by Rick Dakan
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“I dunno.” Conrad slumped against the side of his SUV and looked back towards the house as the gong rang out again. “Maybe there’s another way around so we can see what’s going on in there.”
Without waiting for my words of protest, Conrad set out along the fence line, moving around toward the back of the house. I started after him and then stopped as he entered the neighbor’s yard and then disappeared around the corner. I didn’t think he’d find another way in and told myself someone should stay with the car in case we had to move it. Not that I had the car keys. I paced back and forth in front of the gate and even called Conrad’s cell phone to check on him, only to hear it ring from inside the SUV. The gongs stopped, but I thought I could hear a faint piping coming from somewhere, like maybe flutes or even pan pipes. I couldn’t quite make out the tune and so the melody was lost to me, leaving only wild-sounding snatches of sound that reminded me more of chittering insects than music.
The piping grew louder as I thought about going after Conrad. He’d been gone for ten minutes now. Then there was a muffled bang, like an explosion of some sort and the piping stopped. I heard far off yelling. Screaming? I climbed up on the hood myself this time and peered over into the locked compound. Past the trees I could see the top of the oversized garage in the back and there was red smoke rising from somewhere out of sight. A door? A window maybe. The yelling/screaming/cheering had subsided now, although I could detect chanting voices coming from within. For one reckless moment I considered vaulting over the gate and inside, but a flood of worried questions quickly dispelled such wild notions. How would I get out? How would I land without hurting myself? Was I strong or agile enough to even get over the top? Instead I watched the red smoke dissipate into the sunset-drenched air.
“Get down!” a voice hissed at me from my left. I jumped and lost my footing, coming down on my ass and leaving a serious dent in the hood of Conrad’s truck. Conrad emerged from the gathering gloom by the fence, retracing his steps back toward me. As he came close and I started to apologize for the dent, I noticed he was soaked from the waist down and that his shoes were covered in mud.
“Conrad, fuck! What happened to you?”
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, pulling his keys and tossing them to me. “You drive.”
By the time we got back to my condo he’d explained what had happened. Having circled around the entire property, he’d come to the end of the fence, which, inconveniently, corresponded to the beginning of the pond. Thinking he could maybe swing around the fence at the water’s edge and get a view inside, he was as startled as I’d been by the sudden explosion. He lost his footing and stumbled forward into the muck of the pond, sinking down into the mud, ruining his shoes. However, he then had his sought-after improved view: a good angle towards the side of the oversized garage structure. The smoke came pouring out of a door as it was opened to release three coughing, black-robed figures. They heaved and coughed before taking a few moments to compose themselves in the grass before taking some deep breaths and heading back inside. All the while the chanting I’d heard snatches of continued from within. Conrad thought that maybe one of them might have seen him there, crouched in the reeds, but he wasn’t sure. He’d managed to extricate himself from the mud and then head back around back to me without seeming to alert anyone else of his intrusion.
Back at my home, his pants in the washing machine and a heavy glass of scotch in each of our hands, we quietly mulled over what we’d seen.
“Well, first of all, I can’t believe Cara says we never dated. We may not have had sex but we certainly dated.” Conrad took a sip of whiskey.
“That’s the first thing you think of?”
“I’m building up to something here. It speaks to her state of mind. Specifically the fact that I think she’s out of it, not seeing the past or her friends clearly. I’m convinced more than ever that Shelby really believes in this Cthulhu stuff. I don’t know why and I don’t know how he came to be that way, although Kym is a likely culprit, but I think he honest to God believes this crazy shit. And I think he’s getting other people to believe it to, including Cara.” I nodded. Shelby was certainly playing the reclusive guru to the hilt, and I was as freaked out by how Cara reacted as Conrad was. “And then there’s the smoke and that sound. I don’t know what the hell that is, but it’s not like anything I’ve ever heard of in this world.”
“Oh, come on. You can’t be seriously implying what it sounds like you’re implying.”
