The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

by Stephen Jones

  Marion looked up to see Karl, the manager, crouched in front of her. He was heavyset, paunchy, with chaotic gray hair that wisped up from his temples to make him look like a kindly owl.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  He reached his hand toward her, slowly, giving her plenty of time to understand his intention, and gently ran his thumb over her left cheek, and then the right. She realized both were wet, and she’d been crying, and that’s why the light had seemed strange. And because it was the first time in a long while that someone had done something like that, she wound up telling him about her dream, and that her friend was blowing town, and she wondered whether she maybe should too.

  Karl listened and said the right things, and left the right pauses, and let her make up her own mind, and eventually got her laughing about some of the store’s more notoriously weird patrons, and by the end of that she felt okay again.

  He walked with her up the stairs and told her to go home and get some sleep—and to eat more, she was looking thin.

  “Here’s a thing, though,” he said, before she left.

  “What?”

  “Your dream. The place where you’re living now. You know that area used to be under water, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah. I mean, forever ago. But half of the Financial District used to be part of the bay. There was a thing about it a few years back. They found some stuff during an excavation or something. You should look it up.”

  She stepped out into the evening. It felt cold, and the street-lights looked strange.

  Three hours later she was cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by paper. She’d stopped off at the main library on the way back to the building, expecting it to only take a few minutes. Instead she lost an hour of time—and six bucks she absolutely couldn’t afford—duplicating several old maps, along with sections from a couple of books.

  She was holding two of these now, trying to compare them. The picture in her left hand was an old photo. A daguerreotype taken by a man called William Shaw in 1852, showing a wide panorama of the San Francisco Bay, taken from Rincon Point. The far left of the picture held a few shacks and low buildings, and gave a sense of the area stretching behind. Much more interesting was the way in which, as it panned across this part of the bay—a shallow portion called the Yerba Buena Cove—the view became at first dotted and then positively cluttered with sailing ships. Some looked ready to roll, as if they could head straight out for pastures new. Others less so, and a few were in advanced states of disrepair. On the far right of the picture, the two closest to the camera had lost their masts and significant chunks of their sides, looking like sad, bedraggled ghosts.

  One of the books had informed her that over sixty thousand people arrived in the city in the 1850s, come to try their luck in the Gold Rush. They came on ships like these, and abandoned them in the bay. Not completely—some had caretakers, men who lived in the gradually declining hulks, much as she now sat alone in this room—but the truth was, almost none of these ships ever sailed the open seas again.

  In her other hand she was holding a reproduction of a section of an old map published by a San Francisco company called Britton & Rey, from some years later. It showed approximately the same area as the daguerreotype, though looking rather different. Yerba Bueno Cove, which had once stretched from Rincon Point to Clark’s Point, had disappeared. It remained indicated as a dotted line on the map, but where once had been water now lay streets, some of the main ones—like Market, California, and Sacramento—clearly following what used to be the line of the old wharfs into the cove.

  From reading a history from 1922, pages of which she’d also copied, Marion knew how one view had turned into the other. As the city grew and grew (bolstered by men returning empty-handed from the gold fields), the pressure for land increased, especially that which had coveted bay access. By scuppering the old ships still languishing there, speculators had been able to make sanctioned land grabs of small portions of the cove. The section of land under your sunken ship became yours by right. Some had even towed ships into position before dropping them. They then got busy with dumping sand and debris into water, which in parts had only ever been a few feet deep, and before long the entire cove had disappeared into prime real estate that eventually became the Financial District.

  Marion looked more closely at the map and confirmed that half of Battery Street had once been in the cove, and all of California south of Montgomery. This included the point where Battery and California intersected.

  Where she was sitting, right now. Or at least, where the foot of this building met the ground six stories below.

  And more than that. She reached across to the last bundle of photocopies, and pulled out the portion reproducing a newspaper article from 1963. She found the sketch map and bent over it. As she did so, she noticed a couple of spots of moisture on it. She looked up, and watched as another drop of water gathered and fell from the wooden roof a couple of feet above her head.

  It wasn’t raining. The fog, perhaps, condensing in sufficient quantities to drip. She kept watching for a moment, but it didn’t happen again.

  So she went back to her documents.

  It was the sound of shouting that woke her this time. Again, not angry shouting. The distant bellows of men working, attracting the attention of others, calling instructions.

  She knew now what the sound reminded her of. The noise you hear at a busy harbor, the hubbub of sailors and the men who work the docks. Loading, unloading. Moving cargo to and fro. She got quickly out of bed and went to the window.

  The Moon was bright once again, but it looked different from the night before. Then it had been almost full. Tonight it was only a sharp sliver. That didn’t make much sense, but she immediately forgot about it.

  All the other buildings had disappeared.

  Though fog billowed below, she could see through it right down to a shallow cove. A few large shapes lurked within it, prows and sterns, and here and there a mast tilted like the charred remnant of a forest fire.

