After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  They had been given a hiatus from the more hard-boiled end of “it” until now, their lives being filled for weeks and months with the encroaching and constant background radiation of “it” that living in the Unfolded World gave them. Every day brought a deluge of “it,” and the best strategy was just to let “it” slide by. Nobody in the Unfolded World said, “Lock and load,” for example, because the phrase was supposed to be “Load and lock,” but John Wayne fucked the line up in Sands of Iwo Jima and it had become part of the vocabulary of the Folded World.

  Here, however, the Duke never got a chance to transpose the words, because the movie was never made, because the battle for Iwo Jima had never taken place, because the USA never entered the Second World War, because the Germans talked the Japanese out of Pearl Harbor and redirected their attention to mainland Asia, and the Japanese listened because “the fucking Germans fucking vaporized fucking Moscow” (this being Lovecraft’s exact phrase to Carter on discovering the schism), and if the Japanese hadn’t had a proverb about respecting the wishes of a country that can vaporize cities before Moscow sucked on twenty kilotons of atomic airburst, they sure did afterward.

  “It” also covered the misty details of a world that was not simply a historical counterfactual brought into actual, vibrant existence, but something that was skewed from what Carter and Lovecraft had known in many small ways. The most obvious was that Arkham and its near neighbors existed at all, but there were a vast multitude of other things that plainly predated the folding of the world in the 1920s. Things like whispers of lost cities, and peculiar episodes in the lives of the great, the good, and the not so good.

  And then there were the unusual books.

  Lovecraft was pointing at a book lying open on the counter beside an open storage box.

  “That,” she said, and she didn’t use anything like the tone she often adopted when talking about books, “that was not on the counter last night.”

  Carter tried to remember whether it had been there when he went to work that morning, but he had been in a hurry and had barely glanced around the store before leaving and locking up. The book looked familiar.

  “Isn’t that the … uh, Necro … What was it called? Necronom—”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly what it is. I dreamt I took it out of the safe last night. I dreamt I opened it when I really, really didn’t want to.”

  Carter nodded at the book open on the counter. “Just like that?”

  “I opened the book, took it out of the box. I couldn’t help myself. Then I woke up all sweaty and shit.” She realized how that sounded. “Sweaty. Just sweaty.”

  Carter began to walk toward the counter.

  “What are you doing?” said Lovecraft.

  “Seeing where you opened it. It might be important.”

  “It might be dangerous.”

  “It’s just a book.” He allowed a slight dismissive tone into his voice and regretted it immediately.

  Lovecraft grabbed his arm, pulled him around, and glared in his face almost nose to nose. “It is not just a book. There is nothing just a book about that thing. It’s a metaphysical virus. It’s a mind killer. It’s the fucking apocalypse with page numbers. It is not”—she placed the flat of her palm against Carter’s chest and pushed him hard enough to make him step back—“light reading.”

  “It still might be important. You’re right; it’s happening again.” Lovecraft frowned again, but this time with curiosity, and Carter quickly added, “This job I’m doing. It’s beginning to feel a lot like somebody is pulling strings. If Henry Weston offering it to me in the first place wasn’t enough, it turns out that the only reason I’m able to do it at all is because the guy before me had some sort of breakdown.”

  “The previous security guard?”

  “The night after I turned the job down precisely because I couldn’t get in there unseen. Now I can.”

  “You think that Nazi—?”

  Carter shook his head. “Just because the man’s got Party membership, it only makes him a Nazi by name. I don’t think he’s a bad guy.”

  “A nice Nazi.”

  “Yeah, a nice Nazi. Look, Emily, this is this world, not ours. You’re going to have to get past the whole Nazis being elemental-evil thing.”

  She looked at him as if he were simpleminded. “Nuh-uh. We know. We know what they would have done in a New York second if things had just been a little different.”

  “But … they didn’t do them. They nuked Stalin instead and became heroes of the Western world. They gave back almost everything they’d conquered in Europe. In this world, the Swastika is a symbol for … I don’t know. Civilization.”

