Carter & Lovecraft

by Jonathan L. Howard

  “Not in here, you fuckin’ moron! You’ll kill all of us!”

  Carter wasn’t clear whether she meant it was a bad place to fill with shot or hitting The Twist might cause problems, but he was fine with it either way. He had two bullets and four targets, three of whom might as well have been coated in six inches of Kevlar for all the good Lovecraft’s Beretta would do against them. He considered shooting Colt instead, but he couldn’t easily bring himself to kill an unarmed man like that. Fool he might be, but at least Colt definitely was human.

  And Colt was staring at the thing, The Twist, except it wasn’t. He was focused and concentrating on it, and Carter realized what he was doing.

  “Don’t call me ‘Billy,’” said Colt in a disconnected monotone.

  “Don’t do it, Colt,” said Carter. “You’ve been lied to. That thing’s not what you think it is.”

  “That’s weak,” said Colt in the same monotone. The Twist shifted under his gaze. “It’s exactly what I think it is.”

  “Only because you think it. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Colt! Do you understand?”

  “I understand it all,” said Colt, and so demonstrated he understood almost nothing.

  Carter glared at The Twist. He could feel his inner landscape bleeding out, but this time, he let it. The Twist was relaxing, releasing phenomenological and probabilistic shrapnel as it did. Colt sucked on it, not a god but a parasite, an addict at a glory hole. Colt had reified himself a golden calf out of reality’s undercoat and could see it as nothing else. Carter would have pitied him but for Colt being a self-serving fucking idiot.

  For his part, Carter wanted nothing of it. Every iota of ontological radiation The Twist emitted was an indication of growing danger, danger of a kind he was too wise to guess at.

  “For Christ’s sake, Colt! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  It was meant literally, but Colt took it as a challenge, and that error would change everything.

  “No?” shouted Colt over the growing sensory roar they felt and heard and tasted and saw and smelled and that made the pineal glands in their skulls ache under stimulation they had never experienced before. He glanced briefly at the cube in his hand and tossed it to one side; he didn’t need it anymore. “Well, let me show you.”

  And Colt destroyed the world.

  Chapter 30

  THE NIGHT OCEAN

  William Colt reached into the Perceptual Twist. Not physically—nothing so gross as that—or even psychically—nothing so gross as that, either—but conceptually. He looked at a vase and forced himself to see two faces. He looked at an old hag’s portrait and saw a full-length rendering of a pretty girl. He saw two different shades of gray and perceived them as the same. Lines of perception flowed one way, and were reinforced by stanchions of actualization passing the other. The Perceptual Twist untwisted a little further, sending differences of potentiality and probability outward and in, eddying along the seams of Colt’s will.

  “No.” Carter raised Lovecraft’s Beretta and fired twice at Colt’s head at a range of less than five feet. He couldn’t possibly miss, but possibility wasn’t what it was, the laws of ballistics had been hacked, and the bullets fell to the striated floor directly beneath the gun’s muzzle.

  Colt smiled, because he perceived himself to be the victor. Carter snarled, because he knew they were both the losers.

  “You stupid dick,” said Carter. These were the last words of any importance uttered in the world, and summed it up well.

  The Perceptual Twist uncurled, loosened, and potential flowed. Colt laughed at the pleasure of empowerment, what felt to him like natural justice, the mark of a superiority that had been evident to him ever since he was old enough to realize that he was an individual and that he was surrounded by idiots. Now, flanked by two men whose mental processes ran like cold fat, he was the biggest idiot in the chamber, and too much a fool to know it.

  Carter had to stop him. He had no idea how. Bullets hadn’t worked, and he doubted he could get close enough to punch the man; the Waites would be on him before he had a chance. There was only a single chance, and it was no chance at all. Carter looked at The Twist, saw it for what it really was, found sliding planes of reinterpretation on which to lean his mind, and pushed back.

  Colt’s smile vanished instantly. He said nothing—the time for that was passed—but sought to reestablish control of the Perceptual Twist. He bent himself to the task, physically leaning forward as he brought his concentration up.

