An estimated forty thousand died in the initial detonation with three times that many injured. The death toll had barely begun to climb.
No one understood what had happened. The German visit was known only to a few, and most of them died in the explosion. The only ones who might have been able to give a reasonable clue that D-2600 had somehow exploded like a small star and decapitated the Soviet Union in a burning moment were the flight direction staff at Khodynka Aerodrome, and they had no opportunity to talk to anyone who mattered before it all became far too late. As the country flailed without comprehension or leadership, in the West the massive armed force assembled by the Third Reich for Operation Barbarossa started to pour eastward. With the 18th Politburo eradicated to a man, any likely successors were already dead thanks to Stalin’s murderous paranoia, and the Russian people terrified into hopeless dismay by the inexplicable events and rumors of what had occurred and might happen again, the defense of the country was sporadic and feeble.
Years, decades, generations later, the newsreels survive. Heroic Wehrmacht troops streaming across undefended kilometers of Russian countryside, while unopposed Messerschmitt Bf 109s of the Luftwaffe soar overhead to hunt and strafe isolated pockets of the Red Army. Leningrad, fallen. Stalingrad, fallen. The Ukraine, the Baltic states, falling one after another under German control.
The human cost was hidden from the watching world. The inhuman cost was hidden from almost everyone.
Chapter 2
THE UNFOLDED WORLD
The flags snapped and flickered in the stiff breeze coming in from the Atlantic. There were many flags, each with their own poles, ranged across the ornamental lawns before the hulking assembly building, muscular and massive in red stone. These were not the flags of every nation, but the vast majority. Daniel Carter and Emily Lovecraft sat upon a bench, eating an al fresco lunch, and never quite able to stop staring at one flag in particular.
Lovecraft took a sip of coffee from a polystyrene cup and watched the crisp red, white, and black of the swastika wave over New York.
“Well, fuck,” she said. It summed up the feelings of them both exactly.
They had known things were going to be different, but the degrees and types of difference had taken them by surprise. They had not expected the Nazis to still be around post 1945, for example. Yet there they were, large as life and twice as unwanted, taking senior roles in the United Nations. Except it wasn’t the United Nations. It was the League of Nations. Not the toothless League of history, which is to say, Carter and Lovecraft’s history, the folded history. Apparently the institution had undergone reforms after the contention over Poland had come to an abrupt halt with the vaporization of Moscow that signaled the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the Third Reich’s entirely successful invasion of the USSR.
As footage of the mushroom cloud that ended the reign of Stalin made its way around the world, the USA abruptly became very quiet about the evils of the Nazis even as the British feverishly evacuated London, convinced it was the next target.
The bombshell when it fell, however, was not atomic. With potential global domination within their grasp, Germany instead pointed to the conquered swathes of Russia forming a Greater Germania, called it sufficient Lebensraum, and gave up the war in the West. No A-bomb fell upon London, or anywhere else. Instead, the Nazis sued for peace, and they offered excellent terms. The occupied countries of Europe were handed back to their governments, the exceptions being the territories ceded by Germany in the Treaty of Versailles and taken back by force in 1940, which were now held by them for perpetuity.
The West pretended not to notice that Poland had essentially ceased to exist or that Czechoslovakia’s situation was scarcely any safer, and agreed.
Up in Arkham, which used to be Providence, but had been Arkham before that, Carter and Lovecraft hadn’t opened the bookshop they co-owned for a week while they pored through books and scoured the Internet. So much was different, and so much was the same. There was a Cold War of sorts, but with the Third Reich instead of the Soviet Union, and it had fizzled out by the early fifties. The Nazis were being so damn reasonable, and after all, Hitler’s flavor of Fascism was always joined at the hip with capitalism in general and corporatism in particular. It’s hard to stay mad when there’s money to be made.
“How can everyone be so cool with the Nazis?” Carter had asked. “What about the Holocaust? They can’t have been given a free pass for that, can they?”
For her answer, Lovecraft passed him an atlas and told him to look up Israel in the index. He did, and found it listed, which was a relief. But then he went to the page indicated, and found himself looking at a map of the southern half of the continent of Africa. In the corner was an inset of Madagascar; the north of the island down to the nineteenth parallel was labeled “Israel.”
He’d looked at Lovecraft, speechless.
“Yeah,” she’d said.
In this world, the Nazis had enacted their plan to dump their Jews and other undesirables on Madagascar, now a German holding after the fall of France. It was a difficult transition for the refugees, but this Israel was much larger than the Middle Eastern version, and it was rich, verdant land. Policed by the Gestapo until 1955, it had been given full independence in return for favored trading partner status. In this world, the Jewish people might not have loved the Nazis, but nor did they hate them with much enthusiasm.
So, no Holocaust.
Though … there had been a holocaust, but it had been in the East, and the victims were Bolsheviks, Communists, and other degenerates the West couldn’t get excited about.
The weird thing was that Carter and Lovecraft had both known it. They had lived in the Folded World consciously, and the Unfolded World by association. They were people with two histories sitting one upon the other, and with a little shift of focus that became easier every time they practiced it, they could read this one or that.
