New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (25 page)

“But this one did.” His deep-set eyes bored into me, but I held my ground.

“So they say. I guess we’ll see for ourselves in the morning, sir.”

Unexpectedly, Keith dropped me a wink. “The hell with that. I was thinking we might take a stroll down to the courthouse after dinner and save ourselves a night of playing guessing games. Skip all the foofaraw the mayor’s got planned. That is, unless you have plans for the rest of the evening?” A wave of his cigar over sleepy downtown Oram.

I spread my hands, palms up. “What do you know? Clara Bow just phoned to say she couldn’t make it.”

And so, in the absence of Miss Bow’s company, I found myself walking out down the main street of Oram with Horton Keith, headed for the courthouse. We’d passed it in the mayor’s car earlier that afternoon; Kronke had told us that was where the whoosit was being kept, under lock and key and guarded by his best men. If the man who was on duty out front when we arrived was one of Kronke’s best, then I’d have loved to have seen the ones he was keeping in reserve. He was a dried-up, knock-kneed old codger with hardly a tooth left in his head, and when Keith told him we were the men from Washington come to see the whoosit, he waved us right through. “In there,” he said, without bothering to get up off his rocking chair. “What there is of it, anyways.”

“What there is of it?” Keith’s heavy brows came down.

“Feller who found it, Lamar Tibbs? Had him a dispute with the mine bosses when he brung it up last week. They said, any coal comes out of this shaft belongs to the company, and that’s that. So Lamar, he says well, thisyer freak of nature ain’t made of coal though, is it? Blind man can see that. And they say, naw, it ain’t. And Lamar, he says, it’s more in the nature of an animal, ain’t it? And they say, reckon so. And Lamar says, well, I take about a thousand cooties home out of this damn pit of yours ever’ day, so I reckon this big cootie here can come along for the ride as well. And he up an took it home with ’im.” The caretaker cackled with senile glee at Lamar’s inexorable logic. I guess it was a rare thing for anybody to get the better of the company, let alone some poor working stiff. But more to the point:

“You’re saying the whoosit isn’t actually in there?”

“No sir. It’s over to Peck’s Ridge, up at the Tibbs place. Mayor’s plannin’ to take you there in the automobile tomorrow, I believe—first thing after the grand civic breakfast.”

This was starting to look like a snipe hunt we’d been sent on. Keith jabbed his cigar butt at the courthouse. “So what
have
you got in here?”

“Lump o’ coal it came out of,” said the caretaker proudly. “Got an exact imprint of the whoosit in it, see? Turn it to the light, you can see everything. Large as life, twice as ugly.”

“Is that right?” Keith said. “Company hung on to the lump of coal, I guess?”

“That they did,” agreed the last surviving veteran of the Confederate army. “All the coal comes out of that mine’s company coal—them’s the rules. Mayor’s just holdin’ it for safekeeping, is all.”

“Exactly so,” said Keith. “Well, thank you, sir.” He slipped a dollar into the caretaker’s eager hand—assuming it was eagerness that made it tremble so. “Now if you could see your way to showing us where they’re keeping it, we’ll quit bothering you.”

“They got it in the basement,” said the caretaker, leaning back in his rocker and expelling a gob of tobacco juice. “Keep goin’ down till you can’t go down no more, mister, an’ that’ll do it.”

The basement of that courthouse was like a mine itself; you might almost have believed they’d dug the whoosit out right there, in situ. Keith and I came to the bottom of a winding flight of stairs and found ourselves in a musty sort of crawlspace, its farther corners filled with shadows the single electric bulb on the ceiling couldn’t hope to reach. The ceiling was low enough that we both had to stoop a little, and most of the floor was taken up with trunks and boxes and filing cabinets full of junk. Thank God we weren’t looking for anything smaller than a pork barrel. We’d have been down there all night. As it was, we began on opposite sides of the basement and aimed to get the job done in something under an hour.

“This is annoying,” Keith called over his shoulder. “These damn rubes don’t realize what they’ve got a hold of here.”

“Toad in a hole,” I called back. Keith ignored me.

“This miner fellow—”

“Lamar Tibbs,” I sang out in a poor approximation of the caretaker’s Virginian twang.

“—he probably thinks he’s sitting on a crock of gold, just like the mayor here and the mining company with their slab of coal. But the two things
apart
don’t amount to a hill of beans, and they don’t have the sense to see it.”

