The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (12 page)

Lieutenant Cory — he surely still carried himself like a lieutenant — may not have been entirely happy, but he turned over the giant
coffee can to Matthew and let Chantal show him out. Presumably they’d share e-mail addresses, trade secret handshakes, whatever.

There was an auxiliary outlet in the back of one of the front-desk computers. Matthew plugged in the coffee can and set it on the floor under the desk, where no one would trip over it. He couldn’t find an on-off switch, so he assumed he didn’t need to do anything else. If he was expecting it to do anything audible, he was disappointed. The floor might be vibrating just a little, like when a truck went by outside, but he finally decided that was just his imagination.

No rest for the wicked, though. Chantal now advised him Marquita was here.

“Browsing, or asking to see me?”

“To see you. She’s a little agitated.”

“Bring her into the office,” he sighed. “But you can stay with us, right?”

Matthew asked her how Gilbert was doing out West with the grandmother, she said fine, et cetera, but the small talk didn’t seem to relax her.

“What is it, Marquita? What’s wrong?”

She looked at Chantal.

“I can leave, if you like,” Chantal offered.

“No, no, that’s not it. Bucky’s been gone two nights, that’s all. It’s not like him. My friends roll their eyes like he’s out cattin’ around, but that’s not what it is. I would know if it was something like that. He and his friend Alvin both been gone, now. You know Alvin?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Little white guy, you probably seen him. He was one of those Derlethians. Now he says it was all a big misunderstanding so he’s back in the church, but Bucky and I think Windsor went way too easy on those guys. Anyway, they both work for Worthy, now, so I call for Worthy, and I can’t reach
him,
either. Oh, they’re real nice at the Annesley house, they take messages for him and Bucky, but they won’t tell me nothin’. Turns out nobody’s seen Worthy for about a week. I think they went away someplace with Worthy, which is fine.
Sometimes he has to do that, that’s his work now. Worthy pays him pretty good. Pretty well. But it’s not like Bucky not to tell me he’d be gone, or not to get in touch. I think he’s hurt or in some kind of trouble.”

“I think you’re right,” Matthew said.

That seemed to surprise both Marquita and Chantal. Everyone seemed to expect the standard “Don’t worry, go home and bake cookies, I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

“How well do you know Worthy Annesley?” Matthew asked.

“What do you mean?

“Does he manipulate people? Like, would he ask Bucky to do something dangerous, something he wouldn’t be able to talk to you about?”

“They all talk about Worthy like he’s this violent man who’s gonna take the church to war, but it’s not true.” Marquita was suddenly less tongue-tied. Whether it was deserved or not, the Annesleys inspired that kind of loyalty. “If the way he talks sounds angry it’s because he
cares.
He cares about these people whose lives are ruined by the drug war, like Bucky’s boy. Everybody else just flap their arms like a chicken and say, ‘Gee, too bad, nothing we can do,’ while people get sent away for twenty, thirty years for possession, for driving the truck, nothing violent at all. The buzz-heads just decide if it’s more than a pound, you must be a ‘dealer.’ But except for Bucky, Worthy is one of the most caring people I ever met. He was just about the only person who ever showed any interest in my photography.”

“Your photography.”

“Never mind.”

“No, I’m interested, Marquita. This could be important.”

“Nobody’s interested. Forget I said that.”

“You photograph things that no one else can see.”

“What?”

“Don’t you? And when you’ve tried to show them to people, they laugh, they tell you it’s lens flare or dirt on your lens, they won’t even look.”

“You got my house bugged or something? You some kind of cop?”

“Marquita, I would never talk to anyone about the books you buy, that’s your business. But now I hope you’ll talk to me and Chantal, who’s my partner in these things. Because I think it might be important. You buy books about unexplained phenomena.”

“Yeah. Is that a problem?”

“Crop circles, reincarnation.”

“Yeah? So?”

“I’m not being critical, Marquita. We wouldn’t sell those books if I thought there was any problem with them. But this could be important. You buy books about orbs.”

“Yes, OK. I do.”

“And did Worthy find out you were interested in orbs? Did he talk to you about them?”

Marquita said nothing.

“Marquita, I’ve crossed the horizon and looked back, OK? Emilio was my first road man.”

