The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

by Stephen Jones

  There were at least a dozen of them. They must have come up from the underground river I’d heard earlier. I’d been careless—I ought to have surveyed the entire building more thoroughly before looking through the records. No, the truth was, I’d been afraid. I’d hoped I could get what I came for and get out of there without venturing any further into that awful darkness. Now, if I didn’t act fast, it was going to be my tomb.

  I had speed, but they had the element of surprise. Before I reached the stairs, they caught at my coat and hat, pulling me backward. My hair spilled out and they grabbed fistfuls of it. I had to drop the flashlight. It hit the floor, flickered, and rolled away. I spun around, punching and kicking wildly in the dark. My hands and feet sank into clammy skin. It was a fight for my life, and the most terrifying thing about it was the silence. They gurgled at me, they hissed, but they did not speak or cry out.

  I don’t know what I did to them, or how many I injured, only that I was able to break free and race up the stairs. I burst through the locked door into a long corridor. They were behind me, but they couldn’t keep up. The corridor opened into a chapel—their place of worship—where I surprised another dozen or so as I burst in. These were more human-looking than Olmstead, or the creatures I’d fought down below, but they still bore the reptilian features of most of the town’s inhabitants: flat-eyed and scaly-skinned. I caught a quick glimpse of an altar that I would have described as blasphemous if I’d cared, but there was no time to gawk.

  In the end, I outran them, out of the church and through the alleyways of the town. I thought for a moment, once I was out of immediate danger, that I might leap to a rooftop and observe them from up there, but I couldn’t see that it would add anything to what we already knew that would be worth the risk. There was no need to walk with caution back to the car, and as badly as I wanted to sit inside it for a moment and pull myself together, I knew I needed to put as much space as I could between myself and the ichthyoid inhabitants of Innsmouth.

  A couple of hours later, I sat in a diner with a cup of coffee and a stack of waffles—I don’t know why, I just wanted something normal and comforting, and waffles seemed like the thing, but once they arrived I couldn’t imagine eating. I took out the torn sheet of paper and stared at it again. I thought maybe I’d misread it, but there it was, clear as could be. A family line that started in Innsmouth and ended with Richard Milhous Nixon. The more human among them even had good penmanship.

  There was a jukebox in the diner, and someone put on The Beach Boys’s “Surfin’ USA.” An oldie but a goodie. It reminded me of my father. When it came on the radio, he used to dance around the kitchen with me while it played.

  If everybody had an ocean . . .

  I couldn’t bear to think about him. I couldn’t bear to think about any of it. I fumbled in my pocket for some crumpled bills, didn’t even look as I left them on the table and went back outside to the car.

  . . . Across the USA.

  The sun was shining, but I couldn’t feel it. I wondered if I would ever feel anything again besides this overpowering fear and sorrow, the sense that no matter what we did, the human race was done for.

  “I’m not going to turn into Special Agent Rooks,” I said out loud, and with that I started the car and pointed it in the direction of D.C.

  V

  He looked like the kind of worm who got his kicks peeping through keyholes and rifling through panty drawers. Misted-up bifocals, a cheap plastic raincoat he wore like a second skin. The bugger. After weeks of turning over rocks, we’d finally got a lead via a Georgetown student hooking her way through university. “Oh, Mr. Caul—C-A-U-L,” she’d said, correcting our spelling. “He doesn’t say very much. He just likes to watch me undress. He’s real private. I asked him once what his favorite color was and he got so upset it wasn’t funny.”

  He was twice as upset now. I’d tailed him here to the top floor of a semi-abandoned warehouse, a fenced-off lock-up tucked away at the farthest end of the building, and I got the impression he was more put out at being successfully followed than by the idea of being sweated by a G-Man. He blinked at me, the shadows of the surrounding steel-mesh snaring him like a cobweb. “Are you going to kill me?”

  I smiled, and lit a cigarette. “Paranoid, aren’t you?”

