by Curtis Hox
“Certainly.” Then Dreya asked, “You believe me, don’t you?”
“Let’s meet, tonight. Just the two of us.”
Dreya agreed, and cursed that her old friend possessed this ability to cause her anxiety.
With a simple command, an on-call team could take care of this problem. They’d do it silently and cleanly and without the fumbling heavy-handedness of her husband’s people. She’d imagined it many times over the years, knowing someday a confrontation might occur.
Margery had sensed the inevitability and made all three of them swear they’d never misuse the N.P.B. But something about Hattie’s unstated acquiescence had always bothered Dreya. And her husband was a zealot. His mind was filled with the fiery stuff of true belief based on little more than desire. Hattie, though, even as a wide-eyed undergraduate with a wild claim about what she could do in libraries, presented Margery with challenges she couldn’t answer. It was Hattie who’d introduced them to the scientific reality of the N.P.B. Margery had fallen for her in those heady days, only later becoming the heart of the group that softened Hattie’s intellectual pursuits.
Here, Dreya finally came to it. She had to admit she feared Hattie because Hattie was always smarter. Corbin’s misstep had finally proven that Dreya’s caution had been wise. Corbin had already damned himself.
Dreya knew exactly what to do.
* * *
In a new, hip Chelsea high-rise hotel with an open restaurant overlooking Eighth Avenue, late diners sat at tables, while people chatted in front of the two bars at either end.
Dreya had the excuse of flying in from California. She promised to arrive before midnight. Dr. Sterling had told Masumi to find a place at the bar and sit tight. Bernard Corrigan’s team was there, listening; they had followed Dr. Sterling, while a plain-clothes agent sat two seats down from Masumi. Two tall, fit gentlemen dressed in high-end, fashionable suits pretending to socialize over appetizers, Dreya’s personal bodyguards, kept eyes on the area. For the first time, the major interests in the N.P.B. had come together.
Dreya finally walked into the restaurant in a casual, but nice-fitting pantsuit, as if she had come for a business meeting. She garnered a few glances, even at her age, and ignored them.
She took the empty seat across from Hattie, who had obviously not given a thought to her appearance.
“Corbin killed Alice Reynolds,” Hattie said.
“I’m so sorry. I just heard.”
Hattie raised her hand. “Did you know?”
“I told you. No.”
“And Eliot … killed.”
“What? Eliot?”
“Really? You don’t know anything about what’s happening?”
After recruiting Towns, Dreya had mostly ignored the events surrounding Riodola because she believed it was better to leave Hattie alone. But Eliot! Her husband had told her, offhandedly, that Eliot Brandeis had been picked up and let go. He had lied to her. He had gone behind her back, used assets without her knowledge, and put her in danger. How come she didn’t know poor Eliot had been killed? She felt shaken, incensed.
“Corbin didn’t tell me.”
“Your husband has taken a renewed interest in me, Dreya. I must respond.”
Hattie said nothing more to clarify the threat. She could see that Dreya understood.
Still, after all these years, Dreya’s fear worked in her favor. During those early days when Margery claimed reality had changed and when she began formulating its articulation with neologisms like bleedover, Dreya had little to offer other than fawning praise. Even after they grew into independent women, Dreya was never able to respond to Hattie’s insistence that imagination was as important as reality, that the represented thing was as real as the original. Such preposterous claims, yes. Yet Dreya had never directly opposed Hattie, even staying out of the bickering between her husband and her old friend.
“How, Hattie?”
She shook her head. “No, Dreya. I won’t talk about that.” Then, “Your husband has also taken an interest in a student of mine—”
“A student?”
“Sorry, a former student. His name is Towns.”
“You want him back?”
“I want him to be able to leave if he chooses.”
“I’ll look into it.”
But Dreya knew her husband would never give up the boy because she had given Corbin the idea to recruit him. Dreya knew she had created this snare for herself. Her husband would burn the boy to a husk, as he had others, before Towns ever saw sunlight again. She remained calm, already letting Corbin go in the face of Hattie’s rage. She felt relieved, actually, that Hattie Sterling might finally stop him.
“What about me?” Dreya asked.
“You leave New York until it’s over.”
“All right.”
Dreya stood.
“One more thing,” Hattie said. Dreya obediently waited. “I spoke to Margery. She’d be disappointed in you.”
Dreya blanched and took a few steps back, banging into her chair.
She rushed from the restaurant, leaving Hattie to breathe a sigh of relief, even though she now struggled with what she had done. She had promised aggression to further her aims.
Hattie saw the faces of Eliot and Alice and knew she had no choice. Towns—what about him? She knew that Dreya probably had no say, at this point, in what Corbin did with Towns. She had relinquished control of that aspect of her husband’s twisted life long ago.
Hattie finally took a breath.
“I have to do it.”
She hurried to the bathroom, found a stall, and wept, barely able to stop shaking. She had now committed herself to a path that Margery would condemn. She knew she would use the N.P.B. for violence. She feared she would never recover. Still in a fit, but knowing she had one more statement to make, she dialed Corbin.
He answered.
Sobbing, her face streaked with tears, Hattie said, “Bastard.”
