The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (5 page)

Coca-Cola had actually been invented to replace coca wine when alcohol Prohibition hit the state of Georgia, decades before it went national, as Matthew recalled. But he saw no need to interrupt. Let Worthy have his blow, here among friends.

“Prohibition is why. Prohibition makes it more cost-effective for drug dealers to transport more potent versions of their drugs, the same way alcohol Prohibition changed America from a nation of wine and beer drinkers into a nation of whiskey drinkers, because the bootleggers could make more profit bringing in the harder stuff — a trend which started to reverse itself as soon as
that
Prohibition was repealed, in 1933.”

Matthew seemed to remember the patriarch of the Annesley clan, Worthy’s granddad, had known more than a little about rum-running on the Bay, 90 years ago. But again, he saw no point in interrupting.

“Drugs can kill you? OK. But we all own our own lives and bodies, we have every right to decide how we want to die, the same way they’re free to die of tobacco and booze and too many donuts and a heart attack while they rape some chicana in the back of their van who’s afraid if she complains she’ll get deported.” Worthy was on a roll. “But how on earth can they pretend to police drug use if they can’t tell the entheogens from crack or heroin? Nobody gets addicted to LSD or peyote or any other mind-enhancing drug; they’ve never documented a single overdose death in a human subject.

“If drugs are bad, the number one culprit is alcohol, which they all drink like fish. Where do cops go, after hours? Not juice bars. Meantime, God forbid we let people get a fresh look at their proper, joyful place in the world, in the bosom of their families, which happens when they’re given the opportunity of a life-changing experience
with peyote or LSD in church, in a responsible, religious setting. Peyote has cured lots of cases of alcoholism, as I’m sure our friend Emilio could testify.”

“Could
have
testified,” Matthew smiled.

“Exactly. But you know what? I don’t give a damn whether they think our use of our sacraments is wise, or good, or anything else. I just want them to answer one question: Are you willing to forswear the initiation of force, to allow us each to seek God and revelation in his own way, yes or no? My brother gave them a deadline. He gave them a full year to repeal all their drug laws, to release every drug prisoner from their jails and prisons, for the cops and prosecutors and judges to swear in public they’d no longer enforce those laws.”

“Any takers?” asked Les.

“One pro tem judge out in Arizona, a former U.S. Marine, asked them not to send him any drug cases, since he couldn’t enforce those laws in good conscience. They immediately kicked him off the bench. Otherwise, not a one.”

“So what happens, now?” Les asked.

“Simple. If they don’t go on the record, in public, foreswearing the use of force to take away our freedom in regard to manufacturing and selling and possessing these sacraments, then we’re going to officially adopt
their
method: the use of force.”

“You’re going to kill them?”

“No, no. It wouldn’t be wise to talk about that, obviously.” Worthy suddenly glanced around, as though realizing for the first time that a microphone could be hidden anywhere, even here. “One loose cannon does something stupid, and suddenly because of some loose talk they claim we’re involved in a conspiracy. I’ve seen the way that works. No, no, we’re against that. The preferred course of action is to win a majority at the polls, change the laws, and then
legally
lock them up in little cells the way they’ve locked us up, take away
their
freedom where LSD and the other psychedelics are concerned.”

“But they don’t want to use psychedelics.”

“Exactly. They lock us up in cages to prevent our using our sacraments, so we lock them up in little cages and put LSD in their drinking water, also against their will. An eye for an eye. We’ll see how
they
like having someone use force to decide whether and how
their
consciousness is altered.”

“Doesn’t sound very peaceable,” Matthew smiled.

“We offered them peace. My brother tried to win the argument by logic and reason and medical evidence. You see where that got him.”

“But Worthy,” Les the vampire novelist has obviously heard the argument before, “you know they’ll come right back and say a retroactive law would be unconstitutional.”

Why was it, then, Worthy asked, after chemists had stockpiled millions of doses of LSD while it was legal, and Congress then decided to outlaw the molecule in 1966 without a single meaningful public hearing, without demanding peer-reviewed medical testimony to back up all the wild assertions from crewcut rural sheriffs about kids staring into the sun till they went blind and jumping out of high windows because they thought they could fly, that no one in Washington said “Of course you can continue to distribute and sell all the supplies you have on hand because we can’t make a law retroactive”?