  Marion pinched herself. It hurt, as she’d known it would. She grabbed her coat and ran over to the door.

  She clattered down the steps as fast as she could, and was breathless by the time she got to the bottom. She yanked the big door open and stuck her head out.

  It wasn’t there. What she’d seen from above.

  Instead she was looking out onto a grimy backstreet, murky in the shadows of the same old buildings. It looked just the same as it had when she’d returned home from the library. All she could hear was the sound of distant traffic.

  On the other side of the street, a middle-aged man shambled by, broken by drugs or alcohol. He shouted something incoherent at her.

  She closed the door and walked slowly back up the stairs. She went back to the window and stood looking out, even though all she could see now were the buildings everybody else saw. She couldn’t hear the faraway shouting any more.

  But she could hear something else. Again. Something so faint it could almost have been her imagination. A melody. It sounded as though someone must be standing somewhere nearby, perhaps even on one of the rooftops, playing this composition to himself, or perhaps up toward the stars above.

  Then it was later.

  Back at the house. The one where she’d lived for over a month. Even more crowded now. Even dirtier than it had been. It smelled like damp wood and seawater, like rot and decay.

  Even louder too. Different music in every room. Two groups of people who couldn’t play, but played nonetheless. And people who danced nonetheless too, arms flailing, bodies contorting, faces smeared with movement and incoherence.

  Marion staggered around for a while, looking for Katie. Her vision was foggy at the edges, and sometimes at the center too. She got lost in one room for ages, and couldn’t find her way out even after she remembered that Katie wouldn’t be there or anywhere else in the house. Katie was gone.

  It was getting later.

&nb
sp; It was getting darker too.

  Then she was in the downstairs hallway and somebody gave her another drink. She was very happy again for ten minutes, laughing and laughing, and made it into the living room. But she fell over there and lay on the floor for a while, as people walked and danced around and over her.

  She couldn’t get up because she couldn’t work out which way that was. It seemed like she was lying there on her back for about a thousand years, and then she saw blurry shapes and realized it was Dylan and Cindy, kneeling on either side and leaning over her. She smiled and tried to say hi, but couldn’t.

  And then the ceiling was coming down to get her, and she was afraid. The ceiling was covered in mold, dripping with salty water, creaking as in a high wind.

  “She’s having a bad trip,” Dylan said, indistinctly.

  “There are no bad trips,” she heard Cindy say, as the girl pulled at Marion’s belt buckle. “Only bad people. We have to help them see the light.”

  She overslept. When she hauled herself out of bed at 9:30, she felt exhausted. Her calves hurt, as if she’d walked a tremendous distance, though she knew it was probably just because she’d waited for so long in the dead of night, looking out of the window, seeing if it would change. It did not.

  She stood under the near-cold of the weak shower for a long time. It smelled weird, rusty, salty. It didn’t help much. Her clothes smelled that way too, when she climbed back into them, and she realized it had been a week or more since she’d taken her scant set of outfits to a Laundromat. She needed to find one soon.

  Late morning she walked to the café where Katie worked. The owner confirmed that the girl quit the day before. Marion hadn’t doubted her friend’s resolve. But she’d had to check, and now the city now felt very big. Katie was gone.

  After that she walked over to City Lights for want of anything better to do. Karl wasn’t there when she arrived, so she sat in a window seat, watching all the people outside walking back and forth, feeling her eyelids start to droop. She wondered how many of them had real places to go, real things to do, and how many were just ballast, ships rocking gently up and down on a shallow tide, with no onward voyage charted. It seemed busier out there than normal, a lot of people headed in a particular direction, so maybe so.

  She woke at the sound of her own name. It wasn’t someone talking directly to her, however.

  “Her name’s Marion.” She recognized Karl’s voice, even though he was keeping it low. “She’s good people.”

  Marion opened her eyes. She couldn’t see him, and realized he was on the other side of the half-wall, near the register.

  “Has she ever actually bought a book?”

  Marion recognized this voice too. Carol, the older woman who acted as manager when Karl wasn’t in.

  “Yes,” Karl said. “The Naked Ape. I . . . sold it to her. Several weeks ago.”

  “What an excellent memory you have. She’s rather young, though, isn’t she?”

  “Fuck off, Carol.”

  “Teenagers don’t care about the likes of us, Karl. They’re off on their own journey. Isn’t that what they like to say? It’s true. We’re just the lands they leave behind.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Well, it’s up to you. But even in these enlightened days free love comes with strings attached. Baggage. And to be honest, she smells.”

  “She does not.”

  “Not always, I’ll admit. But she does today.”

  There was a little more of the conversation, but Marion didn’t listen. She pulled herself upright on the window seat, feeling dizzy. Hunger. She’d forgotten to eat anything this morning. Last night too, though then it had been more of a choice, after she’d spent her money on the photocopying. She was about to stand when Karl came through.