PART THREE: THE SYMPOSIUM
From Uncommon Learning: Understanding in the Age of Culture Science, by Harriet Sterling (New Jersey: Riodola UP, p. 112)
The need for a ‘culture science’ outweighs the challenges of its construction. Indeed, old-fashioned positivists should feel threatened. In a world where narrative speaks back, and not only speaks, but manipulates the world in which we live, we need a working theoretical model for understanding it. Reality itself must be reassessed, far beyond any other challenge. The Copernican Revolution looks like a mere ripple in the pond of intellectual history. Descartes, Galileo, Newton fall by the wayside as mere commentators who got a portion of the problem right. Darwin’s dethroning of a humanity made in the image of God from its principal position high atop the animal kingdom comes closer to the social revolution occurring. The New Phenomenon of Bleedover requires a complete revision of our key metaphysical categories. Reality, and Nature itself, must be rethought.
Validated Interpolation
Robert E. Howard: Altered Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, 27 Nov 1934
You may not believe me, sir, but Conan is as real as spit. In fact, I would say that he is more real than any character I ever wrote [//////////] Conan walked up to me one night, tapped me on the shoulder and told me to sit down and listen. He then dictated his first story and told me [\\] he is real. Yes, I’ll say it now, it’s as if he were a real person with real stories to tell. Take it for what’s it worth, sir, but [/////////] Conan lived and died and [\\] he’ll never be forgotten.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The return to Riodola for Dr. Sterling occurred the same week she planned to fulfill two important academic responsibilities: attending the symposium on the N.P.B. sponsored by Dr. Ross’s Cognitive Neuroscience Facility and a peer-led academic hearing to assess the efficacy of her demonstration.
She walked in the library all morning, moving through the atrium where the attack had occurred, into the vestibule, then up into the galleries.
She scanned for the laminates,
knowing her Saint George ward was effective in most instances—but not always. She cleaned the scorched stone inside of Kant’s hand and added another Saint George, something she’d been planning to do since Arnold Perniskie broke in. She also knew somewhere another laminate had dissipated in a puff of smoke protecting them in the atrium during the demon attack.
On each floor, she rested in one of the glass-and-iron turrets to stare out over the quad.
At one point, she missed Dr. Ross hurrying from the president’s office back to the science complexes.
He spotted her, though. He paused in the middle of the quad, noticing the still figure on the third floor of the old library. At first, he mused how fitting it would be if it were a ghost, unaccustomed as he was to seeing any activity in the building.
Stephan Ross’s glasses worked well enough for him, though, to recognize the thin figure of Hattie Sterling. He felt no remorse for his tireless campaign against her; he felt no guilt that Eliot Brandeis had aligned himself with her—and suffered the consequences in losing his chair and funding. Stephan felt a driving need to exact from her a confession; yes, that’s what it was.
Her hoax, or her complicity in believing in it, had tarnished the name of Riodola. Besides, she had given a home to the traitor, Masumi.
Back in the turret, Dr. Sterling only spotted Dr. Ross a few moments before he was lost between rows of hickories that lined the path. She had no time for him right now. She had Corbin on her mind.
She continued her reconnaissance of the building, knowing that she must be aware of its every nook and corner, niche, and side passage. She planned to sacralize these hidden places with wards of protection so powerful nothing like Corbin’s twisted, imaginary demon-thing could survive. She even commended Masumi on her choice of a pulp element for her personal protection and planned to keep that one with her at all times.
“There you are.” Masumi appeared around a corner. She wore her revamped Socspin ID on a pink nylon cord around her neck. On the back was written her personal protection ward that had worked so well in the library. She thumbed it while she spoke. “They’re going to eat you alive.”
“The symposium?”
“Yes.” Masumi chose a chair in a turret and sat down, elbows on the old, wooden reading table. “I snuck around and inquired a bit. Dr. Ross is setting you up for a fall.”
“I know. And I don’t care. Dean Edwards has cleared me of egregious wrongdoing, but Stephan wants an internal debate among the faculty regarding the merits of my ideas. I agreed, of course, claiming it’s an honor to be given such an opportunity. The problem is that both the symposium and the open hearing will be on the same day—”
“At the end of the week.”
“That gives us five days to prepare,” Hattie said. “Five days to return to normal. Five days to deal with Corbin Lyell.”
“And Towns?”
“He might not survive five more days. Bernard Corrigan sent me an email confirming that high-profile subjects like Towns usually burn out in a month or two at Hexcom. His organization (which he still hasn’t identified) tracked the abuses of twelve individuals in the last three years. Two of them died a few months later of suicide, while most of the others were emotionally and mentally damaged. Whatever Hexcom’s doing, they’re legally covered. Their experiments in media manipulation require consent forms that provide indemnity. Anyone who accepts money from them signs a waiver.”
“Yeah, he signed something like that,” Masumi said. “What’ll you do?”
“Before this is all over, Stephan Ross will admit his mistake, and Corbin Lyell will taste justice.”
Masumi had not heard such talk before. She glanced around, even though no one was in the galleries.
