After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  “Attu. Rings a bell. Something to do with World War Two, but we never got to go to war here, so whatever it was didn’t happen anymore. Must have been a battle with the Japanese, I guess. That sounds right.” She went out of the kitchen for a minute and returned with an atlas. She opened it on the table and flicked through to a world map. “Attu. Wow. You can barely see it at this scale. The army put a base there?”

  “Air Force, I think. It was an early warning station. There’s a concrete dome the scientists have set their hearts on as a laboratory, and a bunch of blockhouses. It’ll be home away from home.”

  Lovecraft grimaced as she looked at a larger-scale map of the islands, although they were still tiny even at 1:6,000,000. It was a grimace of self-disgust, as she was starting to like the idea. “I don’t guess many people can say they’ve been to the Aleutians,” she murmured, half to herself. Then, louder, “Admin, you say?”

  “And you’ll need to carry a gun. Open carry in a hip holster.”

  “Heh. I’ll feel like a sheriff.”

  “A deputy. You’ll answer to me. I answer to Dr. Malcolm, who’s the project manager. I’ll ask them to supply you with a shotgun, too. I know you love your shotguns.”

  “I do love my shotguns. Get me a semiauto like my Mossberg. Better yet, get me a 930 with a folding stock so I don’t have to learn anything new. Tactical sight, too.” She thought about what else could go on her rider, but remembered something more pressing. “Money. What’s the money like?”

  He told her. She whistled. “Sounds like business is good in the lawman industry these days. Do I get a badge?”

  * * *

  In the state of Westphalia, Germany, a few kilometers southwest of Paderborn, lies the town of Wewelsburg. It is, to some significant people, the center of the world because of the castle that stands over it.

  Weweslburg Castle was built on the site of several predecessors and, indeed, built from their bones, the stone of earlier iterations being pressed into service to raise the curious, triangular structure. It had originally been built as a residence for the Prince-Bishops of Paderborn at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, the castle had a checkered history, changing hands by deed and act, in peace and in war. It was abandoned for some years, fire hollowed out one of the towers, and it was left to decay and crumble for decades. In the early twentieth century, however, it was rebuilt with the intention of it becoming a cultural center for the historical area, containing a museum, youth hostel, and banquet hall.

  In 1933, however, Heinrich Himmler toured the castle and took a fancy to it. When his plans to take over Schwalenberg Castle, some forty-eight kilometers away as the eagle flies, for a center for the SS fell through, he immediately turned his attention to Wewelsburg as an excellent second choice. Overcoming resistance from the district authority, Himmler was able to negotiate a hundred-year lease for the castle for a nominal rent.

  Initial plans for the castle to be a school teaching a broad spectrum of ideologically sound subjects for fresh, young SS recruits quickly became derailed by Himmler’s personal obsession with the occult.

  Such is the history of the Weweslburg in both the Folded and Unfolded Worlds. The primary difference is that these hopeless desires for powers beyond those of conventional thought and science in the history of the Folded World were weak echoes of the far more successful research in the Unfolded. In the Folded World, Hitler was largely unimpressed by Himmler’s forays into the supernatural. In the Unfolded World, he had cause to be more accepting.

  The triangular form of the castle had been extended twice: once immediately after the abrupt end of the world war that never was in 1941 when the village church was demolished on Himmler’s orders, and again in 1984. The building style had been maintained throughout, and only the age of the materials was an outside indication of how the building had evolved. Even then, it took a close inspection to tell where the 1941 stonework began, and it would surely be as difficult to tell the eighties extension was new in a few decades.

  As a general principle, the closer to the northern tower one came, the greater the security. This had been Himmler’s scheme for a “Black Camelot,” a searing focus point of all that the Nazis in general and the SS in particular stood for. Thousands of slave laborers had died in the reconstructions, and a well of darkness filled with their unwilling sacrifices. In the northern crypt, rites had been performed, and associations formed of a sort that could only be sanctified far away from the sight of those who were too weak-willed to understand that the path to power is neither pretty nor painless. One of the great advantages of the annexation of so great a portion of the former Soviet Union was that most of the pain could now be so easily outsourced. The people of the town below the castle had long since learned not to question the arrival of large trucks that rode low on their suspension, and through whose thick walls it was still just possible to make out shouts and thuds as of fists against steel, yet rode high and silent when they left.

