Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  He sounded like a madman.

  But so had the fellas who’d warned them of exactly what they would find here.

  When they swept through for the third time, to Dobbs’s eye most of his fellow agents appeared to have aged ten years in just a few days. Haggard and worn, with the distant stares of combat veterans, they had more interrogations to run. More arrests to make. More prisoners to transport. They did their jobs with the plodding determination of men who wanted to see it done so they could go home, drink themselves to sleep, and hope the place didn’t follow them into their dreams.

  At midday, he was helping clear one of the last manses left on Lafayette when a commotion rippled through the town. The last to know? Maybe he was.

  Dobbs was lingering in the chilly parlor of this grand old house built by the fortune of another age, lived in and loved well, then left to go to ruin. Even now, he probably couldn’t afford it. He stood at the baby grand piano, its lacquered maple dulled by years of sifting dust. Lillian played. She would’ve been thrilled to have an instrument like this. Would’ve been thrilled to have the room for it. With clumsier fingers than his wife’s, he pressed a few yellowed keys and winced at the discordant clang of neglect.

  He hadn’t seen the fellow Bureau agent hustle in off the porch. Losing his edge? Maybe he was.

  “There’s something big going on out by that reef,” the agent said.

  Dobbs sprinted for high ground, taking the broad steps of the main staircase two at a time, three stories’ worth. At the roof, he burst out onto the widow’s walk where, in the Golden Age of Sail, a woman must have maintained a vigil to watch the eastern horizon for the ship that would bring back someone she loved.

  The day was cold but clear, visibility good and the wind like a knife at his skin as he peered past the breakwater, out where the spine of rock called Devil Reef cut a ragged slash across the untamed waters of the open sea. As they’d fled the town, heedless of the cold and pounding waves, the Deep Ones had made for it, and no one could fathom why. They hadn’t gathered on it, as if waiting for a ship. They’d simply gone no farther, then disappeared.

  It was a fool’s wish to conclude they’d drowned; unthinkable to speculate they might’ve had a whole other home out there waiting, once they were ready.

  He’d think about that later. Right now, the Atlantic Ocean had a hole in it.

  How wide? Wider than the reef, and certainly wide enough to swallow the Coast Guard cutter that appeared to be frantically trying to chug away from its pull, a circular depression into which water was pouring from all around, as if the drain plug had been yanked from a tub. It churned deep, deeper, revealing more of the reef like a cliff-wall as the motion began to swirl with purpose and direction, into a vast whirlpool.

  In the greater distance, the submarine’s conning tower marked its course as it swung around in a wide arc, until it pointed in the direction of the reef. It submerged, the tower and its thicket of masts and scopes slicing beneath the waves as smoothly as a diving shark.

  Ever since the raids began, one of the hardest things to manage was sorting fact from rumor. Nobody knew what was true and what wasn’t unless they’d seen it with their own eyes, and even then it could be hard to know.

  What he’d heard? That the waters ran deep out there. That the shelf of land fell gradually away from shore, then in one broad spot abruptly plunged into an anomalous abyss. The depth soundings and other sonar readings the submarine had taken couldn’t tell what or why, only that it was a rift of immense dimensions. The sub wasn’t built to operate much past three hundred feet down, and it hadn’t come anywhere near the bottom.

  For no reason Dobbs could see across the surface—he had only a sense that it presaged something worse—the whirlpool slowed, stopped. The depression in the sea collapsed inward, the ocean colliding with itself as water rushed back in to fill the void and rebound with a foamy geyser as tall as the house beneath him. He saw it first, and seconds later heard it, a roar like an awakening leviathan.

  It had barely settled again before the water was roiled a second time— smaller disturbances now. Dobbs gripped the walk’s railing until the cold iron seared his hands. A series of four, he counted, then a brief wait and another four.

  Torpedoes. The submarine must have fired its torpedoes.

  And then . . . calm.

  But calm was deceptive. Calm could never be trusted. Calm was a sunny, blue-sky day pierced by the whistle of an incoming shell, not knowing where it would land until the arms and legs went flying. That was calm for you.

