Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (55 page)

    "If you're going to try to fleece me," Armstrong said, raising his voice so that he could be heard in the adjacent room, "then you and Lopez will have to do better than all this Barlow and the 'Sodality of the Black Sun' crap."

    When San Isidro came back into the room, his teeth were bared like those of a hungry wolf. In his right hand he was clutching a small calibre pistol, which he raised and aimed directly at Armstrong's head.

    
"Cabron, hijo de puta, di tus ultimas oraciones, porque te voy a matar."

    Sweat broke out on Armstrong's forehead. His thoughts raced. Was the gun loaded or was this only bravado? Another means of extorting money from him? Could he take the chance?

    Just as Armstrong was about to cry out, everything went black. Despite the fact that it was the middle of the afternoon, with brilliant sunshine outside, the room was immediately swallowed up by total darkness. Armstrong could not believe what was happening. He thought, at first, that he had gone blind. Only when he stumbled around in the inky void and came right up against the window did he see the sunlight still outside, but not penetrating at all beyond the glass and into the room.

    Outside, the world went on as normal. Armstrong turned back away from the window and was aware of a presence moving within the dark. Whatever it was emitted a high-pitched and unearthly whistle that seemed to bore directly into his brain. God, he thought, his train of reasoning in a fit of hysterical chaos, something from Lovecraft's imagination had clawed its way into reality, fully seventy years after the man's death.

    Something that might drive a man absolutely insane, if it was seen in the light.

    Armstrong thought of the hundreds of hackneyed Cthulhu Mythos stories that he'd been forced to read down the years and over which he'd chortled. He recalled the endless ranks of cliched yet supposedly infinitely horrible monstrosities, all with unpronounceable names. But he couldn't laugh now, because the joke wasn't so funny anymore. So he screamed instead-

    "Juan! Juan!"

    Armstrong bumped into the sofa in a panic, before he finally located the exit. From behind him came the sound of six shots, fired one after the other, deafeningly loud, and then nothing but dead, gaunt silence. He staggered into the hallway and reached the light outside, turned back once to look at the impenetrable darkness behind him, before then hurtling down the stairs. He now gave no thought, as he had done when coming up, as to how precarious they were. He did, however, even in the grip of terror, recall that the building was deserted and that no one could swear to his having been there.

    After what had happened to him, Armstrong expected to feel a sense of catastrophic psychological disorientation. Whatever had attacked San Isidro, he thought, carrying darkness along with it so as to hide its deeds, was proof of something, even if it did not prove that everything San Isidro had claimed was in fact true.

    At the very least it meant that "The Sodality of the Black Sun" had somehow called a psychic force into existence through their half-century of meddling with rituals and sacrifices. Armstrong had no choice but to discount the alternative rational explanation.

    At the time when day had become night in San Isidro's apartment he had been afraid, but nothing more, otherwise he was clear-headed and not prone to any type of hysterical interlude or hallucinatory fugue. Rather than feeling that his worldview had been turned upside-down however, he instead felt a sense of profound loneliness. What had happened had really happened, but he knew that if he tried to tell anyone about it, they would scoff or worse, pity him, as he himself would have done, were he in their position.

    Enrique and Maria returned to their apartment on schedule and Armstrong told them of his intention to remain in Mexico City a while longer. They noticed the curious melancholy in him, but did not question him about it in any detail. Nor would he have told them, even if prompted.

    Armstrong moved out the next day, transferring his meagre belongings to a room in a seedy hotel overlooking La Calle de Bucareli. From there he was able to gaze out of a fifth-floor window in his
cuartito
and keep watch on the Cafe la Habana opposite. His remaining connection to the affair was with Felipe Lopez, the man who had the mind of Lovecraft, and he could not leave without seeing him one last time.

    He had no idea whether San Isidro was alive or dead. What was certain was that it was inconceivable that he attempt to make contact with him. Were San Isidro dead, it would arouse suspicion that Armstrong had been connected with his demise, and were he alive, then Armstrong had little doubt that he'd want to exact revenge.

    Days passed, and Armstrong's vigil yielded no results. There was no sign of Lopez and he had no way of contacting him directly, no phone number, and no address. He was fearful that the Mexican police might call upon him at any instant, and scanned the newspapers daily in order to see if there were any reports mentioning San Isidro. He found nothing at all relating to him and recalled what he'd been told about the authorities having been paid off with blood money over decades.

    When Armstrong left his room it was only to visit the local Oxxo convenience store in order to stock up on
tortas de jamon y queso, Faros, y tequila barato.
The last of these items was most important to him. He spent most of the time pouring the tequila into a tumbler and knocking it back, while sitting at his pigeon-shit stained window, hoping to see Lopez finally enter the Cafe la Habana in search of him. All he saw was the endless mass of frenzied traffic, drivers going from nowhere to anywhere and back in a hurry, oblivious to the revelation that separated him from such commonplace concerns, and which had taken him out of the predictable track of everyday existence.

    And then, twelve days after he'd rented the room in the hotel, he finally saw a slightly stooped figure in a grey suit making his way towards the Cafe la Habana. It was Lopez; there could be no doubt about it.

    Lopez was seated in a table in the corner of the Cafe, reading a paperback book and sipping at a cup of coffee. As Armstrong approached he saw that the book was a grubby second-hand copy of
Los Mitos de Cthulhu por H. P. Lovecraft y Otros.
The edition had a strange green photographic cover, depicting, it appeared, a close-up of a fossil. Lopez immediately put down the volume once he caught sight of Armstrong.

    "San Isidro seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth," he said, "I've been endeavouring to contact him for the last two weeks, but all to no avail. I admit to feeling not a little concern in the matter. Have you crossed paths with him of late?"

