Carter & Lovecraft

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Lovecraft flinched and made an incoherent sound that might have been a gasp or may have been a half word to stop Carter, uttered too late.

  “Look at it,” he said, and it was not plain whether he meant the scene or the body. “Look at the blood. Look at it all. The color. I didn’t kill anyone. Not anything human.”

  Now in the silence, they heard the heavy footfalls above as the Waite men, implacable and entirely expendable, came to avenge their kin.

  * * *

  The Beretta had two rounds left in it. Lovecraft had felt nervous about having one in the chamber, but Harrelson had talked her into it. It was as well that he had, as it broadened their narrow chances from hopeless to almost hopeless. Still, the thought We have a bullet each came sliding into Carter’s mind like a snake. It wouldn’t come to that, he chastised himself, but then he thought of stolid, solid, reliable, last-man-who-would-ever-put-a-gun-in-his-mouth Charlie Hammond doing exactly that.

  “Any more ammo?” He could see they’d taken her jacket, which he knew she’d stored the two spare magazines in, but he was hopeful she might have moved them to elsewhere on her person as she’d done with the pistol.

  “No. And they took my bag,” Lovecraft reminded him.

  “Okay.” Two bullets and a knife. He was beginning to regret delivering the coup de grâce to Keturah Waite on purely logistical grounds. They could hear that the rumbling of steps above them had quieted.

  Colt’s voice upstairs was just about discernible. He sounded hysterical and muffled by at least one closed door between him and the hallway where the trapdoor stood open. Then, very clearly, somebody racked a shotgun. A live shell clattered onto the floor; there was scrabbling to recover it, and a sharply whispered admonition not to rack a shotgun when it already has a live shell in the chamber.

  Carter’s face tightened. A shotgun in the confined space did not seem like a survivable scenario. Lovecraft was ahead of him.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said, and she was looking at the hole in the wall as she said it.

  “Take this,” he said, handing her the knife, “and go. I’ll cover us.”

  She stuck the knife through her belt and clambered through the jagged hole into darkness. “Does she have a phone on her?” she called back. “Or him? It’s pitch-dark back here, we’re going to need light.”

  “Fuck,” muttered Carter, and quickly searched the man. He was still alive, and watched Carter’s face with a strange, childish obsessiveness. He had no phone, but he did have a sheath knife and a battered old Zippo gas lighter. As he moved to check Keturah’s body, the man gently caught his wrist. Carter started, and gripped the knife hard, ready to strike. But the man just looked up at him and said quietly, “Thanks … thanks…” Then he seemed to lose interest, and looked away.

  Unused to being thanked by somebody who had been involved in his kidnapping, Carter turned to Keturah. It was impossible not to end up with her blood on him. The pool around her was bigger than she was by a couple of feet all around her, and better than an inch deep where the depression in the imperfect floor had caused it to collect. He felt it soaking through the knees of his pants as he kneeled by her, saw it smear and color his hands as he went through her pockets. It didn’t feel warm, and Carter guessed the rock floor was draining the heat from it rapidly. But it didn’t feel like blood, either. He’d had the misfortune to get the stuff on him too many times in the past, and this blood was not what he was used to. It felt thin and oily, and the distinct and foul smell of normal blood wasn’t there at all. Instead, there was a faint acidic tang to it, like vinegar.

  He pushed these observations from his mind and concentrated on the task at hand. She did have a phone, but it was an old-style handset with a gray LCD screen and a dim backlight. It would be no use as a flashlight.

  As he started to get to his feet, Keturah’s eyes opened. They rolled lazily in their sockets for a moment and then settled, staring at him. The .380 hole in her forehead was clearly defined, and the dark within showed it had penetrated the skull. She couldn’t have survived it. It wasn’t possible. So much wasn’t possible.

