New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (32 page)

There were several cheers, and the comedian said, ”Well, it’ll make a change from herrings and pickled-cabbage,” and the company laughed.

And it was to the smiles of all of them that we walked out of the theatre and out onto the fog-wreathed streets.

“My dear fellow,” I said. “Whatever was—”

“Not another word,” said my friend. “There are many ears in the city.”

And not another word was spoken until we had hailed a cab, and clambered inside, and were rattling up the Charing Cross Road.

And even then, before he said anything, my friend took his pipe from his mouth, and emptied the half-smoked contents of the bowl into a small tin, he pressed the lid onto the tin, and placed it into his pocket.

“There,” he said. “That’s the Tall Man found, or I’m a Dutchman. Now, we just have to hope that the cupidity and the curiosity of the Limping Doctor proves enough to bring him to us tomorrow morning.”

“The Limping Doctor?”

My friend snorted. “That is what I have been calling him. It was obvious, from footprints and much else besides, when we saw the Prince’s body, that two men had been in that room that night: a tall man, who, unless I miss my guess, we have just encountered, and a smaller man with a limp, who eviscerated the prince with a professional skill that betrays the medical man.”

“A doctor?”

“Indeed. I hate to say this, but it is my experience that when a Doctor goes to the bad, he is a fouler and darker creature than the worst cut-throat. There was Huston, the acid-bath man, and Campbell, who brought the procrustean bed to Ealing . . . ” and he carried on in a similar vein for the rest of our journey.

The cab pulled up beside the curb. “That’ll be one and tenpence,” said the cabbie. My friend tossed him a form, which he caught, and tipped to his ragged tall hat. “Much obliged to you both,” he called out, as the horse clopped out into the fog.

We walked to our front door. As I unlocked the door, my friend said, “Odd. Our cabbie just ignored that fellow on the corner.”

“They do that at the end of a shift,” I pointed out.

“Indeed they do,” said my friend.

I dreamed of shadows that night, vast shadows that blotted out the sun, and I called out to them in my desperation, but they did not listen.

5. The Skin and the Pit.

Inspector Lestrade was the first to arrive.

“You have posted your men in the street?” asked my friend.

“I have,” said Lestrade. “With strict orders to let anyone in who comes, but to arrest anyone trying to leave.”

“And you have handcuffs with you?”

In reply, Lestrade put his hand in his pocket, and jangled two pairs of cuffs, grimly.

“Now sir,” he said. “While we wait, why do you not tell me what we are waiting for?”

My friend pulled his pipe out of his pocket. He did not put it in his mouth, but placed it on the table in front of him. Then he took the tin from the night before, and a glass vial I recognized as the one he had had in the room in Shoreditch.

“There,” he said. “The coffin-nail, as I trust it shall prove, for our Master Vernet.” He paused. Then he took out his pocket watch, laid it carefully on the table. “We have several minutes before they arrive.” He turned to me. ”What do you know of the Restorationists?”

“Not a blessed thing,” I told him.

Lestrade coughed. “If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about,” he said, “perhaps we should leave it there. Enough’s enough.”

“Too late for that,” said my friend. “For there are those who do not believe that the coming of the Old Ones was the fine thing we all know it to be. Anarchists to a man, they would see the old ways restored—mankind in control of its own destiny, if you will.”

“I will not hear this sedition spoken,” said Lestrade. ”I must warn you—”

“I must warn you not to be such a fathead,” said my friend. “Because it was the Restorationists that killed Prince Franz Drago. They murder, they kill, in a vain effort to force our masters to leave us alone in the darkness. The Prince was killed by a rache—it’s an old term for a hunting dog, Inspector, as you would know if you had looked in a dictionary. It also means revenge. And the hunter left his signature on the wallpaper in the murder-room, just as an artist might sign a canvas. But he was not the one who killed the Prince.”

“The Limping Doctor!” I exclaimed.