  Lovecraft was going to a lot of trouble not to look at the warped thing that was the pivot of all worlds, so instead she was looking at the Waite woman Charity and her two kinfolk. She was the only one to see Charity’s expression of horror at the discovery of Carter’s ancestry fade into a deeply satisfied smile. Charity tapped the two Waite men on the shoulders and walked out, going back through the tunnel from which they’d emerged.

  Lovecraft was unsure what to do; Carter and Colt were both staring at The Twist and she was the only one not enthralled by it. Whatever the Waites were up to, it stank, and she was the only one left with her consciousness largely intact to deal with it. With forebodings—and a feeling that such forebodings were pointless because she and Carter were already deep in a world of shit, so how much worse could this get?—she made to follow Charity and her men.

  She left Carter and Colt doing their weird staring match and ducked into the tunnel Charity had retreated along. She no longer needed the Zippo; the tunnel thrummed with light. At least, she thought it was light. She could see, but the colors were not ones she could easily identify and they made her forehead hurt. The black was almost red, and there was a pale green marking out the detail that was occasionally indistinguishable from purple, or perhaps orange. She couldn’t remember what those colors looked like anymore, in any case. She tried to remember what an orange looked like to help her recall the color, but her memory only offered her a cluster of related labels and associations, all devoid of immediate sensory recall, and it was like having an orange described to her over the phone.

  “I’m seeing in the dark,” she muttered under her breath. The sound of her own voice helped ground her, so she continued. “Kind of cool. Okay. It’s cool. I’m down with this. I like seeing in the dark. I’m just not going to think about how I’m doing it. I think I need new words for colors.”

  The light wasn’t stable, however. It pulsed and raced. Lovecraft knew it was something else, that the tunnels, that the world was emitting light that was not light in the sense that she understood it. Light that was not light that she was sensing in a way that was not seeing.

  Her forehead hurt badly, but it didn’t feel like any sort of headache she had ever had before. She had to ignore it. Catch up with Charity Waite. Get her gun back. Save the day. Somebody had to do it, and she wasn’t convinced Carter was going to be the one. Staring contest. Whoever stares at the thing in the chamber longest wins. Yay. Macho bullshit.

  Lovecraft had never made any great claims to her navigational talents and so did not care much that she had no idea where she was. Despite which, whenever she reached a junction she made a choice of which way to go without hesitation and felt sure, truly positive, that she was following the path taken by Charity Waite. “Just follow the smell of bitch,” she said to herself.

  The tunnel twisted abruptly, and she was entering a chamber, but it wasn’t the chamber of The Twist, or even the cellar beneath the end house. It was immense, and she was standing on the rocky beach of a vast subterranean lake, perhaps even a sea. She looked up and saw there were stars, but that was impossible. She was in a cave. They couldn’t be stars. They were stars. There couldn’t be stars in a cave. She rationalized it away, put it down to the strangeness of seeing in the dark. They weren’t stars, merely artifacts of her new way of seeing. It was a lie, she knew it was a lie, but it kept her mind working and what she needed more than anything else in the world right now was not to piss herself with terror and curl
up into a fetal ball. That was a bad thing, she told herself fiercely. Stay focused, Emily Lovecraft. Stay focused, stay sane, find Charity Waite.

  And there she was. On the bare rock escarpment that led down into the sea that was a subterranean lake because it had to be, and fuck those stars because they’re nothing. Charity Waite was naked, her clothes cast aside, detritus from an existence she was shedding as a spider sheds a skin. The two men were also undressing, but slowly and awkwardly; Lovecraft had a feeling they were usually helped to get dressed and undressed. They fumbled with shirt buttons and belt buckles and it was painful to watch. Charity could have helped, but she did not, and ignored them in their patient incompetence.

  “It’s beautiful, ain’t it?” she said over her shoulder at Lovecraft. “The world before. Like turning a page in a book and a pressed flower leapin’ up into life right there in front of you.”

  Lovecraft ignored her. Her Mossberg was lying discarded on the rocky edge; she grabbed it, shouldered it as she’d been taught, and aimed it square at Charity. She could hear her instructor’s words: “Never aim at something or somebody unless you intend to shoot it or them.”

