The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

by Stephen Jones

  “The bureau’s finest,” he snarled. “This is what they send after me. A broken-down drunk and a girl freak. Oh, I know all about you two. Probably more than you know about yourselves. You have a couple of choices. You can either shoot me, go down in history as presidential assassins, and you might slow but you won’t stop any of this. Or you can go on your way. You have no authority to act against me as the president, and no one will believe you if you try.”

  I was still sizing up the situation, trying to work out whether I could get purchase on the slippery rocks if I leapt from the canoe, and how many worshippers I might be able to take out. We might be able to do it, if we were lucky. I cut a glance over to Rooks. I could see him wavering.

  “Springer,” he said, in a low voice, “row.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Row.”

  “But we—”

  His voice was weary. “I’ve been at this for decades, Springer. This is a war of attrition. You win some, you lose some. We’ve lost this round and they know it. There’ll be others. We need to get back in one piece so we can make a report to Brady and the others. And maybe that Bernstein guy.”

  He was right. I hated him for it, but he was right.

  He kept the bead on Nixon until he was out of our sight. I was sure they were going to pursue us, but Rooks said not this time. They couldn’t interrupt the ceremony they were in the middle of. “Why not?” I wanted to know.

  “The Great Old Ones don’t like it when they do that,” he said. “Putting it mildly.”

  Still, surely there were minions who could pursue us, like the gatekeeper and her reinforcements. Yet we were unmolested for the entire journey back. There was only one explanation.

  They let us go because we weren’t a threat, and they knew they could get to us anytime they needed to.

  That was two weeks ago. I thought about taking a leave of absence, but it seemed both weak and pointless. After a debriefing, Special Agent Rooks and I haven’t really talked about it much. What is there to say? We’ve been pursuing a few unrelated leads here and there, most of them dead ends, and I think Rooks talked to Bernstein, or maybe the other one, but who was going to back up our story?

  All the same, I’ve written up an account of my own to send to them in the morning. I’m not sure how much time we have left. A little while ago, when I looked out my window, I saw a plumber’s van parked across the street. It’s been there since I woke up this morning. When I pick up my phone, I hear a clicking noise. I am 100% certain my place and my car are bugged. Three times in the last week, I’ve seen something dark and shadowy vanish around a corner just as I turned to confront it.

  Is this how it was for my parents, in those final days? They never let on, but they would have known, after my “accident” if not before, that their days were numbered.

  I said I used to wish the bomb had finished me off. Now that I’m so close to the same thing happening to me again, only successfully this time, I don’t want to die. I want to keep fighting them. I’ve discovered a purpose, as horrible as it is. In the morning I’m going to get those documents to the Post. Even if they don’t believe us, or they can’t run the story, they’ll have the information. The world has to be warned about the president. About what’s coming.

  All I have to do is survive the night.

  EIGHT

  Voodoo vs. Cthulhu!

  I

  AT 8:05 EST, FIVE minutes into the Movie of the Week on ABC, a hundred tons of fish fell out of cloudless sky onto the Buchanan South substation on the Hudson River.

  The shoal exploded like a cluster bomb, disrupting the process of converting energy from the Indian Point nuclear power plant to a lower voltage for commercial use. Out of their element, sea creatures were surprisingly lethal. Circuit breakers were gummed by smashed skate and cod. The skeleton staff suffered jellyfish stings which raised weeping blisters like ovoid puffballs. A silvertip shark—a specimen of a squid species unknown to science embedded in its head—slithered along a walkway and took a bite out of the shift manager. His deputy drowned in krill. After that, the remaining workers were too busy saving their own hides to report the situation to offsite authorities.

  Within half hour, the electricity system supplying New York City was severely overtaxed. Con Edison operators in other stations made desperate attempts to “shed load” to stave off a mass outage. Their efforts were futile. The Ravenswood 30 Generating Station in Queens ground to a sparking halt and Manhattan went dark. Simultaneously, a sulphurous blaze in the New York Telephone Company switching center at 204 Second Avenue cut off nearly all connection to the Bell System Network. Inhalation of noxious green smoke was instantly fatal. The fire department could not be called because their phone lines were as dead as everyone else’s.