“I’m not saying it’s Cthulhu or something like that. I’m just saying it’s really, really not normal. Way outside the realm of normal. And I’m not willing to rule anything out until we know more.”
“I can’t believe it’s something supernatural. That’s just not possible.”
“All we can go on is what we can see,” Conrad said. “I didn’t see Cthulhu. I didn’t see anything supernatural. But I did see some pretty freaky, unexplained shit. And even if it wasn’t really supernatural, whatever that means, that doesn’t mean Shelby and Kym and the rest of them don’t believe it is. Either way, it’s dangerous as far as I’m concerned.”
“So what do you want to do now?”
“I’m not sure. We have to find a way inside somehow. If Shelby believes in Cthulhu for real, what would that even mean?” He paused to sip at his scotch for a while and we both pondered our next move.
“What about Sinclair, the collector I’ve been buying things for Shelby from?” I said. “He’s a little bit of a stiff, but he knows his Lovecraft. I sent a copy of the Cthulhu Manifesto to him.”
“I’d like to hear what he thinks about it. Since he’s got expertise and maybe even experience with this stuff, he might be seeing something in it that we’re not.”
“Sure, I’ll give him a call tomorrow.” I’d been wondering what Sinclair made of the manifesto and all the rest of Shelby’s activities. It would be good to get a more educated opinion on things.
Conrad and I talked for the next few hours, going over the day’s events again and again. Around 10:30 I got a call from one of my subjects for the Anarchy at Work book from Oakland, so I went upstairs to take the call. The conversation took half an hour, and by the time I came down, Conrad was passed out on the couch. I tried to wake him, but he was deep in it and probably in no condition to drive in any event. I called Lauren and told her that Conrad was passed out here and should probably just sleep it off on my couch. This news didn’t seem to please her very much, but Lauren would never take her anger at Conrad out on me, so she just listened without comment and asked me to have him come home first thing in the morning. I was really glad I wasn’t going to have to face whatever wrath she brought down on him the next day, and wondered just how much he was going to tell her about what he’d seen and done at Shelby’s.
I went upstairs to my office to work some, although I ended up just playing an online game called Metropolis 2.0 for a while. I turned in around 1:00 a.m., only to be awoken a couple hours later by terrified screams from downstairs. I snapped out of my slumber, heart racing. I don’t think I’d ever been awakened by screams before. They’d stopped, but I could still hear a kind of whimpering coming from downstairs, so I fumbled for my glasses and hurried down to check on Conrad.
He was curled up on the living room floor in a fetal position, clutching a pillow to his chest and rocking back and forth. I stood over him for a moment, not sure what to do. His eyes were still closed. Was he asleep? Some sort of night terror? I wasn’t even really sure what night terrors were.
“Conrad,” I said in a quiet, calm voice. “Are you all right?”
He just whimpered some more.
I bent down on one knee and gently put my hand on one shoulder. “Conrad?”
His eyes snapped open and his whole body stiffened. “Rick?” he croaked. “Where… ?”
“You’re at my place. You passed out on my couch. I called Lauren and told—”
; “Jesus!” he said, trying to sit up straight but then lying back down. “Oh fuck, it’s so good to be here. I thought I was… I thought I was somewhere else.”
“It’s OK, man,” I said. “Let me get you a glass of water.”
“No!” Conrad shouted. “Not water. I’m fine. I’ve had enough water… ”
“You haven’t had any water. You’re dehydrated from all the scotch. Lemme get you some—”
“I was drowning,” Conrad said from the floor as he stared up at my ceiling fan. “There were all these… these eels or snakes and they were pulling me down under the water. Under that pond. That pond of Shelby’s. There was something in there, something awful. I saw what they were doing in the house, Rick. I saw what they called forth. What Shelby needs all those followers for! It’s terrible. And part of it is in that lake. That pond. There are these snake-things. Eels maybe? All tied together down there and when I was trying to get away they were eating at me.”
