The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (17 page)

Graham Hancock, Joe Rogan Podcast 142, Sept. 25, 2011.

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

Terence McKenna

C
HAPTER
N
INE

“This is Brittany Watson with Action News. Is there a sea monster in Narragansett Bay?” Beside the lovely, pouting Brittany on the split screen came up some 19th Century engraving of a giant sea serpent.

“Two fishermen reported to the Coast Guard last night that a large creature swam alongside their boat right about sunset in the waters off Hope Island, Dave, and then actually passed through the hull of the craft, without doing any substantial damage. Lieutenant LaRiviere of the Coast Guard says the report is being investigated, though there are indications alcohol may have been involved.”

“Thanks, Brittany. Party on, gentlemen.”

“Yes, Dave. I’d like to have a couple belts of whatever they’re doing.”

The members of the Cornish Horrors had gladly seized upon his discovery of “The Sign of the Sixteen Oyster Shells” as a welcome excuse for an evening of Italian food and merriment. As guest of honor at the special summer awards dinner, Matthew had foolishly allowed his fellow Sherlockians to convince him to drink the traditional toasts to the queen and to Brenda Tregennis (heroine of the Holmes story from which Rhode Island’s chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars drew its name, in whose honor Les had composed and tonight declaimed a highly skilled and slightly bawdy piece of verse) not in ginger ale or Mexican Coca-Cola, as he would normally have preferred, but in a pitcher of some concoction they knowingly dubbed “dirty martinis.”

The things tasted like brine — indeed the only parts of the brew that really
had
any taste were the green olives and the salt water in which they’d been preserved. It was only as he rose to weave his way
past the bar of the Italian-American Club in the general direction of the men’s room that Matthew realized more than 95 percent of the contents of that pitcher — allowing for some small amount of vermouth and water from the melting ice — would have been pure Bombay Sapphire Gin.

He could thus be excused if he did nothing but smile and shake his head as he paused to watch the lovely Munchkin newsgal deliver her cheerful sea monster report on the wide-screen TV above the bar, wondering how on earth the station management defined little Brittany’s beat: “Hey, this is cute, where’s Brittany?”

A sea monster off Hope Island, wherever that was. He seemed to remember some Indian chief had made a gift of Hope Island to Roger Williams, which probably meant it had been a worthless piece of rock from Day One, out in the bay somewhere.

The Italian-American Club’s Venus de Milo Room was done up in Early Seaport Whorehouse — gigantic crystal chandeliers, red-and-black figured carpet, red-flocked wallpaper, and of course your phalanx of identical four-foot-high white resin Venus de Milos, cast to resemble white marble and arrayed on pedestals in their little recesses along the walls.

Back at the head table, Matthew accepted with appropriate good cheer the memorial plaque they had prepared to honor his book-sleuthing achievement. Les and Richard St. Vincent, the university’s plenipotentiary of rare books and special collections, had enlisted the group’s best cartoonist, proprietor of a comic-book store in North Providence, to depict Matthew as Quincy Magoo, the near-blind cartoon character voiced for TV by the sainted Jim Backus, fumbling his way with the aid of a white-and-red cane down a forest path, alongside which the bushes and trees were festooned with lost bibliographic treasures to which he was oblivious, including Shakespeare’s
Cardenio
and Melville’s
Isle of the Cross.
Mr. Magoo was depicted as about to stumble over a huge tree root labeled “The 16 Oyster Shells.”

It was all in good fun. At the tail end of his acceptance address, however, Matthew had decided he couldn’t forego the chance to ask
the assistance of the region’s foremost literary and investigative minds in his current quest.

“And now I’d like to take just a moment, gentlemen and ladies,” Matthew said, after a pause, “to enlist the aid of this most august group of investigative minds on a small challenge that’s currently occupying me and my associates at Books on Benefit.”

He had their attention.

“I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Howard Lovecraft’s story ‘From Beyond.’ In it, he purports to describe a machine called a resonator, which is capable of exciting the Pineal Body and thus allowing his mad scientist — all scientists being presumptively mad —” a few appreciative chuckles from the representatives of the harder scientific disciplines, “to see objects, creatures, which exist in a parallel dimension, but to which we residents of this dimension are usually insensate. A device which not only makes them visible to us, but us visible to them.

