by Rick Dakan
“The light catches his feet first and then I jerk it up and there’s this dark form on top of Shelby, kind of grinding against him and smothering him it seems and it takes me a second to realize what I’m seeing. It’s Kym and she’s dressed all in black tights and has Shelby tied up with some kind of cord or rope. They’re fucking making out like fiends and when the light shines on them from my phone they just turn and start laughing! Go into hysterics. And of course I start laughing too. Eventually they got up off the ground and we all go back to the table. I’m not sure, but I think Kym was just playing a joke on Shelby and me. The whole tying-up-with-a-tentacle thing seems like some weird kink of theirs.”
“You mean rope, right? You just thought it was… ”
“Some kind of tentacle rope. They’ve made it — it’s like latex and foam. They showed it to me. It’s like fifteen feet long and about half an inch thick but the end kind of flares out into this pad, like on a giant squid, you know? It’s some kind of prop thing. They soak the end in goo so it’s all slimy and sticks to people.”
“Did Kym say anything about why she’d done that? Shelby didn’t seem mad that she’d yanked him out of his seat?” I asked.
“No, not mad at all. Like I said, we were all laughing about it. It was kind of like a weird, unexpected haunted-house moment or something. But the adrenaline from the scare totally killed my buzz and it was getting late so after a few minutes more I made my excuses and got up to go. To be honest, I was kind of pissed at this point. I mean, scaring someone like that who’s on hash? That’s not really cool. Kym gave me a hug goodbye and then Shelby walked me to my car. And then he finally asked me for a favor too, just like he did with you. Maybe he thought since he and I aren’t as close as you two, he needed to get me drunk and stoned first or something, I don’t know. But as I’m getting in my car he asks me if I can broker the deal for him to rent some warehouse space somewhere in town. He already knows what he wants, he just thinks he’d get a better deal if I did the negotiating for him.”
“What’s he want it for?”
“He didn’t say. He just said he wanted to rent a big, empty warehouse for a month or so. ‘The more square feet the better, the more squalid the better.’ Those were his words. And he had a couple places picked out as possibilities.”
“Sounds like he’s maybe planning a party or something,” I said, remembering a few raves Shelby had helped organize back in the 90s.
“That’s probably it. He told me he’d pay me a commission and it’s not like I’m swimming in other deals right now, so I told him I’d look into it for him.”
“He’s got both of us doing his legwork it seems,” I looked at the clock on the TiVo and saw it was 11:51. “Speaking of which, I need to get online and scoop that last bid. He asked me to get him some stuff on eBay.”
“That’s right,” Conrad said. “You mentioned something about that. Having been to his house I’m not surprised. I’m not even sure he’s got power over there, much less Internet access.”
We both stood up and I walked Conrad out of the living room towards the front of my condo. “Thanks for letting me stop by and sober up a bit more before I head home to Lauren.”
“No problem,” I said. “Life sure is a little more interesting when Shelby’s in town, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes it’s a lot more interesting,” Conrad said. “And that isn’t always a good thing. The whole evening has weirded me out in a serious way.”
“That could be the hash talking.”
“Maybe, yeah. But it’s Shelby too. Shelby and Kym together. It’s like together they’re not just twice as strange, but four times. Four times as intense.”
I said my goodbyes and watched as Conrad walked across the parking lot towards his car, judging him sober enough to drive (I hoped). I shut the door and locked it and headed upstairs to check on the auction that was due to end in just a few more minutes.
By the time I’d gotten home from our afternoon in the park, Shelby’s foolish seeming paranoia about rival collectors had started to grow on me, so I made a new eBay account not associated with my real name. I picked “Lovecrafanatic,” which seemed to describe what Shelby had become. As for his list, it was pretty ambitious. It contained fifty items, including first editions of the original Arkham House collections of Lovecraft’s stories along with a wide number of issues of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines from the 1920s and 30s. There were only a few of the latter on Ebay, but they seemed to be going for around $200 each, so I placed bids on all three including the February 1936 issue of Astounding Stories, which had a cover illustration devoted to part one of Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness. There was also one item for auction that, even though it wasn’t on Shelby’s list of books exactly, I was pretty sure he would want. It was a signed manuscript of one of Lovecraft’s poems, “Despair,” handwritten by the man himself. The bid had started at $1000 and one person had placed an offer.