“It was just a dream, Conrad. Just a dream.”
“No!” he said. “It was a dream. But it wasn’t just a dream. It was a message. And I think it was an attack. I think it was Shelby trying to scare me away.”
“C’mon, Conrad, you just need to wake up a little more.”
“My legs. Why do they itch so much?” He pulled himself back into a sort of fetal position and started massaging his ankles. I looked down, but in the darkness I couldn’t see anything wrong with them.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” I said. “You probably just slept funny.” But even as I said this, I was bending over again and examining his ankles.
“They feel bad,” Conrad said. “Itchy.”
Close up I could see that there was some sort of discoloration covering his feet and lower legs, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I stood up and turned on the overhead light to get a better view. Conrad cried out in protest and threw his arm across his eyes to shield them from the light. I squinted in the brightness down at his legs. From the calf on down they were covered with bright red marks and blistery bumps. For a moment I thought maybe they’d somehow been boiled.
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed. “Conrad, your legs!”
He moved his arm from his eyes and sat up. As soon as he saw his legs in the light he started screaming.
Chapter 14
I wanted to take Conrad to the doctor, but he refused, so I drove down to the 24-hour pharmacy and picked up some hydrocortisone, which seemed to help a little. Conrad didn’t want to talk about the dream or what had happened to his feet, having fallen into a sullen, pained silence. He decided to go back home around 4:30 in the morning, and I tried my best to get back to sleep, but the adrenaline rush of recent events still hadn’t worn off even hours later. I had no idea what had happened to Conrad. The most obvious explanation was that it was some sort of delayed allergic reaction to stepping in something in Shelby’s pond. But the combination of Conrad’s dream and the bizarre sights we’d seen at the compound were more than sufficient to make my imagination run wild with other possibilities. Could it all be psychosomatic, a product of Conrad’s fevered imagination perhaps? Or was there really some way that Shelby might send actual dreams or thoughts to plague Conrad’s sleep? Perhaps there were subliminal messages of some kind in the weird noises he’d heard that lodged themselves in Conrad’s subconscious and waited for him to fall asleep. As for the other option — that there really was some sort of occult force at work — well, I didn’t believe it, but I also no longer felt I could totally dismiss it out of hand. As Conrad had suggested earlier, we needed to know a whole lot more about what was really going on. The one bright note in this puzzling macabre turn was that pondering Conrad’s predicament distracted me from much deeper worries about Cara and what her state of mind was.
I called Conrad later that day and left a message for him on his cell phone. I was kind of afraid to call his house for fear of having to answer uncomfortable questions from Lauren. My next step was to e-mail Sinclair and see if he had anything new that I might be able to tempt Shelby with. Unusually, I didn’t hear back from him that day at all, nor did Conrad return any of my calls. I considered going down to the compound to try and talk to Cara again without Conrad by my side to provoke her, but I didn’t want to do that without having a firm plan of action. Part of me feared being turned away at the gate once more by her. And so, as always when at a loss as to what to do with myself, I went down to the comic shop to pick up some distractions.
Once there I had Brian pull my comics from my subscription file, hoping that maybe Shelby might have chosen to leave me a message there of some sort. Indeed there was a message in the file, although I couldn’t tell for sure if it was from Shelby or not. It was a single, letter-sized piece of paper covered in strange writing that I’d never seen before. It looked like the kind of thing you would expect alien writing to look like, or, more precisely, the way it’s often portrayed in comics and sci-fi movies — somewhere between Arabic and hieroglyphics.
“What’s this?” I asked Brian.
“I guess it’s some sort of party invitation. One of my employees, Dan, asked if he could put them in the files of people who’d picked up that Cthulhu Manifesto from the other day.”
“And you said he could? You don’t even know what it says.”
