The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

by Stephen Jones

  “And this latest one,” Luna said, “his favorite time of day to be out was around twilight. I talked to the concierge about that. They call it the blue hour, because of the light. Winter, northern latitude, the mountains and snow . . . it can be really gorgeous in a place like this.”

  Yahav looked intrigued. “Say this is when Portner is picking them off. When he’s losing light and visibility. That sounds like a targeting system other than visual.”

  “Heat signatures, maybe?” Claude said.

  Yahav looked at the stove, then out the window. “Could be. We’d have to be putting out a tempting one here, wouldn’t we?”

  Claude looked worried now. “Are you saying we should douse the stove?”

  “And be freezing our bits off in ten minutes?” Yahav waved it off. “Just another thing to be aware of. So you can be ready to head out the back if your binoculars start icing over.”

  Soon, Claude grew restless enough to throw his parka back on and head outside for a look around and a better view of the sky, to see if the weather showed any signs of clearing.

  “He’s not fooling me, he’s going to dump that coffee,” Yahav said, and grinned, then began peering at her as if she were an object of curiosity. “Special agent . . . that’s how he introduced you last night. You’re an actual bureau agent too.”

  “Right.” No need to share too much. That it had only been official for three days, and getting her out in the field had been so rushed, she didn’t quite feel like one yet.

  “I didn’t think your FBI hired women as agents. Not that it isn’t long past due. A ridiculous policy. I thought it wouldn’t die until after Director Hoover does.”

  “I’m actually the first in about forty years.”

  Yahav peaked his eyebrows. For him, that might have been awe. “I never got the impression Hoover was open to change.”

  “Our branch’s director bent his ear long enough to convince him to give it a try. There have been other women who’ve worked with the HPL, but none of them was a bona fide special agent. Director Brady thought it was high time he had one on staff. I was a good fit for that. I grew up with Agent LeGoff, and when I was fifteen I met the same agent who later recruited him.”

  Yahav looked as if something made sense now. “I thought it felt like the two of you had a history. Anyway. Well done, Special Agent Bearheart. It’s impressive to see someone be the first to get her foot through a door that’s been shut for forty years.”

  Special Agent Bearheart . . . god, the sound of that. And at this moment, a Nazi hunter seemed a safer confidant than Claude did, because Claude would only tell her it was her imagination. Even though Claude had his own misgivings about their boss’s boss.

  “I think Hoover’s probably hoping I fail,” she said. “So he can say ‘I told you so’ to anyone who’s tried to get him to modernize. He only let himself be talked into this because the Lovecraft Squad has such a lower public profile. That way, if I fail, I fail out of sight.”

  Yahav looked openly sympathetic. “There may have been a time and a place for someone like him. From what I know of Hoover, he was forward-thinking in an era when that mattered a great deal. But those times have passed, and he’s refused to change along with them.”

  “I suppose he hasn’t.” Again, discretion. Hoover had changed, but only for the worse. He’d had years to go power-mad.

  Yahav swirled his mug and stared at the sludge of coffee grounds. “Let me tell you something that nobody else with my agency might ever admit to on the outside. When we go after Israel’s enemies, there are times we go through doors because of who we believe is on the other side. Terrorist cells, sometimes. On our own soil. In Palestine, Syria, Egypt.”

  Then he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.

  “But we don’t always know everyone who is going to be on the other side of the door. There’s an unofficial rule we have. There may be ten men in that room, and we know they all want us dead . . . but if we see a woman with them too? Shoot her first. Because to prove herself to men like that, for them to accept her, she’s had to become twice as lethal as any one of them. So we kill her first.”

  Yahav gave her as frank a look as anyone ever had, pragmatic and cold and duty-bound, and she realized that only now, for the first time, she was seeing the last face that Portner might see. This was it. Not the one before, the face of the man who’d boiled coffee for them. This face.

  “So be her,” Yahav said. “Be that woman.”