  “A paranoid schizophrenic is just a guy who’s figured out what’s really going on.”

  “Suppose you tell me what is going on, Mr. Caul.”

  He squirmed wordlessly in his seat, his raincoat crackling like a fire that was slowly coming to life underneath him. Maybe I’d have more luck asking him his favorite color.

  I tried again. “I understand you have a recording.”

  “You don’t understand anything. Do you know what happened to the last person who heard that tape?”

  I exhaled. “I know he hasn’t called his mother in awhile.”

  Caul got up and started to pace the room, a rat in a cage of his own making. He began to gibber. “I need to get away from here. I need to go . . . somewhere where there isn’t any water. I was just doing my job, understand? My god, if the president calls on you . . . I mean, you do it, no questions asked. It was an honor. That night . . . I just went back to check a malfunction on the system, I wasn’t spying or anything . . . but they were meeting in the Oval Office. Their voices . . . I couldn’t understand any of it . . . they didn’t even sound human.”

  “Give me the tape. We can get you away from here, protect you.”

  He let out a high-pitched laugh, like a language he didn’t quite know how to speak. “You can’t protect me from them. My god! No one is safe. Your agent . . . they even got to Hoover, for Christ’s sake. They’d kill all of us if they got the chance.”

  Didn’t I know it. “The tape, dammit. Or I’ll feed you to them myself.”

  Something in him quieted. Face pale, he moved to a hidden floor safe and produced a reel of audiotape. Maybe he thought that if he passed it off to me he’d be saved, like slipping someone cursed runes in an old ghost story. But you can’t pass off what’s coming, like it’s someone else’s problem. It’s coming for us all, sooner or later.

  I pocketed the tape. “If you come with me now I—”

  The sound of a cigarette lighter sparking into life cut me off. I looked around to see four men standing in the shadows. Their leader, a thin man with a heavy mustache, held up an expensive-looking gold lighter. The flame swayed in his dark eyes, like Mata Hari dancing for a private audience of one. It was the only sign of life I could see there.

  I dropped my spent cigarette to the floor and produced a fresh one. Proffered it toward him. “Would you?”

  Ignoring my request, the man raised his other arm, clenching the hand into a fist. He then moved the lighter underneath, allowing the flame to lap at his skin. Seconds passed. I could hear the flesh starting to sizzle.

  He smiled. “Do you know what the trick is? The trick is not minding.”

  I was impressed, but tried not to show it. “Can you make a coin vanish too?”

  He snapped the lighter shut and stared over at Caul. “The tape. Where is it?”

  So they’d followed me following Caul. I’d been sloppy. Or maybe just too hungover to see straight.

  Caul glanced helplessly at me. For someone who spent all day listening-in on other people’s secrets, he didn’t strike me as the type who’d hold onto his own for too long. Especially not when the smell of his own flesh burning hit his nostrils.

  I played for time. “So, who are you guys with? Parallax? The Olde Fellowes? The Esoteric Church? The Illuminati? Jews for Jesus?”

  Mr. Mustache scowled over at me. “We’re Special Ops reporting directly to the White House. That’s all you need to know, agent.”

  “Oh, so you’re Liddy.”

  He looked stung. “Never mind who I am. This man is engaged in stealing national secrets. We’re here to take him into custody.”

  I pulled out my badge. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but seems to me
that I’m the only one here with any actual legal authority. As opposed to, you know, being a jumped-up Nixon stooge with bad breath from kissing Tricky Dicky’s ass all day.”

  Liddy leapt forward and grabbed me by the lapels. “You’re screwing with the president of the United States, asshole! I’ll make you eat that shitty badge!”

  Just then the window behind the four men exploded inward, showering the room with broken glass. Hungover or not, I still had sense enough to close my eyes at times like this. Once it was safe to open them again, I looked up to see Agent Springer standing in the middle of the floor, tossing her hair back from her face. She still looked like a goddamn Clairol commercial, even when she was jumping up through a second-story window.