“You’ve visited the other world?”

“Many times. No one here is going to laugh at you. I know something about the pain of speaking the truth and not having anyone listen. But you said Worthy did listen.”

“Yeah.”

“He was interested in what your camera was capturing. Seriously interested.”

“Yeah.”

“Which was what?”

“The orbs. But how did you know that?”

“Worthy said he started to find evidence that the kind of things Lovecraft wrote about in one of his short stories are real, that there are things all around us that we can’t normally see, but now people are starting to see them, in pictures taken with electronic cameras. Do you take pictures of the orbs that way, Marquita?”

“I don’t talk about that anymore.”

“Because people made fun of you, told you they were fakes, or something.”

“All the time. They look at you like you’re crazy. They say your camera must be broken, you’ve got dust on your lens, you’ve got water droplets on your lens. I even have them say maybe I need eye surgery, if I’m seeing these things, go to the hospital. You show them three pictures taken a minute apart, less than that, all in the same place. First one, no orbs. Second one, the sky’s full of orbs, all different colors. Third picture, they’re almost all gone, you can even see the tracks where some are moving off. If it was water on my lens, where’d the water go? They just laugh.”

“But Worthy didn’t laugh.”

“No, he wanted to see more. He had all kinds of questions. Do the same ones come back on different nights, how fast can they move, what seems to attract them, stuff like that.”

“He didn’t think you were crazy.”

“No way. He kept saying the orbs came ‘from beyond.’”

“Did he? Could he have been saying they reminded him of a story called ‘From Beyond’?”

“Yeah. That sounds right. You really think this has something to do with what’s happened to Bucky?”

“Yes, I do. Not like you’ve done anything wrong. But Worthy had us find a book for him, and I think he used the book to find a machine, and the machine is to help him see the orbs, and lots of other things. See them, find out where they come from, how they move back and forth, find out a lot of things. I hate to impose on you, Marquita, but if we’re going to help you find Bucky, I believe this is very important.”

“You think Bucky is dead?”

“No, Marquita. I think we can find him. At least, I’m going to assume we can, and we’re going to try. But Chantal and I would like to see your photographs.”

“Sure, OK. But which ones? I got thousands.”

“Where do you take them?”

“Right in my back yard, mostly.”

“In fact, could we come over and join you, watch you take some orb photos?”

“You’re serious.”

“Very.”

“When?” Marquita asked.

“Right now.”

And then, finally, Marquita laughed. Charming laugh. She was pretty when she let herself be.

“They don’t come now. Right after sunset is best, before it gets full dark.”

“This evening, then?”

Marquita hung her head again. “Sure. OK.”

“What’s the matter, Marquita?” Chantal asked.

“The place isn’t cleaned up for company. And I’m afraid you’ll have to eat macaroni and cheese.”

“Don’t be silly,” Matthew smiled. “If we invite ourselves over, we bring the food. Hot oven grinders and a pizza OK? What kind do you like? And do we bring wine or beer or soda?”

“Really? You sure?”

She gave her home address, a modest working-class neighborhood on the far side of the hill, and they agreed on a time, a good half-hour before sunset.

* * *

“Les?” Matthew found their local Lovecraft expert replacing polyester dust jacket protectors on books which the customers had jammed into the shelves without properly folding the jacket flaps back under the boards, making portions of the jacket and Mylar protector alike resemble wadded-up packing material. No one was quite sure why or even how they did it; speculation ran to a race of trolls who appeared human only during daylight hours, who had never actually seen a book before and thus regarded them as some kind of threatening object to be battered and subdued.

“Hm?”

“The Derlethians.”

“What about them?”

“Marquita says Bucky is missing, and some little white guy with him, who she says was ‘one of those Derlethians.’ Says she and Bucky figure Worthy went much too easy on them. On the Derlethians. Mean anything to you?”

“You mean you don’t know about the biggest apostasy in the Church of Cthulhu, the Derlethian Heresy?”

“Anything like the Presbyterian schism of 1837?”

“Out of my area. Though we could sure use another president like Martin Van Buren.”

“Fill me in.”