“Very good. There was a tall man there that night—I could tell his height, for the word was written at eye level. He smoked a pipe—the ash and dottle sat unburnt in the fireplace, and he had tapped out his pipe with ease on the mantel, something a smaller man would not have done. The tobacco was an unusual blend of shag. The footprints in the room had, for the most part been almost obliterated by your men, but there were several clear prints behind the door and by the window. Someone had waited there: a smaller man from his stride, who put his weight on his right leg. On the path outside I had several clear prints, and the different colors of clay on the bootscraper outside gave me more information: a tall man, who had accompanied the Prince into those rooms, and had, later, walked out. Waiting for them to arrive was the man who had sliced up the Prince so impressively . . . ”

Lestrade made an uncomfortable noise that did not quite become a word.

“I have spent many days retracing the movements of his highness. I went from gambling hell to brothel to dining den to madhouse looking for our pipe-smoking man and his friend. I made no progress until I thought to check the newspapers of Bohemia, searching for a clue to the Prince’s recent activities there, and in them I learned that an English Theatrical Troupe had been in Prague last month, and had performed before Prince Franz Drago . . . ”

“Good lord,” I said. “So that Sherry Vernet fellow . . . ”

“Is a Restorationist. Exactly.”

I was shaking my head in wonder at my friend’s intelligence and skills of observation, when there was a knock on the door.

“This will be our quarry!” said my friend. “Careful now!”

Lestrade put his hand deep into his pocket, where I had no doubt he kept a pistol. He swallowed, nervously.

My friend called out, “Please, come in!”

The door opened.

It was not Vernet, nor was it a Limping Doctor. It was one of the young street Arabs who earn a crust running errands—“in the employ of Messrs. Street and Walker,” as we used to say when I was young. “Please sirs,” he said. “Is there a Mister Henry Camberley here? I was asked by a gentleman to deliver a note.”

“I’m he,” said my friend. “And for a sixpence, what can you tell me about the gentleman who gave you the note?”

The young lad, who volunteered that his name was Wiggins, bit the sixpence before making it vanish, and then told us that the cheery cove who gave him the note was on the tall side, with dark hair, and, he added, he had been smoking a pipe.

I have the note here, and take the liberty of transcribing it.

My Dear Sir;

I do not address you as Henry Camberley, for it is a name to which you have no claim. I am surprised that you did not announce yourself under your own name, for it is a fine one, and one that does you credit. I have read a number of your papers, when I have been able to obtain them. Indeed, I corresponded with you quite profitably two years ago about certain theoretical anomalies in your paper on the Dynamics of an Asteroid.

I was amused to meet you, yesterday evening. A few tips which might save you bother in times to come, in the profession you currently follow. Firstly, a pipe-smoking man might possibly have a brand-new, unused pipe in his pocket, and no tobacco, but it is exceedingly unlikely at least as unlikely as a theatrical promoter with no idea of the usual customs of recompense on a tour; who is accompanied by a taciturn ex-army officer (Afghanistan, unless I miss my guess,). Incidentally, while you are correct that the streets of London have ears, it might also behoove you in future not to take the first cab that comes along. Cab-drivers have ears too, if they choose to use them.

You are certainly correct in one of your suppositions: it was indeed I who lured the half-blood creature back to the room in Shoreditch.

If it is any comfort to you, having learned a little of his recreational predilections, I had told him I had procured for him a girl, abducted from a convent in Cornwall where she had never seen a man, and that it would only take his touch, and the sight of his face, to tip her over into a perfect madness.

Had she existed, he would have feasted on her madness while he took her, like a man sucking the flesh from a ripe peach leaving nothing behind but the skin and the pit. I have seen them do this. I have seen them do far worse. And it is not the price we pay for peace and prosperity. It is too great a price for that.

The good doctor—who believes as I do, and who did indeed write our little performance, for he has some crowd-pleasing skills—was waiting for us, with his knives.

