The Lovecraft Code

by Levenda, Peter;

  “We need you, Professor Angell. And we need you now. I wish it could be another way, a different person. Someone with a different background. But we don't have time to vet a dozen other men or women with your qualifications. It has to be you, and it has to be today.”

  “You said something about a weapon, something that could save or destroy millions...”

  “Are you with us?”

  The setting sun ignited the New York skyline aglow in reds and yellows. The site where the World Trade Center had stood—the site where an Angell had died on September 11—was conspicuous now, another massive construction in its place that would open in a few months. A gesture of defiance and a testament of survival.

  How long would it stand?

  If Angell didn't do the right thing now—whatever that was—how long would it stand?

  The rear door of the SUV opened and before he could second-guess himself Professor Gregory Angell stepped inside and surrendered himself to his destiny.

  Brooklyn Heights/Red Hook

  1926

  A short walk in space from where Aubrey and Gregory Angell were talking, but 88 years earlier in time, Howard Phillips Lovecraft closed the door to his tiny apartment on Clinton Street with a grateful sigh.

  The peace and silence were luxurious. He was alone. Alone! No mother, no aunts, and most of all no wife.

  His mother died in 1921, in the same hospital in Providence that had claimed his father's life, her husband. He married one Sonia Greene in 1924 after a rather lukewarm courtship that had begun shortly after his mother's death, but financial difficulties drove her to the Midwest in search of a job, leaving Lovecraft alone in Brooklyn. He was never able to tell her, not in so many words, but their separation gave him room to breathe. If it wasn't for the fact that he was in New York—a center of pestilence and depravity if he ever saw one—he would be as close as he had ever been to happy. He had some friends in the Kalem Klub—an informal group of writers that included his friends Frank Belknap Long and Samuel Loveman—and that served to pass the time and offered him a sense of collegiality, but the inspiration to write seemed elusive until he was left alone on Clinton Street.

  He would return to the core experience of his life, the one he dared tell no one but which had been festering in his mind for years now. The distance from Providence was giving him the mental space he needed to create what would become his most famous tale, even as that distance was driving him slowly insane.

  From the rooms next door in the apartment house he could hear the Syrians at it again, playing some indescribable alien melody on an instrument he could not identify. It put him in a foul mood, and he was fearful that the arcane chants of the diseased Levant would somehow act upon his mind the way the unheard music of her dreams drove his mother insane. Indeed, he had been having strange nightmares for weeks now which he attributed to the darkly hypnotic quality of the flute and the oud. He had written a story—“The Horror at Red Hook”—in a white heat, driven nearly mad by the nasal, atonal droning of the primitive harmonium and the arrhythmic thumping doumbek of the Yezidi family upstairs.

  He sat on his narrow bed, little more than a cot, and reached under it for the box he had brought with him from Providence.

  There, in among the notes for a dozen stories and some cherished correspondence, was the file he had stolen from Professor George Angell's office, the one marked CTHULHU CULT.

  It was time to get down to business.

  Providence

  April, 1925

  He had taken the Cthulhu file from Angell's desk and, not waiting for the professor to return he made his excuses and carried the folder back to the house his aunts were living in. He didn't know why he took the file, only that the name on the file brought back those early memories of dreams he had when he was a child, dreams of nameless cities with cyclopean architecture, and of a dead priest asleep in his sarcophagus beneath the seas. A priest dead, but dreaming.

  There was a connection! There was an iron thread running between his mother's madness, Wilcox's psychopathy, and his own nightmares. The young artist had seen what Lovecraft saw in his dreams; and whatever that was, whatever was meant by Cthulhu, was somehow at the root of his mother's illness and his family's insanity. His father, his mother ... both driven insane. Lovecraft knew that there was no way to outrun whatever hereditary strain there was that he inherited from both his parents. So, instead of outrunning it, he would have to stand and fight it. The key was buried somewhere in the Cthulhu file.

