Carter & Lovecraft

by Jonathan L. Howard

  William Colt looked on the pure stuff of the universe, the pervading omega, the incandescent alpha, the binary of that which is and that which is not, and his synapses turned to mercury, the axons of his brain to glass, his eyes froze in his skull, and his heart liquefied in his chest. The everything and the nothing poured through him and his scream lasted forever.

  * * *

  It was confusion and certainty all boiled together. As in a dream where you have something so important to do, but the situation and the people keep changing and sometimes the important thing to do becomes a different important thing to do, they ran through the tunnels. Sometimes it was to escape whatever was coming, sometimes to reach a place for reasons other than safety.

  Lovecraft spluttered words, but Carter already knew what she was trying to tell him. The Waites had used Colt. They had tried to use Carter. They were always intended to war there, to fight over The Twist that was a Fold. They were always intended to damage it in the fight, to release what lay beyond. That which Carter’s and Lovecraft’s ancestors had placed under a fold in reality, as one hides a smudge on a bedsheet, or a note upon a piece of paper.

  Both sides had lost. Both sides had won. Coup could only be counted in individual cases, by individual standards. Right now not being in the immediate area, as the Fold unleashed an angry reality that had suppurated like a boil for the past several decades, would and could be all they hoped for.

  They found themselves on the riverside. Lovecraft’s car was nearby. An old blue and white sneaker lay on the grass. They did not remember leaving the tunnels. Above them the stars whirled as in a planetarium and roared as they sped across the night sky. The river shuddered, and the close Atlantic raged, and even the earth rippled and swept beneath their feet. It might not do any good to run. The whole world might die that night, but they could not stand and not even try to outrun the epicenter of the world’s end, for that is human nature and human nature was not one of the things that had lain pinned beneath the Fold.

  They ran. They ran to the car, and Lovecraft slung the Mossberg into the footwell, started the engine with the key the Waites had not bothered to take from her, and pulled away in a shower of earth even as Carter was dragging his door shut.

  They got as far as the isthmus, where they almost crashed into Detective Harrelson coming the other way. He opened his door and half got out, yelling, “Where the fuck have you been? What happened?” Lovecraft was waving at him to reverse out of the way and he was starting to obey when—above them and unseen—the stars became right, the omega erupted, and the world was destroyed.

  Chapter 31

  FROM BEYOND

  Death felt a lot like being in bed.

  Carter finally decided that nothing could feel quite so much like being in bed without actually being the experience of being in bed. He would have to do something to ascertain the truth of that and he settled on opening his eyes, which seemed to work.

  He was in bed and, as far as he could see, was not dead at all. He was in the bed in the apartment over Hill’s Books and the world had therefore not ended, unless he was wrong about eternal souls and this was some sort of version of Heaven, or Hell, or maybe Purgatory. Then he remembered that there is no such thing as an eternal soul, and he remembered why he knew that, and he sat up in bed breathing hard and with a cold sweat squeezing from his pores.

  The room sat around him, continuing to look willfully mundane. Carter closed his eyes, centered himself, and looked again, but this time he looked. It was just the apartment. His apartment, the one he’d inherited. He could detect nothing twisted or folded about it at all. Clean, comfortable, and completely unthreatening.

  He decided to take it at its unspoken word. He rose, showered, and made himself an omelet for breakfast, washing it down with orange juice and coffee. It was as he was finishing his breakfast that he noticed his shoulder holster lazily slung over the back of the chair opposite. His Glock 17 was in it.

  Hadn’t the Waites taken it from him?

  He wasn’t usually so cavalier with firearms as to leave them littering up the place like that, but it wasn’t unknown when he was tired and securing the weapon properly looked like taking a minute further away from sleeping that he wasn’t prepared to give. He secured it now, checking its load and discovering it was unfired. His Ruger holdout was lying in its ankle holster on the chair’s seat. This, too, had not been fired.

  He locked them in the safebox he’d fixed to the floor of the closet as a temporary measure until he could make something more secure and checked his watch. It was almost half past ten on a weekday, but there was no sound from downstairs. Lovecraft was punctual, always punctual, and the store always opened at nine.

  Carter was somewhere in the uncomfortable hinterlands between acceptance and denial. The world had ended, and now he’d had an omelet. It wasn’t something he’d thought he’d ever enjoy after the destruction of the world.

  He went downstairs, shrugging on his jacket as he went. The bookstore looked much as it ever did, right down to the political biographies near the door. He went behind the counter and found the Mossberg there. He checked that the chamber was empty and cautiously sniffed the muzzle; no scent of gun smoke. Not that that proved anything; a good cleaning would lose the smell. He also noticed the ammo tube was unextended. Frowning, he replaced the shotgun in its hiding place.

  Nothing was different. Was Colt still out there? Was The Twist or the Fold or whatever the fuck it was called still active? Did all that ever happen? Carter would have loved to shrug and say in a faraway voice, “It was all a dream,” but he knew damn well it wasn’t. He’d experienced something, although he was prepared to accept it might be some sort of breakdown. That was preferable to it being true.

