New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “Hatch, they destroyed the vehicle for a reason. Obviously they want us to walk. Who knows what nasty surprise is waiting down that road? For now we stay here, fortify. If worse comes to worst, we break and scatter. Maybe one of us will make it back to HQ.”

  “How do we handle Porter and Riley?”

  “This has become a security issue. Let’s see what we find; then I’ll break the news to the good doctors.”

  My involvement in Project TALLHAT was innocent—if you can ever say that about Company business. I was lounging on an out of season New York beach when the telegram arrived. Strauss sent a car from Virginia. An itinerary; spending money. The works. I was intrigued; it had been several years since the last time I spoke with Herman.

  Director Strauss said he needed my coolness under pressure when we sat down to a four-star dinner at his legendary farmhouse in Langley; said he needed an older man, a man with poise. Yeah, he poured it on all right.

  Oh, the best had said it too—Put his feet to the fire; he doesn’t flinch. Garland, he’s one cool sonofabitch. Yes indeed, they had said it—thirty years ago. Before the horn rims got welded to my corrugated face and before the arthritis bent my fingers. Before my left ear went dead and my teeth fell out. Before the San Andreas Fault took root in my hands and gave them tremors. It was difficult to maintain deadly aloofness when I had to get up and drain my bladder every hour on the hour. Some war hero. Some Company legend.

  “Look, Roger, I don’t care about Cuba. It’s ancient history, pal.” Sitting across the table from Strauss at his farmhouse with a couple whiskey sours in my belly it had been too easy to believe my colossal blunders were forgiven. That the encroaching specter of age was an illusion fabricated by jealous detractors of which great men have plenty.

  I had been a great man, once. Veteran of not one, but two World Wars. Decorated, lauded, feared. Strauss, earnest, blue-eyed Strauss, convinced me some greatness lingered. He leaned close and said, “Roger, have you ever heard of MK-ULTRA?”

  He was right. I forgot about Cuba.

  The men dressed in hunting jackets to ward the chill, loaded shotguns for possible unfriendly contact, and scouted the environs until noon. Fruitless; the only tracks belonged to deer and rabbits. Most of the leaves had fallen in carpets of red and brown. It drizzled. Black branches dripped. The birds had nothing to say.

  I observed Dox and Richards. Dox lumbered in plodding engineer boots, broad Slavic face blankly concentrated on the task I had given him. He was built like a tractor; too simple to work for the Company except as an enforcer, much less be a Russian saboteur. I liked him. Richards was blond and smooth, an Ivy League talent with precisely enough cynicism and latent sadism to please the forward thinking elements who sought to reshape the Company in the wake of President Eisenhower’s imminent departure. Richards, I didn’t trust or like.

  There was a major housecleaning in the works. Men of Richards’ caliber were preparing to sweep fossils such as myself into the dustbin of history.

  It was perfectly logical after a morbid fashion. The trouble had started at the top with good old Ike suffering a stroke. Public reassurances to the contrary, the commander in chief was reduced to a shell of his former power. Those closest saw the cracks in the foundation and moved to protect his already tottering image. Company loyalists closed ranks, covering up evidence of the president’s diminished faculties, his strange preoccupation with drawing caricatures of Dick Nixon. They stood by at his public appearances, ready to swoop in if he did anything too embarrassing. Not a happy allocation of human resources in the view of the younger members of the intelligence community.

  That kind of duty didn’t appeal to the Richards’ of the world. They preferred to cut their losses and get back to slicing throats and cracking codes. Tangible objectives that would further the dominance of US intelligence.

  We kept walking and not finding anything until the cabin dwindled to a blot. The place had been built at the turn of the century; Strauss bought it for a song, I gathered. The isolation suited his nefarious plots. Clouds covered the treetops, yet I knew from the topographical maps there was a mountain not far off; a low, shaggy hump called Badger Hill. There were collapsed mines and the moldered bones of abandoned camps, rusted hulks of machinery along the track, and dense woods. A world of brambles and deadfalls. No one came out this way anymore; hadn’t in years.

  We rendezvoused with Hatcher’s party at the cabin. They hadn’t discovered any clues either. Our clothes were soaked, our moods somber, although traces of excitement flickered among the young Turks—attack dogs sniffing for a fight.

