After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Carter did so, being absolutely honest in as many details as he could, although that resolution suffered a bad start when he had to lie about why he’d arrived at work early. After that, however, he was able to stick rigidly to the truth, at least about the events of that evening.

  Harrelson stopped at a couple of points, signaling it was off the record by clicking the point of his pen in. “This guy Koznick, what do you know about him?”

  Carter knew next to nothing, only that it had been Koznick’s resignation on health grounds that had opened a job for Carter to take. Harrelson nodded, clicked the pen point out again. “Seems kind of a coincidence, though, wouldn’t you say? You should check him out in a few days, after the heat from tonight’s had a chance to die down a little. Find out if that sick leave story’s true or if he was pushed, y’know?”

  “Why should I care? Client’s dead. I’m out and clear.”

  Harrelson gave a short, derisive bark of a laugh. “Yeah, you wish, like it’s your choice.” He tilted his head and gave Carter an appraising look. “Let me just run something by you, and then you can tell me again how easy it’s going to be to walk away from this cluster fuck.” He squared to Carter as if they were about to start a staring contest. “Does the name Henry Weston mean anything to you?”

  Carter’s face told him everything he needed to know. Again the short derisive laugh. “Yeah,” said Harrelson, “you wish you were out and clear.”

  * * *

  The sun was long up by the time he got back to the bookstore. He had a change of clothing in his locker, which was lucky, as CSU wanted the ones he was standing up in. That was fine by him; he’d almost got used to the smell of blood, but when the fresh air mixed with it, it was as if his nose had become resensitized, and reminded him that there was nothing to love about that scent.

  He’d had to hand in his weapon, but as it wasn’t really his, this he was also cool with. He wasn’t worried about any legal comeback on the shooting. It had been a “good shoot,” fired to prevent a likely further homicide or multiple homicides by a man who had already killed once that night. Carter had taken the shot in front of, and to protect, four American citizens of impeccable character and three Germans who were probably okay, too. None of the witnesses had anything to say about Carter that wasn’t flattering. How he’d tried to talk Jenner/Janowski down, how he’d avoided violence as long as he could even at risk to his own life, had only fired when it looked likely Jenner/Janowski was about to shoot somebody else, and how he’d shown control in firing only once, putting the gunman down with a single bullet.

  This last point bothered Carter. He’d always been trained to fire twice in a situation like that. He said he had no idea why he’d only fired once. That was a lie; he guessed it was because he liked Pete Jenner, and had no desire to reset the trigger of his own Walther a tenth of an inch, then put a second round in the guy.

  He was surprised to find the store locked up, and the note he’d left Lovecraft about a display case she wanted for some of the store’s more expensive (but not the most expensive) books was still lying in the middle of the counter where he’d left it. Maybe she was sick. He checked his phone, but there were no messages, or any from her on the landline’s answering machine. It wasn’t like her, but at the same time he was so tired it was hard to care. Tired and sick at heart; he’d killed once during his police career and—although he’d weathered it better than some—it still gnawed at his conscience sometimes. That was for somebody he only knew by rep, all bad. Pete Jenner was somebody he knew, had chatted with, joked with. Even as his head was hitting the pillow, Carter knew he was going to need some closure on this. He’d look into Koznick’s breakdown and find out the truth of it, a favor to a dead man.

  * * *

  She’d started with drawing curves and arcs on paper, using her old high school compass and a French curve, both of which were stored in a “drawer of things that might one day be useful.” It was nice to see the line, graphite gray on white, and what it meant became a little more solid in her mind. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. Emily Lovecraft went back to her “drawer of things that might one day be useful” to look for more art supplies.

  She’d found string and thumbtacks. This was more like it. It was a large ball of white string she’d bought for something—a parcel, maybe? she couldn’t remember—and only used a few inches. There looked to be a lot left. Good. She’d be needing it.