I had this cunning plan to try and scoop the auction at the last second, which was midnight that night. There’d still only been one other bid on the “Despair” manuscript last time I checked. Things had been busy since then, though, with two bidders going back and forth. The price had quickly jumped to $1750 in the last hour or so, but it looked like the original bidder had driven his rival from the field. With only minutes to go, I bid $1800. A moment later the bid came back at $1850. I realized almost too late that the other guy probably had a reserve max bid set up and the computer would bid back for him until it reached some pre-set limit. With time running out I decided to go for it. I guessed his reserve would be $2000, gambling on the human penchant for nice, round numbers. I bid $2050 of Shelby’s money and hit send at the last second. I felt safe.
When I refreshed the page to see the final results I was stunned to see my opponent had won with a bid of $2100. “Fuck!” I shouted to my office wall. I’d got caught up in the bidding excitement and hated losing. I calmed down soon enough though. After all, the manuscript hadn’t even been on Shelby’s list and there were plenty of things I could buy without bidding from used-book dealers on the American Book Exchange site. I poked around online for a bit, mindlessly going through links from Digg, and checked my e-mail accounts (there are four of them) one last time before calling it a night.
Mixed in with the spam I found an e-mail through my eBay account from someone calling himself Calvin Sinclair regarding the recent eBay auction:
Dear Lovecrafanatic,
Well fought. You almost outbid me there at the end. I’m sorry I beat you to the prize, but I’m a bit of a “Lovecraft Fanatic” myself. I’m also a bit of a dealer in Lovecraftiana. As I’ve improved my collection over the years I have a number of duplicate pieces, including several first-edition Arkham Houses and numerous issues of Weird Tales. I’ll not part with any of my autographed material of course, but if you’re interested in any other titles, I’m sure we could work out an arrangement. I’m always pleased to correspond with fellow aficionados of the gentleman from Providence.
Regards,
Calvin Sinclair
I went back on eBay and looked at the seller profile for the person who’d won the auction — using the screen name “sinslair.” Very funny, or not. Anyway, he was a prolific eBayer and had a 95 percent–positive feedback rating from the stuff he’d put up for auction, which was mostly old pulp magazines from the 20s and 30s. The guy seemed legit, so I e-mailed him back a copy of Shelby’s list. If he could hook me up all at once, so much the better. Feeling good about this plan and not then having any idea just who Calvin Sinclair really was, I went to bed without a worry in my head.
Chapter 5
Conrad and Lauren’s house in Laurel Park always gave me a twinge of regret when I went over there. When I was growing up and downtown Sarasota was a wasteland, this was a bad neighborhood. I wasn’t allowed to spend the night at the house of the one friend I had who lived down there. When I had freshly dropped out of grad school and moved back home, it w
as up and coming and I’d rented a rundown house on Oak Street that was within easy stumbling distance of the newly resurgent Main Street nightlife. But I rented and rented, putting off buying the place, even when my landlord gave me the chance. Then the boom hit and an investment that would have stretched but not broken my resources soared into the stratosphere well beyond my means. It was in that housing boom of the late 90s that Conrad started to hedge his bets on his desire for a career in radio and got his realtor’s license. And once he sold his first house, one just three blocks from where I’d been renting, and made his first commission, more than I made in a year as a struggling freelance writer, he left the DJ dreams behind for real estate and, eventually, Lauren.
