After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  The British still loathed them. They’d been stripped of an empire in a humiliation that made the Versailles Treaty look like kid-gloves handling. They’d been marginalized, and left with a huge war debt that took generations to pay back. When the American media mentioned them at all, it was either pityingly or patronizingly, often both. The British were like savages living in the ruins of Atlantis. The French had barely done any better, but they had fallen to the Third Reich during the war, and the Germans had been magnanimous in victory. The British had held out, right up until the moment the future dawned in a brilliant mushroom cloud over Moscow.

  Carter could sympathize with them. The U.S.’s “business as usual” attitude when the rest of the world had fallen in the toilet depressed him, but there it was, and here he was, and he would just have to get used to the idea.

  The other reason he hated watching TV was that it was terrible. He’d left a world in which TV was in a new golden age, and arrived in one that was artistically mired in what would have been the late seventies or early eighties to him. It was beautifully shot most of the time, but it was a long way short of challenging. Every new cop series was about a mismatched pair, one wacky, one straitlaced. Every new sci-fi series seemed to involve a cyborg protagonist.

  He’d watched an episode from a top-rated spy series a few nights previously. There was a biological weapon placed in a crowded public place by a “Neo-Communist” group that couldn’t be evacuated because “it would cause panic.” The hero, who had no skill shortages in any area, managed to defuse it with one second on the clock. There was some “America! Fuck, yeah!” air-punching, the episode’s romantic interest implied that, yeah, she’d be very happy to blow the hero after or maybe during the credits, and then the show’s theme played with enough screaming guitar power chords to light New York for a week. It was shit, and it was at the top of the ratings.

  Existential reasons aside, Carter wanted to refold the world just so he could bear to watch TV again.

  The book Carter had brought with him was From Berlin with Love, one of a series of books by Ian Fleming that were never very popular outside the U.K.—the copy he was reading was an import—and that fizzled out after maybe six titles. From what he had read so far, it seemed pretty close to the movie he could still remember if he focused, except obviously the Russians had been replaced by Germans, and SMERSH by the Abwehr.

  He patrolled as he was supposed to, although he varied the exact time by about ten minutes before or after the hour. After all, an intruder might depend on evading him by hiding on the hour. A little variation might make all the difference. He did his eleven o’clock patrol at 10:51, his midnight patrol at 12:03. He’d just finished a chapter at 12:59, though, so he decided to tour then and there, at one o’ clock.

  On an impulse, he decided to reverse the direction of his previous two patrols, just to bring at least one unusual factor to it to catch out the unwary, hypothetical intruder. He’d start in the basement offices and work his way up.

  He descended the steps and walked through the open area, it looking very much as it had last he saw it less than an hour before. His impulse was to sink into routine and just wander around, shining his flashlight into any dark corners along the way and simply fulfilling his own idea of diligence. Yet, the impulse foundered as he entered the level. Perhaps it was simply that he wasn’t used to seeing it first on a patrol, but somehow, the place seemed out of kilter.

  It was a sensation that he would have been unable to describe if asked, yet that was all too familiar to him, a curious, quivering, inherently unwilling disbelief that he felt as much in his gut as in his mind. He hadn’t felt anything like it since the last time he had been on Waite’s Bill, as he and Lovecraft had run from the unfolding of the world and all the realities adjacent. He hadn’t missed it in the slightest. Yet here it was again, and there was no reason for it. He’d been through the offices several times already, twice already that evening, and not felt a thing except boredom. Yet now those self-same offices were redolent with a foreboding usually reserved for the abandoned mansion on the edge of town, or the stark Carpathian castle set upon a mountain slope. He saw a gel wrist support before a keyboard and it reeked of a dreadful alien quality, as if it were only a copy of the real thing. The whole room felt like a copy, a set of a real office. No, not even that; its artificiality was deeper still. It was like looking at a photograph of a not-quite-convincing office set, as if the set dressers had never seen one and were working from a brief written description.

  Carter was aware he was sweating. The sensation always, always boded ill. Any second now, weird shit would happen, or somebody would try to kill him, or somebody would try to kill him in a weird way, but something would happen. He moved so his back was to a wall, rested his hand on the butt of his pistol, and waited, mind and gut quivering, as the world rotated off its axis and slid ugly feelings through the room.

  Presently, it stopped, which was the most threatening thing it could possibly have done. It left Carter backed into a corner, pale and sweaty, standing in a gunslinger’s crouch, all ready to draw, but no one to plug, goldarnit. He felt stupid, and hoped he wasn’t on camera. As he straightened up, a man who wasn’t there developed into existence by the stairwell, and walked out.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” said Carter, and went after the ghost.

  He hadn’t hallucinated it, he felt reasonably sure. Then again, the essence of a good hallucination is that you buy into it. Making a mental note to check the security camera footage later, he climbed the steps to the first story and found himself alone. The door through to the steps leading up to the next floor wasn’t moving, but he felt it was, or at least should be. It had swung open a moment before, though he had not seen it, and swung shut, though he had not seen that either, and now it was still just slightly in motion, although it did not move at all. Without hesitation he followed the nonexistent man. It did not feel absurd to Carter; it would have been more so not to pursue.

