Carter & Lovecraft

by Jonathan L. Howard

  “Fine,” said Colt. He said it in the peevish tones of a man bullied into doing the washing up. He picked up the cube from the table with markedly less enthusiasm than he had shown in the past. “Fine, I’ll go after them, but I’m not going alone.”

  “Course not,” said Charity. She smiled and his flesh crept.

  * * *

  Lovecraft had been dismayed when she found she couldn’t turn the Zippo’s flame down. “Why the hell not?” she had said as she looked for some sort of control. “Every lighter I’ve ever seen had a little doohickey on it. What the fuck, Zippo?”

  “Those are propane or butane,” said Carter, who used to smoke. “That’s a naphtha lighter. You can’t control it the same.”

  “I never thought my life might come down to what kind of lighter I could get my hands on,” said Lovecraft. The flame was dying. There couldn’t be more than a minute left in it.

  “We need to keep moving,” said Carter.

  The flame flickered.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said Lovecraft. “That was a breeze. That was a breeze, right? That’s not just it running out of gas?”

  Carter looked into the darkness. He could smell salt water. He tried licking his finger and holding it up. The pad felt cold after a moment. “There’s a breeze,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  His sense of direction was completely shot. He’d always flattered himself on keeping track of which way was north even on cloudy days when he couldn’t see the sun, but this was like a funhouse maze. The tunnel had split, split, split again, and if he had met the fucking Minotaur coming the other way, it would not have surprised him.

  The floor sloped up and down, and he was confident that it could easily have gained or lost—he had no idea which—enough depth to be crossing back over itself for all he knew. The feel of cool air was something new, however. Unless the Waites had left their front door open and the breeze was coming in from the cellar, then he knew he was heading away from them. That was good. That there was a breeze was also good; that meant they were above the water level and, he guessed, heading for someplace-out-of-doors. He hoped they were off the spit and would come out in somebody’s backyard. That would be the best.

  Then they saw light ahead, gleaming from the smooth, glassy surface of the melted rock, and Lovecraft clicked out the guttering Zippo with a sigh of relief. Carter signaled her to halt for a moment while their eyes grew accustomed to a natural light far brighter than the Zippo’s flickering flame, then to follow as he advanced, the Beretta braced in both hands, leading the way along his eyeline.

  The tunnel jinked and they suddenly saw the exit. It wasn’t the ending of the tunnel, but more as if the tunnel had grazed the surface, leaving a gap in its wall. Carter once again thought how organic the way had been, and how it did not feel like a human tunnel—a way of getting from here to there—but instead the by-product of the passage of something else, something he did not even care to make conjectures upon because he doubted he would like any solid conclusion that might form from the evidence.

  Besides, it didn’t matter. There was a way back to the surface, and that was all they needed. They could get out into the city, make contact with Harrelson, and formulate a new plan. Carter liked the idea of filling the back of a pickup with Molotov cocktails and burning every fucking house on Waite Road down to the foundations.

  They made their way to the exit cautiously, both because the light of the day was so intense on their eyes and because there was a good chance the Waites knew about the exit and might have people waiting.

  At the edge of the opening Carter paused, his back braced against the curved wall of the tunnel, his eyes wide to become as accustomed as possible to the light, then narrowed them as he swung out suddenly, gun up, safety off.

  He looked at the cityscape before him. There was no sign of the Waites.

  “Oh, shit,” he breathed.

  Lovecraft looked fearfully at the expression of frozen horror on Carter’s face. “Are they there?” she asked in a loud whisper. Carter didn’t answer, so she risked a peek. What she saw made her freeze, too.

  They were on the edge of the city. It just wasn’t her city. It was hard to believe it was anyone’s city. It sprawled like a spreading infection under a daylight moon, and even that was a terrible blight upon the heavens. Clumsily bisected as if by the action of a petulant, idiot god, the two halves of the moon clung together by their mutual gravity and tumbled slowly across the sky of an alien Earth.