She was a lawyer on the fast track to partner at a mid-sized downtown firm and had met Conrad during a real estate deal five years ago. Although downtown had been expensive for several years when they got married, the pair of them decided to buy a house where they really wanted to live instead of having a big wedding or a fancy honeymoon. Two years later they were still fixing it up, but it was coming along and, even in this down market, worth twice what they’d paid for it (or so Conrad assured me). I’d finally gotten wise enough to buy my own place a couple years later, but by then a condo south of town in the most generic of neighborhoods was all I could afford. One thing I had learned from Conrad was that real estate really just seemed to be about lost opportunities and how well you handled them. Conrad didn’t handle them all that well, which kept him driving forward looking for new ones. I had resigned myself to my condominium fate, and even come to kind of like it.
Lauren answered the door when I rang the bell, still wearing the cream blouse and navy pants she’d obviously worn to work that day. She smiled as I handed her a bottle of wine and gave me a hug. “Hello, Rick,” she said. “Good to see you.” She took a quick glance past me. “Conrad said you might be bringing a date?”
“It didn’t work out. We didn’t click,” I said. And we hadn’t. The night before had been another night wasted on a Match.com-mediated meeting. “Turns out she was a closet Republican.”
“Well,” said Lauren, “It’s probably just as well then. Dinner conversation might have been awkward.”
“Trust me, it was.” I followed her inside through the seldom-used great room and into the open plan kitchen and dining area where Conrad was sautéing some spinach in a pan. Conrad and Lauren both loved food and loved to cook, and the fact that they could still stay in such great shape drove me a little nuts sometimes. I have a large, naturally muscular frame and am often described as an intimidating presence, but I’ve got a soft middle that never seems to go away no matter how many sit-ups I do (and I don’t do that many), and I put on the pounds with ease.
I poured wine while Lauren and Conrad laid out the meal they’d prepared. Oven-roasted trout in some delicious white wine sauce served over spinach with spicy lentils. It was, as always, really freaking good, and Conrad and I weren’t shy about having seconds as we talked. Lauren was involved in a lawsuit against the city over some zoning issue that had been all over the papers for the past week, so I pressed her for information about that. The lawyer representing the city had gone to law school with her, and she joked that it would make for an awkward class reunion after he read some of the choice quotes she’d given a reporter earlier that day.
“Speaking of reunions,” said Lauren, “You have to help me convince Conrad to go to yours.”
“You’ll have to convince me first,” I said.
“See,” Conrad chimed in. “Rick doesn’t want to go either.”
“Why not?”
“There’s no one I want to see that’s going to be there. None of my old friends are coming back to Sarasota and the ones who live here I see as much as I want to anyway.”
“Plus it’s being held at Chef’s Table and it’s not cheap,” Conrad said.
“You’ve spent more money at worse places going out to dinner with Rick,” Lauren pointed out. “And I think it would be fun to see all your old high school friends fifteen years later.”
“You do remember that we were total nerds, don’t you?” Conrad asked. “I wasn’t always the suave, hip, sophisticated realtor I am today.”
“You became hip and sophisticated today? Oh honey, I’m so proud of you,” Lauren joked. She turned to me. “Maybe there’s some old high school flame you could rekindle something with. A little ‘let’s do it like in the old days’ sex.”
“All of my old flames are married, last time I checked,” I said. That seemed true for lots of my exes. I had a string of four serious relationships where each woman married the next person they dated after me. It was almost enough to give a guy a complex of some sort. As for high school ex-flames, that was a very limited set: Cara McMillan, Kelli Hartshorn, and Lisa Carlotti, with only Lisa lasting more than a few weeks. I’d lost track of all of them over the years, but assumed they were well and truly spoken for.
“What about Shelby?” Lauren asked. “Is he going?”
“If Shelby goes then I’ll actually consider it,” Conrad said. “I’d like to see how they react to him and Kym.”
“I thought Kym was perfectly sweet,” Lauren said, surprising me when she added, “I had lunch with her and Shelby yesterday. It was a little odd, but quite nice. Kym is really funny.”