“Funny, I don’t remember that,” said Worthy, deadpan. “But more to the point, there’s no authority in the Constitution for any government agency to regulate drugs, so every drug law is already unconstitutional, and unconstitutional laws are deemed to have been null and void
from the moment of their inception,
which means they’ve all been guilty of kidnapping and false imprisonment under color of law, which have
always
been felonies.”

Les and Matthew smiled. Les got up to let Tabbyhunter, who’d been standing there chattering at them, out the back door. The gray tabby rarely meowed; he chattered like a squirrel. Les grabbed a couple beers and a couple cans of soda pop from the fridge, set them on the table. Les kept a squat little bottle for himself, some kind of
foaming brownish concoction from the Philippines. Worthy thanked him, seemed to realize he’d been preaching to the choir for some time now. He took a deep breath, chuckled a little, popped the top on a can of 7-Up.

“Wait, I’ll get you a glass and some ice,” Les offered.

“No, no. This is fine. Sorry, guys.”

“Worthy,” Matthew nodded, “We’d all love to see an end to the Drug War. But I don’t think we’re going to resolve all our differences over tactics here today. You wanted to talk about finding a lost book.”

“Yes. Sorry. It gets very frustrating, trying to be more like my older brother, trying to seem calm and witty and philosophical in front of the cameras and the microphones, when what’s needed is something to shake them out of their damned complacency.”

“It’s OK, Worthy. You’re among friends.”

Worthington Annesley shrugged, back in control. “So, ‘The Miskatonic Manuscript.’”

“Hm?”

“The missing H.P. Lovecraft notebook that I hope you can help me find. It actually relates to a distant ancestor of mine.”

“Tell us more,” Matthew said, happy to be getting down to business. “When did it go missing? This would be a hand-written single-copy manuscript, not something that was ever set up in type and printed?”

“Maybe I’d better start from the beginning.”

“Good idea.”

Worthy Annesley had run into some contemporary evidence, he said — “in fact there’s more and more of it, if you search online” — that things, beings, did indeed seem to exist, moving all around us, that remained invisible to the naked eye, but reflected or fluoresced light when photographed with modern electronic cameras, registering images just outside the wavelengths of human vision.

“Mm-hm.”

“Sounds kind of nutty, I know.”

“Worthy, the quantum physicists say there could be as many as 31 parallel dimensions wrapped around us here, like helical ribbons,” Matthew volunteered. “That there are more things in heaven and earth than can be perceived by our unassisted senses, our adult senses as we’re conditioned to use them, isn’t far-fetched to me.”

“OK,” Worthy chuckled again, seemed to relax a little. “I did a little checking up on you, Matthew. I know you’ve done some lecturing at the university on the literature of the entheogens, the psychoactive plants. It was one reason I thought you might be a good match for this job, that you’d understand what I’m talking about. Plus Les, of course, has studied all this stuff, I know.”

“So: A Lovecraft notebook?”

“These photos people are getting, things they call veils, orbs, vortexes. Usually shot outdoors at night or in dim light, I’m not talking about your supposed ‘ghost photos’ of ectoplasm in haunted houses, whatever those turn out to be. Anyway, these things immediately reminded me of Lovecraft’s story ‘From Beyond,’ which he wrote in late 1920.”

So Worthy had started researching that year in Lovecraft’s life, to see if there might be any evidence that the phenomena he described in ‘From Beyond’ weren’t made up, that they stemmed from something he actually experienced.

“And what did I find, but a reference in a Lovecraft letter from 1920 that he actually visited my great-uncle, Henry Annesley, to discuss some experiments Uncle Henry was conducting.

“Not only that, this letter clearly implies he’d taken notes with an eye to developing a story, notes which he referred to as ‘The Miskatonic Notebook’ or ‘The Miskatonic Manuscript.’

“So, Matthew, I understand you’re in the business of locating rare, lost, hard-to-find books and manuscripts. Everyone’s heard about your million-dollar Sherlock Holmes story, and I knew Les worked with you here, so I asked him for an introduction. What do you think? Can this notebook be found?”

