The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19

by Stephen Jones

  There are a lot of sad crazies out there, thought Armstrong, who believe in nothing except the power of their own imaginations to create whatever they want to create from a supposedly malleable reality. A whole bunch of them had doubtless fastened upon Lovecraft’s mythos for inspiration, but he doubted that any others had wound up like Felipe López.

  “Well,” Armstrong said, “I don’t know what to make of all this. But surely one consideration has occurred to you already? If you really were Lovecraft, you’d know certain things that only he could possibly have known.”

  “An ingenious point,” said López, “but with all his contemporaries in the grave, how then to verify that information? Mr Armstrong, I must remind you that the idea of Lovecraft’s consciousness not only surviving the death of his physical form, but also transferring itself to another body, is patently ridiculous. I make no such claim.”

  López stared at him wordlessly and then, having finished the dregs of his coffee, got up and left.

  When Armstrong arrived back at Enrique and María’s apartment, he found the door already ajar. Someone had broken in, forcing their entrance with a crowbar or similar tool judging by the splintered wound in the side of the door’s frame. He was relieved to find that the intruders had not torn the place apart and seemed to have scarcely disturbed anything. When he examined his own room however, he noted at once that the López manuscripts were missing. He unmistakably remembered having left them on his bedside table. However, in their place, was a note left behind by whoever had stolen them. It read:

  DO NOT MEDDLE IN OUR AFFAIRS AGAIN,

  LEST THE DARKNESS SEEK YOU OUT.

  Obviously, this was a targeted burglary by the people who’d left that answering machine message warning him off having dealings with López. They must have wanted to get hold of the López stories extremely badly. Whoever they were, they must have also known that San Isidro had passed them to him, as well as knowing that Armstrong had an appointment with López, thus giving them the perfect moment to strike while he was out.

  It was difficult to figure out what to do next. Everyone in Mexico City realizes that to call the police regarding a burglary has two possible outcomes. The first is that they will turn up, treat it as a waste of their time and do nothing. The second is that things will turn surreal very quickly, because they will casually mention how poorly paid police officers are, and, in return for a “donation”, they are able to arrange for the swift return of your goods with no questions asked. Given that the burglary was not the work of organized crime but some nutty underground cult, Armstrong thought better of involving the police.

  Great, thought Armstrong, now I’m in trouble not only with the local branch of occult loonies, but with San Isidro and López for having lost the manuscripts. The first thing to do was give San Isidro the bad news. Since a matter of this delicate nature was best dealt with face-to-face, Armstrong decided to make his way over to the poet’s apartment, after he’d arranged for someone to come over and fix the door.

  A cardinal, though unspoken, rule of travelling by metro in Mexico City is not to carry anything of value. If you’re a tourist, look like a tourist with little money. The security guards that hover around the ticket barriers are not there just for show. They carry guns for a reason. D. F. is the kidnapping capital of the world. Armstrong had always followed the dress-down rule and, although he stood out anyway because he was a pale-skinned güerito, he’d encountered no problems on his travels.

  The stations themselves were grimy, functionalist and depressing. Architecturally they resembled prison camps, but located underground. Nevertheless Armstrong enjoyed travelling by metro; it was unbelievably cheap, the gap between trains was less than a minute, and it was like being on a mobile market place. Passengers selling homemade CDs would wander up and down the carriages, with samples of music playing on ghetto blasters slung over their shoulders. Others sold tonics for afflictions from back pain to impotence. Whether these worked or not there was certainly a market for them, as the sellers did a brisk trade.

  One of the carriages on the train that Armstrong took must have been defective. All its lights were out and, curiously, he noticed that when anyone thought to board it anyway they changed their minds at once and preferred to either remain on the platform or else rush over into one of the adjacent carriages instead.