  She ducked back into the tunnel. The tunnel she could deal with, just so long as she didn’t think too hard about how it might have been made. The city, though …

  “I’ve seen it before,” said Carter in an undertone that Lovecraft could only just catch.

  “It’s wrong,” said Lovecraft with furious emphasis, as if it were Carter’s fault that the wrong city was outside. “It’s all wrong. The proportions, it’s … What do you mean, you’ve seen it before? In what fucking nightmare did you see that ants’ nest before?”

  “When I…” He hesitated. He’d seen it twice, hadn’t he? Once when he first visited Waite Road and again when he escaped Colt’s house and ended up at Waite Road again somehow. It was hard to be sure. The sensation of it, the experience had been so similar, and so alien, on both occasions he had done what he could to remove the memory by inattention, just like he tried to erase his dreams. It hadn’t entirely worked; the edges were gone, but the aberrance of the sight still seeped through his mind, liquid and electric. There was no mistaking it now, though. It wasn’t a dream. It was real, and Carter fought to stop the sensation of everything he thought he knew about the everyday act of existing sheering away from him like a panorama made from jigsaw pieces, caught in a hurricane.

  “We can’t go there.”

  “No,” said Lovecraft. She had made no further attempt to look at the city, anomalous in so many ways. “We can’t.”

  Both of them meant that they shouldn’t, that they mustn’t.

  Carter spotted movement in one of the long unglazed windows of a twisting tower.

  “We should go.”

  Chapter 29

  MEDUSA’S COIL

  They returned to the tunnel and left the exit behind them, because it was no exit at all: only an entrance into something that would complicate their already complicated lives beyond any human ability to deal with.

  The Zippo refused to light, its reservoir finally dry, and they were compelled to travel blind, Lovecraft volunteering to go first, arms waving, one foot tapping ahead, afraid of a sudden drop. Carter walked close behind her, his left hand on her shoulder and the other pointing the Beretta ahead. If something happened, he would pull her back and fire, the muzzle flash providing him with an idea of what the danger was and leaving him with a single round with which to deal with it if need be. It was a shitty sort of tactic for a shitty sort of situation, and Carter felt like he was a kid again, playing War with the neighborhood kids and coming up with stupid tactics that sounded pretty cool to a seven-year-old.

  “It’s not a natural tunnel,” muttered Lovecraft under her breath, “so there shouldn’t be any sudden drops.” But she kept testing ahead with one foot anyway.

  She thought she was developing some sort of sixth sense—she was prepared to believe almost anything by this point, slippery slope for her mental stability though it was—when she saw the tunnel curve ahead of her, the bend rimed in the dimmest light. Then Carter asked, “Is it getting lighter again?” and she didn’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed that, despite everything else, she wasn’t developing extrasensory perception. Or, if she was, so was Carter, and where was the pleasure in that?

  The tunnel opened out dramatically, and the neat striations in the wall became chaotic and smeared, as if whatever had excavated the way so far had been reduced to running around and around to create the larger space. It still looked organic, and it was far from perfectly formed, the floor being a rolling surface like the slow heave of a lake sudden
ly turned to stone.

  The chamber showed three or four other exits; it was hard to be exact since some gaps in the wall might have been the beginnings of new tunnels or just a redundant extra opening into a tunnel that had another farther along. The chamber had in no way been designed, not even in the impromptu way of miners. It was an abscess in the earth, boiled around the glowing thing in its center.

  “Oh,” said Lovecraft as she saw it, “what is that?” She said it in a faint tone of complaint, as if to say the universe was simply being unreasonable now and she would like a return to some sort of decorum.

  Carter couldn’t say. He didn’t want to look at it, but he also knew he couldn’t look away. It was some twenty feet tall and too complex for his eyes to parse as an object. The one thing that surprised him was that the Perceptual Twist actually looked twisted. A mass of splintered and extruded light, it stood like a piece of a tornado, equal in width at top and bottom, although it had no particular top and bottom but instead bled into light and variation at each end. It neither moved nor stood still, slicing and rolling every iota of sensory data it carried to the observers. Under the liquescent flood of the blistering probabilities, the cortices of Carter’s and Lovecraft’s brains started to misfire, and synesthesia spread through them like roaring-rough blue tear gas.

