The Mall of Cthulhu
Page 15
He suspected that this was the part of glimpsing the Old Ones that drove people barking mad in the Lovecraft stories. He had felt his mind straining under the certainty that all that awaited him and everyone forever was endless torment. And then, it had ended, and he'd found himself face down on some foul-smelling flagstones.
Lovecraft was certainly right about the geometry. It was all wrong—looking around, Ted couldn't get a fix on what was up, what was down, and even whether he was looking at a sidewalk or a wall. He seemed to be in a city, in that there were streets and buildings, but it was like being trapped in that Escher drawing he'd hung on his dorm wall freshman year. Except that it smelled horrific, as though the contents of the Queequeg's dumpster he'd sat in just a few days, or possibly several hundred thousand years ago, had been pureed with a thousand decaying corpses and four tons of dogshit, and spread everywhere.
Actually, Ted's freshman room had also smelled horrific, due to his roommate's aversion to doing laundry as well as a jar of kimchi, which some kid from down the hall had left sitting in the sun on their windowsill one hot afternoon and which had exploded all over. If you magnified the stale crotch-sweat and fermented cabbage smell of his freshman room a thousand times, it might come close to the smell of what he assumed was R'lyeh, the city that, somewhere, held the sleeping Cthulhu.
And, hopefully, Cayenne. Uneasily, Ted stood up . He found that he was on a sidewalk, or possibly a roof. "Cayenne!" he called. "CAYENNE!" he screamed again. He wondered if his screaming might possibly wake the sleeping Cthulhu, which couldn't possibly be a good thing. But as he called Cayenne again, he realized that there was something else funny about this place. Despite the fact that he was standing on a flat expanse of stone with other flat expanses of stone all around—he wanted to think of it as a plaza, but then it kept looking spherical from certain angles—his voice wasn't echoing at all. In fact, it sounded much quieter than it should have in his ears. It seemed that sound waves weren't propagating properly here either.
Ted wandered aimlessly for a period of time through the streets, sewers, hallways, plazas, walls and rooftops of R'lyeh. He had no idea how long a period this happened to be. His feet did not get tired. He did not feel like sleeping. He was not hungry. He didn't have to pee. The light in and around R'lyeh—a sick greenish-yellow glow that emanated from the sky, or possibly the ceiling, or, then again, maybe the floor, did not vary at all.
All of which seemed to argue only that Ted hadn't been walking for very long. Yet it felt like at least three hours. Then again, he'd been to ninety-minute movies that felt like three hour movies simply because they were dull, and dull was certainly a good way to describe R'lyeh. Oh, sure, the city was dotted with statues of what he assumed to be Cthulhu—a big, octopus-headed creature—but these didn't live up to Lovecraft's billing of mind-destroying wrongness—they were a little weird, but Ted had seen weirder at Goth dance clubs, and they were not weird enough to distract Ted for long from the monotony of his surroundings and the feeling of dread and despair that was welling up inside him.
He called for Cayenne again, got no response, and started to run. When he found himself suddenly on a wall that used to be a sidewalk, he shouted at the top of his lungs that he was "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man." This remained entertaining and funny for a period of time, and then, suddenly, the dam burst on his despair, and he began to cry.
He'd been a fool to hope, to believe even for a second that he wasn't doomed to live a shitty life, that everything hadn't been ruined that night in the sorority. He'd only known Cayenne for a few days, but he felt a connection with her that he hadn't ever felt with anyone. He had dared to hope that he was going to get a third act—the one where he got to be happy and live some sort of approximation of a normal life and possibly end up as the patriarch of some large happy family instead of just being a ghost that haunted Laura.
Well, that's what he got for hoping. It seemed God, or whoever ran things, was pretty pissed at Ted and had His own special plans to make Ted suffer. Even this place, with its boredom and horrible smell and bad geometry, might be endurable if he and Cayenne were together. He'd given up everything for her—the hope of ever setting foot in his own reality with its comforting, Euclidean geometry again—and it turned out to have been a sucker bet. He couldn't help her, he couldn't help himself.