  None of them had been in a war. I’d checked. College instead of Korea for the lot. Even Dox had been spared by virtue of flat feet. They hadn’t seen Soissons in 1915, Normandy in 1945, nor the jungles of Cuba in 1953. They hadn’t seen the things I had seen. Their fear was the small kind, borne of uncertainty rather than dread. They stroked their shotguns and grinned with dumb innocence.

  When the rest had been dispatched for posts around the cabin I broke for the latrine to empty my bowels. Close race. I sweated and trembled and required some minutes to compose myself. My knees were on fire, so I broke out a tin of analgesic balm and rubbed them, tasting the camphor on my tongue. I wiped beads of moisture from my glasses, swallowed a glycerin tablet and felt as near to one hundred percent as I would ever be.

  Ten minutes later I summoned Doctor Porter for a conference on the back porch. It rained harder, shielding our words from Neil who stood post near an oak.

  Porter was lizard-bald except for a copper circlet that trailed wires into his breast pocket. His white coat bore stains and smudges. His fingers were blue-tinged with chalk dust. He stank of antiseptic. We were not friends. He treated the detail as a collection of thugs best endured for the sake of his great scientific exploration.

  I relayed the situation, which did not impress him much. “This is why Strauss wanted your services. Deal with the problem,” he said.

  “Yes, Doctor. I am in the process of doing that. However, I felt you might wish to know your research will become compromised if this activity escalates. We may need to extract.”

  “Whatever you think best, Captain Garland.” He smiled a dry smile. “You’ll inform me when the moment arrives?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then I’ll continue my work, if you’re finished.” The way he lingered on the last syllable left no doubt that I was.

  I persisted, perhaps from spite. “Makes me curious about what you fellows are up to. How’s the experiment progressing? Getting anywhere?”

  “Captain Garland, you shouldn’t be asking me these questions.” Porter’s humorless smile was more reptilian than ever.

  “Probably not. Unfortunately since recon proved inconclusive I don’t know who wrecked our transport or what they plan next. More information regarding the project would be helpful.”

  “Surely Doctor Strauss told you everything he deemed prudent.”

  “Times change.”

  “TALLHAT is classified. You’re purely a security blanket. You possess no special clearance.”

  I sighed and lighted a cigarette. “I know some things. MK-ULTRA is an umbrella term for the Company’s mind control experiments. You psych boys are playing with all kinds of neat stuff—LSD, hypnosis, photokinetics. Hell, we talked about using this crap against Batista. Maybe we did.”

  “Indeed. Castro was amazingly effective, wasn’t he?” Porter’s eyes glittered. “So what’s your problem, Captain?”

  “The problem is the KGB has pretty much the same programs. And better ones from the scuttlebutt I pick up at Langley.”

  “Oh, you should beware rumors of all people. Loose lips had you buried in Cuba with the rest of your operatives. Yet here you are.”

  I understood Porter’s game. He hoped to gig me with the kind of talk most folks were polite enough to whisper behind my back, make me lose control. I wasn’t biting. “The way I figure it, the Reds don’t need TAL
LHAT . . . unless you’re cooking up something special. Something they’re afraid of. Something they’re aware of, at least tangentially, but lack full intelligence. And in that case, why pussyfoot around? They’ve got two convenient options—storm in and seize the data or wipe the place off the map.”

  Porter just kept smirking. “I am certain the Russians would kill to derail our project. However, don’t you think it would be more efficacious for them to use subtlety? Implant a spy to gather pertinent details, steal documents. Kidnap a member of the research team and interrogate him; extort information from him with a scandal. Hiding in the woods and slicing tires seems a foolish waste of surprise.”

  I didn’t like hearing him echo the bad thoughts I’d had while lingering in the outhouse. “Exactly, Doctor. The situation is even worse than I thought. We are being stalked by an unknown quantity.”

  “Stalked? How melodramatic. An isolated incident doesn’t prove the hypothesis. Take more precautions if it makes you happy. And I’m confident you are quite happy; awfully boring to be a watchdog with nothing to bark at.”