  She smiled at him, a sneering, triumphant rictus, and she said something, but the syllables were thick and liquid, and Carter couldn’t have reproduced the sounds her throat made if he had heard them a thousand times. Her eyes rolled up in her skull and she lay still. Then Carter noticed her chest moving slow and rhythmically. She had been gutshot, headshot, had bled out more than she should have had in her, and she was breathing.

  Shaken, he got to his feet and backed away from her.

  “Did you find a phone?” asked Lovecraft from the dark.

  “I got a Zippo,” he said, working hard to keep the shakes he could feel in his legs and his guts out of his voice. “It’ll have to do.”

  He climbed over the lip of the hole and into the darkness.

  Chapter 28

  THE HUNTED IN THE DARK

  Lovecraft and Carter moved as quickly as they dared in the uneven and claustrophobic tunnel. Lovecraft had taken the Zippo to guide their way, but the metal casing grew hot quickly and she could only use it for a minute or so before plunging them into darkness while the brass grew cool enough to handle again. The tunnel was not at all regular in its construction, but wound both left and right, and sometimes up and down. They had lost the slightest glimmer of light from the tunnel entrance in the first minute of crouched scurrying in the low, oddly organic tube cut through the bedrock of Waite’s Bill. Carter noticed and then purposefully ignored the curious walls of the near circular tunnel, how there were no obvious tool marks but only fine striations marking the surface like ribs, as if some unimaginable machine had melted an inch or so of the tunnel and halted to get rid of the molten debris before repeating the process again and again and again. The enforced moments of stillness in the dark were unwelcome and unnerving for them both; all it left them was the sound of their breathing, the touch of the striated wall against their palms as they steadied themselves, and a faint chemical smell, musty and acrid, unlike anything else in either of their experiences.

  Carter thought of the tunnel as “organic” in the first instance because of the indiscipline of its path, but presently he realized that when he thought of the “something” that had made it, that “something” had ceased to be a machine in his imagination and become a living creature. Somewhere the excavated rock had been dumped, and he feared that when he saw that spoil heap it would have more in common with a worm casting than a heap of rubble.

  The flint grated, sparks flew, and the dark fled from them to await its next chance.

  “Did you feel that breeze?” said Lovecraft. “Please, God, let this thing open out onto the beach. Somewhere.”

  The last word told Carter she was having the same misgivings as him; Waite’s Bill was not large, yet already they had been walking as rapidly as they could for six or seven minutes in between moments of dark. Even allowing for the winding of the path, they should have passed the edge of the spit of land by now. That meant they must be underwater, but there was no sign of it, no coldness in the air, no condensation or water leaking through the bedrock. They might as well have been wandering beneath the Gobi Desert as the Providence River.

  Then the tunnel split. It did it as easily and, yes, as organically as an artery forking.

  “Keep tending left?” said Lovecraft, and went down the left-hand path without waiting for an answer.

  Keeping moving was obviously the right thing to do; they were being pursued. But were they? In the quiet of the halts both keened their hearing as much as they might, yet neither ever heard the least sound behind them.

  “You know what’s worrying me?” asked Lovecraft during the second break in darkness since they’d taken the left-hand fork.

  “There’s so much to choose from,” said Carter. “Okay, what specifically?”

  “The reason they don’t seem to be chasing us. I have, like, a mental image of a scene from some shitty 1930s
B movie. You know the kind of thing—Fay Wray and some hero with a firm chin have escaped from the bad guy and run off into the forest or caves or a jungle on an alien world. The bad guy’s guards—they all wear silver clothes and stupid helmets—are going to chase them, but the bad guy—I’m thinking of someone like Leslie Banks here—says, ‘No. Those woods or caves or whatever are home to the voracious snorkfangs. Leave them to the snorkfangs!’ And then he laughs, and all his guards laugh because it’s in their job description.”

  “Snorkfangs?”

  “Or whatever.”

  “You think they’re not following because there’s something in these tunnels already?”

  “No. I was just saying it’s like those movies where … Shit, you don’t think something’s in here with us, do you?”

