Carter & Lovecraft

by Jonathan L. Howard

  * * *

  The position of Owen Worley’s house meant that he and his family saw much of the comings and goings of Waite Road. Generally it was uninspirational viewing; the residents of the street all tended to drive cheap pickups, and once you’d seen one, there was little to differentiate them from one another. What passed as excitement was what happened every few weeks; somebody would turn down there on the assumption that it would be a shortcut to one of the roads to the west. Then they would find that the road led onto an isolated spit of land, and they’d have to turn and come out, feeling shameful for trying to rat run through and being caught out. Owen never failed to smile and wave at the impatient assholes if he was outside when they drove by.

  Yeah, there’d been that guy the other day who’d stopped and actually talked to Worley. He’d been okay, hadn’t taken offense. Most just drove by with their tails between their legs. Once or twice they’d stopped and gotten in his grill, which kind of proved his point. Only an asshole wouldn’t be able to take such a mild piece of hazing as that.

  Recently, he’d noticed an outsider visiting pretty frequently. He drove a red Mazda, and looked a mite like that guy who used to be on MTV a lot, singing a song about running along a road that didn’t go anywhere. He wasn’t a resident, and—apart from service vehicles like the mail—about the only regular visitor. Maybe he was the boyfriend of one of the Waite girls. That kind of made Worley envious.

  The Waite men he’d seen were a real bunch of sad sacks. They looked stupid, with heavy stupid faces and dim stupid eyes. The women, however, were something else again. He’d started telling the guy who stopped the other day, but he’d given Worley a look that made Worley shut up. Well, more fool you, buddy.

  The Waite women weren’t beautiful in that brilliant-toothed, immaculate-hair, movie-and-TV way. They weren’t plain, either, but Worley found it hard to apply words like “pretty” to them. They were something else. “Striking,” maybe. “Attractive,” definitely.

  They didn’t dress up, they didn’t wear much makeup, if any, but Worley would have nailed any one of them if he thought he could get away with it. The oldest looked like she was in her forties, but he’d thought that when he and his wife had moved in opposite Waite’s Bill fifteen years before, so he guessed he just wasn’t very good at gauging how old people were. The youngest he’d seen was maybe sixteen. Maybe. Normally he wasn’t much into jailbait, but holy fuck.

  A couple of weeks before he’d been out front mowing the lawn on a Sunday morning. One of the interchangeable pickups had swung out of the bill’s approach and headed up the slight rise leading west into town. It had stopped more or less in front of him while the driver, a typical Waite man with dead eyes, got out to make sure the load of boxes and junk in the back was properly secured. While he fussed with ropes, his passenger—one of the girls—slouched with her arm out of the window.

  Worley would swear he wasn’t staring. He’d just stopped to wipe his brow. That was all. Just stopped for a minute, and happened to be facing that way. He wasn’t staring.

  The Waite girl looked at him suddenly and it was just as he happened to be looking at her, at her naked arm, at her hair, her profile. It just happened that way. He wasn’t staring.

  She looked him dead in the eye, and she smiled. No. She grinned. It wasn’t a happy, joy-of-life grin, but the grin of somebody who’s just won. A grin of victory. It looked good on her.

  He’d blushed. Big guy like him, and he’d blushed. It was just because of the mowing, though. It had made him hot. He’d turned away as he became aware of a forming semiboner, and walked into the house to get himself a drink.

  He had heard her laughing as the door closed behind him.

  He’d hated it, feeling horny because of her. Jesus, was she even legal? It made him feel like a pervert. Even more so when he beat off thinking of her. Even more so when he imagined her under him as he fucked his wife. Waite’s Bill, just down the little isthmus road. Waite Road, just there at the end. Its proximity itched. He scratched hard.

  But the guy in the red Mazda, no, he couldn’t be the boyfriend of any of them. Worley had seen him drive in alone and, after a few hours, or even overnight, he’d drive out again, still alone. He entertained the idea that maybe one or another of the women was a whore, but that didn’t make sense. Why would they have only one client? Still, the thought of going over there with a fistful of bills and buying a few hours with a Waite woman occupied him for a while.