  So he had taken it.

  There was a lot in it he didn't understand. References to cults around the world, strange phenomena, riots, surrealist art exhibits that seemed to hint at other dimensions and the beings—the entities—that dwelled there. Lovecraft prided himself on his pragmatic, scientific approach to the world. Science had replaced religion for him a long time ago. It had been his bulwark against his mother's hysteria. But as she descended slowly down a maelstrom of fevered hallucinations, getting worse and worse to the point that science could not help her, could not make sense out of the shuddering images that persecuted her every waking moment, he began to sense a dim outline of another reality beneath or behind the comfortable science of straight lines and chemical compounds. Insanity defied science. Maybe it also informed religion. Maybe there was even a kind of science that masqueraded as religion, a science so old and alien to this planet that it could stand right in front of us and we wouldn't even know it was there until it was too late. Didn't Einstein speak of strange geometries, non-Euclidean lines and angles that hinted at the vastness of space and time? Weren't we on the verge of discovering something—some power, some destructive force—that had existed all around us since the worlds began?

  Buried in the file from the professor's office were references to Louisiana and a cult that practiced orgiastic rites in the bayous, including a report by an Inspector Legrasse and a statement from a witness called Castro. The site was raided by the police in 1907, and strange artifacts were recovered. Professor Angell was consulted on the case in 1908, and it was this initial consult that led to Angell making the connection between the bayou cult and the soul-bled dreams of young Henry Wilcox.

  1908? The year had enormous significance for Lovecraft, for it was the year that he suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to leave school for good.

  “Oh, God,” he said aloud in the silence of his small room. “The same year the devotees were calling upon Cthulhu in the swamps I was descending into my own pit of madness. Soon thereafter, my mother went insane. It's not ... it's not possible. How can this be?”

  He swiftly went through page after page of the professor's notes, some of it in a scrawl that was impossible to read as if the writer were in a desperate rush to get the words down on paper before something terrible happened. It was only by reading the professor's file and plugging in his own life story—the dates and sometimes even the places that seemed to match up so well—that he was able to see that what he and his family had suffered was only part of a much larger picture.

  So Professor Angell was not trying to discover a cure for Wilcox's psychopathology but instead was investigating the extent to which a bizarre gaggle of devil worshippers in Louisiana could affect the consciousness of an art student in Rhode Island seventeen years later, and from there to a series of cult activities around the world.

  He would try to digest the information in Angell's file and then perhaps pay a visit to the old man to get as much more from him as possible. This was suddenly no longer just about Lovecraft's mother but about something that was happening on a global scale. He didn't believe in astrology or any of the pseudo-sciences, but what if an alignment of the stars acted as a kind of cosmic clock, affecting gravity and electricity and the mysterious dark forces the ruminations of Einstein had only hinted at? A clock that was counting down to a date only the ancients would have known? How else to explain a worldwide increase in cultic activity that was directed towards one end only: the awakening of
the Thing that had been drawn by Wilcox, worshipped in Louisiana, and haunted the dreams of Lovecraft himself?

  The dead priest Cthulhu.

  For the next several months in New York City Lovecraft spent hours in the Public Library's Main Branch on Forty-Second Street. He called for book after book from the deep stacks below street level, books that no one had looked at in decades. There was the Rare Book Room, and he lingered for days over ancient texts in Latin, Greek and Arabic with their elaborate designs of pentacles, magic squares, and drawings of demonic forces. He taught himself some basic Arabic, enough to learn that his childhood persona of Abdul Alhazred was not true Arabic, but that Abdul Hazred might be: the “Servant of the Forbidden,” or so it was told to him by one of the room's curators.

  “Is that me?” he asked himself when no one was around to notice his distress. “Am I the Servant of the Forbidden?”