  As the afternoon wore on, the sky blackened and turned against them one last time, spitting down a freezing rain that stung Dobbs’s face until his cheeks and chin went numb. He hated the place and it hated him back, and he couldn’t say he blamed it.

  They’d done what they’d done and, after tonight, wouldn’t be returning.

  Had it been worth it? He supposed that depended on what would’ve unfolded here if they’d never known enough to smash the place apart.

  Maybe it was a question better put to the widows and children who would be denied the truth of why their husbands and fathers had come home in boxes. Or put to Ridley Hewlitt, if he could give a coherent answer, because if the kid wasn’t bound for his own stay at Danvers . . . well, if not, maybe then Archie Dobbs could start believing in God again, instead of sitting in the pew each week beside his wife like a morally upstanding agent should, feeling like a fraud.

  After the disturbances near the reef, rumors were quick to float up from the harbor, carried by agents and brass alike. The Coast Guard, they said, had made a few slow, back-and-forth runs over the site. The cutters’ hulls plowed through a spreading field of some thick jellied substance that bobbed to the surface from below. For half an hour, it rose in noxious dark clots and globs, some the size of a side of beef, but formless and translucent. Every now and again, one popped or bubbled with the suggestion of an eye.

  The crews tried to dredge a few samples on board, a frustrating and futile endeavor. As with so many things, the harder they tightened their grasp, the quicker it slipped free, until the whole ungodly mess dissolved into an iridescent slick that drifted away on the tides and left them with nothing.

  Just rumors. He hadn’t seen it with his own two eyes.

  But it sounded true.

  He couldn’t leave soon enough.

  It didn’t matter where in town he stood, looking out over Innsmouth’s moldering roofs and forsaken steeples, its once-proud docks eaten down a sliver at a time, its harbor and breakwater and reef. All of that was just the mask. What he was really looking out over was an entire way of life that had come and gone, risen and fallen and become something else, something malevolent beyond understanding, while hardly anyone had noticed.

  The sea was a vast and hostile thing, less a place than a force, and hid its secrets well. It devoured at will and never gave back.

  And one day, he feared, one way or another, it would rise to devour the world.

  TWO

  Ec’h-pi-el

  I

  April 11, 1937

  WHENEVER NATHAN BRADY WAS summoned to the office of Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, he felt nervous. An atmosphere of power and menace, assiduously cultivated by Hoover himself, surrounded the director of the FBI like a force field, and it threatened even Brady who had never suffered its ill effects.

  It so happened that Brady was one of “the young men,” as Hoover liked to call them, who had found favor in his eyes. Tall, well-dressed, handsome, Harvard-educated, daring in his actions, observant and yet discreet in his reports, Brady met with Hoover’s approval in almost every respect, except perhaps for his literary and artistic leanings. Mr. Hoover regarded an over-pronounced taste for literature and the arts to be, as he termed it, “being too clever by half.” What precisely he meant by this is uncertain. After all, could you be too clever by any sort of fraction, however vulgar, if you worked for the FBI?

  Despite his apprehensiveness, Bra
dy knew better than to knock hesitantly at the director’s door. A sharp double-rap was met almost instantly by a characteristically staccato “Come!” from within. Brady entered.

  The agent sometimes wondered, without naturally ever voicing his wonder, whether Hoover had taken a leaf out of Signor Mussolini’s book. Like “Il Duce,” Hoover had had his office built on the grand scale, calculated to intimidate the visitor, with a huge desk at one end of the room opposite the door. It stood on a dais so that anyone, whether seated or standing before the director, would have to look up. Mr. Hoover was somewhat self-conscious about his lack of inches, and wore built-up shoes.

  The floor was of polished black marble relieved by a fine Turkish rug or two. To Brady’s left as he looked down the room were bookcases filled from floor to ceiling with gilt-tooled, leather-bound volumes that the director would never open. To his right, three tall windows looked out onto Washington, D.C., and the Capitol Building, gleaming like a wedding cake in the spring sunshine. On the wall behind Hoover’s desk was a full-length portrait of himself, left hand tucked Napoleonically into his double-breasted jacket, looking even more menacing, and rather more soigné than its subject currently did, crouching in shirtsleeves behind a battery of telephones, intercoms, and neat stacks of paper. He was a squat, squarish man, with oiled hair combed straight back into a tight black ridge over his brow and round, slightly protuberant eyes that seemed to penetrate the soul of whatever came within their range. The face of a power-worshipper, if ever I saw one, thought Brady, who did not himself pay homage at that particular shrine.

