Carter & Lovecraft

by Jonathan L. Howard

  “Honestly?” The man seemed pained. “Okay, but just quickly. I went to a locksmith and had him cut a key randomly. I told him it was for a college film project and would end up being destroyed so we didn’t want to use a real one. I used it to get through your front door.”

  “How?”

  “How?” The man looked at Rothwell like he was an idiot. “By putting it in the lock and turning it. How do keys usually work? Maybe you have a flunky to do that for you. Anyway, that got me inside. Then I entered a code into the alarm that I’d randomized with a decahedral die.” He took a ten-sided die from his pocket and rolled it on the desk by his side. “Seven … nine … five … three. That’s your code, isn’t it?”

  Rothwell had watched the die rattle out the numbers with each roll with an expression of deepening disbelief. “How the hell did you do that? Are you a conjuror?”

  The man smirked. “I’m a magician, if that’s what you mean. Oh—” He took a key from his pocket and tossed it onto the desk, picking up the die and returning it to the pocket. “Here’s the key I used to get in. You can have it. Useful to have a spare, isn’t it?”

  Rothwell picked it up and compared it with his own. He could see no differences in the milling. “This is bullshit. You did not get this cut randomly.”

  The man gave up any pretense of friendliness. “You are such a fucking waste of skin, Rothwell. You happen to be born into money and you think it makes you special. No. It means you were lucky. Once. I’m lucky all the time. That’s special. What’s funny is that you think your one-shot little bit of luck is going to get you into the Senate. No … fucking … way. This is a blue state these days, ‘Ken.’”

  “For now.”

  “How long were you planning on waiting? You can piss your money up a wall trying, but you will never get into government running here. Unless”—the man raised an admonitory finger—“you get real lucky. The kind of luck I deal in. Onetime offer. Say yes right now, or I find somebody with some balls who really wants that ol’ brass ring.”

  Rothwell looked at him steadily. “Let me make sure I understand you. The key, the alarm code … you say you can influence chance?”

  “I say it because it’s true.”

  “Fine. Let’s see you put your ass on the line over that.” Rothwell went to the heavy maple-wood desk, felt under the edge of it, and released a catch. A concealed drawer slid out. From it, he removed a revolver with an unusually long cylinder. “This,” he said to his visitor, “is a Taurus Judge. It fires 410-gauge shotgun shells. Not a nice thing to be shot by.” He smiled at the man. “Let’s up the game a little, huh?” He broke the pistol and removed the load it was carrying. He took out a new box of ammunition and showed it to the man. “Critical Defense cartridges. Fires a bullet followed by two .35-caliber ball bearings. Really, really not a nice thing to be shot with. Bought these the other day. Haven’t had a chance to try them out yet.” He broke the seal on the box, removed a cartridge, and slid it into one of the cylinder’s five chambers.

  “What is this?” asked the man, curious rather than worried. “Are you seriously suggesting that we play Russian roulette?”

  “Fuck, no.” Rothwell grinned at him. “I’m suggesting we mathematically model my chances of making it to the Senate. You like probabilities, don’t you? Tell me … what’s your name, by the way?”

  “Colt. William Colt.” Colt’s eyes never left the pistol in Rothwell’s hands.

  “Colt. I like that. That’s a good name. Bill Colt. You sound like a hero of the Old West there.”

  “Nobody calls me ‘Bill.’”

  “Why not? It’s a good, manly name. So, anyway. My Senate chances. What do you reckon, Bill? Eighty percent?” He showed Colt the one filled and four empty chambers. Colt said nothing. “No. I’m a realist. I can’t see it being any better than sixty.” He slid in another cartridge. “But the pundits are saying even that’s delusional. They say I’d be lucky to make forty.” Another cartridge. Rothwell was grinning and could feel himself sweating. He was glad he was a little drunk. “And then there’s you. What was your nuanced political view of my chances? Oh, yeah. ‘No fucking way.’ Let’s round that down a little to a nice pitiful twenty percent.” He slid in a fourth cartridge. He regarded the one empty chamber philosophically. Then he laughed, spun the cylinder while looking at Colt, and closed the pistol. “Like the man said, I guess that makes me shit out of luck. Stand up, Bill.”