  Then there was the Brooklyn Museum, with its store of Babylonian artifacts. The Metropolitan Museum, with its extensive Egyptian section as well as rooms devoted entirely to the Greek and Roman gods. And there were other libraries, bookstores, and even curio shops specializing in the arcana of countries where the indigenous peoples prayed to goats, boars, crocodiles ... there was endless depravity to be found, certainly ... and no less in his own neighborhood of Red Hook, where the Arab hordes floated obscenely down Atlantic Avenue on nauseating fumes of sandalwood and roast lamb, fueled by hashish and hopelessness.

  It took him nearly a year, but he finally put it all together. No one would believe him, of course, and he was not going to commit the whole truth to paper lest he be considered completely insane. He had to report the danger, reveal the darkness that was closing in on the Earth, without showing his hand. He was no one. He had no credentials, no degrees after his name. He was not part of the academic elite or the scientific establishment. He wrote stories, that's all. If no one listened to him, if Professor Angell somehow rebuffed his petition, he would do this the way he always did: with fiction, with story-telling. He would bury the truth in the fertile ground of language and suggestion. He would let readers come to the truth slowly, as he had, but with all of the essential facts in one place. All it would take would be someone clever enough to read the signs, to notice the dates, and put the pieces of the puzzle back together. This was not a thing you shouted from the rooftops, no matter how imminent the threat. This was a thing that had to be whispered, from one to another, until that whisper became a murmur and from there an alarum.

  In another fifty years or so, his discovery would go mainstream. Erich von D niken, Pauwels and Bergier, Robert Temple, Graham Hancock ... reinterpretations of ancient history and religion (especially those of the “ancient alien” genre) would make the best-seller lists and enrich a generation of writers and historians. Lovecraft, though, would remain virtually penniless for his entire life.

  For now, however, it was of utmost importance that he return to Providence to confront Professor Angell with what he had found and to enlist his aid to avert a disaster that was rapidly forming on the outer edges of the galaxy.

  He had to convince the old “emeritus” that he had discovered the key to the Cthulhu Cult.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Codex II

  There is more in the Codex than the biographies of either Lovecraft or the crazy old Count Karl Tanzler would reveal. Context is everything, and the quiet travels of Lovecraft back and forth to Providence, New York City, and Florida bear much more investigation than has been revealed. The same with Tanzler, who made his way from Germany to Cuba and then to Florida, at a time when the Nazi Party was growing in strength and influence. Tanzler's connections with German occultists and psychics would have been of intense interest to many in the Party, and his strange voyage to Cuba and then to Key West suggests the itinerary of a man who wanted to slip into the United States unnoticed.

  Tanzler's brief was quite specific. Based on his research concerning the Cutha artifact and what was known about the academic career of Professor George Gammel Angell, it was obvious that the old professor knew much more about the mythology of Cutha and its mysterious ancient inhabitants than did even the German archaeologists who were embedded deep within the digs of Babylon and Nineveh. Himmler's instructions were clear: obtain a copy of the professor's research on Cutha and anything having to do with the civilization of Sumer.

  But then, even as Tanzler had just arrived in Florida, a bombshell: an unknown writer of fantastic fiction had written a short story in which the entire scenario was played out, for all the world to see.

  The story was “The Call of Cthulhu,” and the writer was Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

  From the Codex:

  The Cthulhu File was stolen from HPL's apartment on Clinton Street in May 1925. His rooms were entered by someone who possessed a key. Suspects were many, and HPL suspected the perpetrator was one of his Arab neighbors. HPL returned to Providence in April 1926. He made overtures to Professor Angell immediately. He did not reveal that he had stolen the Cthulhu file from his office. The elderly Angell, by then ninety-two years old, did not put together the appearance of HPL and the disappearance of his file. He answered questions about Henry Wilcox as best as he was able without violating confidence. He was somewhat more reticent about discussing the cult. He did, however, mention the existence of a mysterious “black book” that was said to contain secrets of the cult. He mentioned a tribe of Kurds in northern Iraq called the Yezidi who, it was claimed, were devil-worshippers and who had access to the volume.