  Carter was overwhelmed first. He couldn’t understand what he was looking at, what he was experiencing, and his brain had no safety mechanisms built into it to tell it not to even try. More and more of it was assigned to comprehension in a way that brains simply are not supposed to behave, and as it committed to the hopeless task, he became helpless as the higher brain functions were starved of cerebration, his muscles locked, and his heart slowed and stuttered at the edge of fibrillation.

  As his life moderated, his mind quickened. He was standing at the window in the Suydam house, watching the omega, the ending of all things roar toward him with some unseen alpha assuredly traveling in its wake, and he finally understood The Twist, at least a little.

  Colt was wrong. Colt was so very wrong. It was a shame, Carter concluded, that he was going to be snuffed out by the realization before he ever had a chance to tell Colt to his face what a total dick he was.

  Then he was falling, and he blinked reflexively, and he was saved. Lovecraft lay on top of him, slapping him, saying angrily, “Do not look at the Medusa!” as if it had been a considered decision.

  He liked how, at such a time, she could use an allusion like that and realized he was perhaps a little bit in love with her.

  “I’m okay,” he said. His heartbeat settled. He was aware of the feel of fresh air being drawn into his lungs with every breath. He could sense the skin of his lips lying against each other, warm and smooth. He took such landmarks of normality and used them to build a bulwark against the unknowable, an inner campfire within whose circle of light he felt safe and stable, and without those defenses, the other things that threatened his very mind and soul could—with his most sincere best wishes—go fuck themselves. “I’m okay,” he said again, and he was. “You didn’t look?”

  “I did for maybe a heartbeat. That was long enough for a lifetime. Then,” she added pointedly, “I shielded my eyes because I’m not a moron.”

  She helped him to his feet, and he shocked her by immediately looking back at the thing.

  “Man! What are you…?”

  “It’s cool,” he assured her. “I get it now.”

  There was a Perceptual Twist; Carter could see that now, and he appreciated the irony. He was experiencing it right now, but the difference between him and Colt was that he knew it. Using it, he could look at the thing and not die, or go insane, or be turned to stone or a puff of steam or any of the other things it could probably do if you perceived it incorrectly. He liked to think he could look at it without ill effect because he was smart and perceptive, but he had a strong sense that he was kidding himself. You could probably walk a hundred smart and perceptive people through that chamber and ninety-nine of them would end up dead or as good as. The hundredth would be him. There was something else that saved him, and it probably had to do with his ancestor. Carter made up his mind that, if they ever got out of this place, he would read H. P. Lovecraft’s stories of Randolph Carter, because he could do with every little bit of help he could get.

  The thing was bearable now that he had twisted his own perception to underestimate it. Now it was just a very nice special effect. He had to be careful not to consider it a movie special effect, because that would undermine his own confidence in his existence as anything more than a fictional construct. He didn’t want to think about that; he mustn’t think of that. The thing was fractious and might be responsive to even passing whims and random conceits such as that. What if it rendered himself as fictional as he’d thought Randolph was? Was that what had happened to Randolph when the world was twisted all those decades ago? What would happen to Dan Carter when the tale was told and the book was closed?

  No. The thing was an effect without context; as a collection of pretty lights and moving lines he could look at it, even admire it, and still deal with it. It took a mental effort, and the cognitive sensations it caused were new to him, untrained muscles getting their first ever workout. There was a skill developing here, a knack at least, and he remembered Lovecraft—Emily Lovecraft—referring to Randolph Carter as a “practiced dreamer” like it was a job, or a vocation, or even a calling. Daniel Carter, Private Investigator and Practiced Dreamer. He’d need new business cards.

  He was still deliberately distracting himself with such thoughts when Colt and the Waites arrived.

