Lovecraft looked at him as if he were an imbecile child. “Yeah. Right. This is absolutely something you can walk away from.”
“I have nothing to do with this, and I didn’t even know my ‘fictional’ great-great-great-uncle did until you just told me. I don’t have a dog in this fight, Emily. I am walking away.”
“Tell me how that works out for you when you get dragged back into it again. Dan, don’t be a fucking idiot. There’s somebody out there who wants you involved. They won’t let you walk. They pulled you into the Belasco investigation. They’ll do it again the very next time Colt does his numbers voodoo.” She laughed bitterly. “Or maybe they won’t have to. What do you think Colt’s doing right now? He set out to kill you, and you escaped. That makes you a double threat. You were enough of a problem for him to want to kill you already, but now you wiggled out of it in a weird way, and he’s going to be wondering how the actual fuck you did that.”
“I don’t know how…”
“I know! He doesn’t. No Scottish giant is going to walk in here and tell you you’re a wizard, Dan, but Colt’s going to be pretty worried that’s exactly what you are.”
“A wizard. Fuck’s sake, Emily…”
“Colt breaks basic physical laws to do what he does. If that isn’t magic, what is it? And if it is—for want of a better term—magic, what does that make him? It’s not about pointed hats and Gandalf, man. It’s about lifting some heavy math and somehow being able to see through The Twist. He doesn’t see things as they appear. He sees them as they really are—profoundly fucked and held together with one Band-Aid.
“Look, H. P. L. was a romantic. He wanted there to be magic in the world. He hated how science had overwhelmed it. Wait a minute.” She went to the bookshelves in the apartment and took down a black volume. “This is a fragment of a novel he really wanted to write, but he never did. Wrote less than five hundred words of it, and never any more. Listen to this.” She found the page, and started to read.
“When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped Earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away for ever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.”
She closed the book and looked at Carter. “You get that? That’s the opening to Azathoth. That’s a love letter to magic. He wrote it in the early twenties. And he went off to find real magic with his pal Randolph Carter. They found it. And—what do you know?—then they spent years trying to destroy it again. They saw stuff, Dan, and it made them decide that science was boring, but better.”
Carter stopped pacing. He pulled up a chair and sank into it, defeated. “Fuck. Why couldn’t I have inherited a bar instead?”
“So,” said Lovecraft. She watched his face carefully. “What are you going to do?”
“Do? Same as I was before. I’m going to close Colt down before he hurts anyone else. None of this changes that. I don’t care if he is offing people with pixie dust instead of a gun like a good American; he tried to kill me, and he came into the store to threaten you with math and philosophy. The motherfucker’s going down.”
“My hero.”
“Yeah.”
* * *
Lovecraft was counting out bills from the cashbox in the store while Carter looked on with interest.
“That’s a lot of money to hold in petty cash,” he said. By his guess, there had to be somewhere around ten thousand dollars in the box.
“It isn’t petty cash. It’s for buying books off the books, if you follow. Some dealers want cash in hand. They can be kind of secretive.” She looked at the amount on the invoice again, swore under her breath, and carried on counting. “What do you want this thing for, anyway? Colt’s a dick, but he’s also a very smart, very talented mathematician. I don’t think you’d be able to just say, ‘Abracadabra,’ and do the shit he does.”
“I’ve got a theory about the pattern on it, but I’m going to need a copy as a reference.”
“Just the pattern? Did you really have to have your copy in aluminum, too?”
“The file was already set up for the metal sintering process. Redoing it for plastic would have been a false economy. Besides, this way it’s good and solid and won’t deform. Plus, if push comes to shove, I can beat him to death with it.”
“I didn’t hear that,” said Lovecraft. She snapped an elastic band around a roll of bills and handed it to him. “This is coming out of your side of the business.” She took a small pad from the cashbox, arranged a sheet of carbon paper in it, and started writing heavily with a ballpoint.