“Dan assured me it wasn’t anything dirty. And a lot of my customers really seemed to be into that manifesto thing, so I didn’t see the harm. It’s a code, and you can decipher it if you have the manifesto. Of course we’re all out now, and I didn’t keep one for myself, so I haven’t tried it.”
“OK,” I said, staring at the sheet of strange symbols. “Well, thanks for this.”
I paid for my comics and went back home. I’m not good with codes, and I hadn’t noticed any kind of key to a cipher in the Cthulhu Manifesto, so I was at a loss as to how I might decode it. Even with my original, handmade copy of the manifesto at hand I was still stymied. There weren’t any symbols like the ones on the page anywhere in the book that I could see. I called Conrad again to tell him about this latest development, but his cell phone was still going straight to voice mail. Finally, since I needed to talk to him about the manifesto anyway, I decided that maybe Calvin Sinclair might have some insight into this mystery.
Sinclair answered on the fifth ring, and sounded out of breath. “Mr. Dakan!” he said, his voice sounding surprised. “How are you this afternoon?”
“I’m good. I actually have a bit of a situation here and I was hoping you could help me out.”
“Oh? How may I help you?”
“I’ve just received a piece of paper that’s got some kind of code on it. Supposedly the key to deciphering it is in the Cthulhu Manifesto, but I’ve gone through my entire copy, and I can’t find anything. I was hoping you might be able to make some sense of it.”
“I’ll do my best, of course. You say it’s just one sheet? Perhaps you could fax it to me?”
I faxed Sinclair the encoded sheet and then waited by the phone for about twenty-five minutes or so, surfing the net for hints on code-breaking. There were a lot of complicated processes out there, but if it was a simple code, it might not be too difficult to crack. Before I had a chance to download a code-breaking program, Sinclair called back.
“Hello, Mr. Dakan. Do you happen to have one of the original, handmade copies of the Cthulhu Manifesto?”
“Yes,” I said, remembering that I hadn’t bothered to mention to Sinclair that these rarer volumes existed when I sent him the comic book version.
“Have you tried peeling back the end paper pasted into the back cover?” he asked, sounding a little smug to my ears.
“No, of course not.”
“Well, according to a friend of mine I just spoke with, there is indeed a hidden code placed beneath the end papers. It should provide you with everything you need to read the letter.”
“That’s great!” I said, reaching for my copy sitting on the desk.
“Or I could simply read yo
u the translation if you’d prefer. It’s quite short.”
“You’ve translated it?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes indeed. It’s a simple substitution code, with each symbol standing for a corresponding letter in our alphabet. No trick to it really, once you have the key. My friend e-mailed me a copy.”
“Well, what’s it say?”
“This part is a little more cryptic, but perhaps it makes sense to you: ‘Seeking the Truth about Cthulhu? Join the Church of Starry Wisdom April 6th at 9:00 p.m. at the Hippo House.’ Then it ends with the line from ‘The Call of Cthulhu’: ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,’ which you no doubt recognize yourself. Does this allusion to the Hippo House mean anything to you?”
“As a matter of fact, I think it might,” I said. It was a college house — one of those places that passed from college student to college student over the years. In this case it was associated with students at the Ringling School of Art and Design rather than New College, but it was not too dissimilar from the place Shelby used to live in on Indian Point Drive before that last, fateful party. “I’ll have to ask around to be sure,” I said.
“I do urge you to be very careful moving forward. I hope I’m not being out of line when I say that I believe your friend Shelby has traveled too far down a dark and dangerous path.”
Put in Sinclair’s florid language it all sounded very melodramatic, but after seeing Cara in the thrall of the compound, melodramatic seemed just about right. “Thanks for the warning. Things are getting weird here. I’m worried that Shelby might be influencing one of my other friends. Actually there’s something else you can help me with. My friend, Cara, just got a tattoo that’s identical to one that Shelby and Kym have. It’s sort of a branch-like symbol or maybe an arrow.”
Sinclair didn’t answer right away, and when he did he sounded very concerned. “Did you say a tattoo?”