  Worley was alone today. His wife and daughter were away for the week seeing family in Maryland, so he had the run of the house to himself. He’d taken a few days off to get some work done on the place without falling over his family, and had rapidly sunk into a routine of treating every day like a Sunday. So, there he was on the porch to pick up the mail in underwear and a robe when the red Mazda drove out of Waite’s Bill. He saw it slow at the corner and drive past his house still in first.

  For the first time ever, the driver wasn’t alone. There was another guy in there. He looked disheveled and kind of shocked to Worley’s eye, so out of the norm that it took Worley a second to realize he was looking at Kenneth Rothwell.

  His jaw dropped. That was just weird. What had a guy as rich as God been doing on Waite Road?

  Rothwell didn’t look up—he just carried on looking shell-shocked. The driver, though, Worley had a momentary glimpse of the driver looking across and seeing him there on his porch. Then the Mazda was gone, off up the rise and out of sight. Worley went back inside, shaking his head.

  It nagged at him for the rest of the morning, distracting him from his chores and his work. He drove his car onto the drive to wash it, and then decided he’d rather have lunch first even though it was early.

  He came out to find one of the Waite women half sitting on his car’s hood. No, not one of the women. It was the girl. The one who’d laughed at him. She wore jeans and scuffed blue shoes and a T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra, Worley saw that straightaway. She was dark haired and pale, and her pupils were as black as obsidian. She smiled, and it was a close cousin to that grin that had confused him so much. She slid off the car and walked to him, and he could only stand there foolishly as she did so, his heart speeding, his blood beginning to burn him.

  He felt now, though he didn’t truly apprehend it, what it was that was so attractive about the Waite women, so irresistible to him, at least. They were feral creatures, with the lamina of civilization so thin upon them that they tore it with ease. There was something of an ancient incomprehensible wisdom about them, or knowledge at least, that reeked of the land before the Europeans came, or even before the first Americans came across the land bridge from Asia. A power of ages combined with a vulpine vivacity. The Waite family were animals, just like us all, but unlike the rest of us, the Waite women knew it.

  She stood close by him, and touched him on the forearm, her light fingers stroking his skin, now dense with gooseflesh, as she spoke quietly to him, and he heard no words. Then she led him indoors and he followed dumbly.

  They didn’t spend the afternoon together, no more than a vivisectionist spends an afternoon with a subject upon the operating table. The Waite girl operated upon Worley methodically and without mercy, taking him places darker than the perverse commonalities of a century that thinks it has seen it all. It was pleasure of a virulent kind, with each orgasm a precipice to which she dragged him more reluctantly, again and again until he was broken, and then went quietly afterward.

  She left him at dusk without even telling him her name. She left him dead-eyed and alone with the new vistas she had placed in his mind. He had little coherent memory of seeing a red Mazda leave Waite Road. The day would be nothing but a blur by tomorrow. Soon he wouldn’t even be sure if he’d just gotten very drunk and daydreamed the whole thing. The one thing that would stay with him would be that he had no interest in Waite’s Bill. Why would he care who came and went? It didn’t matter. So little that he’d once been concerned with actually ma
ttered. He would just carry on being Owen Worley, reliable worker, loving husband and father. It had all been revealed as an act to him, and he was good at it, so he would just carry on.

  Reliable.

  Loving.

  He could still hear her laughter.

  Chapter 19

  OUT OF THE AEONS

  “I need some money,” Carter told Lovecraft. “I still don’t have any control over the accounts yet, and I need some ready cash for the investigation.”

  Lovecraft knew Carter was aware of what she thought of the investigation and didn’t bother reiterating it. Instead she said, “How much?”

  Carter slid a printout across the counter.

  She read it, then she frowned and read it again. Then she picked it up, so she could look at it more closely and express her incredulity in its fullest form.

  “You have got to be kidding. What is this thing?”