It being considered freakish to hate the Nazis for something they absolutely would have done if things had been just a little bit different, though—that was difficult. Here, the Third Reich was not a touchstone of evil. Here, the Final Solution had involved burning Russian corpses on pyres of Das Kapital. But Stalin had been slaughtering his own people long before the Germans dropped an atomic bomb in his lap, went the argument, so what were a few more after that? And look how stable the world was now, with Greater Germania in the West and the Imperial Japanese territories in the East. Who could find fault in such a wonderful world?
“How’s your coffee?” Carter asked Lovecraft.
She looked ruminatively into her cup. Then she emptied it out onto the grass and tossed the cup into a garbage can. “Like Himmler pissed in it. Let’s go.”
* * *
Detective Martin Harrelson sometimes took his badge and ID out just to stare at where it said “City of Arkham Police Department” where once it had said “City of Providence.” He was a member of a very exclusive club of, as far as he knew, three members who could recall Providence. To everyone else, the place was Arkham and had always been Arkham, sitting upon the Miskatonic River close by where it emptied through a mess of islands and bays into the North Atlantic. The area had been ground zero for changes caused by the unfolding of the world; Lovecraft said that was because it had been the same when things were folded in the first place. Arkham was back, the physical geography of the coast had changed, and now there were new towns in the area he’d never heard of before but that had—still according to Lovecraft—always been there. Kingsport. Innsmouth. There was some tiny place on the turnpike to the west called Dunwich that nobody in the department had one good word for. The word they did use more often than not was “inbred.” They used that word a lot about Dunwich, and some about Innsmouth, too.
Harrelson didn’t like the word “inbred”; it reminded him of the Waite family in Providence, as was. He worked hard to forget all about the Waites if he could manage it at all. At least this dumb-ass version of the real world w
as helping him out with that. The little corner of Providence that had held the Waites—and everything they represented, like a diseased sac containing putrescent blood—had gone. The little lick of land sticking into a backwater of the Providence River called Waite’s Bill and containing the few houses of Waite Street, every one of them owned by a Waite, was now just an even smaller lick of land sticking into a backwater. It was fenced off, and a fading sign said something about an “exciting riverside development” that had never happened.
He’d kind of known it even before he’d driven down there to check, which was freaky, but everything was freaky these days. There were Nazis on the moon. An actual Nazi moon base. And a Nazi space station orbiting the Earth.
The first man in space had been a Nazi. The first man on the moon had been a Nazi. Nobody knew who the fuck Neil Armstrong was. That steamed Harrelson, who’d always admired Armstrong’s quiet heroism.
Living in the Unfolded World meant he couldn’t get drunk in company, because God only knew what might slip out. Yeah, the Cold War was all about the USSR. Remember when the Berlin Wall came down? That was crazy talk now. He’d got drunk by himself a couple of times, but he didn’t like where that was headed, so now he only drank with people who understood. All two of them, and he wasn’t sure if he liked them that much, either.
The details were vague, but he kind of had the idea this was Carter’s fault, though Lovecraft said things would be a bunch worse if it hadn’t been for him. How worse? Well, just as bad, really, in terms of the day-to-day. But there would be no hope to put things back as they were if Carter hadn’t done something they were real vague about, so that was something, wasn’t it?
It was obvious Lovecraft and Carter did not have the first fucking idea how to make everything go back as it was so, yeah, that was just peachy keen and grounds for bubbling optimism for sure.
It was all he had, though, and he’d take that pinch of hope and work to put things back how they should be. Neil Armstrong deserved it.
He put away his badge, looked at the computer screen on his desk at Arkham Central, read some of the crime reports, and sighed. Folded or not, the world contained some real assholes.
* * *
The following day, Emily Lovecraft was back in Providence. No … back in Arkham. It still took an effort to use the name even after the months they had spent living in this world, which was different in gross and subtle ways. It was still easy to be depressed and angry that the Nazis were still around and that nobody understood why this was a thing to be depressed and angry about. What was more insidious, however, was how politics and attitudes had slid over a few notches to accommodate this new world order.
For one thing, it was like twenty years of social progress had gone up in smoke. Antisemitism was reflexive and commonplace. The great shaming that the Holocaust had caused in the Folded World was not a thing here, the mirror of a prejudice taken to its logical conclusion; she routinely heard “kike,” “yid,” “heeb,” “hymie,” even “half-dick.” They were liars, they were cheats, they were rats in human form, they should get a ticket to Israel and take their stink with them.
Things hadn’t improved elsewhere, either. The “N” word had gone back to being plain old “nigger” again, and she heard it way too many times a day. What was weird about it was that it was so often said without obvious rancor or intention to hurt; standing in the aisles at the local store, she’d overheard a nice old lady she’d sold a book to the previous day recommend the bookshop to a friend, but she concluded the recommendation with “the nigger behind the counter really knows what she’s talking about.” Lovecraft had to walk out, sit down in the park, and breathe deeply for a while. The irony that this sort of shit had at least been widely understood to be offensive in the Folded World, the product of her own famously racist ancestor, was not lost on her, but that didn’t make matters any better.