  Up the stairs and onto the first laboratory level. There was the vacuum chamber—“God’s dildo,” he’d heard one of the American team members call it—and the detector, the sight of which he was already coming to hate. And there was the figure. It walked casually, unconcerned that it was being observed or even that it did not truly exist. It wandered here and there, and it seemed to Carter that there was something familiar about the way it walked. Not a distinctive gait so much as the degree of relaxation and purpose to the steps, the posture of the blurred man, an ink drawing on the fabric of reality that had been smudged into near incoherence.

  It occurred to Carter at about this point that he had pursued the specter for all the wrong reasons. Because he was angry with himself for standing there with his hand on his gun like Billy the Asshole. Because he had been unnerved by the experience of fugue that had descended upon him. Because he was nursing outrage that the Powers had decided to piss around with him again. These had occupied his mind when he made the decision to chase the figure when, really, running the other way may well have been a profitable option.

  Now here he was, with a blurred man wandering around the project’s scientific gear like an unenthusiastic visitor to a museum of arable farming, and he had not the first idea what to do, or whether he should be frightened or angry. He settled on nonjudgmental ambivalence—a suitable mode for the venue—and followed the figure around.

  As ghosts went, it did not seem very interested in making its haunt entertaining. It—no, he, Carter became convinced from the build and movement—gave every impression of being very at home in the laboratory, and with no great desire to detail the events of his grisly death or to provide cryptic clues to his murderer’s identity. As ghosts went, it seemed as bored with haunting as Carter was with patrolling.

  The thought stayed with him as he followed the entity up the stairs to the topmost level of the building. It hesitated on the top landing, seeming to notice something in the corner, but Carter could see nothing there. Losing int
erest in the unseen object, the ghost went through the doors onto the third story, pushing open a door that wasn’t there and leaving the one that was entirely motionless. Carter followed, less dismissive about interacting with matter.

  He found the ghost standing on the balcony overlooking the laboratory floor, looking up at the glass panels of the roof. Behind Carter, the door thudded heavily shut. For the first time, the ghost seemed to notice that it wasn’t alone. It looked at the door and then—as if seeing Carter for the first time—it looked him in the face.

  Carter’s stomach and heart and mind all lurched, and none of it was through fear. That would come later. The sensation of nothing being right, of things being out of joint, was with him again, but this time the feeling was in itself wrong. It wasn’t quite what he had experienced before, and the difference speared him and opened like a steel blossom in his chest.

  The lines of the ghost grew more discrete and defined with every second. He could see eyes there now, a nose, a mouth. Yet with every iota of definition it gained, he felt that he was being robbed of one. He was losing the ability to feel like a human, to feel human, to feel anything but himself as an expression of vectors and energies in space. He reached for his gun, an action born of instinct and soul-souring panic rather than any hope it might do any good. He wasn’t just dying; he was being unwritten, reduced to factors on existence’s flyleaf before inevitably being forgotten. He wasn’t just dying; he was being unlived. The ghost was sapping him away, and it didn’t even care. It was wearing his uniform, drawing his gun. It aimed right at his chest where silver-toothed nothingness was eating his soul, and the ghost demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

  Chapter 9

  THE NECESSARY TOOL

  But it didn’t demand it in his voice, or from his mouth, or from his face. It was solid now, in the form of a Miskatonic University guard. Carter couldn’t find anything to say, or any way of saying it even if he had. He himself was the ghost now, wet ink smeared under the thumb of an uncaring god with no name a sane man would ever want to utter. He was drawn thinner than thought across an expanse that separated worlds, and—when he could stand it no longer—he hoped for some shade of oblivion.

  He came around forty minutes later, alone on the top-level balcony with his leg folded under him and asleep. He limped downstairs, riven with pins and needles, falsified his “Patrol completed at” time, logged a bathroom break, went into a cubicle, and threw up.

  * * *

  The rest of the shift was uneventful. Carter didn’t even feel wary as he went out on the subsequent patrols; there was a muting in his sensibilities, and he didn’t much care if it was because the phenomenon he had endured had packed up its wagon for the night or whether whatever sensitivity he possessed to such things had been beaten into quiescence by the violence of the vision. He completed his work robotically, and tried not to think about anything much. He did reengage his mind, however, long enough to find the closed-circuit file for the camera in question, copy it to a thumb drive, and then replace it with an earlier example. There wasn’t a great deal to see; he was spared both the sight of the ghost and the potential embarrassment of watching himself mime existential terror in response to a manifestation invisible to the camera. Instead, the video showed some sort of interference, but nothing he was familiar with. It wasn’t snow or lines, and he didn’t care to watch it for too long in case it resolved into a scene of a Japanese woman crawling out of a well.

  It was while he was pulling up the earlier files with matching time stamps that he noticed something odd. The system automatically date-stamped the files, which was a security oversight of which he took full advantage, simply using the deleted file’s name to overwrite its replacement. There was the small matter of the file’s creation metadata, but—by the simple expedient of unplugging the router and then manually setting the time to what he needed before creating the fake—he was able to fool the system and made himself feel like some sort of hacker to boot.