  * * *

  Director Mühlan’s office was in the north tower, a broad, arcing room that gave an excellent view out over the town and onward toward Paderborn. It had been fitted out to the specifications of Heinrich Himmler, its first occupant in 1946, and Mühlan felt the presence of his illustrious forbear every time he entered the room and sat at the very same desk. Himmler would not have recognized the computer that occupied the space once occupied by a blotter, but he would have appreciated the level of security it bore. He was, after all, the de facto ruler of the Third Reich, even if General Warner Richter, the current Führer, was under the impression that it was he. Then again, Richter was no fool; he understood that running the Reich and guiding it toward its destiny were two very different things. So he fussed over finances and kept the rest of the world sweet or intimidated as they deserved, while Mühlan took care of the greater truths. Richter made sure that the Ahnenerbe got whatever it asked for, and—if he ever knew about the trucks that came from the east to Wewelsburg heavy and left light—he had gone to pains to forget about them.

  Across from Mühlan’s desk was that of his secretary, Irmgard. He admired rather than liked her, but the depth of that admiration was great. Plain and oddly sexless, her whole life had been dedicated to the Party, from the Hitlerjugend as a child, to induction into the SS as soon as she was able. Her loyalty and ideological purity were unimpeachable in every respect. She knew full well what occurred in the crypt of the northern tower and it did not lessen her enthusiasm in the slightest. If anything, she had become more steadfast. She had researched the history of the Ahnenerbe in detail, and Mühlan suspected she knew more about it than him by this point.

  She looked across at him. “Herr Director, there is a Triole request incoming from Arkham. Do you wish to receive it?”

  “Of course.” Triole was a simple yet pleasingly sound concept in secure Internet communications. The program ran three popular commercial chat clients, encoding and splitting the message at one end to be pieced back together and deciphered at the receiving end in real time. Between the cipher, the fragmentation, and the security protocols of the clients themselves, the Gestapo has pronounced it breakable only with extreme difficulty, not least because the system randomly selected which of several clients to use every time.

  A flash appeared on his screen telling him about the request, which he immediately accepted. A chat box appeared, an ugly, functional interface with current security and protocol data streaming off on one side. The coders who had developed Triole had gone to some pains to avoid the program looking in any way cute.

  “Stage 2 Seidr confirmed. Hosts in full agreement. Security head confirmed, subject 434. Subordinate request problematical.”

  Mühlan allowed himself a frown. All the project site needed was some goon who could hold a gun as a subordinate to subject 434, Daniel Carter. He waited a moment for clarification, but none was forthcoming. His patience exhausting itself quickly, he typed, “Explain.”

  The answer came b
ack. “Female,” he read. “Black.”

  It was hard not to laugh. He permitted himself a quiet snort of amusement that made Irmgard glance at him. “Understood,” he typed. “Remain watchful. Anything else to report?”

  “Not at this time. Message ends.”

  The ugly little interface told him that the connection had been terminated. He closed the program, thought for a moment, then rose to look out of the window. “I sometimes wonder if our Dr. Giehl is really cut out to be an agent,” he said.

  Irmgard had a security rating equivalent to most high-ranking officers; she knew probably more than was safe for her, but that is the very definition of a secretary, after all. She knew full well who Giehl was, having handled any amount of documents pertaining to the Abwehr’s woman on the spot.

  Irmgard said nothing, for it was not her role to ask for secrets, merely to process and keep them. Mühlan sometimes wished she’d show a little more curiosity if and when he wanted to talk, such as now. “She’s worrying over the ethnicity of one of the Americans, as if it matters.”