  The skies began to clear in early afternoon. Soon after Yahav got his overview of the spread and sprawl of the Olympic Village, he returned below, as they too did a couple hours after nightfall, with nothing to show for the day.

  They returned the next morning, and the morning after that. Most of the time the skies were with them, if not the endeavor. They trained their binoculars here and there, panning and scanning, but there was nothing out of the ordinary to see—to their eyes, just travelers and athletes. The Israelis had moved in in the guise of a ski team, and during their own watching and waiting, nothing had caught their eye either.

  So, up here, the most action was tending the stove.

  “I know how we once would’ve tried to keep warm in a place like this.” As soon as it was out, Claude gave her a sheepish look. “Should I not have said that? I shouldn’t have, should I?”

  “It’s okay.” Three days up here, Luna was surprised it had taken this long. “You don’t think it’s occurred to me too?”

  “Really? I, uh . . . I couldn’t tell.”

  He didn’t know, did he—how difficult this was. Most of the time she kept focused on the job, even if it was endless watching. She couldn’t banish it entirely, though. Claude had matured into everything she’d hoped he might be. They’d had a path, once, but the world had closed it off before they could get there. Claude was offered a future that their friends could only have dreamed of in their Junior G-Men days. He’d been torn, and she’d urged him to take it, and he had taken her at her word.

  Admit the truth, now: a part of her back then was naïve enough to believe he could only have chosen her. And of all the unlikely outcomes, it eventually turned out to be the same path, and now she’d caught up to him, but for some things there could be no going back.

  “It has to stay thoughts and words, though. That’s all.”

  “Why?” He looked so stricken. “I never stopped thinking about . . .”

  He didn’t finish and she didn’t want him to. Never stopped thinking about me? About everything we planned to be together? I can’t afford to know.

  “If we were to let it go anywhere now, Hoover would find out. He would. It’s what he does. You’d come out of it fine. Not me, though. I’d be gone.” She dropped her voice half an octave, turned it gruff. “‘I knew women didn’t belong in the field. Terrible idea. Can’t trust them to stay professional.’”

  For a few moments he was the Claude of before, still in Mitford, looking for the bright side. “Hoover’s old, you know. He’ll never retire, but he’s got to die sometime.”

  “Don’t we all,” she said.

  Late in the afternoon the waiting once again grew tense, as the last of the day’s direct sun disappeared behind the peaks to plunge the sky and the mountains and the valley between into a sapphire twilight so rich it seemed to glow from within.

  If they were on the right track, this was the time of greatest risk, when warmth and safety were an illusion. To the proper sensors, they might be a glowing yellow shape waiting to be fired upon. Somewhere below, Dr. Portner might be calibrating his sights on them right this moment.

  “Let’s go over it again. Why twilight?” she said. “Why the blue hour? There has to be a reason for it.”

  Claude hummed tunelessly, striving to come up with something he hadn’t before. “Fewer targets, farther between? Maybe . . . he wants casualties, but doesn’t want them found right away.”

  “Okay. Why would he want that?”

  “It’s
. . . part of the testing. He wants to see how long they’ll last.”

  “Because,” she said, rolling with it, “he’s not trying to kill them. It’s a more refined weapon now, remember. He’s . . . he’s putting them into hibernation.”

  Claude looked at her as if something clicked. “Hibernation. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  As he continued to chase that line of thought—that this was the ultimate plan for one or more targets at the NATO summit, that maybe Portner had also developed a way of bringing them out of suspended animation—she looked to the sky, suffused now with a cobalt hue. Entirely natural, yet the effect felt . . . otherworldly.

  And was that motion in the air she was seeing?

  A flash—another blue within the blue.

  “Did you see that?” She directed him to one of the buildings in the Village. One of the taller ones, ten floors or so, and cheerless, something Eastern-bloc about its squared-off severity. She trained her binoculars on its grid of windows and strained to peer through the gloaming.