  “Fuck that.” Lovecraft said it sullenly and Carter knew then that she would never change her mind. If he was honest with himself, he wasn’t sure he could, either. He was trying to be pragmatic about their situation, but he just succeeded in making himself feel like a hypocrite.

  Lovecraft went to the counter, opened a drawer, and took out a pair of white cotton gloves and a slip of brownish, unbleached paper. She put the slip into the Necronomicon as a bookmark while making every effort not to look at what was on the page, then closed it, using one of the gloves as a buffer between her skin and the cover. Still using the gloves without bothering to put them on, like somebody using cloths to protect herself while handling a piece of hot metal, she picked it up, put it back in its box and shut it with a distinct sigh of relief.

  She looked over the box at Carter. “Speaking of just what a solid the Nazis did for the heartlands of capitalism, doesn’t that whole thing bother you?”

  “So the Germans developed the atom bomb before we did. Nobody’s ever called them scientifically backward. What are you saying?”

  “Historically … in our history … they didn’t get within spitting distance of a workable bomb. A lot of the best guys for the job were Jewish, and they’d run off. A lot of them ended up on the Manhattan Project. So, they didn’t have all the best minds they could have, plus they didn’t have easy access to uranium, plus pretty early on the British working with the Norwegian resistance blew the Germans’ only supply of heavy water to shit. Even if that last thing didn’t happen here, the other two are still plenty problematical. Yet somehow they got a nuke that worked to specification the very first time.”

  “They didn’t test?”

  “I’ve been reading up on that. The official line is a smaller version that was detonated in a mine someplace in Austria. It worked perfectly, so they upscaled and sneakily got it into Soviet airspace, right over Red Square. Blew up a bunch of their guys, including their senior ambassador to the Kremlin, but, y’know, acceptable losses and shit.” She put the storage box back in the safe, locked it away, and came back to lean on the counter. “Some really interesting conspiracy chat about all that. Seems that Moscow is a ghost city to this day. When the Reich rolled into Russia and conquered as much of it as they could eat, they walled off Moscow because of ‘contamination.’ The wall’s still up. Nobody’s allowed inside. Now, if it’s a relatively low-powered atom bomb compared to what came later, why is there still contamination? That didn’t happen with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Folded World. Uranium ain’t like plutonium; contamination goes pretty quickly ’cos the half-life is that much shorter. So, tell me, what’s going on inside that wall?”

  “That’s rhetorical, right?”

  “No, Dan. I thought you could ask your nice Nazi. Yeah, it’s rhetorical.” She sat on the stool behind the counter and propped her chin up with her hands. “You think you’re being manipulated?”

  “Again.” He gestured at the safe. “Maybe both of us.”

  “For what reason?”

  “How would I know? I thought H.P.L.’s weird gods’ schemes were beyond the understanding of mere humans.”

  “Maybe on a grand scale, but we’re only seeing what’s going on close to the metal. Down here with the bugs and the germs, we can see aims maybe, even if we don’t see the big picture
.” She seemed distant for a moment, remembering something that was not pleasant to recall. “Charity Waite…”

  The name hung in the air like a draft of nerve gas. Carter unconsciously stepped back.

  Happy not to have to say the name again, Lovecraft continued, “She said something the last time I saw her. When she went. When she left. She said, ‘We have common interest with so many.’ She said everything that happened with Colt wasn’t to do with her, at least not to start with. There are factions, Dan. Now they’ve got their sandbox back, fuck only knows what games they’re playing in it.”

  Chapter 8

  THE HAUNTED PALACE OF SCIENCE

  Carter made his apologies, but he really needed to get some sleep if he was going to be in any kind of shape to take on another eight-hour shift starting at ten that evening.

  “Can you do me a favor?” He fished out his phone. “I’m sending you some pictures I took today of some weird screws and an impression I made of the kind of head a screwdriver would need to have to remove them. Could you find a supplier, please?”