  The Plumbers gazed at her in disbelief. She moved quickly toward me, pushing Liddy roughly aside. Off-balance, he fell to the floor, a vein bulging in his forehead as he stared up at Springer, bested by a mere woman.

  “Trust me,” I told him. “The trick is not minding.”

  My partner’s dramatic entrance (“You should be on TV,” I told her later) had given Mr. Caul the distraction he needed to do a quick fade. But I had the tape. I grabbed a reel-to-reel from Caul’s workbench and we got the hell out, before someone else showed up to murder us. Like I said to Springer, I definitely needed a stiff drink or two before I’d be in fit shape to let anyone kill me.

  Trying to lay low, we headed for a cheap motel on the outskirts of the city. Springer debriefed me en route about what she’d found in Innsmouth. I couldn’t help but laugh. When they drafted the Constitutional clause stating that the U.S. president must be a natural-born citizen, I doubt that this was quite what they envisaged. Hell, we wouldn’t want to end up with some guy from Africa running the joint, but a half-breed mutant? No problemo.

  So now I’m standing at the window of our motel room, staring out at the discarded wooden chair gently bobbing in the middle of the pool, thinking about dead men floating in the sea while unseen monsters devour them from below, telling myself that the smell of brine in the air is just my imagination. I take another drink as Springer presses PLAY on the tape machine and a familiar voice fills the room, leading several of the most powerful men in the United States in a terrible chant I know all too well, a litany that will follow me into my dreams tonight:

  “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!”

  VI

  I learned to swim before I could walk. I even enjoyed a brief period of misspent youth, carefree on California beaches, tanning with my girlfriends and flirting with cute surfer boys. I used to go swimming any time I needed to make a big decision, to clear my mind. Even after the “accident,” it was my refuge.

  God, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at another body of water again that’s bigger than my bathtub.

  The worst thing is, everywhere I go, I see his loathsome face. On newspapers, in display windows of TVs stacked one atop the other that are all tuned to the same channel.

  He is, after all, our president.

  When Rooks told me his plan, I thought he was insane, and I told him so. Didn’t seem like much of a reach. Twenty-seven years on this job and all. I said, “How do you think we’re going to get down there?”

  “With this,” he said, and held a pendant dangling from his index finger. It looked—and I know how this sounds—it looked like it was alive.

  The clue had been on the tape. Listening to it was as horrible as you might imagine—no, worse than that—worse for me than for Rooks, and not just because he’d heard that kind of thing before.

  It was my hearing.

  My goddamn superhero hearing. It made the voices on the tape more acute—it hurt to listen to them. Half the stuff sounded like gibberish, of course, even if it wasn’t: calls and invocations to gods that were dead and somehow not dead, dreaming yet not asleep. But underneath all that I could hear people talking in low voices, regular American voices, about a water gate, and an important ceremony, and a pendant. Rooks couldn’t hear any of that, said I was imagining things at first, until I made him go a couple of rooms away and mutter a few things, and then had him come back in and told him what he’d said. I won’t include any of that here. It was, as people used to say back in more delicate times, unprintable. Not that that’s any different from Rooks the rest of the time.

  Watergate. A water gate. Who knew about it? I hadn’t. Right there in the heart of American power, not far from where a stone Mr. Lincoln sat, right under the Lovecraft Squad’s goddamn noses, a series of steps leading down to the Potomac River. I guess it had been originally planned as a fancy way of bringing important people to the Capitol, although that never came to pass, and they were just there—forty wide stone steps to nowhere. From what I’d learned on the tape, we knew we had to get from there to a hidden underground river, and it seemed the pendant would somehow open the way.

  It would not be our most inconspicuous operation. “I don’t think we can just drop a canoe at the bottom of the steps without attracting attention,” I said. So we’d started upriver, under cover of night, and glided without incident past the steps bearing the name that had started it all.

