TURNS OUT THAT BY town car the trip to the Upper West Side is going to take us nearly forty minutes. Travis, our usual driver, isn’t to blame. He’s doing his best—and his best is about as good as it gets—but there’s a Reagan rally in midtown and it’s screwing up traffic everywhere.
About twenty minutes in, Mr. James chooses to point out that he told me we’d have been quicker taking the subway. And so I choose to point out that I married him for his money and that gold diggers are not as a rule expected to ride subways.
“Besides,” I add, “this Arthur Hillibrand character will still be dead whatever time we get to his penthouse.”
“Well, you say that . . . ,” Mr. James says, and I have to admit he’s got me there. If I had a nickel for every corpse we’ve had to re-kill for the HPL in the last three years, I’d have . . . well, I’d only have about 65 cents, but you get my point.
“Mr. James and I could have taken the subway, Travis,” I say through the open partition to the front seat. “You could have had the afternoon off. Mixed yourself a cocktail and watched Donahue or something. Would you have liked that?”
Travis finds my eyes in the rearview. “What?” he says. “And miss seeing you in that dress, Mrs. J.?”
I smile at him and turn to my husband. “There,” I say, because matters have clearly been settled. “Why us, by the way? Why not the cops?”
“Circumstances,” Mr. James says. “And associations.”
“Ah,” I say. “So Mister Arthur Hillibrand is a person not unknown to the bureau.” I fish a cigarette out of my purse and waggle it for my husband’s attention. “Who is he, anyway?”
The Zippo’s in his hand already, bless him. “Hillibrand?” he says. “He was a poet.”
“Christ,” I say, drawing in the flame and taking a first drag. “No wonder somebody killed him.”
The private express elevator—into which the building’s doorman had ushered us before tapping out an access code on one of those newfangled keypad thingies—takes me and Mr. James speedily to the penthouse suite and opens directly onto the late Mr. Hillibrand’s reception area.
I whistle. I assume the Vatican and Buckingham Palace have got this place beat, but I know a few embassies and country houses that are clearly going to need to up their game.
I give my husband a look. “I thought you said he was a poet,” I say, because come on.
“Family money,” Mr. James explains, before extending his hand to the stout fellow in Jeeves drag who’s walking out of the living room to meet us. “I’m Mr. James,” says Mr. James. “This is Tabitha. Was it you who called?”
Jeeves shakes the proffered hand, though his slightly pained expression makes it clear he’s wondering whether Mr. James has any idea at all about the proper way to interact with household staff. Mr. James is perfectly familiar with the proper way to interact with household staff. He doesn’t care for it.
“I’m Kilgallen, sir,” says the late gentleman’s gentleman. “I placed the initial call to the bureau, using a number with which Mr. Hillibrand had entrusted me, but I don’t believe you and I spoke directly.” Look, you can bother remembering that Kilgallen name if you like, but I’m just going to keep calling him Jeeves. At the moment, Jeeves seems a little troubled by the fact that whoever answered his phone call hasn’t shown up in person, which makes me wonder whether Jeeves has any idea at all about the proper way to interact with the FBI.
“If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” he says. “What is it you do at the bureau?”
“I investigate,” Mr. James says, and gives Jeeves the benefit of his most charming, most confident smile. Jeeves nods, somewhat placated, then turns his still-not-sure-about-all-this gaze on me.
“And I do his dirty work,” I say, without waiting for the insulting question he’s attempting to formulate. I’m really not sure Jeeves and I are going to get along.
“Shall we?” my husband says, gesturing to the living room and treating me to one of his best behave yourself looks as we follow Jeeves to the crime scene.
There’s a dead body all right and—despite the aforementioned checkered history which Mr. James and I have had with dead bodies—this one is convincingly dead: cold and still and already starting to discolor.
Oh, and missing its head.
The curious thing about the body—you know, apart from that—is that it seems to have greeted its demise with an impressive degree of aplomb. It’s sitting upright, legs casually crossed, in a tall straight-backed antique chair made from the kind of dark heavy wood I thought they only used in really miserable churches. An ascot or cravat or something equally ridiculous is laid out on an occasional table beside the chair and the corpse’s white shirt is unbuttoned, revealing several carefully incised runic markings on the chest, though they don’t appear to be recent. Both hands rest, seemingly at ease, in the body’s lap.
“His legs are crossed,” I say to Mr. James, because I suppose that’s what strikes me the most. I mean, who sits cross-legged and unperturbed through their decapitation?