  Colt slowly got to his feet.

  “Okay,” said Rothwell, “here’s the deal. I’m going to point this pistol at you now, and I’m going to squeeze the trigger. We’ll see how lucky you are. If you’re not lucky, then I shot an intruder in my home. If you are, I guess we can talk. How’s that?”

  Colt surprised him by laughing, just once. “You have a very muscular approach to experimentation. I approve. Fire away.”

  Rothwell decided he’d had enough of Colt. He’d never killed before, but now it came to it, it felt like it might be pretty easy. He wouldn’t even have to dispose of the body. Just call 911 and put on his best shocked voice. Maybe it might give him some kudos with Emily. Poor traumatized Ken. Yes. That would work.

  Rothwell steadied the pistol in both hands, worked back the hammer, and squeezed the trigger.

  The pistol clicked.

  Now it was Rothwell’s turn to laugh. “You really are a lucky son of a bitch, Bill. Okay. We’ll talk.”

  He broke the pistol to empty it. And froze.

  It wasn’t an empty chamber under the hammer. The cartridge had misfired.

  “Well,” said Colt, smiling the slightest ghost of a smile, “I wonder what the odds against that happening are?”

  Chapter 18

  THE SHADOW OVER PROVIDENCE

  It took Carter a long time to fall asleep that night, despite a deep exhaustion that ached through his every fiber. At least he did not dream, or did not remember his dreams—a small mercy. He awoke late, and came down into the store after showering to find it long open and Lovecraft behind the counter. She was uncommunicative, almost surly, and Carter left her to get some breakfast and to decide what he was going to do.

  “Nothing at all” felt very tempting, he realized over his bacon, eggs, and black coffee. Colt was staggeringly dangerous, and yet there was nothing that could realistically be put at his door. Carter could keep after him, but whatever had gone wrong with Colt’s previous attempt on Carter’s life was not certain to save him next time. Maybe he was only alive because Colt had planned it that way. It was difficult to have an opinion when his antagonist kept breaking the rules of reality.

  Carter looked around the diner and felt very isolated. There was nobody he could talk to about this. Harrelson had misgivings about what was happening, but Carter doubted he thought there was anything more than some deep cleverness in the methods used to kill Belasco and Hayesman. There was a rational explanation behind it all, just something more ingenious than shooting them.

  Harrelson hadn’t seen a building fill with phantom water, though.

  Carter could take his near-death experience as a warning and step back from the investigation, he guessed. Never finding out who called him on Belasco’s phone would grate against his curiosity for the rest of his life, but at least he would have a life.

  It was a fool’s paradise, and it wouldn’t last long. Colt wasn’t your average underachieving serial killer, but that was still where he was headed, and he would follow the usual progression. He would get messier, less attentive to details as his MO evolved. More would die, nothing was more certain. More miserable, terrifying deaths brought on because they accidentally shoved by Colt on the sidewalk, or they talked with their mouths full, or he just didn’t like their faces.

  Usual police procedure would founder. Building a case depended on demonstrating cause and effect. Colt had set fire to causality just for the pleasure of pissing on it to put it out. They’d have to reactivate witchcraft statutes to find laws vague enough to convict him.
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br />   Reluctantly, Carter saw he had no real choice. William Colt had to go down.

  Carter studied the photo of the Material Sciences Department bill he had on his phone. What had they manufactured for him on their “rapid prototyping” equipment? The date was two weeks before Belasco’s death. Maybe they’d built him a wand out of four kilos of powdered aluminum. That seemed as likely as anything.

  Right now, however, it was a Sunday, so that would have to wait for tomorrow. In the meantime he would go back, make himself a pot of coffee, and sit down to read the ever-loving fuck out of The Moving Toyshop. No book was going to make him feel like a detecting reject.

  * * *

  “DMLS stands for ‘direct metal laser sintering.’”