  An underground river. Do you know what that means, what it’s like to travel down one? There you are, deep in the earth, surrounded by rock and water. The walls on either side of you and the ceiling above you are smooth and wet. The water below you is black. It’s dark, and it’s cold. There’s no sky. There’s no escape. You can row forward, or backward, or you can dive into the icy waters and drown. Those are your choices. We probably should have gone with the last one.

  For a little while we traveled in silence, save for the splash of the paddles and Rooks’s heavy breathing, like he was the one doing all the work. I gotta say, he looked bad. Worse than usual, I mean. Like the job was getting to him in a whole new way. He held a light, not that there was anything to see. Until there was, and then I wished we’d had no light at all.

  The thing was upon us before we knew it. Even my hearing hadn’t detected it—it broke the surface of the water, which I heard but thought was no different from the other drips and splashes all around us. Then it was inches away from us, its claws clutching our boat and holding us there against the current.

  It’s the ones that used to be human that are the worst, you know. There was a passage Director Brady had shown me once, by some Welsh guy by the name of Machen. I guess he was pretty deep into the occult as well, so he would know. According to him, the notion of sin actually describes an abomination: And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning? That’s what it was like. It felt like an offense against nature.

  This one had been a woman once. Her eyes had distended horribly, narrowing back toward her flat ears. The gills at her neck flapped when she hissed at us, “Pendant to passsss.”

  Rooks produced it, and she snatched at it, but his reflexes were quicker than you’d think. “Not yours to take,” he said. Something flashed across her face that might have been frustration had she retained more of her human features. I could see the water rippling all around us in Rooks’s bobbing light—she had reinforcements just below the surface.

  “You may passsss,” she said resignedly, and sank back beneath the waters. I half-expected her to tip us out of the boat, to find us losing a fight for our lives in that cold black river as frozen blood slowed our limbs and tentacles closed around us and drew us deeper into the dark. But we were away, moving again, although I don’t think I ever wanted to turn around from a mission so much as I did then.

  I heard them long before we came upon them, and warned Rooks we were getting closer. I could hear their chanting and singing—the singing was the worst of all, the way it worked on your nervous system like a thousand nails dragged down a thousand blackboards. It had a way of getting into your head so you felt like it might be there forever, esp
ecially in any quiet moment you ever tried to seek again.

  I still wasn’t prepared for what we saw as we rounded a bend.

  The cavern we were in opened into a hellish stone cathedral, stalactites and stalagmites thrusting up into blackness, and an unwholesome glow from beneath the surface of the water lighting the horrors before us. “By my estimate, we’re just under the White House,” Rooks said near my ear. Despite our blundering into things, they didn’t see us at first. They were too focused on what they were doing. There were dozens of them, just like the ones at Innsmouth: gray and glistening, their fish-mouths popping open and closing as they chanted and writhed. And at the center of it all, two men—one still in human form, scholarly looking in thick glasses, the other with the face of a pugilist, normal above the neck but below that, like the others, scaly with a ridged back and those horrible fluttering gills.

  The normal one was the Secretary of State. The other was Nixon.

  We had moments to take control of the situation before we were spotted. Once again, Rooks’s reflexes surprised me. He already had a bead on Nixon himself. He could drop the president, and probably even the other one as well, before any of the creatures could reach us. He even sounded authoritative as his voice echoed around the chamber: “This is the FBI. You’re all under arrest. Reinforcements are right behind us.”

  All heads turned in our direction; then another kind of sound rose up. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was, and then I knew—it was the sound Deep Ones make when they are laughing at you.

  “Shut the fuck up, you disgusting freaks,” Rooks said to them in general, but mainly to Nixon.

  At that, the creature drew itself up to what I guess it thought looked imposing. It snarled at us, “I am not a freak!”

  We stood like that for several seconds that felt like about a hundred and seventy years, and then Nixon reached down and shrugged into a robe. It covered his deformities, but was only relatively less strange as we were now facing off with the president in a bathrobe.