Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  Either way, the danger had passed for now. He’d done his job, even though very few people would ever know it. And his wife never would.

  As he got out of the Buick outside the hotel, he glanced up at the windows of the apartment, looking forward very much to being inside.

  The lights were on in there. On brightly.

  All of them.

  “No,” Carl said. “No no no.”

  He lunged back into the car to grab the Colt he kept hidden under papers in the glove compartment. This prevented him from seeing the two men converging rapidly upon him until it was too late.

  Jimmy knocked him to the ground with one blow to the temple from a billy club.

  As Carl collapsed into the gutter onto his back, staring uncomprehendingly upward, Max Fleming’s crooked smile appeared above him.

  “The Olde Fellowes send their regards,” he said. Then he shot Carl in the face.

  The two men dragged the body a few yards along the street and stowed it in the trunk of Jimmy’s car.

  “A good job well done,” Max said, after he’d closed it again. “And our reward beckons. Make sure the boy watches, eh? Our masters are very fond of that kind of suffering.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. Play your part, and I’ll try not to break the little wife too badly before you’ve had the chance to enjoy some fun and games with her too.”

  In the trunk, in the dark, the last part of Carl heard the sound of their words but thankfully could not understand them. As the final lights went out in his mind, like stars obscured behind a black cloud that would never go away, he sensed the approach of the shadow-things that live in the void beyond, their dread fingers and howls, as they came to claim him at last.

  But sometimes the universe is kind, and he died just in time.

  Standing across the street, well back in shadow, Michelle Unger watched the two men stroll up the path toward the entrance to the McCray. Tears rolled slowly down both cheeks, and her jaw was clenched.

  Part of her wished that some intuition, a quiet voice inside, hadn’t suddenly told her that Carl was late, very late, too late, and she hadn’t bundled up the child half an hour before, and left the apartment. This part of her wished she was standing behind the door inside the apartment, holding the big knife she’d used to slice the meatloaf, a chunk of which— cold now, cold forever—still sat on a plate on the counter.

  But she knew Carl would not have wanted it that way.

  “What are we doing, Mommy? Why are we out here?” Carl Jr. had not been able to see what had happened on the other side of his father’s car. A small mercy.

  Michelle wiped her face. “We have to go now.”

  “Why? Where’s Dad?”

  “He . . . he had to go somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere a long way away.”

  “Is that where we’re going?”

  “No. Not that far. But we need to leave right now.”

  “Who were those men?”

  “Bad men. Working for very bad people. And one day, when you’re older, do you know what you’re going to do?”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to find those people and you’re going to kill them.”

  “But killing’s wrong.”

  “Not always.”

  She put her arm around her son’s shoulders and hurried him away into the darkness.

  FIVE

  Randolph Carter, Secret Agent

  SHE WAS EXPLORING AN underwater cavern. Despite the depth, she wore no equipment other than goggles. Somehow her lungs had mutated— she believed she might stay down for hours. But there were things in the cavern beyond what she could see, things that buzzed and flapped and let her know she had no business there. And yet she continued to swim in their direction, into warmer water, into fire. And then the fire alarm went off, and both rock and sea began to fracture.

  Lieutenant Dorothy Williams, Army Nurse Corps, bolted awake. She groped around for her alarm clock, which she always kept on the other pillow, then realized it was the phone ringing. She reached up to the vanity and grabbed it off the receiver. “What is it?”

  There was a loud buzzing and her anxiety climbed. Then the operator came on. “Miss, you have a phone call from Butler Hospital for the Insane. Doctor Andrews.”

  “Put him through.” Her eyes found the clock, still sound asleep on its pillow. Three o’clock, middle of the night. The same time in Providence. She recalled small bits of the dream, flowing shadows with uncommon shapes on undersea walls. Randolph had always offered to teach her how to remember more of her dreams. Once again she was grateful she’d declined.

  The line crackled at the same time lightning struck outside her window, followed by a burning spread of light through the clouds. “Dorothy? What the hell is going on down there? Our special patients are climbing the walls! Where’s Carter?”

  “I . . . he should be asleep.” She could hear screaming in the background. And Daniel, she’d known him since college, and she’d never heard him raise his voice this way before. There was a sudden loud slapping noise, a series of dull thuds. She remembered the three patients strapped into their beds somewhere in the basement of that vast facility, the dull yellow-tiled walls that never looked quite clean.