“How so?” I didn’t think the whole thing amounted to much, myself.

“Because the one authenticates the other, don’t you see? Look here, I’m the authorities, okay? This here’s some sort of a strange beast you claim to have found in the middle of a piece of coal. Who’s to say it’s not a, a, what-d’ye-call-’em—”

“Feegee mermaid.”

“Feegee mermaid, exactly.” A grunt, as he moved some heavy piece of trash out of the way. “Nothing to make a man suppose it ever saw the inside of a slab of coal—
without the coal to prove it
. The imprint of the beast in the coal goes to corroborate the story, see?”

“Yes, but—” I was going to point out that you didn’t find beasts, living or dead, inside slabs of coal anyway, so there was no story there to corroborate, only a tall tale out of backwoods West Virginia. But Keith didn’t seem to be interested in that self-evident proposition.

“And it’s the same thing with the coal. Suppose there is an imprint of something in there? What good is it without the very thing that
made
that imprint? It’s just the work of an few weekends for an amateur sculptor, is all.” He bent to his task again, shoving more packing cases out of the way. “They don’t understand,” he muttered, almost to himself. “You need the two together.”

“Even if you did have the two things, though—” I wasn’t letting this one go unchallenged—“it still wouldn’t prove anything, in and of itself. It might go some way towards the
appearance
of proof—hell, it might even make a good enough story for page eight of the newspaper, I guess. That’s your business. I just take the pictures, that’s all. But at the end of the day—”

At the end of the day, Keith wasn’t listening. I happened to glance in his direction at that moment, and saw as much immediately. He was standing in the far corner of the basement, hands on hips, staring at something on the floor—from where I was, I couldn’t make it out. I called his name. I had to call again, and then a third time, before he even noticed. When he did, he looked up with an odd expression on his face.

“Come over here a second, Fenwick,” he called, and his voice sounded slightly strained. “Think I’ve found something.”

I crossed to where he was standing. In that corner the light was so dim I could hardly see Keith, let alone whatever it was he’d found, so the first thing we did was lay ahold of it and drag it to the centre of the basement, right beneath the electric bulb. It was heavy as hell, and we pushed it more than carried it across the packed-mud basement floor.

It was lying inside an open packing-case, all wrapped up in a bit of old tarpaulin. You could see the black gleam of coal where Keith had unwrapped it at one end. “You raise it up,” muttered Keith, and again I heard that unusual strain in his voice; “I’ll get the tarpaulin off of it.”

I laid hold of it and heaved it upright, and Keith managed to get the tarp clear. It was just one half of the slab, as it turned out; its facing piece lay underneath wrapped in more tarpaulin. Stood on its end, the half-slab was roughly the size of a high-back dining chair: it would have weighed a lot more, more than we could have dreamed of shifting, probably, except that it was all hollowed out, as if someone had sawn a barrel in half right down its centre.

The hollow space was nothing more than an inky pool of shadow at first, till I tilted the slab toward the light. Then, its shiny black surfaces gave up their secrets, and the electric light reflected off a wealth of curious detail. I gave a low whistle. Whoever’s work this was, he was wasted on Oram. He ought to have been knocking out statues for the Pope in Rome. For it was the finest, most intricately detailed job of carving you ever saw—
intaglio
, I believe they call it, where the sculptor carves in hollows instead of relief. There was even a kind of
trompe l’oeil
effect: if you looked at the cavity while turning the whole thing round slightly, the contours seemed to stand out in projection, that strange hollow form suddenly becoming filled-out and real. I’d have to say it was actually a little bit unsettling, for a cheap optical illusion. It was as if you were looking at the sky at night, the black gulf of space, and the stars all of a sudden took on a shape, the shape of something vast and unimaginable . . .

“My God.” A fellow would have been hard put to recognise Keith’s voice. It made me turn from the slab of coal to look at him. He was staring open-mouthed at the hollow space at the heart of the slab, with an expression I took at first to be awe. Only later did I come to recognize it as something more like horror.

“It’s pretty good at that,” I allowed. “The detail . . . ”

“It’s exact in every detail,” said Keith, in wonderment. “You could use it for a mold, and you’d cast yourself a perfect copy.” He shook his head, never taking his eyes off of the coal slab.