  Lovecraft was just finishing making a notice that read, Closed for inventory. Please knock for attention. She went to put it on the door and pulled the blinds.

  “Right. So if your exciting adventure in scientific espionage goes to shit and I get cops in here, or—better yet—the Feds, they can find that I helped you from my search history. Sound plan, Dan.”

  “Don’t worry. They’ll be too busy laughing at your tentacle hentai porn to find it.”

  He’d said it as a joke, but he saw her eyes slightly widen.

  “Oh, my God. Emily…” He couldn’t help laughing.

  “Once,” she said, mortified. “Once. Just out of interest. And that was in the Folded World, anyway.”

  “Yeah. You’d never have a sly look at squid porn in any other version of the universe, right?”

  She thought about that and her face fell. “Shit.”

  “If you find anywhere that sells a screwdriver that fits those heads, order one with express delivery, okay? I’ll pay you back.” He went to go up to the apartment.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he heard her mutter behind him. “Can’t talk now. Searching my browser history.” As the door closed behind him, he heard her whistle low and mutter to herself, “Why, you dirty girl.”

  * * *

  The test chamber was in the process of being worked toward the most perfect vacuum attainable to terrestrial science. This was substantially more perfect than such poor vacuums as, say, outer space, around which peripatetic atoms and micrograins of complex matter might be found floating around, making the spaces between the stars grubby, and unsuitable for serious science.

  While the chamber once again reached such a state, there was little to do in the lab except check and recheck figures, run the sensors through software tests, catch up on general paperwork, and—for everyone else—goof off in scientifically stringent ways. The American and the German teams were polite enough to each other, but they spent little time fraternizing. Part of this was the language barrier—not all the Germans spoke good conversational English, and just about none of the Americans spoke German—and partly the slightly disquieting sense the Americans had that the project was a done deal and they, the Americans, were only being permitted involvement to provide a patina of international collaboration. Results so far had been so good, without false starts or ambiguities, that although no one said as much there was a feeling of stage management, as if they were spear carriers in a play whose script they were not permitted to see.

  It didn’t make for a good working atmosphere, which wasn’t helped by the visits every American scientist had received at home from FBI agents telling them not to become too familiar with their counterparts as it was a working certainty that one or more of them were Abwehr agents. The German intelligence service—just as with most other intelligence services—was not above setting honey traps to ensnare the unwary. Thanks to the FBI intervention, the American contingent was now all too aware, and treated their counterparts as if they were potentially radioactive.

  Only those that needed to be near the chamber during pumping out were. The vacuum was maintained as much as possible, but the limits of engineering meant it had to be scoured for rogue molecules now and then, and the pumps that held the chamber in its near-pristine state were not quiet. The dull thudding of the early evacuation was long past, but the rapid beats of the finer-grade pump was too close to that of a penetrating headache to be tolerated by most for long.

  Dr. Lukas was checking the almost-but-not-quite implausibly good figures for the last run when he felt a presence by his shoulder. He looked up.

  “Still going though those, Torsten?” asked the woman standing over him.

  Lukas fought down the urge to behave like a guilty schoolboy and hide what he was doing. Instead, he said, “Just being diligent, Lurline.”

  “You’re an example to us all.” Her tone was lightly mocking. He was used to that.

  “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “No, no. Just killing time until we’re ready for the sixth series. If the second half of the program returns results as convincing as the first, I think we may be well on our way to Nobel Prizes, don’t you?”

  Lukas couldn’t make himself get excited about such a prospect. A small nagging voice told him the experiment would be discredited well before then. “Perhaps. We need to do much more than we’re doing here to create convincing results.”

  “Of course.” She perched on the side of the desk. “But we are doing good science here. Soon we shall be ready to use a larger apparatus. Perhaps even draw a useful amount of energy.”

  “That is presuming much.”

  She stood up, and laughed once. “I am an incurable optimist, and optimism is how things get done.” She looked up at the rig for several seconds before adding, “There’s a new man on security.”

  The change of direction caught Lukas by surprise, and he found himself saying, “Is there? I can’t say I’d noticed.”