  “No. I don’t.” He forbore to mention his concerns over whatever had made the tunnels. There was no point in frightening Lovecraft.

  “Well, something made these tunnels,” said Lovecraft. She didn’t sound frightened, only angry and determined. “Wish I had my Mossberg. It would be awesome in a tight tunnel like this.”

  “You’re handling this well,” said Carter.

  “I have a little trick. I’m doing my best to pretend this is all some sort of live role-playing thing. It’s all special effects and makeup. You’re handling it pretty well, too. What’s your trick?”

  “I don’t have one,” he said, and as soon as he said it, he realized it was true; he didn’t. The realization startled him. He was accepting it all; the Perceptual Twist, Colt’s ability to take advantage of it, the man who wasn’t a man on the riverside, the Waites and their inhuman nature, the tunnels cut by something other than human tools. He acknowledged it all, accepted it all, assimilated and then acted on it all. It concerned him, but only in the same way as if he’d found out Colt and the Waites were dealing crystal meth and were prepared to kill to protect their trade. The danger was there, and he reacted to it as he would any danger. Its origin seemed not to trouble him at all.

  “I don’t know how that works,” he said. “I should be freaking out, shouldn’t I?”

  “You’re a descendant of Randolph Carter,” said Lovecraft. “I think there’s more to that than just taking his name. In the H. P. L. stories, Randolph Carter’s special. He’s a dreamer in a technical, practical kind of way, and he sees some pretty fucked-up stuff, but he always keeps his sanity. Randolph Carter was a very special little snowflake, and maybe you are, too.” She sparked the lighter into life, tapped Carter on the nose, and grinned.

  * * *

  The injured man and Keturah had been taken up into the main body of the house to be tended to. The man would be fine. Keturah’s brain had been disrupted by the passage of a .380 slug into the skull, where it lacked sufficient energy to escape and had instead ricocheted around inside the brainpan, causing massive damage as it did so. It might even have killed her; she was lucky to survive. They put her to bed in a dark room and left her there. It would take a while, perhaps as long as a couple of months, but her brain would re-form completely and her memory would be patched by the RNA analog stored in her bones. The Waite women were not fragile in any sense.

  In contrast, the injured man was only human, but extended contact with the women was rectifying that. He had to be prevented from trying to push his finger into the bloodless bullet holes, marveling at them as a child does at the socket of the first lost tooth. He would not obey a command to leave them alone, so finally they restrained him, strong leather restraints being a household item on Waite Road.

  Keturah’s place was taken by Charity Waite, who had so recently visited the neighbor Owen Worley to persuade him he had never seen Kenneth Rothwell coming out of Waite Road. Her “persuasion” had been more in the manner of an erasure of the memory, and she had caused Worley much disruption to the workings of his mind and his personality, but that was acceptable. His wife had since separated from him while he “pulled himself together,” but that was never going to happen. He spent his days watching the isthmus now, standing slack-jawed and dead-eyed on his untended lawn, waiting for a sight of Charity. Maybe she’d marry him, she thought. She was, after all, over the age of consent. Far, far over.

  Charity looked around seventeen years old, perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less, right up until the moment one looked into her eyes. They were not the eyes of a young person. If one looked closely enough, they were not the eyes of a person at all.

  She’d sent another of the men down into the cellar room first, the men being both less bothered by damage and generally more expendable. He’d come back with blood on his shoes to report that both Keturah and Richard were shot, and the Lovecraft woman and the Carter man were missing.

  “They’re in the tunnels,” Charity said to Colt. He was sitting on the sofa, clutching a glass of water and shaking. “We’re goin’ t’have to go after them, y’know?”

  “You don’t need me for that,” said Colt. The surface of the water rippled with his tremors. “Send your men after them. You’ve got guns.”

  Charity smiled as if she were talking to an adorably stupid child. “Yeah, we got guns. Trouble bein’ that they’re probably goin’ t’end up at the Fold. You really want a shootin’ match in there?”