“You three had lunch? Why?” I asked. Sure, Shelby invited Lauren to lunch but still hadn’t asked me.
“It was business actually. I could’ve written the whole thing off, but Shelby picked up the tab. Which is good, because they ran up quite a bill.”
“What kind of business?”
“Shelby wants to start a church,” Conrad said. “Can you believe it?”
“A church?” I wondered out loud. “Why on Earth… ”
“If I had to guess,” said Lauren, “It’s some kind of tax dodge or something, although that’s not the reason he gave me of course. He’s very clever, your friend. Says all the right things.”
“What was his reason?”
“Why, to spread the faith of course,” Lauren replied, smirking as she took a sip of wine. “Although exactly what this faith of his is, I’m still a little unclear on. It’s definitely not any kind of church my parents would recognize. It’s certainly isn’t Christian.”
“He’s calling it the Space Wisdom Church,” said Conrad.
“No,” corrected Lauren, “it’s Starry Wisdom. The Starry Wisdom Temple.”
This rang some distant memory bells for me, and I was pretty sure that it was a Lovecraft reference. I resolved to look it up. “And what is he going to preach in the church?”
“He was considerate enough not to bore me with too many details. I had my fill of that business in Sunday school. It generally sounded to me like it was some sort of Unitarian-style, New Age mumbo jumbo about the vastness of the universe and our tiny place in it and how we’re all connected or some such. I honestly wasn’t paying too much mind to the details. I was stuffing myself with sushi.”
“Stuffing sushi in your mouth doesn’t sound like the Lauren I know and love,” Conrad teased, pointing to her half-eaten plate of food. Lauren was a very light eater, as her thin frame testified.
“I know, right? But I just kind of got into the feast. We were at Utamaru, and Shelby just kept ordering more and more — no rice either, just the raw fish and octopus. Is that called sashimi when they serve it that way? And then a couple of big bottles of chilled sake. I’d only ever had it warm, but it was quite nice chilled. Better I think. He and Kym were eating like they’d been fasting for a week and they kept putting these delicious pieces of fish on my plate and I kept eating them. I guess when you just eat straight fish it takes a while to fill up without the rice, because I kept eating and eating.”
“She skipped dinner last night,” Conrad said. “Wanted to jump my bones when she got home.”
Lauren threw her napkin at him and shot him a playful but dirty look. “Shut up you.”
“It’s
true,” Conrad insisted to me. “They must’ve had some oysters in there somewhere.”
“As a matter of fact we did,” Lauren said. “But ANYWAY, as I was saying, we had this huge meal and mostly it was just the two of them telling stories about how they met and what they’ve been doing these last ten months or so.”
“Wait until you hear this,” Conrad said. “I for one don’t believe it.”
“They met in Providence. Shelby had apparently run off to stay with a cousin who lived up there, but the two had a falling out over something, so he had to find a room in some flophouse. His word, not mine. Flophouse. And he’s just spending his days wandering around town and thinking about life or some such thing and he ends up in a graveyard.”
“A graveyard in Providence,” I said. “Let me guess, he was looking for where H.P. Lovecraft is buried.”
“How did you know?” Lauren asked, sounding surprised.
“Shelby’s all about Lovecraft these days.”
“Shelby and Kym, you mean,” Lauren said. “The way he told the story to me, he gave up trying to find the grave and decided to go hit on the pretty woman he saw standing a few hundred yards away. It was Kym of course, and you’ve no doubt already figured out where she was standing.”
“Lovecraft’s grave.”
“Lovecraft’s grave,” Lauren confirmed. “Standing there with a copy of one of his books in her hand. They told me which story she was reading but I forgot. Something about a house maybe? Anyway, they hit it off at once, right then and there. Kym told me that she’d never met anyone like Shelby and that after fifteen minutes with him she knew she wasn’t ever going to let him go. Shelby says he felt exactly the same way about her. They each jokingly claimed that the other one cast a love spell on them.”