  Lovecraft remembered the Arabs who lived in Red Hook, and who had persecuted him with their music and their chants. Now they had a name. Yezidi. They were the ones who had stolen the Cthulhu file, he believed. And now they knew what he was up to. Devil worshippers! His life was very probably in danger.

  During the summer of 1926 he quickly wrote down all that he knew in a story that would become the touchstone for all his later work, “The Call of Cthulhu.” It was encoded, so that only those “in the know” would recognize the essential elements and see how it was all put together. He sent a copy of the story to friends of his from the Kalem Klub back in New York City, before it was finally published in Weird Tales in February, 1928. By then, of course, it was too late and the cat was out of the bag.

  One of those friends—even now, no one knows who—leaked the existence of the manuscript to a German literary figure living in the City: George Sylvester Vierick. Vierick worked for the German government during World War One as a spy in New York, and later worked closely with the Nazi Party in the same capacity. He had also been an intimate of famed British occultist and magician, Aleister Crowley, who worked for Vierick during World War One as a contributing editor and who also had excellent connections back in the Fatherland through a number of German secret societies. In fact, Vierick had published his own vampire novel as early as 1907, as well as a collection of poems entitled Nineveh that same year, had been friendly with Sigmund Freud, as well as Albert Einstein, and in 1923 had interviewed Adolf Hitler himself. With that background, Vierick immediately saw the value of the Lovecraft manuscript to people like Himmler and Rudolf Hess, and sent word back to Berlin where it eventually made its way to Himmler. The short story had contained the words “CTHULHU CULT” in connection with a secret file on the subject. Many of the details in the story were already known to Himmler, which meant that the original file existed in reality and had to be of extreme importance. Himmler then sent a coded cable to Tanzler with the simple command: “Angell. Cutha File. At once.”

  But the file was gone.

  Tanzler had no way of knowing this, however. He made his way to Providence in December of 1926 and surveilled the home of Professor Angell. Unfortunately, Angell was not in residence at the time but was visiting friends in Newport. Tanzler waited until the house was asleep and then broke into Angell's study. He went through the professor's desk and bookshelves, but found nothing on the Cthulhu cult. However, he did see a notation in the old m
an's diary that revealed his trip to Newport and the fact that he would be returning that night on the ferry.

  Providence

  December 21, 1926

  The strange-looking gentleman with the goatee, dressed shabbily but somehow elegantly in a threadbare coat and scarf against the bitter cold blowing in from the harbor, was carrying a small leather satchel by his side. He was tanned a dark brown, result of some months spent in the unrelenting sun of South Florida. He appeared to be waiting for the ferry to come in from Newport. There were two others on the pier that night, one a man already celebrating the upcoming Christmas holiday, the fumes of alcoholic bliss billowing about his face like a drunken halo, and the other a slight woman with a worried expression who might have been his wife. Tanzler took note of their appearance and condition and felt he had nothing to fear from the couple. Just in case, though, he moved away from them and further down the pier.

  A cold night, a quarter moon hanging in the air above the harbor, the spray of stars overhead like a jury of its peers. Tanzler shivered slightly in the salty breeze coming off the bay and heard the sound of the ferry making its way to the dock. A rustle of movement all up and down the pier and Tanzler held his position, far enough away from the off-ramp that he would not be seen in the light from its lamps.

  He had killed a man once before, in India. It had been necessary. A thief who had come at him from behind with the knotted scarf of the thuggee. The man was not a real thug, of course, for they traveled in groups and attacked according to ritual requirements. This was on a side street in Calcutta. The thief had misjudged Tanzler's height, and the scarf did not make it around his neck as intended. Rather, Tanzler turned and grabbed the now-frightened man by the shoulders and slammed him up against a wall of masonry. There had been an iron nail in the wall, protruding just enough that it penetrated the man's neck, severing his spinal column. The thief slumped and hung there, an astonished expression on his face.