  “Come in, Brady,” rasped Hoover in a tone that implied approach the presence, if you dare. “Take a seat, young man.” He waved him to an uncomfortable-looking Chippendale dining chair that had been placed some five feet in front of Hoover’s desk. “I’ve read your report. How in hell did you get to know about this in the first place?”

  Brady held up a rather undistinguished-looking octavo volume. It was hardbacked with a white dust jacket on which was printed in gray lettering the words Shadow Over Innsmouth and, below it, the author’s name: H. P. Lovecraft.

  “I take an interest in this kind of literature, sir,” said Brady. “I have read some of this man’s work before. In Weird Tales.”

  “Weird Tales! You, a Harvard man, read garbage like Weird Tales!”

  “We all have our faults, sir,” said Brady, instantly regretting his levity; but the director did not seem to notice. Perhaps it was just as well that J. Edgar Hoover, like most power addicts, was a stranger to irony and humor. He determinedly pressed on: “Lovecraft’s stories in ‘The Unique Magazine,’ as it calls itself, have included such titles as ‘The Horror at Red Hook,’ ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ and ‘The Dunwich Horror.’ I have been looking back through the Bureau’s files, and I’ve discovered—”

  “Do you play golf?” Hoover interrupted.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then, take it up, Brady. That’s my advice to a young man like you. It’s a decent open-air kind of pastime. Takes you out of yourself. I play golf, Brady.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind, sir.”

  “Take up golf, young man. Don’t mope around reading trashy books and pulp magazines all day. Still, in this instance, I’m very glad you did. You realize this darned book is potentially a thousand tons of high explosive just waiting to blow our asses off?”

  “That’s why I have brought it to your attention, sir.”

  “Well, Brady, you did a good thing there. Consider yourself commended.” It was not a particularly gracious phrase, but it was the highest accolade that Hoover ever offered his subordinates, and that sparingly. “You say in your report that only two hundred copies of this thing were issued last year by some vanity publisher out in Pennsylvania?”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  “Well, you must make darned sure there are no more published. And I want every available copy destroyed, if possible. Without attracting undue attention, naturally.”

  “I have already taken steps to ensure that, sir.”

  “Good man, good man. Shows initiative. I like a young man with initiative, Brady. But you can take a thing like initiative too far. It’s like the game of golf. You can try to hit your ball all the way to the green in one, and land yourself in a bunker—”

  “Yes, Mr. Hoover.”

  “—Or a goddamn lake . . . So who is this sonofabitch Lovecraft anyhow?”

  “He is a writer, impoverished, something of a recluse. Comes from an old New England family. Not very well known, though highly thought of by a small circle of admirers. Divorced, lives with an aunt, somewhat eccentric.”

  “Is he a commie? A Bolshevik sympathizer?”

  “Very much not, sir, I understand.”

  “Well, that’s something anyhow. Is he a fag?”

  “I don’t believe so, sir.”

  “Not a commie fag. That’s encouraging. So how in hell does this guy know about Innsmouth? I thought we had well and truly buried that shit nine years ago with that hothead Dobbs, and now this cockamamy sono-fabitch comes up with his book that spills all the beans.”

  “It is supposed to be fiction, Mr. Hoover.”

  “I know that, Brady. Do you take me for some kind of a dumb-ass?”

  “No, Mr. Hoover!”

  “Fiction is only a fact disguised as a lie. You know who said that?”

  “You, Mr. Hoover?”

  “Correct! Note it down, Brady.”

  “I will, Mr. Hoover.”

  “In this case very thinly disguised. What’s this guy’s game, Brady?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Then find out, godammit!” Hoover banged the desk with his fist in the manner approved by all men of power. “And find out what else he knows. You never know, he might be useful to us.”

  “Have I your permission to go and interview Mr. Lovecraft, sir?”