The store itself was not so very different from its folded version, at least internally. Externally, it was of the same architectural style as the rest of the street: an American brand of collegiate Gothic mixed with the remnants of an older colonial Gothic that lent veracity to the cityscape as a whole. Arkham was a city that valued its history and there were any number of building regulations to maintain that past, to the extent where it had a distinct “Old Town” surrounded by an architecturally more anodyne “New Town.”
Carter & Lovecraft, the bookstore, was well inside Old Town, making it one of the few things about the new situation that pleased her. She had, she realized, always loved the description of Arkham in the stories of her great-great-uncle: the streets described as “ancient” in the 1920s, the gambrel roofs, the sense that somebody had torn up pieces of seventeenth-century Europe, glued them together in fanciful forms, and dumped the resulting gallimaufry onto an unsuspecting America.
It was like nothing she’d ever seen before—not fanciful or whimsical, but a functioning town that happened to look like it had escaped from the set Hammer movies had used to represent everywhere from Cornwall to Transylvania. Chains and franchises were strictly limited here by local ordinance; she had found a Starbucks wedged fearfully into a low-ceilinged building with minimal signage, as if it were afraid of being discovered. The whole of Old Town felt bohemian, not least because it looked kind of Bohemian in the geographical sense.
The store was on the northwestern corner of Church and Parsonage, a pleasant enough location on the southern side of the Miskatonic. There was a nice little park across the way, and it was close enough to the college precinct that she got a lot of student traffic. Her smile was still a little strained when she saw so many of them come in wearing Miskatonic University shirts, but she was beginning to get used to it.
“Get used to it.” The human capacity to accept the extraordinary and adjust to it had proved vital. She still had too many moments when she wanted to deny the reality around her, would give almost anything to only have to worry about Islamist extremism instead of, say, fucking Nazi Germany as, far and away, the greatest world power ever seen.
It was everywhere, not helped by the Nazis being, in the eyes of many Americans, okay guys who weren’t maybe so great on the democracy thing, but who were capitalists to the bone. Almost all of the largest corporations had their HQs in Berlin. Ford was now a subsidiary of Volkswagen. Smith & Wesson was a marque of Mauser. She knew Carter now regarded his Glock with disdain; the Anschluss of 1938 had never been revoked here and Austria and Germany were still conjoined. Carrying an Austrian weapon was therefore pretty much the same as carrying a German one, and that meant some of his money had gone to the German treasury as tax. He was looking into replacing it with a Colt, which was loudly and proudly still an American company. They only produced one decent pistol in his opinion, however: a modernized version of the M1911 .45 ACP, which seemed a little too much of a hand cannon for his taste. He hadn’t taken the jump yet, just grumbling about the Glock at random moments.
He kept his grumbling to a minimum; it was considered weird to see the Reich as malevolent. The USA and the Nazis had been the best of pals since the fifties, after all. Sure, the French had militarized their border to high hell, and the British still hadn’t forgiven Hitler for stripping them of their empire (as if it wasn’t falling to pieces anyway) and leaving them as a margin note in history, but that was their perspective. History, after all, belongs to winners, the smart money loves winners, and Wall Street loves what the smart money loves. It occurred to Lovecraft that if, in the Folded World, Stalin had attempted to dominate the West financially, it would have been far more effective than putting all that money into tanks and missiles.
At least running the store was still pretty much the same as it ever was. The Internet was still the Internet except for a few small changes in how it came to be and in the common sites everyone knew. It had been almost as big a surprise as learning that Hitler died in 1971 as it had been to boot up the store’s computer and discover that the standard, popular browser was Netscape. “Y
ou’re really not in Kansas anymore, girl,” she’d said to herself, looking at a high-definition letter-N icon behind which stars twinkled and swooped.
The phone rang. With the small sense of impending doom she suffered every time the Unfolded imposed upon her in any way, no matter how small, she answered it.
“Carter & Lovecraft Books, academic, secondhand, and antiquarian. Can I help you?”
“Ah, yes.” A man’s voice, unsure. Somebody who didn’t like using the phone. This was going to be hard work. She heard noise on the line as the handset at the other end was juggled, a piece of paper unfolded. “I’m…” More paper noises. “I’m looking for a book.”
A pause. Oh, good, thought Lovecraft. A customer who believes I’m telepathic. Those are the best.
Still, it was generally wise not to taunt the customer. Not at first, anyway.
“Which book would that be?”
“It’s … Just a moment, I’ve got it written down.” More crackling noises. When he’d taken as long to open a piece of paper as it would have taken her to make an origami swan from it while wearing mittens, he finally said, “It’s a German book. Do you stock German books?”
She shot a dirty glance at the political memoirs section, which had become even more expendable in her view thanks to the addition of several editions of Mein Kampf. “Yes, sir, we stock some German books, and we have good connections over there.” They did, as well. The store’s address book contained far more European contacts than it ever used to.
“Oh? Oh, that’s good. I don’t think it’s in print in the U.S. Maybe not even in Germany. It’s called Unaussprechlichen Kulten.” There was some mumbling as he subvocalized other pronunciations, reading from the paper. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s right. Did that sound right to you?”
After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft) Page 2