  “No, but . . . third floor from the top, fourth from the left,” Claude said. “That’s an open window.”

  He was right. The other windows had a sheen of reflection from the sky. Not that one. “None of what we just kicked around has to be wrong. But what if the timing’s about something simpler? What if it’s just about blending with the natural light?”

  Moments later she saw it again, and Claude too this time—an iridescent beam close enough to the shadings of the sky and the last reflected light off the snow that it could hide in plain sight.

  She followed its trajectory with relief—up and to the right of them, tilted at an even higher angle. They clearly weren’t the target. But something was. Somebody was. They just couldn’t see what from here, and that wasn’t good enough for Claude. He was on his feet, zipping up his parka and flipping up the hood.

  “Call it down to Yahav, 90% certainty,” he said, and didn’t wait for her to confirm before he was out the door.

  In the Village below, it was what they’d been waiting for. By late afternoon, the Mossad team was done with surveillance and shifted over to standby, ready to move if they had a target. She relayed the location, then kept watch on the building and the ray projecting from it.

  The longer she watched, the more puzzling the display grew. She could see no sense behind what this blue beam was actually doing. It swept like a searchlight, but in a tighter arc. It went through a sequence of offs and ons, not unlike Morse code, until it entered a pulsation phase stroboscopic in its speed.

  She couldn’t claim to know how an energy weapon was supposed to behave. Still, unless it was taking out multiple targets—a brand new development if it was—this didn’t feel like a weapon. If she’d observed this without knowing anything more, she would have taken if for some sort of signaling device.

  Dear god, what if they were wrong?

  She grabbed for the walkie-talkie, but it was too late. The raid had already begun, and she could only watch the hints of it unfolding. The space behind the window had been dark, but was now lit from within by flashes of white light—one at first, then a flurry of them. Shorter, longer, brighter, fainter. A final one, then more lights came on for good, and shone in the windows at either side, as well.

  Thirty seconds, in all, it had taken? If that. They’d been efficient.

  Yahav, on the radio again: “It’s secure.”

  “Tell me there are survivors.”

  “One. The one that matters.”

  “We’ll be down as soon as we can.”

  Stove off, lights too, parka on, pistol clipped at her hip again. Outside, the deep blue of the sky was fading, giving way to the starry blackness beyond and the light of the rising Moon. The cold hit her like a shock, not unwelcome, not unpleasant. Claude was nowhere in sight, and when she called out for him, the only answer was the soft sigh of wind murmuring across the slopes and through the boreal pines.

  He’d left tracks, of course, and she began to follow them to the east.

  Far downslope, the ski jump lay in partial shadow, curved like the back of some beast undulating in and out of the snow. The sight invoked a flash of home, the narrow valley outside of Mitford that lay between a row of serpentine hills that had always been known as the Devil’s Humps. The Witch House had stood there. Their lives had changed there. They’d learned of things there that she still would rather have never known.

  Luna came to a spot in the snow, packed down with overlapping prints, where Claude must have stopped to watch the ray before trudging onward. Soon she came to another, but now his tracks betrayed indecision, as though he’d paused, stamping one direction, then another, unsure which way to go. When she saw how his stride abruptly lengthened, her own pace quickened, as she followed where he had veered uphill, toward a belt of pines, maybe running for shelter.

  He’d never made it. The tracks simply . . .

  Ended.

  She left some indecisive tracks of her own then. Claude still didn’t answer, but he was up here somewhere, had to be, maybe no more than a few dozen yards away. If she could get to him in time, that might be the key—to start warming him before the unnatural cold had time to seep its way down to his bones.

  Once more, she cried out for him . . .

  And he answered. From somewhere near or far, he answered.

  Sound could play tricks up here, echoing from rock and tree bark; maybe that was why he sounded so close, yet so distant. How he’d made it so far uphill, so quickly, she couldn’t begin to guess. He hadn’t even left tracks behind, yet he’d managed to climb so high, in minutes?