  He noticed a vinyl figure on the shelf behind the counter and his frown returned. He didn’t recognize it at all. He didn’t remember it at all. Didn’t there use to be a little vinyl Cthulhu there? He picked up the figure and studied it. It was of a serious-looking, heavily built fantasy knight in fanciful black armor. Carter looked at the base. Along with the manufacturer, copyright, and trademark information, he read, “Randu the Swordmaster as created by H. P. Lovecraft. Masters of Fantasy Series No.31.”

  Carter had never heard of Randu the anything. Based on Randolph Carter, maybe?

  Across from the counter he found an encyclopedia of fantasy and looked up “Randu the Swordmaster.”

  Lovecraft’s major creation, Randu the Swordmaster was the protagonist of twenty-nine short stories and two novellas published from 1925 until Lovecraft’s death, the final story, “The Funeral Bride,” being published the following year. Randu predates Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian” stories (c.f.) by some seven years, although—despite the friendship between Howard and Lovecraft—the stories seem to have influenced Howard only slightly, the character of Randu having more in common with Michael Moorcock’s “Elric of Melniboné” stories (c.f.), a tragic hero apparently inspired equally by Lord Dunsany (q.v.) and the Nordic tales of Ragnarok.

  Carter felt cold again. He flicked through the book to the entry for Lovecraft, H. P., and skimmed it. He didn’t find what he was looking for and forced himself to read it more slowly, taking in every word.

  There was no mention of the Cthulhu stories. He checked the index. There was no mention of Cthulhu at all.

  A scrabbling of metal against metal, tumblers thrown, and Lovecraft swung the store’s door open. She sagged against the frame and looked despairingly at Carter.

  “We did the right thing, yeah?” she said. Her tone was pleading. “We did the right thing? We didn’t fuck up?”

  He left the book on the counter and came to her. “We didn’t fuck up,” he said, trying to calm her. “Colt fucked up, we stopped it being worse. Things have changed—”

  A small voice, as quiet as a fading memory, whispered to him, Didn’t you have a Glock 19?

  Lovecraft laughed at his words, a pitying, hopeless laugh. “—but nothing
too big. Colt opened the Fold, but I don’t think it opened all the way.”

  “You think?” She was smiling, but such a sad smile, as if she were an ace from crying. “You think that?” She held out her hands, and he took them. She drew him out into the street.

  Providence had gone.

  * * *

  The street was entirely different in character. The buildings were old, the roofs gambrelled, the frontages colonial, the aspect brooding. The city looked far more European than it had any right to.

  “What the fuck?” said Carter in an undertone.

  People walked by, cars drove past, all seemingly blasé to the fact that their whole city had been replaced.

  “What happened to Providence?” he asked. “Did we do this?”

  Lovecraft reached in her bag and took out a newspaper. It was some local rag running on ads and press releases as the Internet sapped the life from the print business. It looked like a thousand others across the country.

  But this one was called the Arkham Advertiser. The lead story was about a pay dispute between faculty and campus staff at Miskatonic University.

  “These…” Carter’s throat was dry. He swallowed and tried again. “These are from H. P. L.’s stories, right?”

  “No.” Lovecraft shook her head and was silent for a moment. Her attitude to Carter seemed to be one of grief. “Turns out, no. I think the stories were his way of remembering his old town. The way it was before he and Randolph changed out that reality and put in one where Arkham never happened and a town called Providence did.” She shook her head and giggled, a little desperately, a little hysterically. “All those poor scholars who were so sure Arkham was based on Salem. He must have changed the details to fit the market. Maybe to hide the truth.” She looked at Carter, the wan smile fading. “We did do the right thing, didn’t we?”

  “I think so,” said Carter. He felt desperate and directionless. “I don’t know. I think the Fold’s still there. We stopped fighting over it … it wasn’t destroyed. It shouldn’t be destroyed. I’m sure it wasn’t.”

  “You’re sure. Awesome.”

  “This has got to be reversible. It must be.”

  Lovecraft wouldn’t look at him anymore. She looked at the street, full of good citizens of Arkham.

  “Randolph Carter and H. P. Lovecraft fixed this once,” Carter persisted. He needed a rock. He needed a path. “We can do it again. Somehow. Somehow we’ll do it again.”

  Lovecraft looked at Carter.

  “That is such bullshit,” she said.

  * * *

  They did not notice the bookstore sign above them. They did not see that it, too, had changed.

  Now, the sign read Carter & Lovecraft.

  Epilogue

  THE STRANGE HIGH HOUSE IN THE MIST

  There was a heavy mist rolling in from the Miskatonic River, drowning the lower-lying streets and burying the roof ridges in thin tendrils of curling white.

  From his top-floor office beneath the penthouse suite at the highly reputable law firm of Weston Edmunds, Henry Weston watched the mist advance. It wouldn’t last long, he knew; from his vantage point, the sky was clear and blue, and the sun would soon burn away the mist. Still, it was a pretty enough sight, and he enjoyed watching the panorama below, the ancient city spread out before him like a quaint model town. It was an exclusive view, after all; the Weston Edmunds building was eight stories high, one of the highest in Arkham, a city that took its skyline seriously and was not keen to see it cluttered.