I send this note, not as a catch-me-if-you-can taunt, for we are gone, the estimable doctor and I, and you shall not find us, but to tell you that it was good to feel that, if only for a moment, I had a worthy adversary. Worthier by far than inhuman creatures from beyond the Pit.

I fear the Strand Players will need to find themselves a new leading man.

I will not sign myself Vernet, and until the hunt is done and the world restored, I beg you to think of me simply as,

Rache.

Inspector Lestrade ran from the room, calling to his men. They made young Wiggins take them to the place where the man had given him the note, for all the world as if Vernet the actor would be waiting there for them, a-smoking of his pipe. From the window we watched them run, my friend and I, and we shook our heads.

“They will stop and search all the trains leaving London, all the ships leaving Albion for Europe or the New World,” said my friend. “Looking for a tall man, and his companion, a smaller, thickset medical man, with a slight limp. They will close the ports. Every way out of the country will be blocked.”

“Do you think they will catch him, then?”

My friend shook his head. “I may be wrong,” he said, ”But I would wager that he and his friend are even now only a mile or so away, in the rookery of St. Giles, where the police will not go except by the dozen. And they will hide up there until the hue and cry have died away. And then they will be about their business.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because,” said my friend, “if our positions were reversed, it is what I would do. You should burn the note, by the way.”

I frowned. “But surely it’s evidence,” I said.

“It’s seditionary nonsense,” said my friend.

And I should have burned it. Indeed, I told Lestrade I had burned it, when he returned, and he congratulated me on my good sense. Lestrade kept his job, and Prince Albert wrote a note to my friend congratulating him on his deductions, while regretting that the perpetrator was still at large.

They have not yet caught Sherry Vernet, or whatever his name really is, nor was any trace of his murderous accomplice, tentatively identified as a former military surgeon named John (or perhaps James) Watson. Curiously, it was revealed that he had also been in Afghanistan. I wonder if we ever met.

My shoulder, touched by the Queen, continues to improve, the flesh fills and it heals. Soon I shall be a dead-shot once more.

One night when we were alone, several months ago, I asked my friend if he remembered the correspondence referred to in the letter from the man who signed himself Rache. My friend said that he remembered it well, and that “Sigerson” (for so the actor had called himself then, claiming to be an Icelander) had been inspired by an equation of my friend’s to suggest some wild theories furthering the relationship between mass, energy, and the hypothetical speed of light. “Nonsense, of course,” said my friend, without smiling. “But inspired and dangerous nonsense nonetheless.”

The palace eventually sent word that the Queen was pleased with my friend’s accomplishments in the case, and there the matter has rested.

I doubt my friend will leave it alone, though; it will not be over until one of them has killed the other.

I kept the note. I have said things in this retelling of events that are not to be said. If I were a sensible man I would bum all these pages, but then, as my friend taught me, even ashes can give up their secrets. Instead, I shall place these papers in a strongbox at my bank with instructions that the box may not be opened until long after anyone now living is dead. Although, in the light of the recent events in Russia, I fear that day may be closer than any of us would care to think.

S___________M__________Major (Ret’d)

Baker Street,

London, New Albion, 1881.

Imagination called up the shocking form of fabulous Yog-Sothoth—only a congeries of iridescent globes, yet stupendous in its malign suggestiveness.

“Horror in the Museum” · H.P. Lovecraft (1932)

• BURIED IN THE SKY •

John Shirley

“If he didn’t kill Mom, then why are we moving away?” Deede asked.

“We’re
moving
because I have a better job offer in LA,” Dad said, barely audible as usual, as he looked vaguely out the living room window at the tree-lined street. Early evening on a Portland June. “I’ll be working for a good magazine—very high profile. See those clouds? Going to rain again. We won’t have all this rain in LA, anyhow and Hanging Gardens will be a nice change. You’ll like LA high schools, the kids are very . . . uh . . . hip.” Wearing his perpetual work shirts, jeans, and a dully stoic expression, he was a paunchy, pale, gray-eyed man with shaggy blond hair just starting to go gray. He stood with his hands in his pockets, gazing outward from the house. In a lower voice he said, “They said it was an accident or . . . ” He didn’t like to say suicide. “So—we have to assume that’s right and, well, we can’t harass an innocent man. Better to leave it all behind us.”