  It sounded like he was shouting for her to run, but given how his voice echoed, with the rising wind peeling away snatches from the syllables, she couldn’t be sure. All she knew for certain was that Claude was in trouble, and beyond her reach, and he was not yet too cold to scream.

  Moving, now . . . he was moving.

  At a speed beyond comprehension, Claude was moving.

  Drenched with snow, belted with pines, topped with a jagged crown of peaks, the slopes rose in front of her as if to scrape the stars from the sky . . . and somewhere in the night, as if mingling with the lowest clouds, he went sweeping overhead, across the face of the mountain, spirited through the sky. The siren of his scream came at first from her right, then grew louder as it neared, drawing even with her, and faded again as it swung far to her left.

  Moments later, when she first saw it, Luna took it for a trick of whirling wind and swirling snow—a form, both solid and ephemeral, more humanoid than not, towering above the pines. But would a trick of wind and snow have lights in it, four of them, large and crimson and globular, where two pairs of eyes would be? This one did. Would its face resemble a mangle of snout and bone, meat and fang? Would it have a spread of antlers as big as leafless trees? She believed her eyes. It possessed the hint of shoulders too, and arms as well. Its movements looked controlled, the locomotion of a being that had learned to stride across the steeps of a mountainside as easily as if it were walking on the wind.

  I know this thing . . .

  The sight of it stopped her, left her frozen in every way but solid.

  Was that why it ignored her? It couldn’t see her unless she was moving?

  In my heart, I always have.

  It was the sort of monstrous being that once was darkly familiar, spoken about around fires, but rarely mentioned anymore. The old legends died with grandfathers now, and in towns like Mitford, to believe was to be thought a fool.

  When Claude bellowed again, she could pinpoint where he was—somewhere within the center mass of this creature that stood between her and the walls of rock and frozen earth, inside the eddies of snow and ice that wreathed it. It burns, she thought Claude was warning her. So cold it burns.

  Even now, she was driven by an impulse greater than terror, more fundamental than awe. How else to explain why she began moving again, toward Claude, if not for the fact that she loved him? T
his specter, this wind-walker, had to drop him sometime. With luck, she could be close by when it happened.

  Moving . . . she was moving. Was that why it now appeared to notice her?

  She shucked her gloves and drew her sidearm, no thought to it, purely reactive, because to think too much might fling the doors too wide to the madness of what she was seeing. After a moment of hesitation, because Claude was up there somewhere, she went wading forward through the snow, firing at the bloodred glow of its eyes. It had no effect, so far as she could tell, but maybe the overlapping echoes of her shots had made it . . . reconsider.

  It emitted a groan like the creaking of a pine trunk twisting in the wind. In a few strides it might be upon her, but then it halted. Nearby, the air shimmered with a ripple of blue and green, like a ribbon of the aurora borealis, only smaller, fainter, localized. The sight seemed to compel the wind-walker to change course, and now it began to ascend, as if striving to keep ahead of the color coming to claim it. Halfway up the mountain it was overtaken, and after another moment, gone, and with its passage came a shower of ice, sharp and stinging cold, driven by the gusts into her face.

  She’d always thought of fury in terms of heat and shades of red.

  Never again.

  From now on she would always think of fury as a force as cold as the empty space between the stars.

  In the end, despite her last-minute doubts an hour ago, this lifework of Gerhardt Portner’s still looked like a weapon. It sat before a bank of windows that remained blacked-out until he opened them for another test. Its barrel was a dozen feet long, wrapped in coils of copper. The main body, as big as a bulldozer’s engine block, was fed by a circulatory system of ducts and tubes, some connected to tanks with valves. Like artillery, it was mounted on a platform that was adjusted with cranks and gears. While she’d expected to find it sighted somewhere on the mountainside, instead it was aimed higher still, into the sky.