The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (10 page)

“You realize this means the next time I hear someone deliver a paper on the role of melatonin in the production of exohormones I’m likely to get some kind of huge erection.”

“You can just tell them you’ve got a real hard-on for chemistry,” she replied, plunging on top of him and beginning to set up quite an aggressive rhythm. She was charmingly moist.

“Oh, baby,” he responded. “That’s good.”

“Very good,” she said

“Very — oh! — very good. Mmm. Next time we can go doggie-style.”

“You just like to see my tits hang down.”

“Very much. You do know why you’re doing this?”

“Because I’m an animal.”

In response, although he’d been meaning to say something else, Matthew found he could only growl.

P
ART
T
WO

“More than anything else the world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had when I was a child. I had forgotten the beauty and the magic and the knowingness of it and me. I was in familiar territory, a space wherein I had once roamed as an immortal explorer, and I was recalling everything that had been authentically known to me then, and which I had abandoned, then forgotten, with my coming of age. Like the touchstone that recalls a dream to sudden presence, the experience reaffirmed a miracle of excitement that I had known in my childhood but had been pressured to forget. The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything that I had recognized had come from the depths of my memory and my psyche. I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.”

Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, Ph.D.,
recalling the first time he consumed 400 milligrams of mescaline sulfate, from “Psychoactive Sacramentals / Essays on Entheogens and Religion” Council on Spiritual Practices, San Francisco 2001

“LSD is not a product of planned research. I did not look for it, it came to me. This means to me that a higher authority thought it was necessary now to provide mankind with an additional pharmacological aid for spiritual growth. LSD is not just a synthetic substance from the laboratory. After the discovery of lysergic acid amide and lysergic
acid hydroxyethylamide (very closely related to lysergic acid diethylamide) as the entheogenic principles of Ololiuqui, an ancient sacred plant of Mexican Indians, LSD had to be regarded as belonging to the group of natural entheogenic drugs of Mesoamerica. These two characteristics of LSD legitimate its use in a religious framework.… The characteristic of entheogens, their faculty to improve sensory perception, makes them inestimable aids in the process of expanding consciousness. It was LSD, the most potent entheogen, that to use Blake’s famous line, cleansed my doors of perception and made me see every thing as it is, infinite. In my childhood I experienced spontaneously some of those blissful moments when the world appeared suddenly in a new brilliant light and I had the feeling of being included in its wonder and indescribable beauty. They remained in my memory as extraordinary experiences of untold happiness, but only after the discovery of LSD did I grasp their meaning and existential importance…. The insights I received, as described, increased my astonishment about the wonder of existence.”

Albert Hofmann, Ph.D., discoverer of LSD,
from “Psychoactive Sacramentals / Essays on Entheogens and Religion”
Council on Spiritual Practices, San Francisco 2001.

“The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty-first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.”

Graham Hancock,
“The War On Consciousness,” 2009.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

TWO MONTHS LATER …

The two men had been exchanging some small talk, but slowed and then stopped as ahead of them in the courthouse corridor the air shimmered, a kind of curtain in the fabric of space opening like the lens aperture of a giant camera. The opening was lined with taught, stretching and folding veils of blue and white mist. Briefly, in the background they could see a three-dimensional landscape that could have been the west side of Providence, the other side of the canal as it might have appeared centuries ago, a landscape without a single recognizable building, a sandy bluff pockmarked with caves and beyond it the forested land of the Narragansetts before the city had ever been built. It actually looked as though they could gaze out over that primeval landscape of rolling hills for miles, as though this section of the very walls of the courthouse had somehow become transparent.

Then, as quickly as it had opened, the vortex closed again and two black-clad men, one short and white, the other taller and of African descent, stood in front of Judge Crustio and his armed and uniformed bailiff. The two intruders held pump-action 12-gauge shotguns ready at their waists.

“Who are you?” asked the bailiff. “You’re not allowed in here!”

A political speech might have been in order, but the two had been carefully drilled. As it was, the judge was a couple minutes ahead of schedule; he was supposed to still be in his office, waiting for the bailiff to come escort him to the parking garage. Although they’d drilled about how to handle the presence of a bodyguard. In fact, finding
the pair already out in the hallway would actually speed things up, though seconds could still be precious.

The taller assassin, the wiry black man, brought his plastic stock up into a good, firm, shoulder weld, made use of the brass bead sight at the tip of the barrel, leaned forward a little to compensate for recoil, and with a deafening blast put a dozen lead buckshot into a pattern the size of a coffee saucer in the middle of Judge Fidelio Crustio’s chest. There was some blood spatter back in the direction from which the blast had come.

The bailiff reached for his sidearm, but his range qualification drills, such as they had been in recent years, generally began with the weapon already out in front of him. From there, his ability to aim and discharge his weapon from a braced “triangle” shooting position might or might not have been satisfactory, but he was attempting to draw against an already deployed shotgun. His wide-grip .40-caliber Glock pistol was not even fully out of his holster when the shorter, white assassin fired his own Mossberg.

The second shooter was nervous. His pattern went almost a foot high, missing the chest but replacing the unformed bailiff’s face with an undistinguishable mask of torn red flesh and shattered white bone fragments. The bailiff, one eye still intact, screamed as he went down, the scream becoming a wet gurgle as he struggled to draw another breath.

Judge Crustio was down on his back on the floor, as well, having been thrown a full five feet backward by the force of the first blast, his face turning slightly blue as he struggled to get his own shattered lungs to draw another breath. He was trying to mouth words but none of the four could currently hear anything, anyway; the two shotgun blasts had been deafening in the enclosed space of the hallway.

The taller assassin gestured for his companion to step closer along with him and finish the job on the bailiff. The next round of buckshot went into the uniformed guard’s chest, shutting off his gurgling scream abruptly.