And maybe, he thought, he was actually dead. Maybe this was hell—this terrible solitude, the boredom, and the sense that everything you'd done was ultimately for nothing. Maybe the cruelest part was that when he'd first found himself here, he'd been allowed to feel some hope.
He curled up and cried for a period of time. Or maybe, he thought, for a period of no-time. Did no-time even have periods? Or was it menopausal? Ted made himself smile with that, and then thought that showed he was desperate for a laugh. Ted went to wipe his eyes and found that they were dry. So maybe he hadn't been crying. Except he remembered crying. Maybe this was the part that drove people crazy—this inability to be sure of anything, ever.
More no-time did or did not pass. Ted wandered. None of the structures he passed looked familiar, but since he might be seeing them from different angles, he couldn't be sure if he was just walking through the same area over and over and over again. "Hey," he said aloud in his strangely too-quiet voice. "Where the hell's Cthulhu anyway? I mean, the guy's supposed to be friggin' huge—how could I possibly keep missing him?"
Armed with a purpose, Ted went wandering again. He alternated calling for Cayenne and calling for Cthulhu. Neither answered. He had three more dry-eyed crying fits as he sank into a pit of despair. He emerged from the pit of despair and walked. Eventually, or else immediately, he came upon a long wooden box. It was definitely a rectangular solid with right angles at the corners, and so was unlike anything else he'd seen in R'lyeh—it was definitely an object from his own dimension. He spent some time trying to figure out how to open it and eventually pried the top off. The smell of vomit and decay rose from the box, and, inside, he saw a corpse with blistered red burns all over it.
"Ah, Half-caf, we meet again," he said. Half-caf said nothing. Ted briefly imagined the horror of enduring the trip here sealed in a dark box, mind already straining at the seams from the pain of the untreated burns. He felt a swell of pity for Half-caf, and a pang of regret about burning him so badly. Then he remembered the young couple with their brains all over the Queequeg's wall, and he remembered Cayenne and the whole city of Providence, the whole earth that this guy had been trying to destroy, or at least transform into a facsimile of this stinking, unchanging shithole. "Tough luck, buddy," he said to Half-caf. He replaced the lid to the box and walked on.
He thought about Half-caf for several days while he walked in circles, or arcs, or intersecting parallel lines or something. He decided that he would try to mark time by singing some of his favorite albums over and over again. This broke down when he couldn't remember some of the lyrics from Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend." Then he couldn't remember which song he'd been singing. He tried to sing every Ramones song he knew, but then felt like he'd been singing "The KKK Took My Baby Away" for a year and a half. Perhaps he had. It occurred to him that he could think of eighteen-month periods he had spent in far worse ways. This made him smile. He was happy.
He was sad. He walked. The wall he'd been walking on suddenly became a ceiling. This made him laugh out loud. "What a feeling," he sang. "Dancin' on the Ceiling." This was funny, but the ceiling he was dancing on suddenly turned out to be a floor.
He decided that trying to play both ends of a chess game in his mind might help pass the time, or at least keep him sane, but then he found himself cackling rather alarmingly as he yelled out, "Yes! Feel the sting of my fianchettoed bishop! Put that in your Nimzo-Indian and smoke it!" This struck him as even funnier, and he started calling out chess openings that never existed outside of this greenish, strangely constructed zone outside of time and space. "Ah, yes, Townsend's hard drive! But black counters with the Queen's knic
kers! Fantastic move. Ah, White has reached Gilligan's Island by transposition! Now, if this were Gilligan's Island, which I guess it is, who am I? Am I Gilligan? Or am I the Professor? Or possibly Mary Ann?" He wondered why no one had ever made a pornographic version of Gilligan's Island, then realized that someone almost certainly had. "Great idea for a porno movie," he said, and then began to cry as he realized he would never ever see it.
Except in his mind, where Ginger and Mary Ann frolicked enthusiastically for quite some time. Or no time at all. Or something.
Finally, or, then again, initially, Ted rounded a corner, or cornered a round, or fianchettoed the bishop, and was knocked out of his pornographic reverie by the sight of the gargantuan Cthulhu, sleeping.