  He looked out over the town, over the land, over the world. An attempt had been made to change the world, but it had failed. So the sensitives told him. An attempt to snuff out the Third Reich by preventing Unternehmen Sonnenuntergang from ever happening. They said in that awful world of shadows, the Third Reich fell yet the Soviet Union survived for decades afterward. That the power that would secure the Reich was taken from them before they even had it in their hands. That the beloved first Führer died in ignominy and was labeled a monster by the Jewish Bolsheviks. They could not be sure how the attempt had been made, or why it might have failed, but the scientists were confident it could be prevented from ever happening again. Yes, the world would be changing again soon enough, but in a way conceived and executed by the Reich.

  Everyone at the so-called ZPE site in the Aleutians would, in all likelihood, die as it happened, but that was a small price to pay, and would come with the bonus that he would never again have to contend with any of Lurline Giehl’s ridiculous taste for melodrama.

  Chapter 18

  THE JOURNEY WEST

  Even Carter, the more enthusiastic out of he and Lovecraft when it came to the Aleutian posting, balked when he realized just how long it was going to take to reach the distant island of Attu. The flight to Anchorage would take twelve hours in itself, and there were almost another two and a half thousand miles to go after that. Attu was an unpopulated island, now receiving its first substantial number of visitors in years as the technicians and the first wave of scientists arrived to start setting up the ZPE rig. It may have been blessed with regular flights when the USAF operated there, but now it would take an ungodly number of little hops to reach Adak Island, a little over halfway along the chain as it heads westward. From there they were to rendezvous with some of the other support personnel and then, to Lovecraft’s profound horror, go the last four hundred and some miles by ship.

  “A little cruise,” Carter described it, unwisely.

  They were talking over coffee at the bookstore. Lovecraft almost snorted hers out of her nose. “Cruises are on cruise liners. This is on, what? A fishing boat? An icebreaker? An iceberg? What?”

  “A research vessel. I forget what it’s called, but it’ll take about a day and a half to get there. It’s carrying supplies for the site, too. We’re the designated adults who’ll be keeping an eye on them.”

  “In case of Somali pirates? Polar bears in fast attack boats?”

  “Maybe. This isn’t our world anymore. Maybe we’ll be attacked by a giant squid or something and have to fight it off.”

  “Don’t even,” said Lovecraft, so Carter shut up about giant creatures with tentacles trying to kill them.

  “At least we’ll be armed. The weapons will be waiting for us at Adak, too.”

  Lovecraft laughed and shook her head in self-deprecation. “I’m just acting up, Dan. It’s all an adventure.” She looked at him and the smile slipped when she saw his distant expression. “Unless there’s something you’re not telling me?”

  “I don’t know if it’s significant. It might be a coincidence. Hell of a coincidence if it is.”

  “Go on.” She said it reluctantly.

  He reminded her of the man who’d vanished from police custody only to reappear almost immediately as a frozen corpse plunging through a rooftop several blocks away. “Before he died, Harrelson took an unofficial interest. The guy was in custody in the first place because he’d been found standing in the street shouting wildly about a man with an empty head and some stuff about fruit. He had almost two thousand in fifty-dollar bills on him. Harrelson goes to have a look around, finds a hat down an alleyway right by where this all happened. Traces the owner. Henry Weston.”

  Lovecraft frowned. “I know that name.”

  “You should. He’s the lawyer who handled your uncle’s estate back in the Folded. Turned up out of the blue to tell me this place was mine.”

  “Okay. So? Coincidence.”

  “He’s also the guy who put me in touch with Lukas.”

  “Still a coincidence.”

  “Harrelson beards Weston in his offices, puts a little pressure on him to find out how his hat ended up where it did. Weston bullshits him. Doesn’t even try very hard, but there’s nothing to say definitively that he’s lying. Only thing that can put him at the scene is if the man with the unexplained money can ID him. Within twelve hours, he’s dead and frozen.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Let me finish. Where this all happened”—Carter pointed down the street outside the store—“thirty yards away, if that.”