“And in dress pants,” Mr. James says. His voice is as respectful as he can make it—doing his best to spare Jeeves’s feelings, I’m sure—but I can still pick up the undertone of dry amusement at this confluence of elegance and atrocity. He turns his head to the valet and keeps his voice gentle. “And we’re quite sure, Mr. Kilgallen, that this is Arthur Hillibrand?” he says.
“You know, on account of the no-head thing,” I offer helpfully. Yeah, I know—saucer of milk for Ms. Tabitha—but I’m still pissed about that whole implicit and-what-do-you-do crap.
“Mister Hillibrand’s fingerprints are on file should it be necessary to check, sir,” Jeeves says. “But I’m . . . quite certain.”
We follow his gaze as he looks pointedly down at the corpse’s left hand. A moneyed hand, delicate and un-calloused, the fingernails manicured and subtly polished, and the fingers themselves long and elegant. All six of them.
“Huh,” I say. “Would you look at that?”
But Mr. James is already done looking at that. There’s a set of glass-paneled double doors off to the side of the living room’s Baronial fireplace and he strides over to them, pushing them open to take a quick glance into the dining room. I sneak a peek too. As dining rooms go, it perhaps mightn’t look like much in the Waldorf Astoria or have turned heads on the first-class deck of the Titanic, but it seems perfectly up to the task of serving bacon and eggs to everybody who’d want some in the event an emperor and his entire retinue should happen to drop by. Mr. James, though, doesn’t appear to be interested in counting the twenty-four place settings or admiring the 18th century silverware and 14th century tapestries. He’s got that look of someone less interested in what they’re seeing than in what they’re not. He lets the doors swing shut and takes a step back into the living room.
“Sir?” Jeeves asks, off his silence.
“I’m very curious about the cats,” Mr. James says.
“What cats?” I say, before Jeeves can answer. “There aren’t any cats.”
“Precisely what I’m curious about,” my husband tells me, clearly weighing the possibilities of accompanying the comment with a smug smile. But as I’m clearly weighing the possibilities of a dropkick to his solar plexus, he elects to restrain himself.
“Here’s the thing,” he says. “To most of his neighbors in this building, Arthur Hillibrand was known—and not affectionately—as ‘The Catman.’”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Is this going to involve a rooftop mounted signal from a police commissioner and a suspiciously fetishistic costume?”
“No,” he says. “It’s going to involve a suspiciously terrible racket, which by all accounts emanates from this penthouse every night at midnight. The concerted screeching, howling, and wailing of what sounds like a thousand cats.”
“Jesus,” I say. “And the neighbors just come up with a disapproving nickname? They didn’t try to get him thrown out?”
“It’d be
a tough eviction,” Mr. James says. “He owns the building.”
“Owned,” I say, a correction of tense which I grant you is rather petty. But he keeps pulling out all these annoying facts—which he could have shared with me on the car ride over instead of wasting his time cheerleading for the damn subway—and it’s getting on my nerves. “Also, at the risk of repeating myself, there aren’t any cats.”
A small discreet cough from Jeeves catches our attention and we see that he’s trotted over the mile or two to one of the room’s several floor-to-ceiling bookcases. “The cats are in here, sir,” he says, pressing the spine of a leather-bound book on one of the shelves.
Well, it’s a secret room of course and, sure enough, it’s packed to bursting with cats. No actual cats, you understand—unless you count the few dozen mummified Egyptian ones scattered throughout the collection—but instead what amounts to a museum of feline representation through the ages: Paintings, sculptures, tapestries, photographs; children’s toys, board games, revolting Victorian napkins with cutesy kittens in baby clothes; VHS tapes of The Black Cat (both 1934 and 1941 versions), That Darn Cat, The Aristocats, and Island of Lost Souls; signed photographs of Anne Francis as Honey West brandishing her ocelot, and of all three Catwomen (that half-rhyme of To Arthur, from Eartha must have irritated his poet’s ear, I’d have thought). High culture, low culture, ancient and modern, priceless masterpieces, tatty junk. A first edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a battered paperback of The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat. Clearly, if you had anything with a cat on it or in it that you needed to unload, Arthur Hillibrand and his bottomless checkbook had been your go-to guy.
“God,” Mr. James says. “Look at the eyes on that one.”
He’s standing in front of a large portrait in oils of the Ancient Egyptian cat-goddess Bast, and he’s got a point about the eyes. They stare directly out at the world—cruel, confident, amused.
“What do you think she’s saying to us?” he says.
I have no doubt in my mind. “You’re all mice,” I say.
“Brrr,” he says, and averts his gaze from her alarming splendor. “Clearly, though, neither she nor her fellow works of art here are responsible for these reported midnight wailings.”