“They called him the Silver Fox of Kinderhook. His term was essentially seen as a continuation of the Jackson regime. Unfortunately, that meant continuing the Indian removals, as well.”

“Les. The Derlethians.”

“Ah. OK. The Church of Cthulhu was founded by a smiling, good-looking, curly-haired blond lunatic — prophet, if you prefer — named Aaron Scheckler, based on a series of visions he had under the influence of LSD and mescaline sulfate from 1969 to 1971 while living in a series of yurts and geodesic domes out in the woods in Ashford, Connecticut and later in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, while in the 30-year pursuit of a doctorate in comparative literature on the works of Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, and Eric Rucker Eddison. Right?”

“Right. Knew that. Although I don’t know what Eddison’s doing in there. Eddison’s work is horrible in a different way.”

“Agreed. I suspect a long string of faculty advisors probably urged Scheckler to tighten up his focus, but Scheckler was reportedly a man longer on enthusiasm than discipline. Before he died, just to add dignity and grandeur to the whole enterprise, Scheckler had his name legally changed to ‘R.U. Nuts.’”

“Heard that. The church eventually published his incomplete thesis,” Matthew remembered.

“As
The Road to Cthulhu,
correct. Interminable, often brilliant, quite mad. I imagine firsts can be pricey.”

“They sure can. The Derlethians?”

“The basic doctrine of the church, of course, is that Lovecraft’s writings form the sacred canon, that he was channeling actual prehistoric information about the elder gods, which can be re-accessed by the faithful through the use of the sacred sacraments, which are basically anything Scheckler ever wolfed down.”

“Right. Even though Lovecraft didn’t so much as drink beer.”

“Didn’t need to. He had the direct channel from the stars, see. It all flowed to him in a dream state. I should be so lucky. We lesser beings need more help to open the portals, see. But the point is, if the sacred writings are everything Lovecraft ever wrote, who would be the biggest traitor to the cause, the Benedict Arnold of Cthulhianism?”

“Ah. Wisconsin’s favorite son, August Derleth.”

“Exactly. Before the fall, Derleth started out as a good guy, co-founding Arkham House to gather together Lovecraft’s stories and publish them in book form. Lovecraft actually knew Derleth, admired some of his writings. The Solar Pons stories are pretty good, although they come later. But when the popularity of Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard skyrocketed in the ’60s, there was a shortage of material to meet the demand, since both those guys died young after publishing a limited amount of stuff, mostly in the pulps. To fill the gap, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter finished some Conan stories that Howard had left incomplete, and rewrote others that originally had different heroes to turn them into Conan stories.”

“Right.”

“Bad enough. But they were pikers compared to Derleth, who probably wrote more words of Lovecraft than Lovecraft ever wrote. The guy churned out prose like a Veg-O-Matic. He’d get hold of an outline Lovecraft never used, or just a sentence or two, a stillborn story idea in the commonplace book or in some letter, he’d expand it
into a novella or a full-fledged novel, and publish the thing as ‘by H.P Lovecraft and August Derleth.’ Lots of people who think they’ve read Lovecraft have in fact never read anything but Derleth.”

“So the Derlethians …”

“Breakaway branch of the church that read Derleth as well as Lovecraft, which was anathema to the purists. Derleth was a traditional Christian, after all, parochial school lad, he superimposed Christian morality on the tales. On top of that, the Derlethians argued there was no need to use all these hallucinogenic sacraments. Needless to say, the mainstream media talked them up as the safe and sane alternative.”

“OK; that sounds familiar.”

“Eventually some of the Derlethians got outed as police informants, at which point the whole bunch got purged, excommunicated, whatever. Windsor Annesley took pity on a bunch of them who recanted and allowed them back into the church on a case-by-case basis, but there’s still nothing much worse you can call a Cthulhian than a Disciple of Derleth the Heretic. Besides which, if you were paying attention, most of the church members and former members who turned state’s evidence and testified against Windsor at the trial were actually Branch Derlethians.”

“And Bucky has disappeared in the company of a former Derlethian.”

“So it would appear.”

“Thanks, Les.”

“Hope it helps.”

“What on earth happened to those dust jackets?”

“God knows. They seem to have been through some kind of titanic struggle with the Forces of Darkness.”