  He wasn’t so busy congratulating himself that he didn’t notice a file in the same time slot from a previous week showing a red exclamation mark, though. He tried to run it out of little more than curiosity, but the player glitched and put up a message saying the file was “damaged.”

  In the fraction of a second the file ran before failing, the corrupted image looked very similar to the one from his one o’clock patrol that night. He copied it onto the thumb drive, too.

  When he was relieved at six o’clock, his relief asked if anything had happened during his shift. Carter said, “No.”

  * * *

  When Carter got back to the bookstore, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while. Instead, he lay on the bed in his underwear—the unlovely and unloved security uniform draped over a chair back—and looked at the ceiling until he heard Lovecraft unlock the front door and come in. He dressed in his own clothes and went down to see her.

  He found her with her head under the counter, sorting out her stationery. “Hi,” she said without looking up. “How was work?”

  Carter considered. “It was okay, I guess. I saw a ghost, was nearly erased from reality, and threw up afterward. Same old, same old.”

  “Yeah, well”—Lovecraft finally got the office supplies organized to her satisfaction and straightened up—“that’s blue collar jobs for you.” She looked at him properly for the first time that morning, and his expression made her brow lower. “You’re not shitting me, are you? You saw a ghost?”

  “The Haunted Palace of Science turns out to be haunted, maybe. Or I’m crazy, maybe.”

  Lovecraft waved a finger at him. “No. No, no, no. We are not at home to Mr. Self-Doubt. We start doing that, and we unravel. You saw a ghost? Then, unless it turns out to be Old Man Jenkins the Janitor in a rubber mask, you saw a ghost.”

  Carter nodded. “Thanks. I did need that.”

  A knock at the door distracted them. “Hold that thought,” said Lovecraft, and went to answer it. Presently she returned with several packages. “Say what you like about the Unfolded World, but couriers turn up damn early. I like that.” She put them on the counter and went back behind it to begin sorting through them. “Tell me about your ghost.”

  She worked as he told her, but he was never in any doubt she was giving him the bulk of her attention. She asked about his routine, what he remembered about the briefly seen true face of the phantom, and about how he’d doctored the video files.

  “You were expecting to see yourself?”

  Carter nodded. “It was like I wasn’t there after a while. Like it started off as a copy of me, but I ended up as a copy of it. Does that make sense?”

  She looked at him long enough to turn down her mouth and shake her head at him. She returned to the packages. “Nope. You’re the delicate and sensitive ex-homicide cop. I’m the two-fisted thug of a bookseller. I don’t feel nuthin’.” She laughed under her breath and Carter smiled, too. “Seriously, you’re the descendant of Randolph Carter. I’m just the descendant of the schmuck who wrote about it. I can’t imagine how it feels when the weird hits. Kind of envious. Kind of relieved.” She tore open the end of a short package fashioned from packing tube. “And what do we have here?” She pulled out the contents, unwrapped a cocoon of green bubble wrap, and produced a very sharp-looking screwdriver. “Excalibur, my liege.”

  “Thanks.”

  Carter reached for it, but Lovecraft held it away from him. “This thing cost me twenty-five bucks, including the overnight. No money, no … man, this thing looks even weirder in the flesh than it did on the website.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Importer. This is a genuine piece of Reich technology. Ahh…” She dropped it on the counter. As it rolled to a halt, Carter saw a symbol embossed into a pommel-like stud behind the grip.

  “You made me handle a swastika, Dan.”

  “Come on, Emily. How was I supposed to know that was there?” He reached for the screwdriver, but she picked it up first.
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  “Then again, you made a swastika get handled by me.” She adopted a bad German accent in a high piping voice, dancing the screwdriver in her hand like a puppet. “Ach nein! Eine schwarze Frau!”

  Carter held out his hand. “Please can I have the screwdriver?”

  Holding the screwdriver by the blade, she rested the handle on her shoulder and held out her other hand. “Sure, but it’ll cost you twenty-five wholesome American dollars, you dirty collaborator.”

  * * *

  Across the street from Carter & Lovecraft Books was a coffee shop. It had been there for several years, certainly long enough to remember when the bookstore was called Hill’s Books. Under that name, however, the bookstore predated the coffee shop, and so they had settled into an easy symbiosis of things to read while drinking coffee, or something to drink while reading.

  The name of the coffee shop was Poppy’s. There had been an actual Poppy some time before, but she had died, and the new owners were not egotistical enough to change the name of the beloved venue simply because it had changed hands, nor so cruel as to obliterate the name of the shop’s equally beloved former owner, nor so stupid as to antagonize regulars by doing so. The spirit of Poppy lived on in the place in a far more benevolent mode than the haunting Carter had endured the night before.

  The coffee shop was moderately to very busy throughout the day, certainly when Miskatonic U was in session, but the waitress still managed to maintain a good grasp of who was in and where they were. Currently on the edge of her radar was the birdlike man at the two-seater table in the window. He was on his fourth cup of tea now, and he drank them like an automaton, looking out of the window roughly in the direction of the bookstore across the street the whole while. He was polite but unengaging when she brought fresh cups over, and declined any food to go with the drink.