  She reconstructed the curve she’d drawn by stretching string between floor, walls, and ceiling (she’d considered using the space under the table, but there were no walls there, and not enough room). Each length formed a tangent and, as the lines proliferated, the curve emerged from their intersections. Unlike the curve on the paper, however, this one warped in the third dimension. It still wasn’t perfect, but it was getting there.

  She’d started with a large tub of thumbtacks, but they gave out before the ball of string, and she went out to the store to buy more. It was only then that she realized it was just past dawn. She had been working on it for the better part of twelve hours. Part of her said she should rest and, anyway, wasn’t this all getting a little psychotic? The rest of her said, no. It was the most glorious thing in the world. For the first time in her life, she truly felt as if she was communicating with something greater than herself, seeing a truth that was larger than any truth she had ever known or even imagined could be. She had always liked to think she was a spiritual creature at heart, but she was beginning to see how infantile a belief that was. She was seeing things now as if she’d been blind her whole life and the book had finally given her the gift of 20/20 vision. Well, not quite. There were still aspects that were occluded, but if she worked toward them, she was sure she’d be able to see clearly. It amused her that “occluded” and “occult” had such similar meanings and yet the Latin roots from which they were derived were subtly different. The former was from occludere, meaning to shut off, and the latter from the frequentative of occlure, to conceal. She’d checked in the dictionary, just to be sure.

  She looked a little too bright-eyed and intense to the man at the counter of the twenty-four-hour convenience store when she dumped six boxes of thumbtacks and four balls of colored string and three of white—the store’s entire stock of these items—in front of him along with a pack of energy bars and a six-pack of caffeine drinks. He decided she was probably wired on something, and just wanted her to get out of the store quickly. Then again, it was Arkham, and Arkham had a reputation for eccentricity among its citizens.

  “It’s for an art project,” she said, unsure why she was lying, or even if it was entirely a lie. She scratched her head fiercely as she said it.

  “I didn’t ask,” said the man, pushing her change across the counter to her.

  “That’s bad customer relations,” she told him as she walked for the door. “Really bad. You should take, like, a polite interest. I won’t be coming here again.”

  Four hours later she was back again to buy more energy bars and caffeine drinks, and to ask if they’d restocked thumbtacks and string yet.

  * * *

  Carter had been told not to report to duty until the police investigation was settled, but he was assured he would be maintained on payroll until that time. It took him a moment to realize they were giving him a paid holiday, at which point he gracefully accepted. Even if he resigned the minute they asked him back to work, he’d have made up the money Lukas owed him. Mercenary, he knew, but he had bills to pay. In any case, he thought maybe if he could work up the ladder a little or took limited shifts, the job might provide a bulwark against insolvency while he tried to get more PI work.

  He’d been asked to come to the precinct to go through his statement once again—Harrelson would be doing that and had assured him that it really was just routine—but that wasn’t until the late afternoon. He’d woken at a little after 1:00 p.m., and discovered that the store still wasn’t open, nor were there any messages from Lovecraft.
He showered, dressed, and went out.

  He had never visited Lovecraft’s apartment in the Folded World, but in the Unfolded about the only positive was she’d found herself living in a small house, a cottage to all intents. Here, she’d shown him around shortly afterward, but the change was still taking up most of their attentions, and little about the visit had stuck in his mind. He hadn’t been around since.

  It looked quiet enough when he arrived. It was the kind of “olde worlde” place that typified Arkham, and appeared on every postcard ever sold in the city. Gambrel roof with gable end carvings, finials, and a wrought iron cresting, with a useful attic bearing its own large and ornamented dormer at the front. It was a fine little house, and more than once while in a positive mood Lovecraft had said that, if and when they refolded the world, they must find a way to bring the place through with them. In fact, they could bring the whole of Arkham through with her blessing; she much preferred it to Providence.