  It was too much. That steely portion of my liver gained an edge, demanded satisfaction. I took off the gloves. “I want to see the woman.”

  “Whatever for?” Porter’s complacent smirk vanished. His thin mouth drew down with suspicion.

  “Because I do.”

  “Impossible!”

  “Hardly. I command six heavily armed men. Any of them would be tickled to kick down the door and give me a tour of your facilities.” It came out much harsher than I intended. My nerves were frayed and his superior demeanor had touched a darker kernel of my soul. “Doctor Porter, I read your file. That was my condition for accepting this assignment; Strauss agreed to give me dossiers on everyone. You and Riley slipped through the cracks after Caltech. I guess the school wasn’t too pleased with some of your research or where you dug up the financing. Then that incident with the kids off campus. The ones who thought they were testing diet pills. You gave them, what was it? Oh yes—peyote! Pretty strange behavior for a pair of physicists, eh? It follows that Unorthodox Applications of Medicine and Technology would snap you up after the private sector turned its back. So excuse my paranoia.”

  “Ah, you do know a few things. But not the nature of TALLHAT? Odd.”

  “We shall rectify that momentarily.”

  Porter shrugged. “As you wish, Mr. Garland. I shall include your threats in my report.”

  For some reason his acquiescence didn’t really satisfy me. True, I had turned on the charm that had earned me the title “Jolly Roger,” yet he had caved far too easily. Damn it!

  Porter escorted me inside. Hatcher saw the look on my face and started to rise from his chair by the window. I shook my head and he sank, fixing Porter with a dangerous glare.

  The lab was sealed off by a thick, steel door, like the kind they use on trains. Spartan, each wall padded as if a rubber room in an asylum. It reeked of chemicals. The windows were blocked with black plastic. Illumination seeped from a phosphorescent bar on the table. Two cots. Shelves, cabinets, a couple boxy machines with needles and tickertape spools. Between these machines an easel with indecipherable scrawls done in ink. I recognized some as calculus symbols. To the left, a poster bed, and on the bed a thickly wrapped figure propped by pillows. A mummy.

  Dr. Riley drifted in, obstructing my view—he was an aquamarine phantom, eyes and mouth pools of shadow. As with Porter, a copper circlet winked on his brow. “Afternoon, Captain Garland. Pull up a rock.” His accent was Midwestern nasal. He even wore cowboy boots under his grimy lab coat.

  “Captain Garland wants to view the subject,” Porter said.

  “Fair enough!” Riley seemed pleased. He rubbed his hands, a pair of disembodied starfish in the weirding glow. “Don’t fret, Porter. There’s no harm in satisfying the Captain’s curiosity.” With that, the lanky man stepped aside.

  Approaching the figure on the bed, I was overcome with an abrupt sensation of vertigo. My hackles bunched. The light played tricks upon my senses, lending a fishbowl distortion to the old woman’s sallow visage. They had secured her in a straitjacket; her head lolled drunkenly, dead eyes frozen, tongue drooling from slack lips. She was shaved bald, white stubble of a Christmas goose.

  My belly quaked. “Where did you find her?” I whispered, as if she might hear me.

  “What’s the matter?” Dr. Riley asked.

  “Where did you find her, goddamnit!”

  The crone’s head swiveled on that too-long neck and her milky gaze fastened upon my voice. And she grinned, toothless. Horrible.

  Hatcher kept some scotch in the pantry. Dr. Riley poured—I didn’t trust my own hands yet. He lighted cigarettes. We sat at the living room table, alone in the cabin, but for Porter and Subject X behind the metal door. Porter was so disgusted by my reaction he refused to speak with me. Hatcher had assembled the men in the yard; he was giving some sort of pep talk. Ever the soldier. I wished I’d had him in Cuba.

  It rained and a stiff breeze rattled the eaves.

  “Who is she to you?” Riley asked. His expression was shrewd.

  I sucked my cigarette to the filter in a single drag, exhaled and gulped scotch. Held out my glass for another three fingers worth. “You’re too young to remember the first big war.”

  “I was a baby.” Riley handed me another cigarette without being asked.