  “Colt had one made. It’s a copy of an artifact that has the college archaeological faculty stumped, and Colt has an exact copy. Whatever he’s doing, that cube’s got something to do with it. I need one to study.”

  “You don’t think you’re getting a little … paranoid about all this stuff, Dan?” she asked with evident reluctance.

  Carter didn’t have the time or the patience for that right then. “He tried to kill me. I still don’t know how he failed.”

  “What now? He did what?”

  Carter was going to lie about how he’d gotten into Colt’s house and then decided, Fuck it.

  “I broke into his house to search. Found some odd shit, including the twin of this invoice, but nothing out-and-out incriminating. On my way out, I saw Colt from the window. Emily, he knew I was there. I think he’d been planning it. He mimed drowning at me, and then drove off.”

  “That’s not trying to kill…”

  “I couldn’t get out. The place was tight as a drum. No, tighter. Way tighter. The doors were sealed, the windows wouldn’t open. Then the place started to flood.”

  “He flooded his own house?”

  “Yeah. No. He flooded it, but I’m not sure it was water. Or, at least, not water from around here.” Lovecraft was already looking at him like he was a lunatic. What the hell, he thought. In for a penny. “And by ‘around here,’ I don’t mean this state. I mean this universe. I know, I know how this sounds, but I am not a fanciful man. I work on the basis of human behavior and solid forensic evidence. I count being able to swim through somebody’s house without the use of water as pretty compelling evidence that somebody is fucking around with the laws of physics.”

  He looked at her closely. “I don’t even know why I’m worried about you believing this stuff. You already believe it.”

  Lovecraft looked away, finding distraction in the invoice and the clutter of the counter.

  “That’s why Colt freaked you out when he came in here. You had a bad feeling about him, and then he as much as told you that he knew how to buttfuck causality. You were scared because you knew it was true. Well, it is. He almost killed me with that party trick.”

  “How did you get out?”

  Carter felt very tired. It had taken a while, but he was finally running out of adrenaline and reaction was setting in. “I don’t know.” His voice was weary. “I have no idea how I got out of there. I woke up over an hour’s walk away. I don’t know how I got there.”

  Lovecraft’s brow furrowed heavily, and she ran her finger back and forth along one section of the counter. Then she spoke with great reluctance, as if letting out a secret that could never be recalled.

  “Waite’s Bill?” asked Lovecraft.

  * * *

  Carter admitted to being surprised several times in his life, perhaps even stunned on a very few occasions, but he doubted he had ever been honestly astounded, even by recent events. They had happened, and he had dealt with them to the best of his ability. Lovecraft had astounded him. He looked at her as if he’d never seen her before for several seconds. Then he went to the door, locked it, flipped the sign to Closed, and said, “Tell me everything you know.”

  * * *

  Lovecraft was sitting at the small kitchen table in the apartment above the store. Carter couldn’t settle himself enough to sit while she spoke. Instead he stood, and sometimes he paced.

  “Everything … is kind of fucked up,” said Lovecraft. “And by ‘everything,’ I mean everything. Nothing is right, nothing is as it appears. I don’t just mean in some nihilistic, conspiratorial, paranoid kind of way. I mean fundamentally. And the joke is, it used to be worse.

  “Then, back in the twenties, a group of guys figured out what was wrong, and how they could fix it.”

  “Hold on,” said Carter. “You keep saying things were wrong. What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, things were out of kilter. What you’ve experienced, but a lot worse.”

  “No,” said Carter. “No, I don’t buy that. That kind of shit would be all over the history books and old accounts.”

  “A lot of it is,” said Lovecraft quietly. “The ‘Age of Superstition.’ But most of it was hidden or dismissed and, afterward, it got hard to remember it in any case. You want to hear about these guys or not?

  “So, there was already a high level of background weirdness. These people, they were already sensitive to it, and then Charles Fort had published The Book of the Damned just after the First World War, which just made concrete a lot of their fears. They corresponded with Fort, met with him secretly.”