  Lovecraft grew quiet.

  “So I did a little footwork myself. Talked to Jen over at Poppy’s.”

  “Poppy’s?” Her eyes flicked to look through the storefront window toward the coffee shop across the street.

  “The day the guy went crazy in the street, just before then by a few minutes, she remembers a customer. She can’t remember much about him, just how he behaved.”

  “Jen? But she remembers everything.”

  “Not this time. He bought tea. Second time in two days. Barely touched it, then suddenly left. Both times he paid with a fifty buck bill and told her to keep the change. Harrelson told me the dead crazy man was pulled in holding nineteen hundred dollars he couldn’t account for. You see?”

  Lovecraft did. “The one in Poppy’s started with two grand. Dead guy got it how? Mugged him?”

  “Worst decision of his life if he did. The only description Jen could give me of the tea drinker is he wore an expensive but not flashy suit, nice overcoat, and hat.”

  The description suddenly clicked in both their minds. They looked at one another. “Oh, shit.” They said it so nearly together as to make no difference.

  “He was in here,” said Lovecraft and reflexively looked at the safe.

  “The man in the Clave College parking lot,” said Carter, then quickly added, “He was what?”

  “He knew about the Necronomicon. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. We’ve been had right from the start.” She looked at Carter with frightened eyes, and he couldn’t blame her. “What do we do? I mean, if this whole pleasure trip to the ass end of creation comes from him…”

  Carter thought for a moment, or at least tried to think. The ramifications of this were sending shock waves through his mind and trying to think of a coherent plan was like trying to build a champagne fountain during an earthquake. “If we’re right, then if Weston wanted us dead, we’d be stone dead by now. Harrelson may be in danger, especially if he tries to rattle Weston’s cage again. We got to warn him to back off. In the meantime…” He tried to focus away from the stupid idea that had come into his head. It wouldn’t let him. “In the meantime, I have to go and talk to my lawyer.”

  * * *

  Lovecraft was not very happy about the idea of Carter seeing Weston again. Her happiness did not multiply when he suggested that she accompany him.

&nbs
p; “And what if we’re right, and he’s in with the opposition?”

  “I’m not sure if he’s with us, but I’m pretty sure he’s not against us.”

  “And you’re basing this on what? Male intuition?”

  “On the fact that we’re still breathing.”

  He’d called Weston’s office, but they had told him he was at the courthouse, arguing a complex tort case on behalf of a major client. Later they called back to say he would be happy to speak with Mr. Carter if Mr. Carter could make his way to the courthouse, and not be insulted if the interview was necessarily brief. Mr. Carter had said that was fine, and there they were, waiting for Weston to show up.

  The courthouse was an impressive stack of marble and granite; Arkham had long taken its law seriously. They waited in the corridor between the counsel offices and courtroom number two.

  “What are you going to say to him?” said Lovecraft.

  Carter pursed his lips; he had next to no idea. “Ask him if he’s an agent of extraterrestrial forces from beyond the fifth dimension, I guess.”

  Lovecraft’s expression indicated this wasn’t the time for levity. Then her brow tightened as she looked past him up the corridor. Carter turned, and then rose to his feet as Henry Weston made his way toward them, his old leather briefcase in his hand. He seemed delighted to see them.

  “Miss Lovecraft! Mr. Carter! Well, this is nice. Would you mind if we walk as we talk? I’m in court in a very few minutes.”

  “You don’t seem very surprised to see me here,” said Lovecraft, preempting Carter winding up to pitch his own question.

  “Should I be? You’ve begun studying the book, no doubt? Splendid! Its reputation is deserved to a degree, but exaggerated. Your ancestor tended toward hyperbole, I’m afraid. Still, you seem a very grounded young lady. I’m sure you’ll be fine. I wouldn’t have suggested you look at it otherwise.”

  “You didn’t suggest it at all.”

  “I’m sure I must have. You’re reading it, after all, aren’t you?”