Bleedover

by Curtis Hox

  “Go on,” Corrigan said. “I’m listening.”

  * * *

  The original meeting of the book club had been on a dreary fall evening. Hattie and Margery arrived first and arranged a circle with mismatched furniture. Hattie had cleared the time with the manager, who was happy to have them.

  First came, of all people, a wide-eyed, young Columbia freshman named Stephan Ross who just wanted to meet girls. Eliot Brandeis arrived next, with his full head of hair and devilish smile, and immediately sat next to Hattie. He and Stephan quickly fell into geek talk about the processing power of the latest Intel chips. Eliot seemed to think, even then, that human-like artificial intelligence would happen in their lifetime. Corbin Lyell and Dreya Pontes arrived at the same time, but came separately. They sat on opposite sides of the room.

  Corbin was a lean, young man with bad skin and an inability to match his clothes. He signaled for everyone’s attention and pulled out a few paperbacks and some small-press horror magazines.

  “H.P. Lovecraft’s my favorite,” he said. He spread them out like a proud papa. “I can send everyone a few short stories. Or we can get the anthologies. Library has them.”

  Everyone took a quick look.

  “Trashy,” Margery said.

  Dreya pulled out a some lipstick. “Uh, yeah.”

  Eliot and Stephan said nothing.

  Hattie barely looked.

  Margery suggested a few interesting novels, mostly literary thrillers. Everyone, even then, listened when she spoke. Hattie noticed Dreya’s interest, and felt immediately jealous.

  However, Corbin wasn’t finished. “Lovecraft is as important as Hemingway, you know.”

  Hattie had been listening, allowing everyone to have a go. Stephan and Eliot both seemed content to let others choose the texts. Dreya, as well, hadn’t made any suggestions. Before long, Hattie found herself, naturally, backing Margery, and opposing Corbin.

  “You really shouldn’t put them in the same category,” Hattie said, quieting the group with a bit of authority. “Hemingway influenced a large swath of contemporary American prose that followed, while …” she picked up one of the anthologies dedicated to Lovecraft’s work, “… this seems to be important for only a narrow, particular audience.” A closer look. “What is it, exactly?”

  “Come on,” Corbin said. “Contemporary fiction? Who cares? If you get off on literary stuff, fine. But don’t knock popular culture. Lovecraft prepared the way for most speculative horror and sci-fi. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  Hattie caught herself. She knew the divide between high and low art had been dismantled years ago, that popular culture was a valid field of inquiry in the academy.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll check it out.”

  Corbin beamed. They agreed to each review the suggestions and meet again the following week.

  The next day, Hattie visited the New York Public Library and read a few pages of Lovecraft, without paying much attention. She realized it wasn’t her thing, but she could see the importance of it as early horror fiction, even a progeny of Poe. To mollify Corbin in the spirit of diversity, she thought she would recommend At the Mountains of Madness, unaware that its first lines would echo her later work: I’m forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice.

  Later, when Hattie realized this, she would sometimes fantasize that if she had suggested they skip Lovecraft, Corbin might have left the group in a hissy and never bothered her again.

  Instead, Corbin stayed, and over the months of their undergraduate years and into graduate school a common theme erupted at different times: Corbin’s insistence that the N.P.B. was real, that Lovecraft had foreseen it (which she found preposterous because eventually she looked with care and found nothing in his canon), and, later, that everyone knew his desire to use the N.P.B. as a way to summon Lovecraft’s Elder Gods.

  “Why?” Hattie asked one day while walking with Dreya and Corbin in the city. “Why this desire for, how do you call it, the Deep?”

  Corbin laughed, a little too hysterically, and she began to question his sanity.

  Dreya covered for him. “Oh, leave him alone. He’s just nutty, but he’s entertaining.”

  “Yeah, well, you may find him charming, but I …” Corbin stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and waited. Hattie said, “I think he has little to say about what’s happening.”

  “You’ll see,” Corbin said. “If I could, I’d summon something like Godzilla and set it loose on Manhattan just to see the fucking fashion models scream—and you, Hattie, just to prove you wrong.”