  Armstrong alighted at Chapultepec station, found his way through the convoluted tunnels up to the surface and turned left alongside the eight-lane road outside. The noise of the traffic blocked out most other sounds, and the vehicle fumes were like a low-level grey nebula held down by the force of the brilliant afternoon sunshine. People scurried to and fro along the pavement, their gazes fixed straight ahead, particularly those of any lone women for whom eye-contact with a chilango carried the risk of inviting a lewd suggestion.

  A long footbridge flanked the motorway, and was the only means of crossing for pedestrians for a couple of miles or so. At night it was a notorious crime spot and only the foolhardy would cross it unaccompanied. However, at this time of the day everyone safely used it and a constant stream of people went back and forth.

  Juan San Isidro’s apartment was only five minutes’ walk from the bridge, and was housed in a decaying brownstone building just on the fringes of La Condesa. Sometimes Armstrong wondered whether the poet was the structure’s only occupant, for the windows of all the other apartments were either blackened by soot or else broken and hanging open day and night to the elements.

  He pushed the intercom button for San Isidro, and, after a minute, heard a half-awake voice say, “¿Quién es?”

  “It’s me, Victor, come down and let me in, will you?” Armstrong replied, holding his mouth close to the intercom.

  “Stand in front where I can see you,” the voice said, “and I’ll give you mis llaves.”

  Armstrong left the porch, went onto the pavement and looked up. San Isidro leaned out of one of the third-floor windows, his lank black hair making a cowl over his face. He tossed a plastic bag containing the keys over the ledge, and Armstrong retrieved it after it hit the ground.

  The building had grown even worse since the last time he’d paid a visit. If it was run-down before, now it was positively unfit for human habitation and should have been condemned. The lobby was filled with debris, half the tiles had fallen from the walls and a dripping water pipe was poking out from a huge hole in the ceiling. Vermin scurried around back in the shadows. The building’s staircase was practically a deathtrap, for if a step had not already collapsed, those that remained seemed likely to do so in the near future.

  As Armstrong climbed he clutched at the shaky banister with both hands, his knuckles white with the fierce grip, advancing up sideways like a crab.

  San Isidro was standing in the doorway to his apartment, smoking a fat joint with one hand and swigging from a half-bottle of Cuervo with the other. The smell of marijuana greeted Armstrong as he finally made it to the third floor. Being continually stoned, he thought, was about the only way to make the surroundings bearable.

  “Hola, compañero, good to see you, come on inside.”

  His half-glazed eyes, wide fixed smile and unsteady gait indicated that he’d been going at the weed and tequila already for most of the day.

  “This is a celebration, no? You’ve come to bring me mucho dinero, I hope. I’m honoured that you come here to see me. Siéntate, por favor.”

  San Isidro cleared a space on the sofa that was littered with porno magazines and empty packets of Delicados cigarettes. Armstrong then sat down while San Isidro picked up an empty glass from the floor, poured some tequila in it and put it in his hand.

  “Salud,” he said “to our friend and saviour Felipe López, el mejor escritor de cuentos macabros del mundo, ahora y siempre.”

  “I want you to tell me, Juan, as a friend and in confidence, what happened to López and how he came to think and act exactly like H. P. Lovecraft. And I want to know about the people that are after him.
Were they people he knew before his – urn – breakdown?” Armstrong said, looking at the glass and trying to find a clean part of the rim from which to drink. At this stage he was reluctant to reveal that the López manuscripts had been stolen. San Isidro was volatile, and Armstrong wasn’t sure how he might react to the news.

  San Isidro appeared to start momentarily at the mention of “H. P. Lovecraft”, but whether it was the effect of the name or the cumulative effect of the booze and weed, it was difficult to tell.

  “So he told you, eh? Well, not all of it. No recuerda nada de antes, when he was just Felipe López. No importa qué pasó antes, sure, there was some heavy shit back then. Si quieres los cuentos, primero quiero mucho dinero. Then maybe I’ll tell you about it, eh?”

  “I’ll pay you Juan, and pay you well. But I need to understand the truth,” Armstrong replied.