Deede Bergstrom—waist-length sandy-blond hair, neo-hippy look—was half watching MTV, the sound turned off; on the screen a woman wearing something like a bikini crossed with a dress was posturing and pumping her hips. Deede’s hips were a shade too wide and she’d never call attention to them like that.

Deede knew Dad didn’t want the travel writer job in LA that much—he liked Portland, he didn’t like Los Angeles, except as a subject for journalism, and the travel editor job with the Portland newspaper paid their bills. He was just trying to get them away from the place where mom had died because everything they saw here was a reminder. And they had to get over it.

Didn’t you have to get over it, when someone murdered your mother?

Sure. Sure you do. You just have to get over it.

“You think he killed her too, Dad,” said Lenny matter-of-factly, as he came in. He’d been in the kitchen, listening. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich dripped in his hand as he looked at his Dad, and took an enormous bite.

“You’re spilling blueberry jelly on the carpet,” Deede pointed out. She was curled up in the easy chair with her feet tucked under her skirt to keep them warm. The heat was already turned off, in preparation for the move, and it wasn’t as warm out as it should’ve been, this time of year.

“Shut up, mantis-girl,” Lenny said, the food making his voice indistinct. He was referring to her long legs and long neck. He was a year older than Deede, had just graduated high school. His hair was buzz-cut, and he wore a muscle shirt—he had the muscles to go with it—and a quizzical expression. His chin was a little weak, but his features otherwise were almost TV-star good looking. The girls at school had liked him.

“Lenny I’ve asked you not to call your sister that, and go and get a paper towel and clean up your mess,” Dad said, without much conviction. “Deana, where’s your little sister?”

They called her Deede because her name was Deana Diane. Deede shrugged. “Jean just leaves when she wants to . . . ” And then she remembered. “Oh yeah, she went rollerblading with that Buzzy kid.”

Lenny snorted. “That little stoner.”

Dad started to ask if he Lenny a good reason to think his youngest sister was hanging with stoners—Deede could see the question was about to come out of him—but then his lips pinched shut. Decided not to ask. “Yeah, well, Buzzy won’t be coming with us to LA, so . . . ” He shrugged.

Dad was still looking out the window, Deede mostly watching the soundless TV.

And Lenny was looking at the floor while he listlessly ate his sandwich, Deede noticed, looking over from the TV.
Dad out the window, me at TV, Lenny at the floor.

Mom at the interior of her coffin lid.

“I think we should stay and push them to reopen it,” Deede said, doggedly.

Dad sighed. “We don’t know that Gunnar Johansen killed anyone. We know that mom was jogging and Johansen was seen on the same jogging trail and later on she was found dead. There wasn’t even agreement at the coroner’s on whether she’d been . . . ”

He didn’t want to say
raped.

“He was almost bragging about it,” Lenny said tonelessly, staring at the rug, his jaws working on the sandwich. “ ‘Prove it!’ he said.” Deede could see the anger in his eyes but you had to look for it. He was like Dad, all internal.

“It was two years ago,” Deede said. “I don’t think the police are going to do anything else. But we could hire a private detective.” Two years. She felt like it was two weeks. It’d taken almost six months for Deede to be able to function again after they found Mom dead. “Anyway—I saw it . . . in a way.”

“Dreams.” Dad shook his head. “Recurrent dreams aren’t proof. You’re going to like LA.”

She wanted to leave Portland—and she also wanted to stay here and make someone put Johansen in jail. But she couldn’t stay here alone. Even if she did, what could she do about him, herself? She was afraid of him. She saw him sometimes in the neighborhood—he lived a block and a half down—and every time he looked right at her. And every time, too, it was like he was saying,
I killed your mom and I liked it and I want to kill you too and pretty soon I will.
It didn’t make sense, her seeing all that, when he had no particular expression on his face. But she was sure of it, completely sure of it. He had killed her mom. And he’d liked it. And he had killed some other people and he’d liked that too.