“I don’t ask anyone here to debate whether such a device is possible. I merely take the opportunity to report we believe a group of men is in the process of attempting to build such a device, now, here in Southern New England. A secret project, at a secret site. And we’d like to talk to them, about literary matters, of course.”

A few smiles.

“So I’m just seizing on this convenient opportunity to expand the number of eyes we have watching out for a new, unexplained, secure facility, probably on one of our islands or at least out in one of our rural areas. If you have any information you think we might find of use, about a new secure facility where none existed two months ago, or particularly of a new facility generating strange humming noises, or even unexplained apparitions, I’d welcome any news; you can of course contact me in confidence.”

There were more chuckles, a few of the tipsier attendees apparently assuming it was another joke, but generally there was applause all round, and the evening broke up in the traditional spirit of Sherlockian congeniality, with the usual ad hoc swap meet at the cloak
room until everyone was fairly certain they had the correct Inverness cape and deerstalker cap.

Matthew gathered up his plaque and other mementos, but of course he and Les had to wait a few minutes while Chantal and Marian paid a last visit to the Ladies’ Room. And that gave Richard St. Vincent the opportunity to bring over a bearded compatriot from the state university.

“Matthew: You know Professor Challenger?”

“From URI? I do. You spoke last year on the other missing piece of Doyle’s canon, ‘The Inca’s Eye.’”

The professor beamed broadly to have his efforts remembered. Matthew shook his hand.

“I know where it is,” said the senior professor of English Literature, without undue preliminaries.

“‘The Inca’s Eye’?”

“No, no. The secure facility that wasn’t there two months ago. And it does emit a hum, at least some of the time.”

“Where?”

“A lot of people prefer the sea beaches, of course. But I find them crowded and obnoxious, this time of year, all transistor radios and suntan oil. So I take the kids to Blue Beach on Quonset Point, or Rome Point to watch the seals. But there’s also a little beach a lot of people don’t know about, a little further north, north of the state airport. It’s called Spink’s Neck Beach.”

“In Warwick?”

“No, not by Green Airport. Just north of what they call the state airport, now, the old Navy strip on Quonset Point. The town has developed an industrial park there, some of the projects have made it but there’s one building that sat abandoned for quite awhile, just to the right and across the railroad tracks off Davisville Road as you head out to the Davisville Piers, which is also the way to Spink’s Neck Beach. I would say it was almost two months ago that we noticed that building is in use again. And it doesn’t exactly look very friendly.
Barbed wire along the top of the fence, now, and an armed guard at a new guardhouse by the main gate.”

“On Quonset Point.”

“Yes. You’re after the Cthulhians, aren’t you?”

“Why would you say that?”

“Everything Lovecraft wrote is sacred scripture to that bunch, and you mentioned this project is based on ‘From Beyond.’ I had a distant connection to the founding of the church, as it turns out.”

“How’s that?”

“For a brief time in my younger years I was faculty advisor to Aaron Scheckler, when he first moved here from Storrs. There was brilliance in the man, though trying to get him to finish anything was like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. Always dashing off after something new. Hunting for the resonator would have been just the kind of rabbit trail he would have loved. I’d look on Quonset Point, Matthew.”

And then Matthew remembered little Brittany Watson and her silly report about the sea monster.

“The TV news is reporting some disturbances off Hope Island,” he said. “Is that anywhere near Quonset Point?”

Professor Challenger looked at Richard St. Vincent, as though to ask whether Matthew was drunk, or joking, or both. Professor St. Vincent looked at the ceiling.

The bearded English professor decided Matthew was just a geographic idiot, turned back and patiently explained “Hope Island sits just off Quonset Point, Matthew. Saying something is ‘off Hope Island’ and saying it’s ‘off Quonset Point’ are two ways of saying the same thing.”

* * *

“He’s right,” laughed Captain Jack, next-door neighbor to Books on Benefit, when Matthew and Chantal finally found him the next afternoon. Captain Jack was rarely available mornings, generally being out on the Bay before dawn. “Sayin’ somethin’ is off Hope
Island and sayin’ it’s off Quonset Point is two ways of sayin’ the same thing. No wonder he looked puzzled. You’ll never make a sailorman, Matthew.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Matthew admitted. “How far?”