  The few institutions—hospitals and research laboratories—with backup generators were swiftly overloaded and overwhelmed. Police car radios could transmit, but receiving stations were inoperative. Multiple crises were called in, but alerts simply poured into the ether. It was as if the plug were pulled on New York. Clocks stopped or ran fast. Water pipes burst. Car batteries melted down. Food turned rotten, as if left on the counter for months.

  The spotlights around the Statue of Liberty died, veiling the lady’s face in mournful shadow.

  II

  Curwen and the captains of the Five Families stood on the observation platform of the Empire State Building—made available to the Esoteric Order by the office of Mayor John Lindsay—and watched the lights go out. From this moment, the calendar began. These were the first moments of the first year of the New Age.

  “Iä! Iä!” he breathed.

  All hail the Great Old Ones!

  Soon, the flares—green plumes of fire, five hundred feet tall—rose from preordained points on the island. The temples had fallen. Six sites desecrated, stripped of poor flickers of arcane power. The upper floors of the Pyramid Building, where the Wizards of Wall Street manipulated money with transcendental arithmetic and fed interns into the number-crunching maw of the colossal computer MOLOCH, evaporated in a silent implosion. Rune-scrawled banknotes rained into the streets. Malicious imps sank barbs into fools who snatched cursed money out of the gutter, riding their human hosts to exhaustion. In Chinatown, the sorcerers of the Temple of the Seven Golden Fists were maddened by the tinkling of a thousand unnatural bells. Every dog within earshot died, brains bleeding out through their ears. In a frenzy, the monks turned their martial artistry against each other. The kabbalah sweatshop on 34th Street, where cracked stoneware fingers stitched day and night, was struck by an energy wave. The golem workforce was reduced to a tide of clay, which spilled through the building and buried the dybbuk floor boss alive. The Herbal Hangout of the Children of Aquarius in Greenwich Village nurtured a fast-acting rot which leaped from vegetable matter to human flesh. Flower children turned to stinking mulch. The Chapel of Satan in Hell’s Kitchen, sanctum of East Coast Antichrist Montresor Mountmain, burned with black flames as the get of Shub-Niggurath revolted. Emboldened, suddenly bipedal goats disemboweled scarlet-robed acolytes who would have sacrificed them. The Harlem Hounfor, where Brother Cutter reigned as bocor, was invaded by invisible things which clawed, rent, and trampled. Six quick, easy victories. Six pieces taken off the board.

  Randy Zann played “We’ll Have Manhattan” on his fiddle.

  “Shush,” said tone-deaf, cleft-palated Ralf Martense. “You’ll shpoil the moment.”

  Curwen agreed. Youngest of the captains, Zann was long-haired and elevated early. He had spent the last two years in a rock band called the Three-Eyed Burning Lobe, writing and recording The Sounds Out of Higher Space. The triple LP still wasn’t finished—the apocalypse would literally come before he was satisfied with the mix. Zann made a lot of noise and thought himself a humorous fellow.

  Martense’s different-colored eyes glittered, reflecting the flares.

  Curwen had known the Five Families for centuries, cultivating them like tr
ees in an orchard—sometimes by pruning, sometimes by judicious watering. Each had a district assigned. They were ready to assume thrones in their dominions. It was about powers and principalities.

  Aza Whateley was to hold the Village. His bulk was hidden under a poncho sewn from scraps of human and animal skins. Tie-dyeing disguised the sucker-shaped wet patches. He was an eater.

  Zann’s place was Chinatown. He made strange harmonics.

  Mungo Delapore, Baron Exham, would be Vermin Lord of Hell’s Kitchen.

  Carolyn Marsh would be Queen Elegance of the Fashion District.

  Martense was welcome to the uptown jungle where brute Africans danced in frenzy to raise loas. He would bring the fellahs under the whip.

  Curwen would hold the Bank. In 1903, he had whispered in the ear of Elizabeth Magie, creator of Monopoly, revealing to her how the world worked. As surely as the Elder Gods inspired Abdul Alhazred to embed horrifying cosmic truths in the Necronomicon, the dreams he visited on Magie made her understand the circle of profit, loss, and jail which was to be the lot of human insects under the rule of the Great Old Ones. Families willingly carried out the ritual in the form of a board game without end. Each quarrel over Marvin Gardens or a “Go Directly to Jail” card was a genuflection to Nodens, True Lord of the Gold Standard. With such stratagems, the Esoteric Order had seized the 20th century while no one was paying attention. In the end, the Bank would amass everything. It wasn’t just money. It was what money represented.