Matthew was on familiar ground, now. He flipped open a notebook, asked for details.

“Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a weird duck, from a weird family. Les knows all this; stop me if I’m covering old ground.” The author’s grandfather had made his first fortune with a general store out in the rural Rhode Island town of Foster in the mid-1800s, Worthy explained, which you might presume would have given his descendants some sympathy for the nobility of commerce. But in fact, after his father died the mother and maiden aunts seem to have raised the boy to believe they were part of some natural Providence aristocracy, that it would have been beneath any of them to seek gainful employment, even when the inheritance dwindled to the point where they were living in rented rooms on short rations.

“All the way up to age 30, Lovecraft was adamant that he would write only for amateur journals, mostly poetry and essays, he certainly was not going to stoop to writing anything aimed at the lowbrow tastes of the vulgar crowd, anything ‘commercial,’” Worthy explained. “As a result he never owned a car or a home, spent most of his life in a rented room living on donuts and coffee and cold canned spaghetti.”

“We’ll allow a bit of literary license, here.”

“No, this is by his own written testimony. Am I right, Les?”

“He was proud that he could live on less than two dollars a week,” Les nodded, “which wasn’t much, even in 1920. He bragged about it. Not a big fan of fresh fruit or vegetables. I can sympathize with him there. But he even hated seafood, reviled it, this from a guy who lived within walking distance of the water all his life.”

“You’d die on that diet,” Matthew frowned.

“He did,” Worthy agreed. “It would be unethical for any nutritionist to put a patient on that diet today just to see what would happen, but Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who was never known to smoke or drink alcohol, died in the late 1930s at the age of 47 of cancer of the small intestine, an ailment as unusual as his diet. So if you really need one, he’s your one-man ‘all-processed-food’ control group.”

“Nasty.”

“Yes.” Worthy wanted to get back on track. “But we were talking about this idea that ‘Society’ people, no matter how down-at-the-heel, should remain above the degradation of getting involved in actual commerce. Lovecraft married Sonia Greene, during most of their brief marriage he lived in a rented room in New York while she went to Cleveland to find work as a milliner, sending him back a little money to live on.”

“Milliner as in hats?”

“Right. Millinery. This was the 1920s, when virtually everyone in America still wore a hat whenever they stepped outdoors. Sonia Greene designed hats.”

“OK.”

“So finally Lovecraft’s homesickness for Providence overwhelmed him, they both came back here, Sonia told the aunts she could open a hat shop, which would have been the family’s only source of income, and they wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Why?”

“I told you; they were ‘Society’ — an attitude I’m afraid I know a little something about. They would not have any wife of any nephew of theirs bringing in an income by being involved in ‘trade.’ Would not hear of it.”

“Amazing.”

“Sonia gave up and left.”

Matthew nodded.

Worthy leaned forward in his chair. “Up through the summer of 1920, when Lovecraft turned 30 years old, he embraced this ‘nothing commercial’ attitude, which wasn’t unique for the time. Then, in the fall of 1920, Lovecraft wrote a short story called ‘From Beyond.’ And soon after, the next year, ‘Herbert West — Reanimator.’

“Now, Lovecraft never made much money from his writings. He was lucky to get $25 or $50 for a story, so it wasn’t exactly selling out for the big bucks. But these stories were different. They bridged the
gap between fantasy and what we now call Science Fiction. Right, Les?”

“Absolutely. Lovecraft became an inspiration and a mentor to a whole generation of future horror and science fiction writers, some of them just teen-agers when they started trading letters with him. The days before the Internet, of course. Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber. By the 1960s and ’70s they were making feature-length films out of stories like ‘From Beyond’ and ‘Re-Animator,’ which was about a scientist who develops a serum that allows him to bring dead bodies back to life, fifty years before anyone ever heard of
Pet Sematary.
”

“So you’re saying something changed in 1920?” Matthew asked.

“Exactly. Why in the fall of 1920 did he suddenly start writing science fiction, stuff good enough that people are still eating it up, almost a century later? Why did it start with ‘From Beyond’? And why does that story still resonate today, so they’re still making movie versions of this little 2,400-word short story?”