The Mall of Cthulhu (10 page)

"I'm sorry?" he said.

"I said, I hear you. This band sucks so bad I can't believe it. This is their third afternoon here, and they're not getting any better."

"Wow. You ought to be able to get hazard pay or something. Can you get time and a half for this?"

"I wish," she said. "The worst part, I mean the part that really makes me nuts is that these awful songs are now stuck in my brain. I walked out of here last night singing one of them under my breath. I was pissed."

"I hate it when that happens."

"Yeah. So, you got any interest in some new body jewelry?" Ted was puzzled, and then realized that the pushcart bore a sign that said "Rings and Things." He also realized he was being flirted with, and he liked that. Of course, this girl thought he was the anorexic Mr. Clean instead of Ted, but then again, maybe he wasn't Ted anymore. Teddy died in a sorority fire, and miserable, broken Ted took his place, and maybe miserable broken Ted died in Queequeg's, and somebody new—who?—had taken his place. So maybe if it wasn't the real Ted this pierced girl liked, that was okay, because maybe he wasn't really the real
him
anymore. Maybe there was no real him—just a bunch of synapses that responded to whatever bizarre stimuli came his way.

"You know, I would love something, but I—well, it's a long and not very interesting story"—and Ted felt something funny in his guts and realized it was that he didn't like lying to this girl, even a lie as benign as that one—"but I kind of found myself without any clothes, and so I had to spend every single cent on clothes, and now I can't even afford dinner, let alone a new earring. This latte is my appetite suppressant."

The pierced one said, "Well, I'll buy you dinner if you let me wear one of your new shirts."

Did she mean what he thought she meant? Like when exactly did she want to put the shirt on?
After?

Before he could answer, something weird caught the corner of Ted's eye. Mr. Average, no longer in his Ocean State Power uniform, now wearing a navy blue polo shirt and khakis, was strolling along the mall corridor. Ted had to hand it to the guy—if he were any more nondescript he'd be completely invisible. Mr. Average was carrying two obviously heavy bags from Ye Olde New England Candlery. That certainly didn't seem to fit the profile of a guy who tortured people until they begged for the sweet mercy of death. Then again, it was kind of cute that he was getting in touch with his softer side.

Ted was torn. If he stayed here, his night might get a lot better, but if he didn't follow this guy, his whole mission down here might go to hell. And, for that matter, if he followed this guy and got caught, he really might end up begging for the sweet mercy of death. And who the hell wanted to do that?

And yet, if he was right about the whole Cthulhu Cult Conspiracy, he couldn't just sit by and hope somebody else dealt with it. He'd have to take action. As much as he hated it, he decided to actually do his job, or whatever this stupid, crazy, pointless thing was, and possibly blow his chance with this completely adorable body-jewelry retailer. He blurted out some damage control. "I don't even know your name—"

"Cayenne."

"Like the pepper?"

"I was originally one of five Jennifers in my class."

"Uh, Cayenne, that is such a fantastic offer, and I really want to take you up on it, but I am—I actually have to run away right now, but I'm not running away from you, and I'll be back tomorrow, and I hope you can extend your offer because it really sounds fantastic and also I'm probably going to be completely famished by this time tomorrow."

Cayenne looked unconvinced. "Well, I don't know your name . . . "

Neither do I, Ted thought, then said, "Jonathan," before he could even think. Mr. Average was about to disappear around a corner, and Ted grabbed his bags and started to run to catch up to a comfortable following distance. He realized he should probably ditch the bags, but then what would he wear?

He ran until he reached what he hoped was an inconspicuous distance. When Ted reached the mall's exit, probably half a mile from the end of the mall from where he had entered, Mr. Average looked back. Ted quickly ducked into a lingerie store, and by the time he'd fought off the three saleswomen who had descended on him when he entered, Mr. Average was gone.