“Taste what?”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
“Not at all,” Masumi said. “What about your promise to never use the N.P.B. for violence—”
“Those days have changed. I was naive. If our Society is to survive in a world where men like Corbin Lyell live, we need to be more … exacting.”
“You mean the two of us?”
“The two of us.”
“How?”
“I have an idea. Somehow, narratives want to be made real. Or maybe it’s even better than that; maybe something in reality allows human beings to generate narratives that already are real. This is an awesome power. We can engage the entire process. We can imagine a world—that possibly already was—)write it into a story, travel through our portal to this narrative, and return with a boon.”
“A boon?”
Hattie refused to elucidate. She watched Masumi roll her eyes.
“I need to eat,” Masumi said.
She stood and wandered away, but Hattie knew she wouldn’t go far. Masumi now spent most of her days in an empty room that had become her office. They’d set up a workstation for her. She pretended to program, but Hattie noticed a few of her monographs nearby and even spotted an open web page about the N.P.B.
* * *
Masumi returned to her workstation in the subbasement. She had been researching Corbin Lyell and Hexcom United.
She had found a variety of historical links between Dr. Sterling and her adversaries. The earliest document she uncovered was a Columbia newspaper article written by Harriet Sterling regarding the N.P.B. in which she plugged her reading group as a viable avenue of investigation. She actually mentioned Corbin’s love of pulp horror as an example of inclusion. Masumi also found a database with an academic article that cited a quote by Corbin Lyell that the N.P.B. “echoes from the Deep.”
Schizo.
Masumi hit a button and returned to the results of electronic search queries referencing the quote.
Most of the information about Corbin Lyell centered on his obsessive hobby of collecting pulp fiction elements and how this endeavor became Hexcom United. She discovered little on the other ventures until she saw a human-interest story written a few years ago by an anonymous former Hexcom employee for an N.P.B. junkie website. The source said Hexcom’s founder began his quest to catalog the world’s pulp material because of a snub.
“Interesting,” she said.
Apparently, an “old intellectual nemesis” (yes, that was the actual phrase in the story), now a professor of cultural studies at Riodola University and a respected voice of all things N.P.B., Dr. Harriet Sterling, kicked Mr. Corbin Lyell out of a popular reading group at Columbia University. It had begun over an internal row regarding the importance of popular culture texts.
The article provided a short history of her work, especially her claim that the N.P.B. is a real phenomenon and that media elements are its avenue of communication. However, the article ended by suggesting that Hattie Sterling, in fact, allowed some Lovecraft into the group but refused to consider the inclusion of R.E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria stories (suggested and presented at a later meeting by Mr. Lyell). Instead, she offered the award-wining—and, much more literary, she claimed—Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon.
Masumi was excited to find a portion of the article dedicated to interviews with both Mr. Lyell and Dr. Sterling.
Interviewer: Mr. Lyell, when I spoke to Dr. Sterling, she said you only wanted the Conan stories to rile up the feminists. Is that true?
Mr. Lyell: No, but that would have been fun.
Interviewer: Then why did you insist?
Mr. Lyell: Why did she say she wanted Bradley?
(The interviewer claimed she had to look through her notes.)
Interviewer: To “battle fire with fire.” What does that mean exactly?
Mr. Lyell: Right, here’s what happened. One night after a reading, I forget when, someone else and I ended up arguing over the impossibility of determining who would win a fight between Batman and Superman. Understand, I’ve been reading that stuff since childhood. Every boy has had this conversation. Superman, of course. Hattie overheard and said such scenarios are silly, so I forced the subject and said Conan could withsta
nd any assault by Bradley’s wizardesses, Vivian and Morgaine. Before I knew it, Hattie was babbling about the power of the druids and elemental magic. I had her really going and ended up laughing in her face that Conan would have lopped her hysterical head off, just like her druidesses. She kicked me out soon after.
The article gave Dr. Sterling only a few words:
Interviewer: Mr. Lyell claims he was kicked out because he won an argument about who would win between a barbarian and a wizardess.
Dr. Sterling: Have you ever read The Mists of Avalon? Morgaine tells the tale. She survives. By default, a first-person perspective …
Masumi could see that Dr. Sterling’s argument was based on the simple fact of literary convention. It seemed like a weak argument, seemed as if the interviewer knew it, and Dr. Sterling knew it. Masumi deduced Dr. Sterling had been beaten in a heated, juvenile version of my-dad-can-beat-up-your-dad.
None of this would have mattered if Masumi had not seen Dr. Sterling sitting in her office, on the day they moved back into the library, with The Mists of Avalon on her desk. Masumi had never heard of the novel but noticed the cover looked like popular fantasy—not the sort of thing you’d expect someone like Dr. Sterling to be reading. A bookmark a quarter of the way through suggested she was.
Masumi was intrigued after finding the interview because of a simple task Dr. Sterling had given her a few days ago: “Go to the Strand Book Store in Manhattan and buy as many fantasy books with strong female characters you can carry. Come back as soon as you can.” She handed Masumi a hundred dollars. “That should cover it.”
Masumi had almost asked, but knew not to.
“Sure.”
Besides, she now had an idea why.