  Weston had missed Arkham. Providence was all very well and he hadn’t disliked it, exactly, but it simply lacked the character of its predecessor, vanished from space, time, history, and human recollection but for the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and it was partially Lovecraft’s fault it had vanished in the first place. Weston didn’t blame him for that, though, nor did he blame Randolph Carter for his part in the affair. Weston was not the sort to hold grudges.

  Still, he was glad it was done with now, in as far as he understood the concept of gladness. He still remembered Providence—that was in his nature—and it seemed likely Daniel Carter and Emily Lovecraft might, too, if they had survived Waite Road. But they would be alone, and Weston would never admit to knowing a city called Providence had ever existed there. Why should he when one never had? A moment’s concentration, and almost a century’s history was peeled away from his memory to be replaced with the correct version.

  There. Much better.

  Not that he would entirely dispense with the memory of those phantom decades, of course. He had learned useful things during the period and, in any case, it might transpire that there was unfinished business to attend to. He hung up the memories in a rarely used closet in his mind, and closed the door upon them.

  Henry Weston decided he would indulge himself with a walk through the mist-haunted streets and got as far as reaching for his coat and hat when he heard a sound he had not heard in a very long time, a metallic purr so high that it would have troubled few dogs.

  With a small sigh, he returned his hat to the hook. First things first, of course.

  He locked the door and called through to his assistant that he was taking a personal call and was on no account to be interrupted for the next hour. Then he climbed the flight of stairs to his penthouse and secured its door after him, too.

  From a locked drawer in the desk in his penthouse study, he removed a wooden box six inches deep by a foot square and placed it on the desktop. It wasn’t exactly six by twelve by twelve inches, of course; it had not been built by artificers who used inches, or even centimeters. No dendrologist would have succeeded in identifying the wood used in its construction, either.

  He made to lift the lid, but remembered himself in time. How could he speak to the others through something as crude as a mouth? This life had made him habituated.

  Henry Weston, attorney at law, smiled a very human smile, dug his fingers into the synthetic flesh of his neck, and proceeded to tear away his face.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The opportunity to develop and write Carter & Lovecraft came to me from Brendan Deneen via the good offices of Peter Joseph, my editor at Thomas Dunne Books. I enjoyed writing it, and I’m grateful to Peter for suggesting me to Brendan. I am also, as ever, grateful to my literary agents—Melissa Chinchillo of Fletcher & Company in New York and Sam Copeland of Rogers, Coleridge & White in London—for fighting in my corner during negotiations.

  My thanks also go to my editor, Peter Joseph (yes, he gets thanked twice; disgraceful, I know) and copy editor, Ivy McFadden. While I flatter myself on turning in manuscripts that are reasonably polished, the text is a great deal shinier due to their efforts.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Noel, who never had a chance to read it. This is just bloody typical of obstreperous fate, as it’s the first novel I’ve written that I think he might have enjoyed, being that he was not a great fan of fantasy, horror, or science fiction. My dad enjoyed detective stories a lot, though; he bought me my first Sherlock Holmes book and lent me his Ed McBains. I think he might well have enjoyed reading of the travails of Dan Carter, PI, and Emily Lovecraft. It pains me that I shall never know for sure. Literary interests aside, he was also a good man, and whatever is good in me came from him and my mother. I miss him a lot. I owe him a lot. Thanks, Dad.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jonathan L. Howard is a game designer, scriptwriter, and veteran of the computer-games industry since the early nineties, with titles such as the Broken Sword series to his credit. He is the author of the Johannes Cabal series, as well as the young adult novels Katya’s World and Katya’s War. He lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and daughter. You can sign up for email updates here.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN L. HOWARD

  THE JOHANNES CABAL SERIES

  Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

  Johannes Cabal the Detective

  Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

  The Brothers Cabal


  YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

  Katya’s World

  Katya’s War

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: THE KILLER IN RED HOOK

  Chapter 2: THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SUYDAM

  Chapter 3: FACTS CONCERNING THE LATE ALFRED HILL

  Chapter 4: PROVIDENCE

  Chapter 5: THE OUTSIDER

  Chapter 6: THE DREAMS IN THE BOOK HOUSE

  Chapter 7: DAN, THE DETECTIVE

  Chapter 8: THE HORROR IN THE PARKING LOT

  Chapter 9: THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY

  Chapter 10: THE SORCERY OF STATISTICS

  Chapter 11: THE TERRIBLE YOUNG MAN

  Chapter 12: THE STREET

  Chapter 13: THE NAMELESS CITY

  Chapter 14: AD OBLIVIONE

  Chapter 15: A REMINISCENCE OF BERTRAND RUSSELL

  Chapter 16: COOL AIR

  Chapter 17: THE PISTOL IN THE HOUSE

  Chapter 18: THE SHADOW OVER PROVIDENCE

  Chapter 19: OUT OF THE AEONS

  Chapter 20: THE PURPLE KEY

  Chapter 21: WHAT THE MOON BRINGS

  Chapter 22: IN THE VAULT

  Chapter 23: THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS

  Chapter 24: ALIENATION

  Chapter 25: THE THING AND THE DOORSTEP

  Chapter 26: THE SHUNNED HOUSE