mutilating these two men.”

  “Wait,” Phantasia said. “Is that exactly true?” There was no answer, and he said, “Then I want my lawyer immediately. This man is not mutilated, or at least he was not posthumously mutilated. The patches missing from his back and stomach are his own work…as you know, Detective Amato.”

  “Well, here’s the interesting thing,” Thomas said. “I think we can get one more cover out of him. It’ll be tricky though, and his skin isn’t holding up so well. We’ll have to tan it soon. But there is an Innsmouth down by the small of his back. His tramp stamp, if you will.”

  “Why did you bring us here?” Chloe said. “This is insane. I should scratch your face off.”

  “That’s why you’re cuffed, but my old friend Duane isn’t,” Amato said.

  “I…” Phantasia started. “This is utter madness. Antony, do you think you can keep this quiet forever? Even prisoners are allowed to send mail. I have many correspondents—”

  “And a big bump on your head,” Thomas said. “I hear that’s allowed in prison too, especially if you insist on spending your license-plate-making money on mascara and rouge.”

  “That was a coincidence,” Amato said. “Duane, I would never do that to you. Trust me, you’re not going to go to trial. There’s no physical evidence, there’s nothing. Same for you, Ms. McKendrick. No evidence. Don’t plead out, you’ll be cleared. You’ll be cleared. We just needed to give the brass something. A name. Two names.”

  “My lawyer told me to plead out. Involuntary manslaughter,” Chloe said.

  “Don’t plead out unless you want nine months in prison, and you don’t want nine months in prison. Duane, tell her.”

  “Chloe, prison is no place for beings such as us,” Phantasia said. Then he hesitated. “Oh, I understand.”

  “Duane,” Amato said.

  “Detective Amato,” Phantasia said. “We have moved far beyond the initial plan here. An initial plan would be simplicity itself for me to describe to an attorney, or a judge, or the National Enquirer—”

  Thomas snorted. “I thought you wanted to be taken seriously.”

  Chloe said, “The Enquirer did break the John Edwards story, of his out-of-wedlock baby.” Everyone was quiet for a moment after she dropped that.

  “Hiram told me that you were interested in all the Cudmore ‘skinner’ books. I thought you’d drive a hard bargain. I suspected you might even rough Panossian up. You’ve always been pleased to throw your weight around, and he was always eager to provoke reactions. I did not expect to be standing before two bodies. My Lord, Amato, what is wrong with you?”

  The big man, no wonder I didn’t recognize him. It was Amato. I’d never met him before, but I knew the name from some old ’zines, from some old anecdotes. Another local to Providence, a fan since childhood, a writer who never made it. He had written some story about Lovecraft’s death, about how the expired tin cans of beans that Lovecraft ate were tainted with the ichor of shoggoths, which led to the cancer that killed him. By all accounts, the story was actually pretty widely read. The joke is that it was widely read only because he would not stop submitting it to every ’zine and online journal in existence. When the name on a masthead changed, he’d submit the same story again. Between the assistant editors and fiction editors, the writing workshop participants, and the fiction contests, more people read his dumb story than would have had he actually managed to publish it. After ten years and countless revisions, he gave up and dropped out.

  “Listen, we all just need to be on the same page here,” Amato said. “You walked in at just the right moment, Duane. You know what happened?”

  What did happen? The large man. Amato. He was the client, he wanted Arkham. But he was a cop, obviously. There’s something about the police, you know. Ever been to a demonstration? I went to one, once. I’m not very political, bu
t I marched in 2015, to commemorate the Armenian genocide. There were a lot of men in suits there, Armenian men, their jackets practically splitting from bulging shoulders. But the cops among the crowd were easy to distinguish. Something about their shoes, their facial hair. Even the young cats who joined the left-wing activists had their tells—baseball caps and Red Sox shirts, as if any pinko would be caught dead with that stuff as their casual clothing.

  I remember now, the surge of panic. I was being set up. Amato had been wearing yet another Cthulhu t-shirt; he smiled and told me that he was thrilled to meet me and thrilled to see the book, but I didn’t trust him. And then Cudmore casually strolled in.