  She paused. Carter’s brow had furrowed at the first mention of Charles Fort, and the furrowing had deepened at the second.

  “If you have no idea who Charles Fort was, just say so,” said Lovecraft.

  “I have no idea who Charles Fort was.”

  “Fine. He wrote a bunch of books that suggested that science wasn’t all that, and that it—and we—might be missing a few tricks. That there might be more things in Heaven and Earth than you can see through a telescope or a microscope or in a particle accelerator.”

  “Religion?”

  “Not really.”

  “Magic? He believed in magic?”

  “Not necessarily, but he didn’t disbelieve it, either. That’s the important thing. Fort was all about keeping an open mind.

  “Anyway, they discovered there was a way to wind things back, to cover up the holes in reality where it had worn thin. You have to bear in mind that quantum theory was a new thing back then. A lot of mathematicians and physicists hated it, because it damaged the solidity of Newtonian physics. Einstein didn’t like it, Schrödinger hated it. The thing about Schrödinger’s cat was an argument against quantum theory, not to show how cool it was. He was another one who got pulled into the little circle of guys who could see things were already bad, and that something had to be done.”

  Carter looked at Lovecraft, coldly appraising her. The enthusiastic bibliophile and businesswoman was absent. Now her whole demeanor was of somebody carefully explaining how they had accidentally killed your mother, and trying to make you understand it was out of her control. Every fact had to be defined, annotated, restated to avoid ambiguity.

  “Who are these ‘guys’ you keep talking about?” asked Carter.

  Lovecraft said nothing for a long moment. Then, very reluctantly, “One was Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The writer. My ancestor. The other was his friend. Randolph Carter.” She looked sideways at Carter. “Your great-great-great-uncle. He’s there in your family tree, if you want to look. You wanted a connection between you and this bookstore. There it is.”

  “You said Randolph Carter was fictional.”

  “I half thought he was. H. P. L. made some reference to him in his private journals that were inferred to mean he was using the name as a pseudonym for somebody he didn’t want to name, borrowing the name from his fiction. Turns out, no, he meant what he said.

  “Between them they did something. There are no surviving notes to explain what, but they did it on Waite’s Bill, and it changed
everything. Not in a rhetorical sense. They changed everything.

  “When it was explained to me by my uncle Alfred, he called it a ‘perceptual twist.’ A different perspective that works for everything, and is entirely objective. They imposed a new paradigm.”

  “Just like that? They changed reality in their lunch hour?”

  Lovecraft glared at him. “You just don’t understand how fucked up it was. It took years to prepare, but only a few hours to do. Believe me, The Twist was waiting to happen. They just shoved it a little way down Entropy Hill, and it settled there really happily.”

  Carter heard “The Twist,” and didn’t think of a dance craze. He thought of Hammond. “So explain Colt.”

  Lovecraft shrugged. “Maybe really happily was an exaggeration. H. P. L. and Randolph, they were doing what nobody had ever tried before. What nobody had even attempted. There’d been a few people down the centuries who had misgivings about things, but they usually lived in times where saying it would be the same as saying, ‘Hey, everyone! God fucked up!’ Not real clever.

  “It wasn’t perfect. Maybe it’s possible to push back here and there if you can see the flaws in the original Twist. I think that’s what Colt’s doing. Everything rests pretty much on probability, and probability is his main thing, from what you’ve told me.”

  “Why Waite’s Bill? Why is it so important?”

  “I don’t know. I only know it gets a lot of mentions in H. P. L.’s notes. He never says why it’s important. He knew why it was, and didn’t bother noting it. I wish he had. When you said you’d followed Colt there, I knew where it was all going.”

  Carter walked up and down once more. He was trying to control his anger, but it was difficult because he didn’t know where the anger was coming from. Maybe it was because Lovecraft had deliberately kept him in the dark. Maybe it was because he believed what she was saying and really didn’t want to. Either way, the anger got away from him.

  “This is such bullshit,” he said. “I’m out of this. You want the store? It’s yours. I’ll give you a good price for my half, and then I am done.”