  Carter couldn’t help but notice that everybody was prepared to think the worst of Colt. He just had to show his license, explain that he was conducting an investigation into the activities of William Colt, and that was all he had to say. People just accepted that Colt had done something bad and that they’d be happy to see him suffer for it. “Arrogant” was mentioned more than once. Colt seemed to have mislaid his copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People.

  Stacy Winters of the engineering department was a postgrad working toward her doctorate, and had responsibility for the fast prototyping equipment. Carter was talking to her in her office, and discovering that she remembered Colt very well.

  “It’s a way of building an object from a 3-D CAD file. Three-dimensional printing except with metal instead of plastic, so you’re dealing with much higher temperatures. Our setup uses a two-hundred-watt laser to melt and fuse metallic powder with a good level of precision. We build a lot of components for engineering projects, and one-offs for stuff other departments need for experimental rigs.”

  “What did Colt want you to make?”

  “To be honest, I don’t really know what it was. It was an imperfect cube. When he came to us, it sounded like an interesting project and he was prepared to pay, so I said, yes, why not? We hadn’t done anything like it before, and experience is always good, especially when somebody else is picking up the tab.”

  “A cube? Just a cube?”

  “An imperfect cube. The angles were off. The archaeology department had gotten their hands on something kind of out of the ordinary, and Colt wanted to carry out a mathematical analysis of the ratios of it, lengths of the sides, the angles, and so forth.”

  The mention of the archaeology department reminded Carter that talking to them was on his to-do list anyway. He mentally shifted them to a higher priority.

  “The archaeologists wouldn’t let him take it, obviously, but he suggested a nonintrusive way of making a copy by laser scanning it,” said Winters. “No plaster casts or that kind of thing. They liked the idea, just like we liked the idea of producing a physical facsimile, so we did it. It would have been a great piece of interdisciplinary cooperation if Colt wasn’t such an asshole.

  “He didn’t seem to understand that we weren’t going to produce a solid block of aluminum for him, even if he was paying for it. We wanted to structure it as hollow, and that meant being clever in how the CAD file was used. Colt didn’t want that, he wanted it identical. I pointed out that the original was made from stone, so he should choose his battles better. He backed down pretty quickly, but he still rode my team every step of the way. Such a dick. I was glad to hand the thing over at the end of the process.”

  She opened a pictures file on her desktop. “Here. This is what we made him.”

  The images were of a polished aluminum cube about six inches along an edge. It was an imperfect cube, just as Winters had said; the corners were obviously not neatly 90 degrees. It sat on a workbench, gaps showing under it where it refused to lie flat. The sides were marred with hundreds of grooves running more or less but not entirely parallel to one another.

  “This is a copy of something the archaeological department is looking at, is that right?” asked Carter to confirm. The cube was intriguing, but he couldn’t see Colt’s interest in it.

  “Yep. Speak to Professor Hubbard; he was our liaison during the scanning part of the project.”

  * * *

  Professor Hubbard was of a similar mind to Winters when it came to the subject of William Colt. He also made the same unsubstantiated assumption that Carter was carrying out an investigation into Colt on behalf of the college regents, presumably with the intention of expelling him. Carter got the impression that both Winters and Hubbard knew they were making assumptions, but their natural optimism that, whatever the outcome, it would put Colt in the shit with someone meant they didn’t care.

  “It was an interesting idea for a project, and I allowed my enthusiasm for the newness of the idea—at least to me—to get the better of me. As it is, it would seem to have been little more than a vanity project for Mr. Colt. He promised to keep me abreast of his analysis of the artifact, and has not done so. I haven’t heard a word from him since the laser scanning part of the procedure was completed. In fact, I thought they’d run into practical problems and canceled it until you told me differently.”

  “What was Colt’s interest in the cube?” asked Carter.

  “Academic. Entirely academic. The thing has no convincing attributions to origin, or date. It’s inorganic, made of porphyry.” He noted Carter’s raised eyebrow. “That’s a form of hard, igneous rock, purplish in color. Anyway, it’s inorganic, so radiocarbon dating is a nonstarter. It’s also in no recognized style, so it could have been made last year as easily as a thousand years ago, for all we know.”