  Curwen alone understood this.

  The Esoteric Order of Dagon was only a name, another front, a shell corporation—superseding the Starry Wisdom, coexisting with the Olde Fellowes, nestling inside GEIST. An idea, a belief, an obeisance to the Great Old Ones.

  Yog-Sothoth. Hastur. Tsathoggua. Nodens. Gla’aki.

  Most of all, patient Cthulhu.

  “Iä! Iä!”

  The air up here had a salt tang. For the waters lapped hungrily at Manhattan. Out at sea, great things stirred and ripples became waves.

  The Age of the Dry Land was ending.

  Now, the flood, the deluge . . . the fish!

  “Iä! Iä!”

  The green flames settled down . . .

  . . . and the screams, the shouts, the roars rose. Beeping horns and smashing glass. Sirens and shots. Nothing to do with the Esoteric Order . . . just men being men. Ordinary crime was how the ignorant worshipped truths they did not yet perceive. Every trespass was an oblation to the Great Old Ones.

  Looting, robbery, theft, rape, assault, murder.

  In the dark, a thousand newly made priests of Cthulhu made offerings of blood and sin. A thousand sacrifices bled and bleated.

  “Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

  III

  Ralf Martense was a born subterranean. He preferred to travel underground. He took the A train up to Haarlem.

  Eighteen hours after the ritual, the power was back on.

  The city didn’t know it was conquered. But many New Yorkers were staying off work, out of the streets, away from public places. Word was out. An understanding was forming.

  His tribe had been swarming in the tunnels for months, training albino alligators to hunt the homeless in the city’s hidden spaces. Gnawed bones were strewn on subway tracks and clogged sewer grates. The undercity was the beachhead of the Great Old Ones. Sub-clans gathered in clades, ready to push up through manholes and take the cement veld. They had teeth, claws, and breeding. Muskets and flintlocks stored in oilcloth since the Revolutionary War—when Dierck Martense had sided with Mohawk and British against the treasonous Yankees—were cleaned and primed. With Brother Cutter dead, the zwarts had no defense.

  This was a simple game—like checkers. White pieces replacing black.

  Ralf Martense was pale, like all his people. Powdery skin, milk-white hair. And proudly heterochromous, with one blue and one brown eye. These were the Martense signs, bred true over centuries. He shaved his cheeks, forehead, and hands, but let fine white hair grow over the rest of his body. Under his cream business suit was a full silk pelt. He was the face of the family. A captain who spoke for the tribe.

  He was whiteness incarnate. Ivory, frost, bone, cotton.

  Which is why Curwen gave him Haarlem. To reclaim the old town for the Dutch who named it and hang the yoke around the necks of the sons and daughters of slaves. Zwarts would bow to Nyarlathotep or die.

  He got off the train at 116th Street.

  “Spook,” hissed a zwart who wore a wide-brimmed hat, pink-rimmed dark glasses the size of two saucers, an unbuttoned paisley shirt, and ochre camel-hide jeans wider at the ankles than around the waist.

  Martense turned and saw his own face twice in the black mirrors of the shades.

  A cutthroat razor came out.

  Martense winked his blue eye and then his brown eye.

  The razorman drew his blade across his own throat. A scarlet offering gouted Martense’s feet.

  A negress—who sported beachwear and beads, and had a bulb of frizzy hair like a space helmet—screamed and fell to her knees beside the dying zwart. Blood spurted into her face. Red on ebony.

  Martense knelt and dipped a finger in the spreading pool, scrawling the infinity sign of the two eyes like stars.

  He walked away and left the station.

  One policeman—a white face in the sea of zwarts—slowly jogged down to the platform. Another pimp suicide was not worth working up a sweat. The cop looked sideways at Martense, nodding approval.

  It was dusk.