“Here’s a thing,” said Carter, pocketing the money, “unless he had a secret hiding place somewhere, I didn’t see Colt’s cube in his house.”
“You think he carries it with him? Maybe in his car?” She finished writing and slid the pad and pen across the counter to Carter. “Receipt. Sign right there.”
“Maybe.” Carter took up the pen and signed. “But I don’t think so. I think he does his heavy-grade juju somewhere safe, and the cube’s there.”
Lovecraft nodded. She didn’t need it spelled out for her. “That’s not a plot of land with a wholesome history. Maybe you can fix Colt without having to do it on his home turf?”
“That’s the way I was thinking. I don’t plan to go back there,” said Carter, but it was a lie.
He couldn’t see any way of finally concluding matters without going back there. Colt was the immediate problem, but Waite’s Bill was one going back decades, generations, maybe centuries, maybe even longer. Mathematical genii come and go, but the land lives on. There was something wrong about that place. The “Perceptual Twist” had occurred there, and it seemed it could be at least partially twisted back there. It was where parallel lines met, and circles meekly allowed themselves to be squared. It was the dark heart of esoteric fuckery, and Carter would bring his judgment down upon it.
Chapter 20
THE PURPLE KEY
The cube was ready a week later. Carter returned to Providence after spending the last few days working in New York, picked the cube up from the Material Sciences laboratory, and took it back to show Lovecraft. They studied it over lunch at the Italian restaurant a two-block walk from the bookstore.
“It’s … heavy” was Lovecraft’s first comment.
“It’s about nine pounds of aluminum.”
“Make a good paperweight.” She put it on the tabletop, and gently pushed down on one corner. It rocked. Lovecraft tried it on every face, but it wouldn’t sit stably on any of them. “Maybe not such a good paperweight. What the hell is wrong with the angles in this thing?”
“Weird, isn’t it? Not a good idea to look at it for too long, either. Or think about it too much.”
Lovecraft looked at him suspiciously, then pushed away the cube as if it were a cup of coffee she’d just discovered was poisoned. “You’re saying it’s part of The Twist?”
“I think it’s pre-Twist. That’s the way the world used to be before our folks changed things. That wasn’t affected somehow.” He looked at it closely, and ran a finger along a grooved edge. “Why it wasn’t affected is another question.”
“I have a theory,” said Lovecraft, “if you want to hear it? It’s got a long line of coincidence in it, but coincidences just ain’t as rare as they used to be around here. Okay, try this. How about the original of this cube, the thing that’s sitting in a filing cabinet at Clave, was in the hands of H. P. L. and Randolph way back when. How about it was the key to causing The Twist in the first place. In the stories, Randolph has some weird psychic talents. Specifically, he can Dream, with a capital ‘D.’ There’s a place called the Dreamlands, and only special people can get there. Randol
ph’s one of them. He also has a thing called the ‘Silver Key’ that allows him to go to the Dreamlands in his physical body.”
“What are these ‘Dreamlands’ like?”
“In H. P. L.’s writing, they’re kind of high fantasy, but more like The Thousand and One Nights of Scheherazade than Conan the Barbarian. Thing is, maybe that’s all projection on H. P. L.’s part. He was desperate to write some Arabian Nights kind of stuff. Remember that opening to Azathoth I read you? That’s the kind of story it was leading into. He was a huge fan of a writer called Dunsany, a British lord no less, who wrote these pseudo-ancient tales with a synthetic mythology. H. P. L. wrote a few stories set in these Dreamlands, but they were very Dunsany in style. I wonder if he used the experiences of his friend as a framework to write the kind of fiction he wanted to.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to get at. The Dreamlands never existed?”
“Oh, I think they did, and do. But they’re not like H. P. L. portrayed them. And the Silver Key?” She nodded at the cube.
Carter laughed. “This is only silver because the copy’s made from aluminum. The original’s a kind of purple color.”