“No fooling you,” I say.
“I’m a detective,” he says, with a modest nod.
“If I may, sir . . . ,” says Jeeves, and we see that he’s brandishing an old 78 RPM record, pulled from a cabinet behind him. “I believe this to have been the source of the neighbors’ irritation.”
There’s a floor-standing antique Victrola in front of the cabinet and Jeeves lifts the lid, cranks the handle, lays the disc on the turntable, and applies the needle.
The noise is horrendous—the collective screeching, wailing, howling, and hissing of what sounds indeed like a thousand cats—but it’s also astonishingly loud. Mr. James waves at Jeeves to stop it and, once that’s happened, stabs a finger toward the large metal horn protruding from the Victrola.
“There’s no way all that sound was coming from that,” he says.
“No indeed, sir,” says Jeeves proudly. “The master had it wired up to his recently installed quadraphonic sound system.”
“Jesus,” I say. “What was wrong with him?”
“Mister Arthur was an enthusiast of the unusual,” Jeeves says, his sweeping gesture taking in the whole room. “A connoisseur of the curious. Goes without saying.”
“Yet there you go, saying it,” I say.
He cocks his head, mask of servility slipping just a little. “I’m sorry?”
“Apology accepted.”
“Tabitha . . . ,” says my husband, in that rein-it-in tone he always thinks will work.
Before Jeeves and I can investigate our antipathy further, something else claims our attention. Off to the left of the Victrola is a free-standing plinth, atop of which is a life-size statuette of a Siamese cat. I don’t know what happens to make all three of us look at it at the same time—perhaps we sense a great disturbance in the Force or something—but I do know that as soon as we do, the statuette steps elegantly from the plinth onto the lid of the Victrola and from there to the floor.
“Good Lord,” Jeeves says, staring down at the cat. The cat stares back at him briefly and then, lest he should think it gives a shit, starts licking its front paw as if it may have picked up something unpleasant from Hillibrand’s rug.
The cat—yellow eyes, long sharp teeth, tail flicking rhythmically, precise as a metronome—turns her face to me. Not Siamese at all, I see now.
We hold each other’s gaze for a moment and then, slowly, she inclines her head. Regal but respectful, like a formal nod of greeting.
“It’s been a long time,” the cat says. “Good to see you again, moya sestra.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Claiborne Hancock, Katie McGuire, Bowen Dunnan, Maria Fernandez, Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Douglas Klauba, Richard Gavin, and Michael Marshall Smith.
“Prologue: The Black Ship” copyright © 2018 by Reggie Oliver.
“The Dreams in the White House” copyright © 2018 by Lisa Morton.
“Weird Shadows Over Innsbruck” copyright © 2018 by Brian Hodge.
“The Window of Erich Zann” copyright © 2018 by Michael Marshall Smith.
“The Dunwich Horrors” copyright © 2018 by John Llewellyn Probert.
“The Shadow Over the Moon” copyright © 2018 by Stephen Baxter.
“Into the Dreamlands” copyright © 2018 by Angela Slatter.
“Water Gate” copyright © 2018 by Sean Hogan and Lynda E. Rucker.
“Voodoo vs. Cthulhu!” copyright © 2018 by Kim Newman.
“Cool Air” copyright © 2018 by Lisa Morton.
“Epilogue: The Cats of Arthur” copyright © 2018 by Peter Atkins.
“1970s TV Guide ad” copyright © 2018 by Smith & Jones
STEPHEN JONES was born in London, England, just across the River Thames from where his hapless namesake met a grisly fate in Hazel Heald’s story “The Horror in the Museum.” A Hugo Award nominee, he is the winner of four World Fantasy Awards, three International Horror Guild Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, twenty-one British Fantasy Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Horror Association. One of Britain’s most acclaimed horror and dark fantasy writers and editors, he has more than 145 books to his credit, including Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, and Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror (with Dave Carson), H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Hallowe’en in a Suburb & Others: The Complete Poems from Weird Tales, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft and Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre, along with the Zombie Apocalypse! and The Lovecraft Squad series, and twenty-nine volumes of Best New Horror. You can visit his website at www.stephenjoneseditor.com or follow him on Facebook at Stephen Jones-Editor.
THE LOVECRAFT SQUAD: DRAMING
Pegasus Books Ltd
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
The Lovecraft Squad concepts, characters, and situations © Stephen Jones
The Lovecraft Squad logo copyright © Smith & Jones
Copyright © 2018 by Stephen Jones
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition November 2018
Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Pegasus Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-68177-867-9
ISBN: 978-1-68177-
932-4 (ebk.)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming Page 38