“Copy of what, though?” I squinted at the concavity, turned it this way and that to get a sense of it in three dimensions. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen—it’s a regular whoosit, all right. Are those things supposed to be tentacles, there? Only they’ve got claws on the end, or nippers or something. And where’s its head supposed to be?”

“The head retracts,” said Keith, almost as if he was reading it from a book. “Like a slug drawing in on itself.”

I stared at him. “Beg your pardon, sir?”

“You said it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” said Keith. “Well, I’ve seen it. Or something exactly like it”

“You
have
?” It was all I could think of to say.

Keith nodded. “Let’s get out of this damn mausoleum,” he said abruptly, turning away from the packing-case and its contents. “I’ll tell you up in the real world, where a man can breathe clean air, not this infernal stink.” And with that he turned his back and was off, stumping up the wooden steps and out of the basement, leaving me to rewrap and repack the slab of coal as best I could before hastening after him.

I was full of questions, all of them to do with the strange artifact we’d been looking at. I have to confess, the level of realism the unknown sculptor had managed to suggest had impressed me—not to say unnerved me. I mentioned before the optical illusion of solidity conjured out of the void, that sensation of seeing the actual thing, not just the impression it had made. That actually began to get to you after a while. Three-dimensional, I said? Well, maybe so. But the longer you looked at it, the dimensions started to looked wrong somehow; impossible, you might say.

On top of that was Keith’s admission that he’d seen the like before. What did he mean by that? And over and above everything . . . well, Keith was right. We needed to be in the fresh air. Fact was, it stank in that damn basement: I’ve never known a smell like it. It was as if a bushel of something had gone bad, and been left to fester for an long time.

An awful long time, at that.

Back at the hotel Keith went straightaway up to his room for about an hour, leaving me to pick at my evening meal in the all-but-empty dining room. The smell down in that basement had killed my appetite, pretty much; in the end I pushed my plate aside and went to the smoking lounge. That was where Keith found me.

He looked better than he had back outside the courthouse, at least. I’d found him leaning against the side of the building, looking as if he was going to be sick: he had that gray clammy cast to his face. I asked him was he all right, and he waved me away. Now, there was a little more color in him, and his eyes were focusing properly again, not staring off into the middle distance the way they do when a fellow is on the verge of losing his lunch.

“You got any of that brandy left?” he said, taking the chair opposite mine. “Medicinal purposes, you understand.”

“You’re in luck, as it happens,” I said, offering him the flask. “I’ve just taken an inventory of our medical supplies.”

“Good,” said Keith, and took a long swallow. His eyes teared up a little, but that was only natural. It had kind of a kick to it, that bathtub Napoleon. You could have used it to open a safe, if you’d run out of blasting gelignite.

“Well, then.” Keith handed me back the flask. “I believe I owe you a story, Mr. Fenwick. Recompense for leaving you with the baby, down there in the basement.”

I waved a hand, which could equally be taken to mean,
no problem, don’t trouble yourself about it
, or—as I hoped Keith would read it—
Go on, go on, you interest me strangely
. The reason I waved a hand instead of actually saying either of those things was because I’d just taken a pull on that flask myself, and was temporarily speechless.

Keith settled back in his armchair and crossed his long thin legs. “It might help explain why I took this assignment,” he said, throwing me a cigar and lighting one himself, “why I asked for it.” He puffed on his stogie till it was properly lit, sending up a wreath of smoke above his head. Then from the heart of that smokescreen he told me the following tale, in about the time it took us to reduce those big Havanas down to ash.

“I was thirty at the time: a dangerous age, Mr. Fenwick. You’ll learn that, soon enough. I was working on the
Examiner
in San Francisco when gold fever hit up in the Yukon, back in ’98. The news came at exactly the right time, so far as I was concerned—a lot of other folks too, among that first wave of prospectors and adventurers. I was missing something, we all were: the frontier had been closed, and the wild days of excitement out West were history, or so it seemed. For better or worse, the job of shaping the nation was finished, over and done with, and us latecomers had missed the chance to leave our stamp on it. We felt as if we’d all been running West in search of something—something magical and unique, that would make real men out of us—only once we’d gotten there, it had already set sail out of the Golden Gate, and there was no way we could follow. The Gay Nineties, you say? I tell you, there were folks dying in the street in San Francisco. Hunger, want . . . maybe nothing more than heartbreak.