  “Hmmmm.” She looked off in the general direction of the security desk, as if she could see the new man there. “You don’t think he’s a plant, do you?”

  Lukas wheeled his chair back to look at her over his glasses. “A what?”

  “You know,” she continued, entirely unabashed by his tone. “An agent.”

  “A spy?” He kept his tone neutral. “For who? Another university, here to steal our results?”

  She snorted. “No, for the American government. OSS or FBI or something like that. You know they don’t trust us. They’re sure we’re all Abwehr or Gestapo.” She smiled, looked off once again at the chamber, and added as an afterthought, “Instead of just some.”

  * * *

  Lovecraft had gone by the time Carter came down to go to work. There was a note on the counter saying, “No joy finding your weird screwdriver. This is what you get for ordering hardware through a bookstore, idiot. Will try again tomorrow. Enjoy patrolling the Haunted Palace of SCIENCE. E xo”

  He smiled and pocketed the note. Then he’d decided it might take some explaining if he dropped it in the lab so he balled it up and dropped it in the trash instead.

  He arrived at the Miskatonic campus with ten minutes to spare and entered the building at five to ten. The cleaning crew were just putting away their gear as he entered and was hailed by Pete Jenner, the guard who’d relieved him what seemed like only a few minutes before.

  “Wow, déjà vu,” said Jenner, signing himself out, and—Carter noticed—marking the time as ten on the nose. “Wouldn’t surprise me if you’re actually a different guy than I saw earlier, and they’re replacing us all with clones. I’d believe anything in this place.”

  “Nah,” said Carter, signing himself in and sticking to the fiction it was a few minutes later than it actually was when he entered the time. “That’s policy over at Genetics. Here, they’re pulling in multiple copies of me from different dimensions, but only paying us
once.” That was almost the truth, when he came to think about it.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.” Jenner pulled a coat over his jacket and tossed his cap into a plastic carrier bag. “Regents of this place are fuckin’ chiselers.”

  Carter was looking at the duty log. Jenner had reported leaving the desk between normal patrol times, and it wasn’t marked as a bio break, “bio” being the notation the guards used to indicate going to the restroom. “What was this?”

  Jenner looked at the notation Carter had his finger rested upon and shook his head, dismissive and perhaps a little embarrassed. “Something or nothing. Thought I heard somebody in the lab, so I went to check it out. Wandered around for ten minutes, but there wasn’t even a mouse.” He grinned. “Mice are smarter than to hang around scientists, am I right?” He picked up his bag. “Just asking for trouble. Anything else?”

  “No, I’m good. Take care, Pete. Sleep well.”

  “Thanks, man.” Jenner hesitated by the door. “You should have a drink with me and Kev Ward and the Sarge sometime when we can get some schmuck to fill in for a shift.”

  Carter nodded. “Sounds good.” And it did.

  Jenner waved, closed the door, made sure the lock had engaged, and walked out into the night.

  Carter was finally alone. Nothing would have pleased him more than to give it a couple of hours, then—when he was supposed to be touring the facility—take the back off the detector and take the pictures Lukas was so desperate for. But, he’d tried to order a screwdriver from a bookstore and look how that had turned out. Idiot. He smiled, and settled down to read a book he’d brought with him from the store.

  He’d noticed he was reading a lot more since he’d ended up as joint owner of a bookstore. He had always been an occasional but steady reader before—maybe four or five or six books a year, which made him a dangerous intellectual if you listened to some of his old NYPD buddies—but now he didn’t like watching TV so much. Part of that was the news was full of people he’d either never heard of or whose roles in the Folded World had been different. It was strange being in a world where JFK had died of undiagnosed prostate cancer in 1978; maybe Lee Harvey Oswald really had been a Soviet assassin the whole time. It was strange that no one had ever taken a shot at John Lennon and he was still around, but that Ringo Starr died in a car crash in 1983. It was strange that the Nazis were regarded as worthy and respected rivals to the U.S., and not stinking turds of evil.