  * * *

  William Colt did not seem happy to be there. Another of the Waite women was with him as they emerged from one of the tunnel mouths on the far side of the chamber, and she, by contrast, seemed pleased enough. She carried an air of languid malevolence with her that made Carter think of a cat, although she was as rangy and raw as a cowgirl in Wyoming. She and Colt were backed by two of the Waite men, dead-eyed and disinterested. Both were armed, one—to Lovecraft’s outrage—with her Mossberg.

  “Give me my gun back, you fucking thief,” she demanded.

  It was a bad start to negotiations, or it would have been if everybody in the room hadn’t already been so polarized in their opinions of one another. As it was, the Waite man looked at the shotgun in his hands as if he hadn’t noticed it before. By a mental process telegraphed through brow and shoulders, he decided the gun was definitely his now and returned it to a position of readiness.

  “Motherfucker,” said Lovecraft.

  “Well, you found it, Dan,” said Colt. He was smiling, but it was a weak smile on a wan face. Carter hadn’t conducted more interviews than he could number without being able to read Colt’s distress easily.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I found it. This is the big deal, huh, Colt? This is what you used to kill a couple of guys and fritz some slots? Wow. What a colossus among us you are.”

  “Slots?” said the woman. She looked at Colt with inquisitive contempt.

  “It was practice,” said Colt. He was sweating, rolling his copy of the cube nervously between his hands. “Probability manipulation. I was just practicing.”

  “Is this what you showed Ken Rothwell?” Lovecraft was speaking, avoiding looking directly at The Twist. “Is this what you did to him?”

  “Rothwell?” Colt was astonished by such an idea. “You think I’d show some politician something as beautiful as this? No, Miss Lovecraft. Your boyfriend never came here.”

  “Your boyfriend?” said the woman. That smile on her face, that damnable smile, that fucking smile. “Why, he didn’t mention you when he lay with my sister.”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  “We didn’t expect him to be so weak, honey. Men break easy, but … why, he just shattered. We were all so surprised. That wasn’t the plan at all.” Her eyebrows raised in false sympathy calculated to infuriate. “Sorry. So sorry.”

  “I will end y
ou,” said Lovecraft.

  “Like you did with my sister? Yeah, Keturah was the one who played with your boyfriend, darlin’. She’s not functionin’ so well at the moment—the second shot, the one to the head, was just rude, so you know—but she’ll be fine soon enough. Then I can tell her what we did with you and Dan here to cheer her up.” The smile was gone. “You can’t ‘end’ us, Emily. You don’t know how.”

  “I do.” Carter said it and, when he had their attention, he slid his eyes to the thing that shouldn’t be in the center of the chamber.

  “Holy shit,” said the woman. She was deadly serious. “Billy. The Fold isn’t fazin’ him. How’s he doin’ that?”

  “The Twist,” said Colt, correcting her in an irritable tic. He shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

  “That sounds pretty fucking ironic coming from your lips, Billy,” said Carter.

  “If it isn’t fazin’ him,” said the woman, “what if he’s understandin’ it?”

  “Shut up, Charity,” said Colt.

  “Charity?” said Lovecraft. “Really?”

  “What if I am?” said Carter. “What if I understand it as well as you, Colt? Better, maybe?”

  “You can’t,” Colt said, his face taut. His was the face of a jealous lover seeing his woman walk away on the arm of another man. “You can’t. How can you? You’re just some ignorant, stupid cop. You can’t understand anything, never mind something as beautiful and profound and mathematical as—”

  “How about if my great-great-great-uncle used to do this shit for a living, Colt? What if it’s genetic? What if math is the idiot’s way of doing it?”

  “Carter.” Charity said it under her breath. Then louder, “Randolph Carter? That was your…? Oh, fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck! Billy! Stop him!”

  Carter found the change in her expression from comfortably in control of the situation to full panic gratifying. He would have found it more so if he had the vaguest idea how to actually do what he had just suggested he could. The man with the Mossberg raised it to fire at Carter, but Charity knocked the muzzle down with the flat of her hand.