“Yeah, because H. P. L. would surely have called it the ‘Purple Key,’ he being such a stickler for accuracy. He wasn’t much of a literary stylist, but give him some credit, Dan. The point is, it’s a key—maybe … probably—and Colt has figured out how to use it.” She glanced at the cube and snorted humorlessly. “Time was, if the forces of evil wanted an artifact, they had to do it the old-fashioned way, with hooded cultists breaking in during the night, killing at least one guard with a ritual dagger that they leave behind for no reason, and then stealing the original. These days, you just laser scan the fucker and build a copy in a 3-D printer. Yay, twenty-first century.”
Carter stirred his cooling cannelloni with his fork. “So, your theory is a literary one? I was hoping for something practical.”
“No, the literary thing was just me not staying on the subject. The theory isn’t too practical, either, but it might explain what happened. I think H. P. L. and Randolph got their hands on the original.”
Carter shook his head. “It was recovered from the seabed.”
“So? Doesn’t mean it was down there eighty or ninety years ago. Work with me on this. Look, they get their hands on the Silver Key—which is purple, but what the hey?—and they create the Perceptual Twist, stabilizing the world. But they have a problem. Anyone with the Key can twist it back, or worse, use it for evil ends, yes? So, they got rid of it. Took a boat out and heaved it over the side. Problem solved, they thought.”
“Why didn’t they destroy it?”
Lovecraft grimaced; she was well into guessing territory now. “Two reasons. One is porphyry is hard. That’s not such a reason, though. I’m sure a cold chisel and a mallet would still have broken it up just fine. The main reason is that it’s ancient. These guys, they were romantics. H. P. L. especially was in love with the past. They couldn’t destroy a thing like that any more than they could take a pickax to the Rosetta Stone.
“What they had no way of knowing was that, in a few years’ time, deep-sea drag trawling would be a thing, and the cube’s final resting place wouldn’t be looking so final anymore. That is my theory … it is mine, and it belongs to me, and I own it, and what it is, too.”
Carter looked at her, stunned.
“Sorry, that was kind of abstruse of me,” said Lovecraft. “You’re not a fan, huh?”
“Son of a bitch,” he said finally. “It was right there. Right in front of me. Everything was perfect in Colt’s house, not a thing out of place, except for a Blu-ray. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Have you seen it?”
Lovecraft shook her head. “I don’t know Python that well. Not much of a fan, but I always liked that dinosaur sketch. It stuck with me.” She shrugged. “So, go on, tell me about The Meaning of Life. What’s it got to do with anything?”
“It’s a set of sketches, really, but there’s one with this fat guy, beyond obese, gets conned into eating just a tiny bit too much by a waiter who hates him.”
“He throws up?”
“He’s spent the whole meal throwing up. That’s why the waiter hates him. No, he explodes.”
Lovecraft’s jaw dropped. “Oh, shit. You are kidding me? That’s what he did to the guy in Atlantic City? Death by Monty Python?” She shook her head in disbelief. “Colt’s broken in the head.”
“He’s definitely sociopathic.”
“A sociopath with the key to creation.” She looked at her penne all’arrabbiata “I don’t feel so hungry anymore.”
“We have a copy of the key, too.”
“You figure out how to use it, Dan, and I’ll start cheering then. Meantime, this is like one of those old Star Trek episodes where some kid or somebody has godlike powers, but the kid’s an asshole.”
“How do those stories finish?”
“Far as I remember, something else godlike turns up to sort them out. Deus ex typewriter, because the writer has come up with an unbeatable bad guy and written himself into a corner. Kirk and his crew, they’re all about damage reduction for a TV hour before another godlike being shows up and says, ‘Hey, dude. Not cool.’ Kind of lame, really.”
“I don’t think a godlike being is going to show up and sort Colt out for us.”
“Maybe it’s you, Dan. Maybe it’s me. Maybe we’ll figure out how to use the cube. Maybe we just beat him to death with it like you said. That’d work for me.”