  “Oh, hi,” he said, as though he’d no idea she was in the store. A lie, but a small one, and forgivable. Kind.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m leaving.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  She shook her head, though she wasn’t sure what she meant. “I only came by to say thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “Yesterday. Cheering me up. And telling me stuff. I looked into it.”

  “Interesting, huh?”

  “You know they’re still there?”

  “What are?”

  “The boats,” she said. “They sunk them, then filled in over the top. Easier than taking them away or breaking them up. The boats are still down there, and sometimes contractors find the remains when they’re digging foundations or fixing pipes. The BART goes right through one. There’s a map showing where some of the others are.”

  “I’d love to see that,” he said. “After you’d gone, I found out something else that might interest you. You told me there was a name on the building you’re staying in. I thought I’d look it up, see if I could find anything about it.”

  Marion nodded. Whatever she might think of Carol, one thing was true: Karl was being very thoughtful. Attentive. “I wondered if it was Italian,” she said.

  “It is, but it’s not a name. Or at least, I couldn’t find anybody called Pentimento in city history. And you think they’d have had to make at least some mark, to have a building in their name. Wait here a moment.”

  He darted off toward one of the stacks. Marion stood, feeling woozy. She saw Carol behind the register, making a not-very-subtle job of watching her. Marion held out her hands, fingers wide, to show she wasn’t trying to steal anything. Carol looked away. Slowly.

  “Here,” Karl said, having returned, holding a battered old paperback. “It’s an art history term.”

  Marion looked at the page he was holding open. The word was there, with an explanation: Pentimento (noun)—A trace of an earlier painting, beneath the top layer of paint on a canvas. She shrugged.

  “Yeah, I know,” Karl said. “Can’t see why you’d name a building for that. So maybe there was someone by that name, and I simply couldn’t find them. I did find out a bit more about the building, though. It was owned by some guy called Erich Zann. There wasn’t much about him. He seems to have been a musician or something, came over from Europe sometime in the early 1920s. Couldn’t find out anything about him since then, I’m afraid, or who owns the building now.”

  Marion wasn’t really listening. She could tell that, at the periphery of her vision, Carol was still keeping an eye on her. “She’s right about one thing,” she said.

  “Who is?” Karl asked, confused.

  “The register bitch. Carol. I do smell funny.”

  “You really don’t.”

  “You can’t smell it? You can’t smell the sea?”

  “No,” he said. But Marion thought he was lying.

  She left him standing there awkwardly and walked out of the store, flipping the bird at Carol in passing.

  Outside, she joined the crowds now concertedly heading in a particular direction, and finally remembered that today was Tuesday, which meant today was the day—the occasion of the big protest in Haight that Dylan and Cindy and the others at the house had been planning for weeks. Marion thought that she might as well see if, for a few hours at least, she could float up and join the people who were doing something real. Whatever that meant.

  And that is how she wound up back at the house, where it all happened, and she learned that the new ways are just the same as the old ones, and that we live in the shadows of the very dark and very old things that came even before that.

  A period of time that Marion would never be able to get back to, even in her most lucid moments. Impossible to tell how long it lasted. An hour, two, three. Split-second snapshots were all she brought with her out of it, and they were more than enough. They were far too much.

  Dylan was so high she suspected he barely knew what he was doing. But he still did it.

  And so did the other men. She recognized a few of them. The rest were strangers. Either new in the house since she’d left, or part of the protest. Rando
m guys. And a couple of girls, rubbing themselves in her face.

  In every snapshot, the people doing these things to her were laughing or smiling. Most because they were deliciously high and assumed this was all part of some generous and giddy game, Marion giving up what she had, because that’s how it worked in this big, new happy world they were making. A wet ritual to the new gods, a way of disappearing inside one another, of them all becoming one.

  Others had faces that looked like they were smiling, but in the cracks between their teeth and the dark holes in their eyes you could see the old blackness that pools up there between the stars above our heads, and in their grunts you could hear the animals that wrapped themselves in these human disguises. So many hands, so many fingers, so many other things. Going into her, time and again. Like tentacles.

  Marion said no. She said no a hundred times. All she heard in response was the distant noise of men shouting, of miserable cargo being loaded.

  And most of all, the sound of Cindy laughing.

  And then somehow, some time later, in the dark and alone, she was back outside the building. Outside Pentimento. With no memory of how she got out of the house, or away from the people there. No memory of her journey.

  She was dressed, more or less. Her face stung from where she’d been hit. Her lips were bruised. She was battered all over, bleeding in places. Every means of entry to her body hurt.

  She saw two men in dark suits walking quickly up the street toward her. Cops? Maybe. She should tell them what had just happened. But she didn’t want to. She couldn’t.

  She opened the door and fell in.

  Got to her knees and slammed the door shut.

  Crawled up the staircase. Maybe there was a loud knocking sound from below. She didn’t care and didn’t stop crawling. It was a long way and took a long time, but what she could hear from up there kept her going.

  The door was ajar on the top floor, and, yes, the music was coming from the other side.