    Armstrong could not take his eyes off the man. Could "The Sodality of the Black Sun" have succeeded? Was the creature that conversed with him now actually the mind of Lovecraft housed in the body of some Mexican occultist called Lopez? God, what a disappointment it must have been for them, he thought. What irony! To go to all that trouble to reincarnate the consciousness of the great H. P. Lovecraft, only to find that after his return he denied his own posthumous existence! But why keep such a survival alive, why allow the existence of the last word on the subject if it contradicted their aims? It made no sense.

    "I'm afraid," said Armstrong, "that San Isidro has vanished."

    "I don't see…" said Lopez.

    "Not all of Lovecraft came back did it? I don't think they salvaged the essence, only a fragment. A thing with his memories, but not the actual man himself. Some sort of failed experiment. You're the one who's been leaving me those warning notes, aren't you?" Armstrong said, interrupting.

    "You presume too much, Mr Armstrong," replied Lopez, "and forget that I have not, at any stage, asserted that I believe myself to be anything other than the misguided individual called Felipe Lopez."

    "That's just part of the deception!" Armstrong said, getting to his feet and jabbing his finger at Lopez, "that's what you
know
Lovecraft would have said himself!"

    "How on earth could I be of benefit to the designs of an occult organization such as The Sodality of the Black Sun if I deny the very existence of supernatural phenomena? You make no sense, sir."

    Lopez's lips had narrowed to a thin cruel line upon his face and he was pale with indignation. His voice had dropped to a threatening whisper.

    Everyone in the Cafe la Habana had turned around to stare, stopped dreaming over their pipes, newspapers and games of chess, and paused, their attention drawn by the confrontation being played out in English before them.

    "The Old Ones are only now being born, emerging from your fiction into our world," Armstrong said. "The black magicians of The Sodality of the Black Sun want literally to become them. Once they do, the Old Ones will finally exist, independent of their creator, with the power to turn back time, recreating history to their own design as they go along."

    "You, sir," said Lopez, "are clearly more deranged than am I."

    "Tell me about the notebook, Lovecraft, tell me about your
Dream-Diary of the Arkham Cycle,"
Armstrong shouted.

    "There is no record of such a thing," Lopez replied, "there are no indications that such an item ever existed amongst Lovecraft's papers, no mention of anything like it in his letters or other writings, no evidence for…"

    "Tell me whether history is already beginning to change, whether the first of the Old Ones has begun manipulating the events of the past?"

    As Armstrong finished asking his question he saw a shocking change come over Lopez's features. Two forces seemed to war within the Mexican's body and a flash of pain distorted his face. At that moment the whites of his eyes vanished, as if the darkness of night looked out through them. But then he blinked heavily, shook his head from side to side, and finally regained his composure. As he did so, his usual aspect returned. The change and its reversal had been so sudden that, despite how vivid it had been, Armstrong could have just imagined it. After all, his nerves were already shredded, and he jumped at shadows.

    "I can tell you nothing. What you are suggesting is madness," Lopez said, getting to his feet and picking up the copy of the book on the table. He left without looking back.

    Armstrong did not return to London. He acquired a certain notoriety over the years as the irredeemably drunk English derelict who could be found hanging around in the Cafe la Habana, talking to anyone who would listen to in his broken Spanish.

    However, he was never to be found there after nightfall or during an overcast and dark afternoon. At chess, he insisted on playing white, and could not bear to handle the black pieces, asking his opponent to remove them from the board on his behalf.

22 - Tom Piccirilli - Loss

    The last time I saw the great, secret unrequited love of my life, Gabriella Corben, was the day the talking monkey moved into Stark House and the guy who lied about inventing aluminium foil took an ice-pick though the frontal lobe.

    I was in the lobby doing Sunday cleaning, polishing the mahogany banister and dusting the ten Dutch Master prints on the walls. At least one of them appeared authentic to me - I'd studied it for many hours over the last two years. I thought it would be just like Corben to stick a million-dollar painting in among the fakes, just to show he could get away with it. I imagined him silently laughing every time he saw me walking up from my basement apartment with my little rag and spritz bottle of cleaner, ready to wash a masterpiece that could set me up in luxury for the rest of my life.

    And it was just like me to keep wiping it down and chewing back my petty pride week after week, determined to drop into my grave before I'd pull it from the wall and have it appraised. The chance to retire to Aruba wasn't worth knowing he'd be snickering about it for the rest of his life.

    I stared at myself in the buffed mahogany and listened to Corben and Gabriella arguing upstairs. I couldn't make out their words from four flights away. He played the tortured artist well, though, and could really bellow like a wounded water buffalo. He roared and moaned and kicked shit all around. He used to do the same thing in college. I heard a couple of bottles shatter. Probably bourbon or single malt scotch. They were props he occasionally used in order to pretend he was a hard drinker. The journalists and television crews always made a point of saying there was plenty of booze around. I had no doubt he emptied half the bottles down the sink. I knew his act. I'd helped him develop it. For a while it had been mine as well.

    Now Gabriella spoke in a low, loud, stern voice, firm but loving. It hurt me to hear her tone because I knew that no matter how bad it got with Corben, she would always stand by him and find a way to make their marriage work.

    I kept waiting for the day when his hubris and self-indulgence finally pushed him into seeking out even more dramatic flair and he actually struck her. I wondered if even that would be enough to drive her away. I wondered if I would kick in his door and beat the hell out of him for it, and in a noble show of compassion I would let his unconscious body drop from my bloody hand before breaking his neck. I wondered if she would gaze on me with a new understanding then and fall into my arms and realize we were meant to be together. I often wondered why I wasn't already in long-term therapy.