Now the first, taller assassin did speak, shouting to overcome the ringing in his own ears. “You wanted a war? Welcome to your war. This is what war feels like when you’re losing, asshole. You said you wanted Windsor’s sentence to send a message? Well here’s a message, cocksucker. You betrayed your country and your oath of office. The Constitution don’t grant the government any authority to meddle in the regulation of drugs or the practice of religion.
Do you understand?
It was the job of the courts to throw out those laws, not send thousands of innocent people to get cornholed in your prisons. And you’re not allowed to stack juries by sending anyone home who thinks your War on Drugs is full of shit and refuses to swear in advance to follow your orders.

“This is the way we treat oathbreakers, you self-righteous pig. This is to make sure you don’t breed any more little motherfuckers to steal away our liberties. Maybe you’ll get
this
message.” Having already pumped the gun as soon as he’d discharged his first round, he again went for a firm shoulder weld, even though he now stood almost directly over the struggling jurist, who was mouthing the words “No, no.” The black gunman centered his next round of buckshot directly into the old judge’s crotch. Since he was firing almost directly down, the recoil was potent; he’d feel it later.

Boom!

The judge tried to scream, would have screamed if his lungs were still working. A nice fountain of blood now shot up from a shattered femoral artery, pulsing about twice per second. Even without his other injuries, this would bleed the tough-assed jurist dry in about two minutes. He didn’t look so scary, now. It rarely dawned on those in power that they might ever be called upon to pay for the many lives and families they’d destroyed,
personally.

“Time,” said the shorter executioner. His companion nodded. Even their ringing ears could now hear shouts and footsteps heading their way from around a bend in the corridor ahead. Both men activated the portable resonators they wore across the tops of their heads, like telephone earsets. Behind them, with a rush of air from
the slight pressure differential, the vortex opened again. Shimmering out the other side of the vortex could again be seen a different landscape, the same land forms beyond the narrow Providence River, but a landscape with no city, a landscape of semi-tropical vegetation. They backed toward it, keeping their weapons aimed down the corridor beyond where their two victims lay twitching. Then they turned and stepped through.

When the first two bailiffs from the guard station near the front door arrived in the corridor, they could see the vortex closing down, like watching the automatic iris of a giant camera respond to a sudden bright light. They moved cautiously toward it, even as they tried to figure out what they were looking at, but then had to steady themselves to avoid slipping in the huge puddle of blood and gore that now surrounded the dead bailiff and the dying district court judge. Now they heard a slight sucking noise, and a pop. By the time they looked up again, the vortex — and the hit men who had stepped into it — were gone.

* * *

“Have you seen the Windsor Annesley video?” Marian asked as Matthew entered the store. Chantal and Les were already gathered around Marian’s computer.

“Windsor Annesley is in prison.”

“That’s part of what’s got people talking. Unless he’s broken out, which no one is reporting, the assumption is he must have recorded this before he got sent away, and they just waited till the right time to release it. The TV stations are just playing selected clips, they obviously don’t want to stand accused of serving as a publicity channel for the Cthulhians, but the thing has gone viral on the net. Here, I’ll re-cue to the beginning. Watch.”

It was Worthy’s older brother, no question, professionally recorded by someone who knew how to set lights and use a tripod, though the indoor location was predictably nondescript except for the American flag and the church banner.

Marian hit the “Play” triangle.

“Hi, I’m Windsor Annesley, head of the Church of Cthulhu, based in Providence, Rhode Island, but with branches in 30 states. We tried to be a peaceful, responsible church, probably just like your church or temple. But in violation of the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion which they’ve sworn to uphold, government judges and officials banned our church, calling us ‘conspirators’ and turning our thousands of members into outlaws, just because we peacefully use sacraments in our religious ceremonies, in our churches, that they don’t like. Natural sacraments that are not addictive, that have never killed anyone, used voluntarily in church services by consenting adults and their supervised, teen-age children. I don’t mean any offense, but they want us to use
their
sacraments, sacraments that — for us — don’t work. Or no sacraments at all. Is that what religious freedom means? Sort of like saying the Second Amendment only guarantees your right to own a plastic pop-gun?”

Windsor allowed himself a faint smile, almost a sad smile, but with that well-known twinkle in his eye. Windsor’s shock of red hair was clean and recently cut. He wore a double-breasted blue blazer and a red-white-and-blue tie. He was handsome, and a masterful public speaker. Somehow the rhythm and the cadence were always perfect, never rushed.

“Well, now I understand a leading figure in the War on Drugs has been killed. Do I regret that? Yes, I regret the fact the fact that, in a war, individuals die.

“But we did not declare this war.” Windsor Annesley tilted his head, soberly. It almost looked now as though he had a tear in his eye, a tear of sadness for a nation betrayed. “The federal government declared this war, a hundred years ago, when they enacted the Harrison Narcotics Act, in 1914. A hundred … years … ago. They swore that first drug law was just about truth in labeling, that they would never actually
ban
any drugs, including opium or morphine or heroin, they would never ‘come between a doctor and his patient.’ That’s what they said. That’s what they promised.

“The War on Drugs is a hundred years old. One … hundred … years. It has cost billions and billions of dollars, till they’ve driven the government of the United States almost into bankruptcy, till our dollar isn’t worth a dime. Did you know our great-grandparents could buy a restaurant dinner for fifty cents, a cup of coffee for a nickel? It has given us the highest prison incarceration rate of any nation in the world, two million of our brothers and sisters in prison — up from just one hundred thousand, a century ago — with black and Hispanic men grossly over-represented, so the children of those victims, raised without fathers, often grow up to be criminals. How’s that working out?