Sixteen
In books, people were always suddenly sobered up by hearing something surprising, but Agent Marrs, if that was his real name, with his absurd tale of werewolves and Bible-based supernatural defenses and Ted being dead, did not sober up Laura one bit. Indeed, her encounter with Agent Marrs made her, feel, if anything, more drunk, like hearing about secret government anti-supernatural fighters was something that just happened when your brain was fogged, kind of like calling your ex at one in the morning. Perhaps it was just the tequila hitting bottom, but she suddenly felt that all the alcohol she'd consumed that hadn't had any effect on her at all had suddenly kicked in.
"Bullshit," she said. "I mean, it's all bullshit, probably, but Ted being dead is definitely bullshit. The guy—I mean, a sorority full of vampires and a mass killing in a Queequeg's and the guy walks away without a scratch. There's no way that something like being sucked into another dimension of unimaginable horror could possibly kill him. The guy is immortal."
Marrs gave Laura a look that she recognized as, "You poor dear, you're in denial, but I'm not going to burst your bubble right now."
"Well," he said, "be that as it may, I would really like to put a stop to this whole Cthulhu Cult business, and I'd love your help if you're willing to work for me."
"Let me just ask you this, Mr. Marrs—" Laura killed her beer and signaled the waitress for a refill, and then suddenly started to giggle as she imagined what Ted would do if faced with somebody named Marrs. "Are you related to the M.A.R.R.S. who did 'Pump Up the Volume'?"
For the first time in this conversation, Marrs looked unbalanced. "I'm sorry," he said, "I'm afraid I don't . . . "
"I'm kidding, I'm kidding. But that would be pretty funny, though, if that was like a fund-raiser for your department or something."
Marrs looked at her blankly, and she tried to make her brain serious for a moment. "Okay, listen—you know about the Omega house, you were just about to stop it, you know about this, you have the power to get me transferred, but why the hell can't you do anything about it? I mean, these losers were digging up the Necronomicon on a public street! You couldn't do that?"
"Oh, we've had the Necronomicon for years. The great majority of it is completely useless. Largely the insane rantings of someone who'd been hitting the hashish a bit too hard."
"Hence the 'Mad Arab' thing, huh?"
"Right. But there are approximately thirty pages of incantations in the Necronomicon with all kinds of deadly implications. But they're coded. You can't do anything with them without a key to the code."
"Which these guys obviously have."
"Right. We don't even know what book contains the code, what it looks like, what language it's in, anything. Frankly, we didn't believe there were any extant copies."
Laura smiled. "Say that word again."
"Necronomicon?"
"Hee! That's a funny one too, but I mean 'extant.' It sounds funny, you know? Like, something that used to be tant. Whatever tant is."
"Well," and Marrs shifted uncomfortably in his seat, "I think perhaps we should continue our conversation in the morning—"
"But, I mean, why couldn't you just kill all these guys, or at least arrest them or something? Why'd you let them dig up the Necronomicon in the first place? Why didn't you kill the vampires? If you know about all this shit, why don't you fix it?"
Marrs sighed heavily, removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and put his glasses back on. "Right now," he said. "I mean at this very instant, my branch consists of me and five other people in the office. We spend a lot of time monitoring information on computers, we piggyback on the surveillance whenever the FBI is investigating anything that we think might be supernatural—we work very hard, I want you to understand this—we all work seventy, eighty-hour weeks, and through anonymous tips and selective use of arson, sunlight, crosses, silver, and numerous magical spells, we've actually been able to prevent probably thousands of deaths.
"But this is a very very big country, Laura. I should probably have one agent assigned to Sasquatch duty full time. Especially during mating season. They grow rather irascible then. But we simply don't have the personnel. When I flew out to Death Valley to perform the simple matter of the Anti-Djinn incantations, some people dug up a Necronomicon. I don't know how long our money has to last, so we can't spend like we'd like to, and, as I said before, it's damn hard to recruit when your pool of qualified applicants includes only those people who believe in the reality of vampires. I can't tell you the number of pale-skinned, black-attired Anne Rice devotees I've turned away—no law enforcement background, and most of them want to play bass for Lestat instead of wanting to rid the earth of bloodthirsty murderers."