  “Twist,” said Colt, glancing up at her. “It’s called the Perceptual Twist.”

  “Semantics, darlin’. They’ll find it, jus’ like they seem t’find every one of our little secrets. They’re special, y’know.”

  “There’s nothing special about them.”

  “We kinda think there is. They’re descendants of the folks who made the Fold … so sorry … the Perceptual Twist back in the day.”

  “They’re not mathematicians. They can’t—”

  “Billy, Billy, Billy. We ain’t mathematicians, either, but we got by with it all these years. It’s not always down to the numbers. Some folk can just feel their way ’round The Twist. We can, and ’less you can tell me how Daniel Carter didn’t die in your house, I’m guessin’ he can, too. Better than us. What if he finds The Twist and ties it up tight, huh? That makes life bad for us, and it turns you back into just another number monkey again. You wanna carry on being a god, you better get your ass down those tunnels and stop them.”

  Only Colt’s mother had ever called him “Billy.” He bridled at Charity’s use of it, but not as badly as at the sudden fear of Carter and Lovecraft somehow strangling The Twist. Charity was supercilious and patronizing, but he forgave her these aspects because she and her extended family had welcomed him here when the indicators—he could hardly call them “clues”—he deciphered from the cube first led him to Waite Road.

  They had known why he had come, had seemed to understand and even anticipate his oblique references to an interest in the history of that little tongue of land. The men were of no use—he was barely aware of the names of any of them, an interchangeable mob of Daves, Bobs, Johns, and Eds—but the women were not the landed trailer trash they first appeared to be. They showed him books, memoirs and diaries, some very old indeed, that told of the land’s past. The women guarded these books with the care they would have given their children, a distinct absence on the street. Colt started to understand the nature of the Waites quickly, and that there never had been and never would be a new generation. At least, not in the conventional sense.

  It should have shocked him, or even just surprised him. But the revelations of the cube had spoken to him and his horizons had not merely broadened, but disappeared. He stood at the precipice above the infinite, and then saw even the precipice was only an illusion. He stood above everything on a pinnacle of self, and he felt secure on that needle, one of only a handful in the world who might, and who had the intelligence and talents to understand what he was seeing and how to manipulate it. The chances of the cube being discovered and by a convoluted path coming to his attention or somebody else like him were infinitesimal. Colt understood that, but it didn’t disturb him. After all, the effects of
the Perceptual Twist made a joke of probability, so he didn’t think long or hard upon the subject. It was nothing but a retrograde effect of the causal ructions he had inevitably made, the anthropomorphic principle writ large in that the observation and the interpretation of that observation were joined at the hip. It had happened because he had used it because it happened.

  Charity did not see fit to tell him the more mundane, and far more horrifying, truth: one of the Waite men, still a Waite if no longer entirely a man, had placed the cube in the deep sea trawl while it was deployed.

  The captain had passed it on to the college because he had been told to and knew far better than to question any orders coming from that quarter. If he had, the best he would have suffered was empty nets until bankruptcy. The worst was the love of a Waite woman, where the terms “love” and “woman” are euphemisms. Contingency plans had been laid to bring it to Colt’s attention if need be, but his natural curiosity and arrogance had led him straight to it. Then it was purely a matter of waiting.

  Charity’s thought processes were in no way human. Where a human mind would pursue a single thought in a train of association and examination, Charity and her sisters maintained a glowing hum of cross-referenced cognitive processes that constantly mapped and modeled possibility and contingency. Elegant and alien, a system once inadequately represented as a frozen moment on a wall in Red Hook. Charity had known there was no possibility of Colt failing to use the knowledge of the cube to his own advantage; she understood him far too well. Once it and he had crossed paths, they only needed to wait until the inevitable day when a red Mazda3 made its way across the isthmus, and William Colt started asking questions. They answered freely, because he never even thought to ask the right questions. They knew he never would, until it was far too late.