She had no proof at all. Recurrent dreams aren’t proof.

“ . . . the movers are coming in about an hour,” Dad was saying. “We’re going to have a really good new life.” He said it while looking out the window and he said it tonelessly. He didn’t even bother to make it sound as if he really believed the part about a really good new life.

Two days later, they were ready to go to Los Angeles—and it had finally started to warm up in Oregon, like it was grudgingly admitting it was the beginning of summer. “Now that we’re leaving, it’s nice out,” Jean said bitterly, from the back seat of the Explorer. The sky was showing through the clouds, and purple irises edging the neighbor’s lawn were waving in the breeze and then, as Deede just sat in the front seat of the car, waiting for her Dad to drive her and her brother and Jean to the I-5 freeway, she saw Johansen walking down the street toward them, walking by those same irises. Dad was looking around one last time, to see if he’d forgotten to do anything, making sure the doors to the house were locked. He would leave the keys for the Realtor, in some prearranged place. The house where Deede had grown up was sold and in a few minutes would be gone from her life forever.

Jean and Lenny didn’t see Johansen, Lenny was in back beside Jean, his whole attention on playing with the PSP and Jean was looking at the little TV screen over the back seat of the SUV. Fourteen years old, starting to get fat; her short-clipped hair was reddish brown, her face heart-shaped like Mom’s had been, the same little dimples in her cheeks. She was chewing gum and fixedly watching a Nickelodeon show she probably didn’t like.

Deede wasn’t going to point Johansen out to her. She didn’t much relate to her little sister—Jean seemed to blame Deede for not having the same problems. Jean had dyslexia, and Deede didn’t; Jean was attention deficit, and Deede wasn’t. Jean had gotten only more bitter and withdrawn since Mom had died. She didn’t want anyone acting protective. Deede felt she had to try to protect her anyway.

Johansen was getting closer.

“This building we’re moving into, it’s, like, lame, living in a stupid-ass building after living in a house,” Jean said, snapping her gum ever few syllables, her eyes on the SUV’s television.

“It’s not just any stupid-ass building,” Lenny said, his thumbs working the controllers, destroying mordo-bots with preternatural skill as he went on, “it’s Skytown. It’s like some famous architectural big deal, a building with everything in it. It has the Skymall and the, whatsit, uh, Hanging Gardens in it. That’s where we live, Hanging Gardens Apartments, name’s from some ancient thing I forget . . . ”

“From
Babylon
,” Deede mumbled, watching Johansen get closer. Starting to wonder if, after all, she should point him out. But she grew more afraid with every step he took, each bringing him closer, though he was just sauntering innocently along, a tall tanned athletic man in light blue Lacrosse shirt and Dockers; short flaxen hair, pale blue eyes, much more lower lip than upper, a forehead that seemed bonily square. Very innocently walking along. Just the hint of a smirk on his face.

Where was Dad? Why didn’t he come back to the car?

Don’t say anything to Jean or Lenny.
Jean would go back to not sleeping at night again, if she saw Johansen so close. They all knew he’d killed Mom. Everyone knew but the police. Maybe they knew too but they couldn’t prove it. The coroner had ruled “accidental death.”

Johansen walked up abreast Deede. She wanted to look him in the eye, and say, with that look,
I know what you did and you won’t get away with it.

Their gazes met. His pale blue eyes dilated in response. His lips parted. He caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth. He looked at her—

Crumbling inside, the fear going through her like an electric shock, she looked away.

He chuckled—she heard it softly but clearly—as he walked on by.

Her mouth was dry, very dry, but her eyes spilled tears. Everything was hazy. Maybe a minute passed, maybe not so much. She was looking hard at the dashboard.