* * *
As they walked back, Lovecraft nodded at the messenger bag slung over Carter’s shoulder that contained the cube. “So what are you planning to do with that, anyway? Spend a few days meditating over it until you get superpowers?”
“Yeah, I doubt it’s going to be as convenient as that. Nice thought, though. No, there’s something about the pattern on it that reminds me of something. I’m going to ask around, see what I can turn up.”
Lovecraft snorted. “Dan, don’t be an asshole. If you have a lead, spit it out. I’m on Colt’s radar as much as you.”
“True. That’s true. Okay. You’ve heard of the Child-Catcher?”
Lovecraft stopped dead in the street. “You are fucking kidding me?”
Carter stopped a couple of paces farther on and looked back at her. “You’ve heard of him, then?”
“Don’t dick with me. He was news all over the country. That man was evil. What’s he got to do with anything?”
Carter nodded to suggest they carry on walking, and Lovecraft did so, though shocked and unhappy. “I thought he was evil, too. Then I started to think maybe he was mad more than bad. I’m starting to think maybe he was neither.”
“Meaning what?”
“I’m wondering if he was … I don’t know what to call it. Differently sane?”
“He cut up little boys while they were alive, Dan.”
“He vivisected them. Every case like this I’ve worked or heard of, the motive was invariably—invariably—psychosexual. Suydam, the Child-Catcher, he was different. No sexual motivation was ever proved, and we had his house, his notes, everything. We had the man’s mind all mapped out. It wasn’t about sex. It was about science. Fucked-up science, and he was no scientist, but he thought he was onto something. Whatever he found, or thought he found, he tabulated the thing. Made a big-ass diagram of it.”
“How does that tie him to Colt?”
“I’ve been working hard to forget what I saw in Suydam’s house, but his diagram, his findings … they looked a lot like the markings on the cube.”
Lovecraft said nothing, but her body language was taut.
“I could be wrong,” continued Carter. “I didn’t look at the wall with Suydam’s big theory on it for longer than I had to. I don’t think I’m wrong, though. I’ll call in some favors, see if I can get an accurate copy or photos of it. Then we can compare it and maybe get an idea what Colt sees. Suydam’s notes never made much sense, but combine
d with what we know now, maybe we can shake some out.”
“Dan,” said Lovecraft, “have you ever thought of just shooting Colt?” Carter started to laugh, but then he looked at her. She was quiet and serious.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” he said.
He didn’t say no.
* * *
Carter called New York CSU the next morning from his office in Red Hook, and asked for Peter Hurwitz.
“Hi, Dan!” said Hurwitz, pleasurable surprise evident in his voice. “Good to hear from you. How are things down among the gumshoes?”
“Not so bad, providing you like divorce work.”
“And do you?”
“Not as much as I thought I might. Look, Pete, I was wondering if you could help me out with something. It’s okay—I don’t want to borrow a mass spectrometer or anything like that.”
“You can always ask,” said Hurwitz. “Just don’t take it to heart if I have to say no, that’s all.”
“It’s about the Suydam investigation. I’m … having a few problems putting it in the past. The way things went down, I know it sounds stupid, but I kind of need some closure from it all, you know?”
There was silence for a few seconds. “I never got to say how sorry I was about Charlie,” said Hurwitz.
“Yeah. Charlie’s part of why I’m having trouble with it. We lucked out and then he ended up dead for no good reason. Wasn’t the way it was supposed to work out. I’ve been going through the notes I still have, and it’s helping. Seeing how we could have found Suydam through police work. It helps.”
“Dan, I’m not sure that sounds healthy.”
“Maybe not, but I’m sleeping better for it. At the time, I never tried to understand Suydam. He was just a son of a bitch and that was the long and the short of it. I think I’m ready to do that now.”
“What are you asking for?”
“The psycho wall. One of your team mapped it, didn’t they?” There was no reply, just the sound of Hurwitz breathing. “I’d like to see the notes, if I could. I have pictures, but they’re not detailed enough to see the labels, or even the whole wall at once.”
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