  She ignored his inflammatory comments and kept walking, but that was the beginning of Corbin’s quest.

  He then began to openly challenge her ideas that bleedover could be understood rationally. He created an entire mythos of his own; he suggested that Lovecraft, and later R.E. Howard, sensed the underlying nihilism of the universe. He claimed this truth was bubbling up and that human cognition could glimpse it, but not fully grasp it. Their private battle to better articulate what was happening intensified, until the break in their contentious friendship occurred after Margery’s death.

  Margery had refused to comment on Hattie and Corbin’s squabble, suggesting that they both misunderstood. Their battle exploded after they received their locks of hair, none of them knowing the effects of the relics until later.

  * * *

  Sitting with Corrigan, Hattie realized, she felt calmer after telling him her story.

  “Remembering those earlier days, before my retreat into the scholarly backwater of cultural studies, allowed me to consider what to do. I vastly underestimated Corbin Lyell, thinking Dreya’s ambitious impulses the greater threat. Today, I know that whatever Corbin is, he’s after me.”

  Hattie skipped the fact Corbin had used media saturation and projection to trigger twisted forms of bleedover for long enough to commit murder. She realized the stakes were higher than she’d imagined. Her desire for knowledge had blinded her to the real, personal consequences of political and religious zealotry. She had imagined internal resistance by Stephan to be her most immediate threat. Maybe Bernard Corrigan and whomever he represented, she thought, might be worth pursuing. Maybe they could help.

  “I’ll be in touch, and keep you informed,” she said.

  “Do that, Dr. Sterling. We’re after the same thing.”

  “Are we?”

  Corrigan smiled, tipped his head, and excused himself.

  * * *

  She tried not to think about Eliot, not now, not in her present condition. Still, the fact remained that she bore that burden as well.

  Her cell vibrated. Masumi left a message: she was going for a walk up West Broadway to browse street art and wanted to meet.

  Hattie caressed her phone, comforted by the talented cog-sci student. Granted, Masumi had little choice but to help. She had been ostracized by her committee head, Stephan Ross, who’d also politely explained she wouldn’t have a job in the fall. Still, Hattie was happy Masumi had not deserted her. Summer was only halfway over, and both women were still shaken.

  She knew that Masumi struggled with her own understanding of what was happening. A conflict raged in Masumi, actually. It was similar to Hattie’s, but much more tempestuous. Masumi was like a wedge of steel upon which most things would shatter. The titanium truth of the N.P.B., though, as they were coming to see it, might be the one thing that didn’t shatter. Hattie feared Masumi couldn’t handle such a collision. So far, she had muttered only a few telltale signs she was reserving judgment.

  “Figure this out,” Masumi said a few days after Alice’s death, “before I go crazy and jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.” Hattie had not taken that lightly, demanding an explanation and receiving vigorous back-pedaling and promises that it was just a tasteless joke.

  What saved them were the nights she and Masumi sat up discussing what they had seen, attempting to understand it. The conversations were an important part of grieving, but H
attie recognized in them the germs of true scientific exploration in its initial phase.

  The same night Masumi had made her remark about jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge they’d been in Hattie’s SoHo apartment. With the lights off and a few cinnamon candles lit, Masumi said, “Bleedover has to be a merging of realities, but some artifacts have to be discounted by logic. Imagine someone writes a story about a Pandora’s box. A character opens it and it unleashes a singularity. The earth is sucked into a black hole in seconds. Science fantasy, sure. If we were to write that story and sing that box into existence …”

  “I see your point. That just can’t happen. Just can’t.”

  “How can we know there are limitations to bleedover, though?”

  Hattie refused to answer because she didn’t know.

  Masumi continued palming the glass of the window overlooking the street, as if the people below might see.

  “Also, that demon thing in the library should have been able to melt you with its eyes or something, right? Well, why didn’t it? I mean, your portal allows us to travel to a fictional world made real. We can assume Hexcom has a different method with the same goal … whereas your method allows one to actually return with an object. Well, return with an interpolation in the text used for … what was the word?”