  “These two were already going at it when I walked in,” Amato said. A lie. No, that’s not it at all. Not really. “I just wanted the book. Cudmore was shouting about how he felt so betrayed, and Panossian was just confused.” Yes, that much is true.

  “You were intimidated by little Charles Cudmore?” Chloe asked. She snorted.

  “No.” The cop voice was back.

  “By the time I got downstairs, Panossian was dead,” Phantasia said. “Next thing I know, I’m being dragged away in chains. Chains, Antony!”

  “Cudmore…killed Panossian, and took his face while you just stood there?” Chloe asked.

  Amato was not a good storyteller, so he couldn’t lie effectively. He had to try the truth.

  “I killed Panossian. It was an accident. I killed Cudmore. That was purposeful. He was going to talk, even after I let him have the face. Here’s my offer—plead innocent, I’ll be sure you both get off. It’ll be an unsolved murder, forever. A Jack the Ripper-style mystique. Think what it’ll mean to the legacy of H. P. Lovecraft to have an unsolved murder of a writer attached to it. Think of the Necronomicon, that face…”

  “I don’t like this,” Chloe said softly.

  “You can not like it as a free woman,” Thomas said, “or you can not like it in prison.”

  Amato still wasn’t telling the whole truth. I didn’t recognize him. I didn’t know him. He had tested me, taunted me. His voice dropped an octave when he got mad. Hell, he dropped a class position from middle-class detective to blue-collar blowhard. “Whaddya mean you never heard uhv me?” he’d said. Then I remembered the story about his one story, and sure, I smirked. I even told him that he could probably pass the text of Arkham off as his own.

  “You’re a wiseass, you know that?” he told me. “I wrote plenty, published plenty,” he said. “I was a wiseass once, just like you. Instead of a blog, I had a ’zine.”

  Fuck Tentacles.

  Antony Amato ruined my fucking life.

  “You brought us here to show us the stakes of not playing along, is that it, Antony?” Phantasia asked.

  “I’d hoped to have another suspect ready to arrest, but that didn’t quite work out the way I had planned,” Amato said. “So just take it easy; you’ll both be out by Friday. No bail, no trial.”

  I could have been a real writer.

  “My poor father…” Phantasia said.

  “I’ll get Cob to go visit him. Even a social worker. I’ve always been open to helping you, Duane.”

  “I don’t need any help,” Chloe said. “I just want this to be over. Can you guarantee that?”

  “Absolutely,” Amato said. “It’s my ass in the frying pan too.”

  There was something so smug and awful about Amato. He was protected by his bulk, his badge, his status. He had played at transgression, fucked around with art. Then he shrugged and left it all behind.

  “We also have an upside,” Thomas said. “We’ve cornered the market on skinner titles. Hiram Chandler is willing to help us pass them on to the right collectors. And the face.”

  “I couldn’t leave Cudmore running around with the face. I had to give it to him to keep him quiet in the short term. He told me he was going to dig up Nigger-Man with Bhanushali too. I told him I’d meet him out there, keep the rest of the police away.”

  “Why me?” Chloe said.

  Years later, richer than I’d ever be, as a bully with a gun, Amato wanted to buy his way back into Lovecraft fandom with a genuine copy of Arkham. I needed the money, and I needed it bad, but not so bad I could keep myself from getting in his face.

  “Listen, you were just connected to Phantasia. It fit.”

  “Our edition of one of the Necronomicon will bring in a pretty penny. We’re proposing a four-way split,” Thomas said. “The face I’m already tanning back at school.”

  Amato never had to leave. He could have continued with Fuck Tentacles for years, triumphantly revealed himself after thirteen issues. He could have been the king of fandom. He traded it for a bullshit existence, and stuck me with his bullshit existence without even knowing it.

  I shoved him. His cop reflexes took over and he clocked me hard. I saw the lights from my back, and then Cudmore’s stupid pointy head hovering over mine too.

  “I’ve been trying to write for years,” Amato said. “It won’t be some useless occult bullshit like Simon’s mass-market Necronomicon. It’ll be good. It’ll be scary. I even wrote a little legend for the face on the cover.”

  I was concussed, confused. But I had reflexes too, and they took over. But I’m all mouth. Amato shut me up but good. Now I have yet another bullshit existence, this hour that stretches between life and death, and it’s fading fast.