Laura's next shot and beer arrived. She shot the tequila and suddenly had the presence of mind to wonder when she'd had this much to drink in this short a time before. Probably ten years ago at a party that this hot girl's sorority was having . . . And she was suddenly annoyed with herself. Time might be of the essence here, and she'd just taken herself out of the investigation for at least a few hours.
She thought, "I investigate better when I'm drunk," and then found herself laughing. She'd laughed a lot in the last few minutes—not too bad, when she'd thought she would never laugh again just a few minutes ago. Maybe she should get shitfaced more often. Marrs looked slightly annoyed.
"Listen, Ms. Harker, you're obviously not in any condition to make a decision right now, but I'm going to give you my card—" he pressed a card into her hand—"and if you'll give me your cell phone number, we can have a conversation in a few—"
"Don't need to think about it. I wanna do it." The words spilled out of Laura's mouth before she had a chance to consider what she was saying. But then she thought about it. This was what she wanted to do all along—to work on this kind of case. And if she stayed with the regular FBI, she'd have to look for Ted on her own time, and every time something obviously supernatural came up, some jackass would tell her it was a magic trick and she couldn't have any resources. It didn't seem like Marrs had much in the way of resources either, but at least he'd let her use her time the way she wanted.
Marrs smiled. "Delightful. Well, I can't obviously take you as seriously as I'd like given your condition."
"Being a lesbian is not a condition, okay? And I don't know why it should prevent you from . . . "
Marrs looked uncomfortable, and his face turned red. "Well, no, I was actually referring . . . I mean, obviously who you choose to . . . that is . . . "
Laura let loose a flood of giggles. "Gotcha!" she said. Marrs didn't look amused. "So when do we start, and where?"
"I really don't think we should discuss this right now. I will call you first thing in the morning. So I suggest you cut off your consumption at this point so as to be in suitable investigating condition. I find that water, in addition to a supplement containing a rich B-vitamin complex does a wonderful job of helping one avoid some of the worst symptoms of the hangover."
"B vitamins?"
"Consumption of alcohol depletes your supply of B vitamins. This adds tremendously to the complications of a hangover. A spoonful of brewer's yeast, or possibly—"
"Yeah, what's that shit Ted drinks? Some kind of fizzy vitamin shake . . . "
Laura looked blankly at Marrs' extended hand and debated whether to smack him. Then he laughed a hearty laugh and said, "I believe I owed you one!" and Laura wasn't sure whether to smile or deck him. Finally she shook his hand.
"Do we get to take 'em out?"
"Who?"
"The guys who . . . who did this to Ted. Do we take 'em out?"
"Well, if they were supernatural creatures, certainly—pile of ashes, puff of smoke, what have you, problem solved. But these cretins aren't supernatural, so not only do they tend to have next of kin, they also leave behind remains that are far more difficult to dispose of, and we simply—"
"I know. Resources."
"Exactly."
"Well. Till tomorrow, then."
"Fine," Marrs said, smiling. He walked out of the restaurant. Laura pondered the beer that sat in front of her and decided not to drink it. She called for her check and paid it. She walked unsteadily down the street toward the panel van—though she hardly knew Killilea, he'd been better through this whole thing than he had to be, and she thought he deserved a goodbye. But the van was gone and Laura was officially transferred. She walked toward the unfurnished apartment that Ted would never set foot in again, stopping at a convenience store a few blocks from Ted's apartment (No, you told him it was your apartment, remember, when he tried to kick you out of it for calling him a baby, a really annoying voice in her brain reminded her.) and bought a packet of what she hoped was the same fizzy vitamin thing Ted always drank as well as a liter of water. She poured the powder into the water and began to drink it.
The phone woke Laura up at six a.m. Her first, half-awake thought was "Leave it to Goddamn Ted to call at six in the morning when I'm trying to sleep off . . . " And then she realized that Ted wasn't calling, that Ted might never call again, and she was wide awake and felt like crying.