He walked out of the door and tried not to look like he was looking around. This end of the mall was on a dirty, deserted street with the highway running overhead, and it seemed a million miles from the gleaming, high-traffic entrance Ted had used. He stood alone on the narrow street for twenty seconds before a dilapidated pickup truck came rumbling by. Looking around, he could see boarded-up buildings and empty lots, and, directly opposite him, rising almost to the level of the highway above, a giant, filthy stone building that had once been white. It was narrow and four stories tall, with gigantic columns that had probably once made it impressive. The windows and doors were boarded up and/or padlocked, and signs saying "No Trespassing—Police Take Notice" competed with graffiti that was either illegible or said things like "Fuck 5
^th
Street Crew Wannabes."

And then, scrawled next to something that looked like "Case96," Ted saw something spray painted on the bottom of a gigantic column that might have been "Yog-Sothoth." Or possibly "Yo Sheila" or "Yes O'Toole." Graffiti was really hard to read.

Ted decided to walk around to the front of the building to see if there was an obvious place where Mr. Average might have gone in. He was keenly aware of how ridiculous he looked, and of every crinkle of his large paper shopping bags with the plastic handles that dug into his hands, but he couldn't just leave all his purchases on the street. As much as it's possible to creep when laden down with rustling shopping bags, Ted crept around through a weedy, trash-strewn lot to the front of the building.

When he got there, Ted got input from two senses that told him that he wasn't crazy, he wasn't lost in a fantasy—this was all too real, and all his suspicions were correct. A strange scent was drifting out of the building: a bayberry spice candle from Ye Olde New England Candlery. And above the door, two words and a symbol were visible through the layers of grime.

He decided it would be prudent to walk away quickly and call Laura from a safe place, and as he headed home, Ted wondered if any place was safe.

Laura was buzzing on the horrible employee lounge coffee. It felt like the coffee might be eating a hole in her stomach, but she headed down to the lounge for another cup anyway. She had no idea if she was going to be able to continue doing this stultifying work she'd been doing for a week now. She understood that she was paying dues, but she was impatient and bored and so eager to be doing something real that she found her mind wandering to the Providence Operation all the time, even though that might or might not be something real.

Before she got more than two cubicles away from her own, her phone vibrated in her pocket. She checked—it was Ted, and she surprised herself by feeling neither annoyance or resignation, but excitement. Maybe he found something!

"Hey Ted, what's up?"

"It's all real, Laura, it's all real, and I'm scared shitless but also kind of excited, but I don't know what to do next!"

"Back up, back up. What happened?"

He told her how he'd followed Mr. Average out of Ye Olde New England Candlery, and how he'd seen "Yog-Sothoth", or else "Yo Sheila" spray-painted on the building next door.

"And then I smelled a scented candle coming from inside the building!"

"So the guy's looking for a filthy thrill, and he took a date there to do it among the pigeon poop."

"You know, if you'd seen this place, I think you'd understand that that's actually more far-fetched than my theory. But anyway, guess what the abandoned building was!"

"I don't know."

"Guess!"

"I don't know. A comic book store?"

"A four-story comic book store? No, It was a temple, Laura. An abandoned
Masonic
temple. The mall is the place of power! It's adjacent to the temple! Remember what it said in the notebook? They are trying to bring the Old Ones back to life right in the middle of the Providence Towne Centre Mall!"

"What the hell is a place of power, anyway? Is that from your pal's racist horror fiction?"

"Okay, he was dead long before my birth, so he's not my pal, and it's not in his fiction, at least not that I remember. Do you remember when I went out with Moonstone?"

"Moonstone? Was she the one with the crystals and the incense and stuff?"

"Yeah. I used to think about how hot her sister was whenever she started talking about New Age stuff, so this might be a little—"

"You used to think about her hot sister? Jesus, you are a disgusting human being."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm male, we knew this already. Moving on, what I think I remember about places of power are that they're places where the, like, boundaries between dimensions are thin, or something like that."

"The boundaries between dimensions."

"Well, yeah! If you're trying to call nameless horror forth from another dimension, maybe you need to go where the walls are thin!"

"That's nuts."