  What San Isidro told Armstrong over the next half hour consisted of a meandering monologue, mostly in Spanish, of a brilliant young gringo who had come to Mexico in the 1940s to study Mesoamerican anthropology. This man, Robert Hayward Barlow, had been Lovecraft’s literary executor. Armstrong had heard the name before, but what little he knew did not prepare him for San Isidro’s increasingly bizarre account of events.

  He began plausibly enough. Barlow, he said, had taken possession of Lovecraft’s papers after the writer’s death in 1937. He had gone through them thereafter and donated the bulk to the John Hay Library in Providence, in order to establish a permanent archival resource. However, he was ostracized by the Lovecraft circle, a campaign driven by Donald Wandrei and August Derleth, on the basis that he had supposedly stolen the materials in the first place from under the nose of the Providence author’s surviving aunt.

  However, what was not known then, San Isidro claimed, was that Barlow had kept some items back, the most important of which was the Dream Diary of the Arkham Cycle, a notebook in long-hand of approximately thirty or so pages and akin to Lovecraft’s commonplace book.

  It contained, so San Isidro alleged, dozens of entries from 1923 to 1936 that appeared to contradict the assertion that Lovecraft’s mythos was solely a fictional construct. These entries were not suggestive by and of themselves at the time they were supposedly written, for the content was confined to the description of dreams in which elements from his myth-cycle had manifested themselves. These could be accepted as having no basis in reality had it not been for their supposedly prophetic nature. One such entry San Isidro quoted from memory. By this stage his voice was thick and the marijuana he’d been smoking made him giggle in a disquieting, paranoid fashion.

  “A dream of the bony fingers of Azathoth reaching down to touch two cities in Imperial Japan, and laying them waste. Mushroom clouds portending the arrival of the Fungi from Yuggoth.”

  To Armstrong, this drivel seemed only a poor attempt to turn Lovecraft into some latter-day Nostradamus, but San Isidro clearly thought otherwise. Armstrong wondered what López had to do with all of this, and whether he would repudiate the so-called “prophecies” by sharing Lovecraft’s trust in indefatigable rationalism. That would be ironic.

  “How does all this tie in with López?” Armstrong asked.

  “In 1948,” San Isidro slurred, “there were unos brujos, se llamaban La Sociedad del Sol Oscuro, cheap gringo paperbacks of Lovecraft were their inspiration. They were interested in revival of worship for the old Aztec gods before they incorporated Cthulhu mythology. The gods of the two are much alike, no? Sangre, muerte y la onda cósmica. They tormented Barlow, suspected that’s why he came to Mexico, because of the connection. Barlow was a puto, he loved to give it to boys, and soon they found out about the dream-diary. That was the end. Blackmail. He killed himself in 1951, took a whole bottle of Seconal.”

  “But what about López?”

  “They had to wait cincuenta años para que se alinearan las estrellas. Blood sacrifices, so much blood, the police paid-off over decades. But it was prophesized in his own dream-diary: el espléndido regreso. Even the exact date was written in there. López was the chosen vessel.”

  “How do you know all this, Juan?”

  “I chose him from amongst us, but I betrayed them, the secret was passed down to me, and now I need to get out of this pinche country rápido, before mis hermanos come for me. López, he wants to go back to Providence, one last time,” San Isidro giggled again at this point, “though I reckon it’s changed a lot, since he last saw it, eh? But, me, I don’t care.”

  He’s as insane as López, Armstrong thought. This is just an elaborate scheme cooked up by the two of them to get money out of someone they think of as simply another stupid, rich foreigner. After all, what evidence was there that any of this nonsense had a grain of truth in it? Like most occultists, they’d cobbled together a mass of pseudo-facts and assertions and dressed it up as secret knowledge known only to the “initiated”. Christ, he wouldn’t have been surprised if, at this point, San Isidro produced a Dream Diary of the Arkham Cycle, some artificially-aged notebook written in the 1960s by a drugged-up kook who’d forged Lovecraft’s handwriting and stuffed it full of allusions to events after his death in 1937. They’d managed to pull off a pretty fair imitation of his stories between themselves and whoever else was involved in the scam. The results were certainly no worse than August Derleth’s galling attempts at “posthumous collaboration” with Lovecraft.