  “Yeah? I was twenty-eight when the Germans marched into France. Graduated Rogers and Williams with full honors, was commissioned into the Army as an officer. They stuck me right into intelligence, sent me straight to the front.” I chuckled bitterly. “This happened before Uncle Sam decided to make an “official” presence. Know what I did? I helped organize the resistance, translated messages French intelligence intercepted. Mostly I ran from the advance. Spent a lot of time hiding out on farms when I was lucky, field ditches when I wasn’t.

  “There was this one family, I stayed with them for nine days in June. It rained, just like this. A large family—six adults, ten or eleven kids. I bunked in the wine cellar and it flooded. You’d see these huge bloody rats paddling if you clicked the torch. Long nine days.” If I closed my eyes I knew I would be there again in the dark, among the chittering rats. Listening for armor on the muddy road, the tramp of boots.

  “So, what happened?” Riley watched me. He probably guessed where this was headed.

  “The family matriarch lived in a room with her son and daughter in-law. The old dame was blind and deaf; she’d lost her wits. They bandaged her hands so she couldn’t scratch herself. She sucked broth out of this gnawed wooden bowl they kept just for her. Jesus Mary, I still hear her slobbering over that bowl. She used to lick her bowl and stare at me with those dead eyes.”

  “Subject X bears no relation to her, I assure you.”

  “I don’t suppose she does. I looked at her more closely and saw I was mistaken. But for those few seconds . . . Riley, something’s going on. Something much bigger than Strauss indicated. Level with me. What are you people searching for?”

  “Captain, you realize my position. I’ve been sworn to silence. Strauss will cut off my balls if I talk to you about TALLHAT. Or we could all simply disappear.”

  “It’s that important.”

  “It is.” Riley’s face became gentle. “I’m sorry. Doctor Strauss promised us ten days. One week from tomorrow we pack up our equipment and head back to civilization. Surely we can hold out.”

  The doctor reached across to refill my glass; I clamped his wrist. They said I was past it, but he couldn’t break my grip. I said, “All right, boy. We’ll play it your way for a while. If the shit gets any thicker though, I’m pulling the plug on this operation. You got me?”

  He didn’t say anything. Then he jerked free and disappeared behind the metal door. He returned with a plain brown folder, threw it on the table. His smile was almost triumphant. “Read these. It won’t tell you everything. Still, it’s plenty to chew on. Don’t show Porter, ok
ay?” He walked away without meeting my eye.

  Dull wet afternoon wore into dirty evening. We got a pleasant fire going in the potbellied stove and dried our clothes. Roby had been a short order cook in college, so he fried hamburgers for dinner. After, Hatcher and the boys started a poker game and listened to the radio. The weather forecast called for more of the same, if not worse.

  Perfect conditions for an attack. I lay on my bunk reading Riley’s file. I got a doozy of a migraine. Eventually I gave up and filled in my evening log entry. The gears were turning.

  I wondered about those copper circlets the doctors wore. Fifty-plus years of active service and I’d never seen anything quite like them. They reminded me of rumors surrounding the German experiments in Auschwitz. Mengele had been fond of bizarre contraptions. Maybe we’d read his mail and adopted some ideas.

  Who is Subject X? I wrote this in the margin of my log. I thought back on what scraps Strauss fed me. I hadn’t asked enough questions, that was for damned sure. You didn’t quiz a man like Strauss. He was one of the Grand Old Men of the Company. He got what he wanted, when he wanted it. He’d been everywhere, had something on everyone. When he snapped his fingers, things happened. People that crossed him became scarce.

  Strauss was my last supporter. Of course I let him lead me by the nose. For me, the gold watch was a death certificate. Looking like a meatier brother of Herr Mengele, Strauss had confided the precise amount to hook me. “Ten days in the country. I’ve set up shop at my cabin near Badger Hill. A couple of my best men are on to some promising research. Important research—”

  “Are we talking about psychotropics? I’ve seen what can happen. I won’t be around that again.”

  “No, no. We’ve moved past that. This is different. They will be monitoring a subject for naturally occurring brain activity. Abnormal activity, yes, but not induced by us.”

  “These doctors of yours, they’re just recording results?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why all the trouble, Herman? You’ve got the facilities right here. Why send us to a shack in the middle of Timbuktu?”