  I can only hope that in the hell of his own mind, Cudmore feels as betrayed, as used.

  I’m not even a mouth now, but I am something else. I’m heading into the outer reaches of time. My body in the ground, food for worms. But I’m not a healthy corpse. I’m sick, and I’ve always been sick. I’m full of poisons, chemicals. Processed food little better than Lovecraft ate, thirty-five years of sucking in car exhaust and playing in asbestos-soaked school hallways.

  “So—Hiram? What are you doing here?” Amato’s voice cracked as he spoke. “How did you even get down here?”

  “I came to visit Ms. Phantasia, and then I met…”

  “The desk didn’t send you down here,” Amato said. Something shifted in the room.

  I am a bag of chemical reactions. Put me in the ground. Put me in the ground of this cursed city, because for sure as fuck my parents can’t afford to transport my body and bury me anywhere else. I don’t even have a savings account.

  “I met someone Panossian’s parents had named…” Hiram said, his voice froggier than usual.

  I’ll curse this land. I’m a man of lead and radioactivity. I sat way too close to the television. Let me rot into the water table, I’ll give that fat baby-face fuck prostate cancer. I’ll drive his children to early graves. I’ll make his grandchildren drooling retards. I swear, molecule by molecule, I’ll push myself into the soil, into the air. Just give me one free radical; I just want to push one gene out of place. That’s all it takes to start the spiral of degeneration.

  “You fuckers are going to pay for this.” It was Colleen Danzig.

  “No, I don’t think we are,” Amato said.

  Did he have his sidearm in his hand?

  The room quieted as though he did. The temperature plummeted. Or is it me?

  “You can’t shoo—” Phantasia said.

  “Easy, easy easy.” That was Thomas. A chant. Art school kids aren’t made for such things. But I am, now. That’s the secret to death. We’re not just food for worms, we’re the death of worms too. The universe is running down, gears grinding against black gears.

  “How many people are you going to kill? Who are you going to frame next?” Colleen said. “Eventually, you’ll run out of Lovecraftians. You won’t be King Shit of fandom if there are no fans left.”

  “It’s not too late. We can all just keep this to ourselves. Forget the books. Let’s all go our separate ways. Phantasia and Chloe, you’ll be all right. You can make sure of that, can’t you Antony?” Hiram said. He was practically in tears.

  “Easy, easy take it easy, easy…”

  Finally, it was C
hloe. She screamed “No!”, and there was a rush of air that felt like her limbs, and the gun went off. I couldn’t even smell it anymore. The report was distant, like thunder a dozen miles away.

  There was more yelling, but I didn’t know from whom. I’m a fading photograph now. It’s all swirling, black seas of infinity. I am on the shore. I don’t have to take a step, it is disintegrating under me. With me. It’s all the sea, washing me away like salt. Then I hear a horrible roar, but it’s not the waves of the dark and endless ocean, it’s an animal noise, something alive raging against death.

  There’s another shot fired, one even more distant, and a gurgling sound. My ears are done, my skin is ice turning to slush, running from my cracked bones. I’m under an ocean of black, the surface too far to see. It’s a good place here, a good place for a long long sleep. One day though, one part of me, one tiny sliver will find its way into an eye, into a throat. I’ll have my fucking killers down here with me, I promise I promise, I swear I swear. Put me in the ground, bury me deep, where I belong.

  I hear something. She’s just so close, so I can hear it, her voice She must be kneeling right by me. She must have been driven to her knees. Colleen’s hot breath is on my ear. I know she’s not talking to me; only a fool or a saint would address me now, but she says it. Colleen says what I’ve always wanted to hear.

  “Are you okay? Where are you hurt?”

  Is that so hard to ask someone?

  Does she have Hiram’s head in her lap now? Is she stroking Chloe’s cheek? Is Colleen kneeling in a pool of blood not her own? Her own? Is she calling out to someone across the room, or talking to herself, half-deranged from a bullet in her belly, from her life leaking out between her clutching hands?

  Then she says something else. Something I still wish were true. Something I know won’t ever be true for anyone, not ever.

  “It’ll be okay. Don’t worry, everything will be okay, okay? Okay...”