  At last, as if San Isidro had reached a stage where he had drunk and smoked himself back to relative sobriety, he lurched up from the easy chair in which he’d been sitting. He ran his fingers through his beard, stared hard at Armstrong and said, “We need to talk business, how much are you going to give me?”

  “I’ll give you enough to get out of Mexico, for the sake of our friendship,” Armstrong replied, “but I can’t pay for the stories, Juan. Anyway, someone has stolen them.”

  Probably you or López, he thought cynically.

  The only reaction from San Isidro was that he raised his eyebrows a fraction. Without saying a word he went into the kitchen next door and Armstrong could hear him rattling around in some drawers.

  “If you’re going to try to fleece me,” Armstrong said, raising his voice so that he could be heard in the adjacent room, “then you and López will have to do better than all this Barlow and the ‘Sodality of the Black Sun’ crap.”

  When San Isidro came back into the room, his teeth were bared like those of a hungry wolf. In his right hand he was clutching a small calibre pistol, which he raised and aimed directly at Armstrong’s head.

  “Cabrón, hijo de puta, di tus últimas oraciones, porque te voy a matar.”

  Sweat broke out on Armstrong’s forehead. His thoughts raced. Was the gun loaded or was this only bravado? Another means of extorting money from him? Could he take the chance?

  Just as Armstrong was about to cry out, everything went black. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the afternoon, with brilliant sunshine outside, the room was immediately swallowed up by total darkness. Armstrong could not believe what was happening. He thought, at first, that he had gone blind. Only when he stumbled around in the inky void and came right up against the window did he see the sunlight still outside, but not penetrating at all beyond the glass and into the room.

  Outside, the world went on as normal. Armstrong turned back away from the window and was aware of a presence moving within the dark. Whatever it was emitted a high-pitched and unearthly whistle that seemed to bore directly into his brain. God, he thought, his train of reasoning in a fit of hysterical chaos, something from Lovecraft’s imagination had clawed its way into reality, fully seventy years after the man’s death.

  Something that might drive a man absolutely insane, if it was seen in the light.

  Armstrong thought of the hundreds of hackneyed Cthulhu Mythos stories that he’d been forced to read down the years and over which he’d chortled. He recalled the endless ranks of cliched yet supposedly infinitely horrible monstrosities, all with unpronounceable names. But
he couldn’t laugh now, because the joke wasn’t so funny anymore. So he screamed instead—

  “Juan! Juan!”

  Armstrong bumped into the sofa in a panic, before he finally located the exit. From behind him came the sound of six shots, fired one after the other, deafeningly loud, and then nothing but dead, gaunt silence. He staggered into the hallway and reached the light outside, turned back once to look at the impenetrable darkness behind him, before then hurtling down the stairs. He now gave no thought, as he had done when coming up, as to how precarious they were. He did, however, even in the grip of terror, recall that the building was deserted and that no one could swear to his having been there.

  After what had happened to him, Armstrong expected to feel a sense of catastrophic psychological disorientation. Whatever had attacked San Isidro, he thought, carrying darkness along with it so as to hide its deeds, was proof of something, even if it did not prove that everything San Isidro had claimed was in fact true.

  At the very least it meant that “The Sodality of the Black Sun” had somehow called a psychic force into existence through their half-century of meddling with rituals and sacrifices. Armstrong had no choice but to discount the alternative rational explanation.

  At the time when day had become night in San Isidro’s apartment he had been afraid, but nothing more, otherwise he was clear-headed and not prone to any type of hysterical interlude or hallucinatory fugue. Rather than feeling that his worldview had been turned upside-down however, he instead felt a sense of profound loneliness. What had happened had really happened, but he knew that if he tried to tell anyone about it, they would scoff or worse, pity him, as he himself would have done, were he in their position.