  Fucking A, thought Emily Lovecraft.

  “You’re wastin’ your time, darlin’,” said Charity, unafraid of the weapon. She looked back out to sea. To the lake, Lovecraft reprimanded herself. It’s a lake. An underground lake. She ignored the stars that were becoming clearer. She ignored the clouds that shifted across them.

  “What have you done?” she demanded of Charity Waite. “This was never about helping Colt and getting on his right side, was it?”

  “Billy? Oh, no, no. Billy the pocket god. He’s a sweet boy, but…” Charity glanced at her kinsmen. One of them was having trouble getting his jeans off, and fell heavily to the stone floor. There he continued to writhe and squirm out of them. “Men are stupid, y’know? Your pal Danny isn’t as smart as he thinks, either.”

  “Dan’s worth twenty Colts.”

  Charity looked back at her again, smiling. “Why, Emily. So quick to defend. You got feelings for that boy? Well, I hope you’re happy together. I do, truly. And, yeah, Danny’s worth at least twenty Billys, but given Billy is a piece of idiot shit, that’s not such a big deal now, is it?”

  Loathsome as Colt was, Lovecraft had never been anything but impressed by his intellect. She was going to argue, but then started to understand what Charity meant. “He’s very smart…”

  “No, Miss Lovecraft. He’s intelligent. Intelligent in a particular way, too. That was good for us. But he ain’t smart, he ain’t clever, and he sure as fuck ain’t wise. That was good for us, too. Your boy Danny’s smart and he’s clever. I can’t speak for his wisdom, but he ain’t so intelligent. Put them together in the same room and it’s like two dogs fightin’ over a chew toy.”

  “Dan’s a good man.”

  “That’s good for us, too, because Billy’s what you might call evil. Those are those moral absolutes you guys buy into, ain’t it?”

  “You guys?”

  “Y’know.” Charity shrugged. “Humans.”

  Somewhere out in the lake that was not—absolutely not—a sea, something huge moiled and shrugged beneath the surface. A hump of water heaved away from it, turning to a wave as it reached the shore.

  “There’s my boy now,” said Charity. “I’ve missed him.” She started to walk down to the water’s edge, the men now finally naked and walking with her. Lovecraft made the mistake of glancing at them and then looked quickly away again, not because of their nakedness but because they had sloughed their humanity and what walked with Charity Waite were no longer men at all.

  “You planned all this?” shouted Lovecraft at the receding forms. The shotgun felt useless in her hands, and she lowered it.

  “Nope,” called Charity back to her, “but we have common interest with so many. Somebody else got this thing rollin’ and I played along.”

  “Who are you? Really?”

  Charity Waite stopped and turned. She was radiantly beautiful and terrifyingly monstrous. She was the sea and of the sea. If Lovecraft hadn’t been frozen in horror at the sight of the slick skin, the writhing hair, and the eyes that held her in a thrall of exquisite terror, she might have fallen to her knees and worshipped Charity as the goddess she clearly was, not like the tawdry dime-store deity Colt aspired to be.

  “I have many heads. You shot one earlier, but I’m seeing my lover again after all this time, so I’ve no mind to be vengeful ’bout that. Clever girl like you, you can work it out, I’m sure.”

  “Dan will stop Colt. He’ll stop you.” Lovecraft managed to croak out the feeble few words of defiance.

  “Darlin’,” said the god that had once pretended to be a piece of trailer trash called Charity Waite, “think of what happens to something when it gets bent back ’n’ forth, back ’n’ forth a few times. There’s no stopping us, ’cause we already won.”

  The men had already slipped below the water. Charity walked into the sea … the nightmare lake … the ocean as a queen enters a bath. The vast ocean was too small to dwarf her. Lovecraft realized she was weeping as she watched the goddess return to her domain to join her lover. Emily Lovecraft felt so inconsequential it was hardly worth breathing. She might as well just die there and be done. There wasn’t a person in the world worth a second’s contemplation by the forces now finding their liberty. It was all a joke. A ghastly unfunny joke.