  Hattie smiled. “Crossover transition—”

  “Yes, and then the interpolation can be incanted and instantiated. We can thank Towns for that. And now you can do it. You believe anyone can incant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even me?”

  “Can you carry a tune?”

  “No. But what makes Towns special? Hexcom seems to think that he is.”

  “I don’t know. He can locate as well. I think he’s just a good singer who got lucky with his beats. The fact he can locate maybe makes him more sensitive to whatever Hexcom has him doing.”

  “Locating is rare?”

  “I’ve met a handful of people who can do it, with a range of abilities in locating. Towns can walk into a library and come out with an interpolation in minutes.” She knew how rare that really was. It took her hours sometimes. “Even I can’t even do that on demand.”

  “But what you can do … is impressive,” Masumi said

  Both of them nodded. Masumi had hinted before at the power of such knowledge. Even with Masumi’s merging-realities question (unproven, but probable), the combined abilities that Hattie possessed allowed her to truly spin (as Margery called it) far beyond even what Hexcom had achieved with Lucid Media Projection.

  Hattie just had to overcome one obstacle: her promise to Margery and to herself never to use the N.P.B. as a tool of violence—whether it be emotional, intellectual, or physical. Margery had argued the ability to perceive these events meant humanity had achieved a new intellectual plateau. The first ambassadors of this understanding to the world must not falter. If ever a time had come to learn from the past, that time was now. Still, Hexcom had kidnapped Towns and put him to use. Bernard Corrigan and his seemingly endless resources confirmed this. Hexcom had also murdered her friend and her student. Hattie couldn’t let that go.

  “It’s time for action, Masumi. We must be together on this.”

  Neither woman stated flatly they wanted to save Towns and exact vengeance, but both skirted around the issue enough to be understood. The idea of using the N.P.B. in such a way ran counter to everything Hattie wanted to create with her Society. But she had to do everything to thwart Hexcom. She had to.

  * * *

  Hattie’s phone vibrated again.

  Another message from Masumi: “I found a nice lithograph. Where are you? Let’s talk.”

  But Hattie wasn’t ready to leave the hotel just yet. Not after that conversation with Corrigan.

  She remembered Margery’s admonitions never to abuse bleedover, remembered her own assurances. In those early days, even when Dreya had been part of their inner circle and Corbin lingered in the margins with his strange gods and demonic hosts, Hattie had listened to Margery speak of the future. No one ever mentioned the silly word prophecy. Yet, Margery’s views felt like more than mere guesses. She was the first to claim that what was happening was real.

  Margery’s demand came one morning while the women walked in Union Square on their way to the Strand. Margery said, “Humanity’s thirty or so millennia of telling stories, since our ancestors first sat down by their fires and looked to the stars and formed syllables to explain them, has finally reached its flashpoint. Something in reality is making use of us.”

  She had already grown thin, the disease that would eat her alive just beginning to show itself.

  She lagged behind, while Hattie and Dreya argued over the idea of N.P.B. activism, Dreya’s euphemism for what she really intended.

  “If it’s real,” Dreya said, “then someone will use it. Why not for good?”

  Hattie knew this argument and countered. “You’ll be corrupted in the process—that’s why.”

  Both of them sensed that Margery had stopped walking.

  They turned and saw her staring at them. She had paused on the curving steps along the southern portion of the square where subway riders poured out of the underground tunnel. Loungers sat on the steps of the open spaces, while others walked along the paths of the busy park.

  On this beautiful, spring morning, while nearly passing out, Margery made her demand, then said, “Promise me, neither of you will misuse this … gift.”

  Dreya spotted what was about to happen first and reached for Margery, catching her. They helped her sit.

  “Do you need some water?” Hattie asked.

  Margery’s eyes glazed over, something that had been happening more frequently lately.

  “No.” After a few moments, she said. “Promise me you won’t misuse it. Promise.”

  “What does misuse mean?” Dreya asked.