  The curtains, Carter noticed, were still drawn. Given what a habitual early riser Lovecraft was, that worried him. Maybe she was ill. Maybe she’d had an accident. He pushed the doorbell and heard the sonorous clang of the sixties-style tubular bells arrangement she’d pointed out to him. Apparently it had come with the house, and she found it too incredibly kitschy to take out. Besides, she liked the low mellow tones it produced, “like an old Avon ad.” Now he could hear those tones reverberate around the house for long seconds until they slowly died. There was no reply.

  He stepped back in time to see the bedroom curtain on the second floor twitch. He walked straight back to the door and pounded on it. He’d hardly started when the door swung open, and there was Lovecraft. She looked a little disheveled, but she seemed very happy about something. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him inside.

  “Dan! I was about to call you! You have to see this!” She scurried up the stairs so quickly she dropped a hand to a riser to prevent herself from stumbling.

  Carter watched her go with incredulity. “Aren’t those the clothes you were wearing yesterday?” But she’d already gone.

  He followed her up to the rear room that she used as a study. On his previous visit, it had been set up with a desk with a PC, a large table against one wall, and bookshelf units. Now he passed stacks of books left out on the upper hallway and, on entering the room, found all the bookshelves empty and pushed up against one another in front of the window.

  How she had reorganized the room was not the center of his attention, however. Running across the center of the room like a web built by a giant and deranged spider was a mesh of strings, mostly white but with some colored threads running through it, centering in a spindle of reds, blues, and greens running slantwise from ceiling to floor.

  Lovecraft looked at him as if seeking approval. “You see it? You can see it, right?” Her eyes were bright. Carter saw discarded caffeine drink cans lying on the floor and thought of how uptight she got about any litter in the store. “You can see it?”

  Yes, he could see it. Lovecraft had built a three-dimensional model of the Fold.

  Chapter 16

  … BEARS BITTER FRUIT

  Lovecraft kept saying, “No.”

  She said it to whatever Carter said, and what Carter was saying was things like, “You need to step away from this and rest,” “We should go downstairs,” “I think you’ve had enough caffeine for today. And tomorrow. Jesus, Emily, how much of that robot piss did you drink?”

  When he finally got her sitting at the kitchen table, he gave her a glass of milk, sat down opposite her, and said, “What the living fuck were you thinking?”

  She smiled at the gratuitous swearing, which he found heartening. “We have to start fighting back, Dan. We’re the only ones who know what happened, so we’re the only ones who can put things back the way they were. To do that, we’ve got to take chances. We’ve got to arm ourselves.”

  As she said “arm” she leaned forward and glared at him.

  Carter thought long about what to say next. He settled on, “Maybe there’s some other way—”

  “Guns? You think we can defeat the Old Ones with firepower? Heh.” She leaned back again. “Nope. The only tiny bit of this playing field that is even close to level is the Fold and what goes with it. We have to figure out how it works, and lever it back on those sons of bitches before they realize we’re still a threat, if they ever thought that, which maybe they didn’t.”

  “You want to mess with this stuff after what it did to William Colt?”

  She half-laughed again at the mention of their erstwhile nemesis, now spread thinner than thought in the dank corners between dimensions. “Him? C’mon, Dan, he was an asshole from the moment he was born. The Fold didn’t do that to him, it just gave him an outlet to grandstand his assholery from. H.P.L. and Randolph handled it and didn’t go crazy.” She thought about it. “Actually, it’s a hard call with H.P.L. That whole ‘fear of the other’ thing did kind of eat him up.”

  Carter pushed the milk glass to her and looked significantly at her until she picked it up and drank from it, all the while making “Fuck you, you ain’t my mother” eyes at him over the glass’s upper rim.

  As she drank he said, “How did you even manage to reconstruct that thing? We don’t have the cube here.”

  She put the glass down. She had a white moustache of milk on her upper lip. She really wasn’t herself, Carter realized. She closed her eyes as if to brace herself to say something unpleasant and shocking, and then said precisely that. “The Necronomicon. I read the Necronomicon.” She shrugged. “Well, some of it, anyways. There’s a lot of stuff in there. Language is kind of Shakespearian vocabulary-wise, but not in iambic pentameters, thank fuck.”