  “Where was it found? Surely that would give you some context?”

  “In the net of a bottom trawler. Deep-sea fishing isn’t well regarded around here, Mr. Carter. It’s hugely damaging to the seabed both ecologically and archaeologically. When they turned up the artifact, they handed it over as a sop to local feeling. I’m still not convinced it isn’t a bit of failed sculpture that a disappointed artist threw over the side of a boat in disgust.”

  “There seems to be a lot of interest in it, all the same.”

  “Seemed. A nine-day wonder, to air a useful old phrase. These days the appetite for such ephemeral sensations is greater than ever. The Internet feeds on such stories. Would you like to see it? It doesn’t get many visitors now that its novelty has worn off.”

  Hubbard took Carter into his office and opened the bottom drawer of a battered gray filing cabinet. He removed an object covered in a soft cloth and placed it on his desk. “Behold, the mystery,” he said dryly.

  The cube was, Carter had to admit, an underwhelming experience in the flesh. It was just as had been described, and simply the stone original of the aluminum copy. If anything, the copy was more impressive.

  “May I touch it?”

  “Go ahead,” said Hubbard. “We carried out trace tests when the thing was first handed in and found nothing you wouldn’t expect from a chunk of stone pulled up from the bed of the Atlantic.”

  Carter picked it up. It felt heavy, and nothing more. He’d almost expected to be momentarily tormented with one of his strange visions, but there was nothing except the experience of holding a cube of stone. It felt very smooth, even the striations having no sharp edges.

  “Nothing at all to date it by?” he asked. “No way of telling where it came from?”

  Hubbard shook his head. “No. As I said, carbon-fourteen dating is useless in its case. We tried thermoluminescence and briefly investigated the possibility of oxygen isotope chronostratigraphy being of any utility, more in hope than expectation. Both just weren’t suitable. The thing lying in water for heaven only knows how long removed a lot of options. We did use electron microscopy to study the striations. We were looking for tool marks.

  “Nothing, which is suspicious in itself. It implies the striations were thermally cut. We consulted some friendly geologists to see if there was any possibility the thing was entirely natural and not a wrought artifact at all. They assured us that there was no reco
rd of porphyry forming anything like this. So, either the striations were smoothed by, well, I can’t imagine … acid, perhaps? Or they were incised with something like a plasma cutter. Neither possibility speaks of great antiquity.”

  “Atlantis?” said Carter. He was sure to smile when he said it.

  Hubbard didn’t smile back. “If I had a dime for every person who’d … What’s the matter, Mr. Carter?”

  Carter’s smile had vanished abruptly as he idly turned the cube in his hands, and happened to look down at it. The face upon which it had been resting when he first saw it was now uppermost. It, too, displayed the dense pattern of apparently semirandom striations cut into the otherwise smooth stone. Running across the striations was a ridge, as high as the striations were deep. Where it crossed them, the striations bent to join it, or perhaps branched from it to head off for themselves. He turned the cube until the beginning of the ridge was in the upper right corner. From there it ran in a straight line of slightly varying thickness down to about a third of the way along from the bottom-right corner on the lower edge as he looked at it.

  In the eye of Carter’s mind, the striations looked a lot like threads.

  His voice was a whisper. He spoke slowly. “When exactly was this thing handed in?” he asked. He put the cube down on its cloth.

  Hubbard looked curiously at him. “It would be four … no, just five months ago now. Why do you ask?”

  That was long after Suydam died. It was impossible. Carter wanted to think it was a coincidence, but that was impossible, too. The ridge, the striations, the bunching of the lines. He would never forget that pattern.

  “I’ve seen something like this before,” he said. It was a partial lie. He had seen something exactly like it before.

  “Really?” Hubbard looked at the cube again, his curiosity reignited. “In a museum? A book? Where?”

  “At a crime scene,” said Carter. “I’d put it back in that bottom drawer again if I were you, Professor, and forget about it. Better still, drop it back in the Atlantic. Atlantis can choke on it.”