  “No violence, of any type, should be done in the name of the N.P.B. No harm. Nor should one use it for monetary or personal gain.”

  The gray moral borderlines were evident to Hattie. “What if you must harm someone to help someone? Or what if to fulfill a commitment you must do something ignoble?” She could go on thinking of particulars in which Margery’s simplistic notions might be complicated—

  Margery ignored her. “Promise.” She looked to Dreya. “And you.”

  Dreya, though, couldn’t contain herself. “I can’t believe you two. The N.P.B. will become another commodity. Better that people of character manage it than criminals.”

  “Promise.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  Now, so many years later, Hattie knew that Dreya had either lied to herself or had been lying to them the entire time. She wanted power, pure, galvanic power for political gain. She had achieved this and provided a platform for her husband’s insanities. Now, Hattie felt she had to act.

  She knew she should call Masumi back to make plans to meet.

  Instead, Hattie dialed Dreya’s number.

  * * *

  Dreya sat alone in a plush, leather seat in Hexcom United’s private jet. Outside the reinforced, oval window, a white floor of clouds stretched away to the horizon, providing a picture of a pristine, cobalt sky.

  At this altitude, she felt immune to the problems of the world, even those created by her troublesome husband. Their loyal daughter slept in the back, unaware that her overzealous father may have endangered them.

  Dreya had not eaten a bite of her salmon salad, not drank any of the fresh orange juice. Her time in Malibu had been cut short. She seethed inside, not just because Corbin’s antics had ruined her plans to sun on the deck of their multimillion dollar beach home; what angered her was that Corbin had gone after the one person she’d made him swear to avoid. He had managed to do so (mostly) for these past three decades. Until now.

  “I’m sorry,” Corbin had said over the phone. Dreya had been napping in the shade on the deck overlooking the Pacific.

  “For what?” she’d managed. Then, “I
was sleeping, Corbin. What’s so important? Tell me it has nothing to do with the boy.”

  “Not really. He’s still at Hexcom.”

  She listened, unnerved by the pause, which meant one thing:

  “Riodola?” Her husband refused to answer. “Corbin, tell me you didn’t move on Harriet Sterling again?”

  “I did.”

  “You fucking idiot.”

  “I know.” Then that nervous laughter.

  “What did you do?”

  He explained that he’d made a mistake with Perniskie, and that he was just trying to rectify things, that she never let him make any decisions anymore, that he wanted to prove he had something to contribute. He claimed she marginalized him too much, didn’t she? (She agreed to this, but that didn’t matter.) He wasn’t a child, he chided. In fact, his money had provided the base for her to build upon. A little respect was in order—

  Dreya quashed that like a brick on a potato.

  In near hysterics, she told him to, “shut up, just shut up,” that she would be home on the red-eye. Lastly, “Don’t do a thing; not a thing, Corbin. Please.”

  Now, with the setting sun behind the aircraft casting broad strands of violet and peach toward the darkening east, Dreya’s cell began ringing. The onboard sat system allowed her to speak to anyone through her private network.

  Harriet Sterling’s name appeared.

  Dreya stopped herself from cursing. She accepted the call.

  “Hattie.”

  Silence for a few moments. “Dreya, tell me the truth. Did you have anything to do with it?”

  “No, I swear,” she said into the phone.

  Dreya heard only the hum of the engines and the slight disruption of the craft pushing airspeed at five hundred and fifty miles an hour.

  “We need to meet … to discuss this,” Hattie said.

  Dreya had a vast network at her disposal; she had used it to her benefit many times in ways that would condemn her to life in prison. Yet, she feared Hattie Sterling, now even more than when they were in school. Dreya had never admitted it to anyone. She could never explain Hattie’s uncanny ability to locate interpolations in texts, or her ability to suggest that what was happening was understandable, and Hattie was its voice. If you pressed Dreya, she’d admit none of this. But, to herself, on this lonely plane ride home in which she must confront the deadly consequences of her husband’s foolish actions, she knew that she feared Hattie because she was usually right about everything.