  Windows up and down the street were boarded. Smashed during the blackout. When the rioting and looting was a savage frenzy. An instinct to foul their own caves ran deep in these people. Take away the candle and they were consumed with terror and insanity. Black faces with bruises and stripes—sticking plasters over cuts. Fear was everywhere, like a fog. Scouts had come up from below and counted coup. There were stories of furry white monkey men, skirmishing with stragglers from the hounfor. The sign of the eyes was on walls, boards, sidewalks.

  Zwarts looked away from Martense, as if his whiteness could blind.

  He shone.

  The historic wooden Martense Manse was set back from the street, surrounded by high chain-link fences. Built as a town house in 1659 by Gerrit Martense, the family property was a neglected museum, of no interest to current residents of Haarlem and too poorly situated to attract scholarly interest. Priceless manuscripts were kept in the library, but few bibliophiles thought it worth being mugged or stabbed to get a look at them.

  This was to be his temple.

  The fences would come down. When the tribe patrolled the streets, no one would dare cross the boundary without an invitation.

  Blue and brown eyes—tinged with the red that came after dark—glinted between the slats of the shutters. The captain’s berth was prepared.

  There were invisible guards. The destroyers of the hounfor.

  But an old zwart, shriveled like a mummy, squatted beside the gate. He wore a once-black tailcoat whose too-short sleeves showed wrists like brown bones. His top hat was banded with cockerel feathers and small bones. An array of crude, homemade toys was set out on a blanket. He had no customers, but his wares creaked, whined, and jittered as half-broken mechanisms worked. He offered bloated baby dolls, dancing minstrels, soldiers in uniform, and mud-slathered stick figures which might have been African idols.

  Martense turned his glare on the toy peddler.

  The old man’s head lolled. His battered hat fell off and rolled away. He wasn’t a man after all, but another doll—an articulated, life-sized castoff, with a paper-covered skull for a head. Gray wool stuck to his temples. His exposed, rotten teeth grinned. Paste rubies were stuck in his eye sockets.

  Was this an offering? Or a curse?

  Martense would have his people tear the dolls to pieces.

  But first, he would enter his own house.

  The gate swung open without sound,
and Martense began to step over the threshold. His shin met resistance. A wire stretched across his path, seven inches above the ground. Glistening and sharp. He drew his foot back.

  What was this? A booby trap.

  The skins of a hundred zwarts would hang from the eaves of his house for this!

  Then the hides would be woven into knouts, and the whippings would last for months!

  Was this the fuse of an explosive device? Was the doll-man stuffed with dynamite? No, the trip wire was stretched between the gateposts and tied off. One step away from a pail of water perched above the door. Soaped windows and stolen mailboxes. He had expected more than Hallowe’en pranks. Without their witch doctor and pagan shack, the zwarts were beaten. He smiled, sucking air through his yellow teeth.

  The doll-man’s head twisted, mock jewel eyes flashing.

  Martense kicked the thing, which fell over into the smaller dolls.

  Some smashed—porcelain heads shattering to release beetles. Some came apart, spilling worms and earth. Some walked, keys turning in their backs. Soldiers marched, sternly. Minstrels hopped, merrily. Babies crawled, mewling. A tinny music box played “The Devil Take the Blue Tail Fly.”

  Out of the miniature crowd strode a man in a white suit.

  A white-faced doll, with different colored eyes. A doll in the form of Ralf Martense.

  He drew back his foot to kick the insulting thing to pieces, then remembered what voodoo dolls were for.

  His own face, tiny and stamped on a wax lump, turned to look up at him, winking first one then the other eye. He almost smiled.

  Then the doll marched throat-first into the tight wire.

  IV

  Two days after the blackout, Curwen sat in his office. His desk was a cyclopean slab prized out of Antarctic permafrost by the Dyer-Lake expedition. Most took the material for granite, but it was black ivory, scrimshawed by abhuman hands, engraved with antic obscenities. His chair was a throne from the palace of Gilles de Rais, with old bloodstains and newly installed swivel/massage functions. He kept the male member of Rasputin in a jar as a paperweight and the heart of the author R. H. Blake in a cigar box stashed at the back of a drawer. His telephone was government surplus. Orders for the illegal bombing of Laos had been rasped into its scrambler-enabled mouthpiece.