“Halfway down the Bay, near enough. Not likely you’ll find anything on the island itself, it’s a bird sanctuary. Any traffic there would stand out like a sore thumb. But there’s good deep water right in close to the point, 20 feet or more, we can likely get in within a hunnert yards or so, give ’er a look.”

“Can you land us?”

“Not much of a beach right at the airfield. Navy put in a lot of fill, a lot of retainin’ walls. The big harbor’s at the south side of the point, Quonset Pier where the high-speed Block Island ferry pulls in. Deep water all the way in, there. But it sounds like you want to go in further north, anyway. We could get you in close to Calf Pasture or Spink’s Neck Beach, you could paddle in in the dinghy, but I don’t see why you’d want to get your feet wet, except for the adventure and all.

“In a smaller craft we could dock at Little Allen’s Harbor or the North Kingstown Marina, or if you’re takin’ a bigger party and we use the bigger boat we could likely tie up at one of the Davisville piers without a lot of hassle, especially if you’re goin’ in after dark. There’s some security south of there, at the airport, ’cause the National Guard fly out of there and you’ve got their planes all lined up waitin’ to be strafed, the military always bein’ great for arrangin’ things in handy straight lines, but there’s not much of a watch on the piers, and if there is, the Idle Times is known there. We’ll just say somebody took sick and we’re pullin’ in to get them ashore. How big a party?”

Chantal looked at Matthew.

“Three of us. We’ll just take Skeezix, for his ears.”

“Then we’ll just take the little boat into Little Allen’s Harbor, that’s the simplest thing.”

“Tonight?”

“If you’ve a mind, and providin’ you can buy the fuel. Couple hours cruise down past Warrick Point, assumin’ you don’t wanna
go down there with a bone in your nose, look like you’re late to the clambake.…”

Matthew looked puzzled.

“ … Then we just hold west of Patience and Prudence.”

“Which are islands.”

“And without even lookin’ it up on the chart, Matthew, you’re a wonder. Do he have any trouble findin’ his way home, miss?”

“Frequently, yes. When a boat has a bone in its nose, dear, that refers to a bow wave,” Chantal explained.

“I can get some sleep this afternoon,” Captain Jack offered. “If you want to leave early in the evenin’, I can have you down there by ten, eleven o’clock, easy.”

* * *

Worthy had made it very clear Tony Waranowicz was under no obligation to undertake the special Launch Day assignment. There were plenty of younger volunteers, and members of the Council of Elders were going to be used very sparingly for any front-line work. Since they had no cut-outs, it was unwise to put any of the church elders in a position where they had direct, first-hand knowledge of Launch Day operations, should they be arrested and questioned.

But he knew their little New Jersey Outreach operation was custom-made for him. And Tony was impressed by the kind of detailed plans Worthy was making, his insistence that every plan allow for multiple contingencies, based on confirmed intelligence. Worthy had a sense of the kind of resources the Drug Warriors would unleash, during the months before public opinion would inevitably turn against them and their police-state excesses. So he was determined that his first blows had to come in a flurry, capable of stunning an adversary that had never faced an organized attack. Worthy was not the kind of captain to fritter away his resources, piecemeal.

And Tony had his own, very personal, reasons to want to strike a blow, as Worthy well knew. He also had the feeling this could easily be his last chance to do anything but lecture and talk and endlessly
bloviate about the cause, that to miss this main chance now would mean gradually fading away into old-man-hood, waking up with bad dreams about a lifetime of opportunities missed.

He was too old to think there’d be anything romantic about “making his bones,” like in the old gangster movies. Hell, once he’d come down off the adrenalin rush he’d probably barf, or pee his pants, or something equally dashing. But Tony no longer had any close family to worry about — thanks to the Drug War — and this was a task that required concentration, steady nerves, a confident manner, an ability to seize the opportunity when it presented itself. He simply knew that logically he was the right person for the job. And he knew that if he succeeded — while there would be no parades or fanfare this year or this decade — it would cement his position. Someday, his name would be listed among those who had struck the first blows.