  “Strap it down! Strap it down!” Was that high-pitched voice really Daniel’s? Then, to Dorothy, “You should be watching Carter every minute! Wasn’t that what you recommended? They should listen to you—you’re the trauma expert there!”

  “He’s . . . he’s . . .” She’d started to say a grown boy, but fortunately the line went dead. The walls of her bedroom were awash in waves of light.

  Minutes later she was in her robe and racing down the stairs. She could see Randolph’s door partway open below her, the light on. She wasn’t surprised. He was always up late. It was Sunday. They’d had an early dinner together and she’d consented to keep him company while he listened to The Shadow. She cared little for the program but she did admire Orson Welles.

  “Randolph? There was a call from the hospital. Your early warning system—apparently the three have detected something. Daniel is beside himself!”

  The room was in shambles, but then Randolph’s quarters were always in disarray: open books everywhere, papers spread across the floor, many full of the strange chirography he’d adapted for his alien appendages, food left out and darkening, gathering dust. But tonight was worse. Furniture had been shoved out of place, lamps and a bookcase upended, broken glass and tiny dark bits scattered across the floor, and there Carter was spread across his shabby burgundy brocade couch, half-dressed in shredded sleepwear. One arm was exposed and bleeding. A partially filled glass syringe lay on the rug. Also on the floor nearby was that comic book he’d bought recently, Action Comics, with the red-caped figure lifting a car over his head. And a large silver key she’d never seen before: tarnished and heavily inscribed.

  “Randolph!” She ran up to the couch and started to bend over him, then stopped, holding her distance, reluctant to touch. He’d changed. But of course he was changed when she’d first met him, when General Craig had insisted that she examine him, interview him. It was supposedly her evaluation that would determine whether he would be given his new role, although she’d quickly decided that had been a bit of a ruse. J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t about to lose Carter—he would use him however he could. He’d simply wanted some idea as to what he was actually letting himself in for.

  When she’d first met her new charge she’d thought there’d been some kind of mistake. They’d told her he’d returned to the Dreamscape several times in order to undo the changes to his body. But they’d presented her with a child, a teenaged boy certainly no older than fifteen. He was short and slight, the initial dark hairs of puberty just beginning to pattern his oh-so-pale skin. When she’d asked him to stand he’d wavered as if he might faint. His nervousness had been palpable. He’d been quite modest, but as she’d slowly coaxed him out of hi
s robe she discovered his deformities: The flesh on the right-side of the scalp burnt and melted, with similar warping and melting down that side of the face, around the neck and beneath both arms. A bronze metal eye patch had been fused to the skin over the right eye, and when she’d asked him what had happened there he’d said his first words to her: “It covers Zkauba’s eye, and must not be removed.” It had been the voice of a much older man, but articulated with some difficulty, as if the speech organs had been damaged, and the ability to speak relearned.

  But none of that had prepared her for undoing the hefty canvas mittens that covered his forearms, and gazing at the long, clacking black claws that were his hands.

  Those black claws were now more distinctly pronounced on Carter’s right side—they were much larger than they had been before, sharper, and were currently partially embedded in the ripped cushion beneath him. But the left hand had been restored almost to a kind of normalcy: it at least resembled a human hand, with five fingers (although two of those appeared to possess an additional joint), which were curled into a painful-looking gesture. His mouth was frozen open in a silent scream. She thought he might be dead, or close to it.

  She turned around and raced to the small liquor cabinet by the door, careful not to step on the glass, or these dark bits—were they dead insects?—in her slippers. She heard a faint scratching and saw movement on the wall above the cabinet and on the other walls and the ceiling. She glanced at this distraction: long lines of insects flowing across the wallpaper—flies, cockroaches, a variety of beetles—travelling in precise, needlepoint-like patterns. She jerked open the cabinet and retrieved the case with the syringe and the little red bottle, brought it back to Randolph, drained the bottle and plunged the contents into his shriveled belly. She had no idea what the bottle contained. Randolph had simply told her what to do if she ever found him this way.

  There was a pause as the insect sounds seemed to multiply a hundred-fold and then Randolph jerked, limbs convulsing as he rolled off the couch and crashed to the floor. When she knelt beside him he grabbed her arm. “Was it him?” he said, his uncovered eye fixed and bloodshot. “Did he come through?”