  Carter didn’t trust himself to reply for a moment. When he did, he only said, “Emily.”

  “I know. I know. I’ve been the one talking about it like it’s a sanity sink, and full of things-man-was-not-meant-to-know, but I thought, hell, I’m not a man, so what the fuck.” She looked up at him. “Have I got a milk moustache?”

  Carter nodded. She wiped it off with the back of her hand. “Let me show you something.” She picked up a memo pad and pen from the counter, and started to draw. First she drew an odd humpbacked curved line. “Recognize this?” Carter shook his head. “You wouldn’t, because it’s this”—she sketched in a few lines over one another that suggested a skein of wool, twisted—“from the side.” She looked him in the eye. “A Nobel Prize can only be given to a team of three at most, and never posthumously. That’s why you’ve never heard of Rosalind Franklin.”

  The change of tack caught Carter off guard. “Who?”

  “Watson and Crick, the DNA guys on both sides of the Fold. They won the Nobel Prize back in 1962. Third name on the ticket was a guy called Wilkins, a crystallographer. But, they’d never have managed to work out the structure of DNA without Franklin. She was brilliant, and had pretty much worked out DNA’s structure by photographing X-ray scatter. Don’t ask me how. That stuff’s kind of like magic itself. Cancer took her in ’58, though. So, no embarrassing woman to make things complicated for the boys by pointing out they took her work without permission.”

  “Okay,” said Carter. “And this is relevant, because…”

  “Structure. She looked at a zillion points of data, and Rosalind Franklin said, ‘Well, lookit, a double helix.’” Lovecraft shook her head. “She was English. She probably wouldn’t have said ‘lookit.’ But William Colt looked at the Silver Key and he said, ‘Twist,’ and it wasn’t, and now he’s dead, and we’re fucked, and it’s all because he didn’t have a sense of perspective. That guy Suydam had a better idea.”

  “Suydam was a child killer.”

  “Doesn’t mean he was stupid. He let himself get killed. That shows how smart he was. I think he saw right at the end what he was really dealing with and that he didn’t dare make anything of it for fear of letting…” Her vocabulary let her down, or maybe she didn’t want to name names. Whatever the case
, she contented herself by just rolling her eyes upward and wriggling her fingers at the ceiling, “… who knows what back into the world. He saw we were all living in a puppet theater. This”—she gestured around and then slapped both hands on the table—“is the reality. Well, I preferred the puppet theater.”

  “Only half of what you’re saying makes sense.”

  “That’ll be because you’re only understanding half of it. The Necronomicon is a gold mine. Nasty, dirty gold that corrupts. So, not so different from gold gold. I know it’s dangerous, Dan. Believe me, I wouldn’t have cracked it open if I thought we had a choice. I’ve got two anchors to keep me sane. First is a Carter and a Lovecraft have already done this shit once before and pulled off the trick. Second is I don’t want power, I just want things back the way they were, back to the good old days when we didn’t have to be polite to Nazis. We pull it off, that copy of Dee’s translation can go into a dark corner and stay there for all eternity as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You wouldn’t destroy it?”

  She looked at him as if he’d just suggested she take up practical coprophagy. “No. The sanctity of books always takes precedence over existential threats to reality. Jesus, what kind of philistine are you?”

  Carter, whose priorities were different, skipped answering. Instead he pointed at the ceiling to indicate Lovecraft’s newest art project, and not any alien entities that might overhear. “That thing you made, you found instruction for it in your reading?”

  “Of course not. It’s the Necronomicon, not a hobby crafts book. I just … look, it’s easier just to show you the book.”

  “No.” Carter said it firmly. “No. I am not looking in that book.”

  Lovecraft looked at him oddly. “Anxious much?”

  “Yeah. I’m anxious to stay sane. One of us has to.”

  She scoffed at him. “It’s not that bad.”