“Hanging Gardens,” Lenny said, finally, oblivious to his sister’s terror. “Stupid name. Makes you think they’re gonna hang somebody there.”

“That’s why you’re going to live there,” Jean said, eyes glued to the TV. “ ’Cause they going to hang you.”

“
You’re
gonna live there
too
, shrimpy.”

“Little as possible,” Jean responded, with a chillingly adult decisiveness.

Deede wanted to ask her what she meant by that—but Jean resented Deede’s protectiveness. She’d called her, “Miss Protective three-point-eight.” She resented Deede’s good grades—implied she was a real kiss-ass or something, to get them. Though in fact they were pretty effortless for her. But it was true, she was too protective.

“Deede?” Dad’s voice. “You okay?”

Deede blinked, wiped her eyes, looked at her Dad, opening the driver’s side door, bending to squint in at her. “I’m okay,” she said.

He never pushed it, hadn’t since Mom died. If you said you were “okay,” crying or not, that was as good as could be expected. They’d all had therapy—Lenny had stopped going after a month—and it’d helped a little. Dad probably figured it was all that could be done.

He got in and started the car and they started off. Deede looked in the mirror and she saw Johansen, way down the street, his back to them. Stopping. Turning to look after them . . .

As they drove away from their home.

“This place is so huge . . . so high up . . . ” Deede, Lenny, and Jean were in the observation deck of the Skytown building, up above Skytown Mall and the apartment complex, looking out at the clouds just above, the pillars and spikes of downtown LA below them. They were in the highest and newest skyscraper in Los Angeles.

“It’s a hundred-twenty-five stories, fifteen more than the World Trade Center buildings were,” Lenny said, reading from the guide pamphlet. “Supposed to be ‘super hardened’ to resist terrorist attacks . . . ”

Deede remembered what she’d read about the Titanic, how it was supposed to be unsinkable, too. Skytown, it occurred to her, was almost a magnet for terrorists. But she wouldn’t say that with Jean here, and anyway Lenny had been calling her “Deana Downer” for her frequent dour pronouncements. “
Just an inch the wrong way on that steering wheel and Dad could drive us under the wheels of a semitruck,
” she’d told Lenny, when they were halfway to LA. Jean had been asleep—but Dad had frowned at her anyway.

“When’s Dad coming back?” Deede asked, trying to see the street directly below. She couldn’t see it—the “hanging gardens” were in the way: a ribbony spilling of green vines and lavender wisteria over the edges of the balconies encompassing the building under the observation deck. Closer to the building’s superstructure were rose bushes too, but the building was new and so were the rose bushes, there were no blossoms on them yet. The building had a square base—filling a square city block—and rose to a ziggurat peak, a step pyramid, the lowest step of the pyramid containing the garden, the penultimate step the observation deck.

“Not till after dinner,” Lenny said. “He has a meeting.”

“Is this part of, what, the Hanging Gardens Apartments?” Jean asked, sucking noisily on a smoothie.

“No, that’s actually down,” Lenny said. “This is the observation deck above Skymall. Whole thing is actually called Skytown. The apartments are under the gardens but they’re called the Hanging Gardens Apartments anyway, just to be more confusing.”

Feeling isolated, lonely, gazing down on the tiny specks that were people, the cars looking smaller than Hot Wheels toys, Deede turned away from the window. “Let’s go back to the apartment and wait for Dad.”

“No way!” Jean said, talking around the straw. “The apartment smells too much like paint! I want to see the Skymall! We’re supposed to have dinner there!” She sucked up the dregs of her smoothie. “And I’m still hungry.”

At first it was like any mall anywhere, though it was so high up they felt a little tired and light headed. Deede heard a security guard talking about it to the man who ran the frozen yogurt shop—the young black guard had a peculiar uniform, dark gray, almost black, with silver epaulettes, and the shapes of snakes going around his cuffs. “Yeah man, we’re so high up, the air’s a little thin. They try to equalize it but it don’t always go. They’re working out the bugs. Like that groaning in the elevators . . . ”