  “Yes godammit, but be discreet about it. You know we are literally sitting on a goddamn volcano at the moment. If it blows, our asses are toast. Literally toast!”

  Brady, being a Harvard man, deplored the misuse of the word literally, but he understood what the director meant. He nodded agreement.

  “So get to it, young man,” said Hoover.

  The meeting was at an end. Brady rose and went to the door. Before he reached it there was one further instruction from the man behind the desk.

  “And get yourself some golf clubs, young Brady!”

  April 19th, 1937 (from the diary of H. P Lovecraft)

  A young man called Nathan Brady has written to me. He claims to be an admirer of my work and wishes to discuss it with me. A Harvard man, I note with approval. Well, I will see him. I feel thoroughly out of sorts and I am, as usual, plagued by ailments mostly of the gastric variety, and perhaps he may bring cheer to my benighted existence. Yet another bad night, full of the phantasmagorical visions which have plagued me since my youth. Aunt Annie tells me she heard me cry out in my sleep, though what I said she could not make out. “It was some awful foreign or Negro tongue,” she informed me. I wonder if I have the courage this time, or the energy, to translate my dream into story. My nightmares are a plague, an alien infection; something is trying to speak to me through my slumber, I am convinced of it.

  I found myself in of all places a theatre. Sometimes my dreams are confused. It was a new theatre and they were still excavating its nether regions while on stage a rehearsal was in progress. A whole line of “hoofers,” as I believe they are termed, in their rehearsal clothes were thundering away in their tap shoes to the accompaniment of an upright piano. I couldn’t make out the words, but I know they were inane. As for the music, it was some vile jazz-infected Negroid muck that banged its way into my brain and now won’t come out. Those odious jungle rhythms! They stayed with me as I seemed to descend below the stage and into the depths of the theatre where workmen were excavating so as to put in machinery for a revolving platform for the dancers. (How I knew this was so,
I cannot say.) I saw them stop as they dug and listen for a while. Below the chattering of the stage piano and the clattering of metal-shod feet that battered out the rhythm of their tawdry dance came another sound, darker, deeper, still more primitive than the music above and yet almost, though not quite, in step with it. The sounds were like a boom, an echo from beneath, as if the very earth were responding to the shallow travesties of dark rites from above. I saw the workmen stop, hesitate, wipe their grimy faces, look for a moment with astonished terror at each other, then resume their labour.

  And then it was as if I had descended farther into the earth than they and had entered into a vast space, like a long gallery, barrel-vaulted and illumined by the pale eldritch light emanating from some fungoid growth on the walls. These walls were cunningly built of vast cyclopean blocks of masonry that might have seemed rudely antique, but for the subtle precision with which they were locked together. Moreover, upon them had been carved many runic signs and bas-relief sculptures of figures, monstrous, shambling, and piscine: hideous to behold. Yet I was enthralled by the cunning with which the carver had limned them as if from the life.

  Then I heard the sound as of a thousand marching feet, yet not like the boots of soldiers, nor yet the rhythmic fusillade of those “hoofers” from above. The sound they made was a kind of thousandfold slap as if a myriad great splayed or webbed feet were stamping onto smooth rock through a thin integument of standing water. They seemed to come nearer, and their hastening was a doom-laden terror to me, and as they came they let out cries, piercing and hideous, yet clearly discernible above the monstrous rhythmical din of their approach. One cry in particular was borne in on me.

  “Rghyyeloi fo Xhon! Rghyyeloi fo Xhon!” And it seemed as if I knew by some dreadful instinct what these horrid intonations signified. It was “The Armies of the Night! The Armies of the Night!”

  Nearer they came and nearer, by which time I was half-conscious that I was dreaming and must need shake off the surly bonds of sleep to rid myself of this mounting terror. I felt like a diver who realises belatedly that he has gone too deep and must struggle upwards, almost despairing that he may reach the surface, gulping for air where none exists. I shook the thunder from my brain and gasped. Almost it seemed I was sinking back into that unspeakable subterranean cavern, then with a final lung-tearing, heart-pounding effort I broke the surface of wakefulness and found myself panting and sweating in my narrow bed at 66 College Street, Providence. More than ever does it seem a blessed haven and a refuge.