  Then she thought of Charity’s words and some part of her pushed against the shock that was crushing the very soul from her and reminded her of two dogs fighting over a chew toy, back ’n’ forth, back ’n’ forth. Charity called it the Fold, not The Twist. Back ’n’ forth.

  Lovecraft sucked in air as if she’d just been brought back from the dead. In a sense, she had; the hopelessness fell away as she found purpose. She was crying, and she was more furiously angry than she had ever been in her life before. Nothing had ever mattered this much before.

  “Not done yet! We’re not done yet!” she shouted at the sea. She ran toward the tunnel mouth, clutching the Mossberg fiercely. Its weight felt good.

  “Fucker!” she shouted over her shoulder at the uncaring waves, and ran into the tunnels.

  * * *

  Logic against instinct, nuance versus principle, Carter and Colt fought an indefinable battle in a non-Euclidean battlefield. Neither knew how long they had been fighting, time becoming just another thing without limits or metric. There shouldn’t have been time enough to draw breath, yet still worlds could have turned to dust, as they presented move, countermove, feint, and block. Colt had discovered a new mathematical argument and bore down upon Carter with it, a juggernaut of brutalist rationalism in a melt of discarded rationales. Carter fended it off and evaded, holding The Twist with difficulty, swaying and sweating and swearing while probability grew heavier and heavier upon him. Then he remembered himself, sidestepped, and the weight became light and blinded Colt long enough for Carter to throw his shoulder back against the door and push. But it wasn’t a door, and it wasn’t a Twist, perceptual or otherwise, though it was closer to a door than the other thing and Carter wondered how they could ever have thought—

  Then Lovecraft was there, she had a shotgun, and she was telling Colt that if he didn’t stop doing what he was doing right this fucking second she would blow his fucking head off.

  He ignored her. She fired.

  They all saw the densely packed cloud of pellets and fragments of cartridge padding travel as slowly as pebbles in honey toward Colt, saw them glow red, white, cherry pink, and turn to vapor that hung in heavy tendrils, falling slowly in fanciful metallic curlicues as they cooled.

  Lovecraft mouthed something angrily, and swung the gun toward Carter. She communicated that she liked him a lot and she wasn’t enjoying pointing a gun at him, but if he didn’t stop doing what he was doing right this fucking second she would blow his fucking head off.

  He didn’t ignore her. He relaxed his mind and stepped away
from The Twist.

  Colt was taken entirely off guard and off balance. He was still pushing, and pushing hard; he’d been expecting Carter to carry on their battle just as he had when threatened by Lovecraft. The Twist unfurled. Too much. Far too much. The potentials held back within it slipped out like dust, first in a wisp and then in a drift and then in a blizzard. He saw Emily Lovecraft grab Daniel Carter’s arm, shout something at him, start pulling him away.

  Carter looked Colt in the eye, and Colt saw pity there. Then they were gone, and Colt was all alone with the Perceptual Twist.

  He looked back to it and started to bring it back under control. He’d done it before; this was more of a leak of potentiality than he’d dealt with before, but the principles remained the same. He anticipated no problem …

  Except there was a problem. His perception was twisted and the Perceptual Twist no longer seemed to be a twist in perception. He scrabbled backward mentally from it. He had to stay in control. He had to see it as he had always seen it if he meant to control it, but it was too late. Like a nagging thought or an earworm, the realization that The Twist was not and had never been simply that had taken hold of him. He had failed to understand it all.

  He thought momentarily of the old story of a group of blind men trying to identify an elephant by touch alone. One embraces a leg and declares it to be a tree, another finds the tail and says it’s a snake, and so on.

  Just like one of those blind men, Colt had profoundly and utterly misunderstood what he was perceiving.

  It wasn’t a twist untwisting. It was a fold unfolding. There was no perceptual liberty to be had at all; there was only one truth, only one way to see, and as he saw what was obscured, what had long lain hidden and partitioned away from the world of men and women, of ephemeral lives and TV dinners, of love and money and lazy days and religious genocides, there lay a reality that brooked no glib reinterpretations or alternate points of view.