"I know. I mean, I even think that's weird and crazy, but these guys appear to believe it. I mean, in these stories, there are always a bunch of evil conspirators trying to bring the Old Ones back. I can't imagine anything else you'd possibly be trying to do with a Necronomicon in a place of power."

"Okay. I'll google places of power and see what I get. Where are you?"

"I'm home, or whatever, in this apartment."

"Were you followed?"

"No. I took a really roundabout way home, and I was checking the whole time. You'd be proud of me—I'm totally paranoid!"

"Let me think about our next move and call you in tonight." Laura suddenly didn't need any more caffeine. She decided she'd take a few minutes to look for places of power and then do some illicit digging through the Bureau's electronic files for stuff about Cthulhu. Maybe if any of it was real, there would be some kind of clue somewhere in the Bureau's database. Of course, she'd leave her footprints all over the system, and if McManus ever decided to check up on her, he'd see exactly what files she'd been calling up, but she'd worry about that when it happened.

First she clicked on her internet browser. She typed "Places of Power" into a search engine and spent the next fifteen minutes clicking around looking for information. What she found, on a variety of new-age blogs and huckster websites, was a remarkably consistent picture of what places of power were, and Ted, with just his horror-fiction background and some half-remembered at his disposal, had pretty well nailed it. All the sites claimed that there were places where the barriers to other dimensions were especially thin, and that people always responded to such places, whether they realized it or not, by building things like Eiffel Towers and Washington Monuments and Stonehenges near them. A badly translated lecture by some Czech guru or something said: "Humanity feels the pull of places of power, and, therefore, will build structures of important in such places. So clock towers, town squares, monuments, all these things are cited where they are situated because of the energy powerful of the location felt by planners and builders of the monumental structures, especially popular works."

Ted had said the place of power was adjacent to the Temple. Laura supposed it made sense that planners and builders were sensing the energy of the place of power and sited the mall where it was situated due to the energy powerful. She smiled. It wasn't Stonehenge, but nobody could deny that the Providence Towne Centre was an important symbol of what its builders revered.

Laura thought for a moment. It might be time to start taking this whole thing more seriously. She'd been relying on Ted's second-hand Lovecraft knowledge for background information, but if she was taking him seriously at last, she had to find out some more information on her own. She typed Cthulhu into the search box and got millions of results. Someone had posted "The Call of Cthulhu" online, so Laura read it. It was pretty much as Ted had described it—bad geometry and horror so indescribable that it defied description.

Having finished with the primary source, she spent a few minutes looking through Lovecraft fan sites, ads for "What Would Cthulhu Do?" t-shirts, Lovecraft related porn, (of course) and the rantings of a few cranks who claimed that some combination of the Rand Corporation, the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati and the international Jewish Banking conspiracy were hiding the Necronomicon and/or using it to control world events. It was pretty telling, though, that none of the millions of Cthulhu-related pages Laura could call up said anything about a conspiracy to bring the Old Ones back. Even the loonies who believed that a cabal of Jews was controlling the world with a Necronomicon pilfered from the Knights Templar had nothing to say about an active conspiracy to bring the Old Ones back.

Glancing around her cubicle to make sure no one was approaching, she accessed the FBI's internal network and searched for Cthulhu. No records found. She tried Randolph Carter and found a guy from Louisiana who was wanted for mail fraud. Lovecraft—no records. Yog-Sothoth. Nothing. Necronomicon: Level Z clearance required to access these records. Password?

Shit. Level Z? What the hell was that? She'd never even heard of Level Z clearance. Her own clearance was A-14. Well, whatever a Level Z file was, she wasn't going to be seen putting bad passwords into it. But why would this file even exist? Maybe it was the code name of an operation. Or maybe Ted was actually on to something.

Laura cleared her browser's history, gathered up her stuff, and swiped out. She'd made precious little progress on Whitey's withdrawals today. She hoped McManus wouldn't notice that either. Would anyone notice? The word around the office was that everybody knew this project was bullshit, that D.C. had just shoveled this bunch of shit their way to punish the Boston office for embarrassing the bureau nationally by having at least two agents in bed with Whitey.