  “You’re an idiot! We’ve all been counting on you!” Dorothy tried to calm herself down. She wasn’t being professional. She sat down in a chair by the parlor window, watching for their car. She looked down at the hem of her uniform skirt, pulled on it, made adjustments to her stockings. Randolph, now in manic mode, paced the room, occasionally glancing at the small line of remaining insects as they marched across the wall, tracing drunken loops before disappearing into a crack in the baseboard.

  “I deserve everything you might want to say, lieutenant.” He was swallowed up in his outfit: oversized gray fedora and flopping topcoat. She could only see part of his scarred face and thin hand protruding. A hastily chosen yellow pillowcase covered his enlarged claw. When he turned, she noticed the rolled up comic book in his coat pocket. “But I thought a brief trip might . . . restore me to better functionality. And I’m much . . . much more intelligent when I am in the Dreamscape, I . . . swear. I thought perhaps I could do something from that side before slipping back through, and prevent future incursions. I thought it would make up for some of the damage I’ve caused with my previous trips.”

  “You should have asked, or at least told someone.”

  “But you would have said no, and then I would have had to do it anyway.”

  They were an adult man’s words delivered through the somewhat whiny tones of an awkward and embarrassed teenager. Dorothy wasn’t sure she would ever become accustomed to that. “We’ll just have to assess the damage, and do whatever we must do.”

  “Perhaps there were no dangerous consequences this time. Perhaps I created but a small leak.” He gestured toward the wall. “This insect activity may be a reflection of that.” He looked pathetically eager for her to agree with him.

  “Perhaps. But Doctor Andrews’s patients—they were quite upset,” she said. He turned away from her and gazed at the insects again. “Randolph, you said, ‘did he come through.’ What did you mean by that? Who is ‘he’?”

  He didn’t answer at first. Then he turned around. “I don’t know. I have no memory of saying those words. I may have been referring to some other version of myself. There are thousands of Randolph Carters, you see, all manifestations of some greater being.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was being deceptive or not. He rambled on about his personal cosmology and the history of his “cosmic journeys” all the time. She’d grown a little weary of it—it didn’t solve anything. Unexplained phenomena still occurred. Strange creatures still had to be tracked down. The push-bell rang. It was their driver.

  “I have your car,” the young soldier said. He stared at Carter for a moment, and then seemed grateful to turn his attention to her. He looked at her uniform. “Miss.”

  “She’s a lieutenant, you know,” Randolph said, sounding offended.

  “Army Nurse Corps, Rand . . . Mr. Carter. The private here is correct. They call us Miss.”

  Randolph snorted. “But your degrees . . .”

  “We should hurry,” she replied, and ushered him through the door.

  In the car on the way to the Washington Monument she scolded the driver for staring too much at Carter through his rearview mirror. It was a problem—no one wanted to take this disabled-looking teenage boy seriously. And Carter hesitated to deliver orders directly. He either communicated through her or by speaking generally to a group, looking somewhere over their heads, to make his wishes known.

  There was still lightning, and an accompanying, hollow-sounding thunder. It lent a peculiar pastel glow to the smoky fog filling the D.C. streets. The fog seemed strangely active, fingers of it moving restlessly, finding new ways into alleys and onto porches, under bridges and into vacant buildings. And yet there was almost no breeze to account for such movement. Windows were dark and the streets were devoid of traffic, the sidewalks empty of people. Of course it wasn’t even 4:00 a.m. yet, but this was Washington, the nation’s capital. There were always people about.

  Much of the sidewalks, the small lawns, were glossed over with a thin coat of frost, but it was summer, certainly the wrong time of year. She noticed glimmers of ice in some of the trees.

  Carter appeared to have reverted a bit during their brief time in the car. A serious rash had developed over his exposed skin, perhaps a sign that he was much more distressed than he wanted to let on. Or was it contamination? Her hands worried at the clasp on her bag. It wasn’t much larger than a purse, but it carried everything necessary. She started to open it and then closed it again.

  He looked at her and she slid the bag behind her on the seat. He looked slightly desperate. “Lieutenant, how bad is it, do you suppose?”

  “Randolph, we’ll soon see. I’m sure they’re monitoring things at headquarters.”

  “Has there been any further progress in the Hindenburg investigation?”

  “They think almost surely it was a gas leak, and a spark—”

  “But they can’t be sure. And Miss Earhart, any word on her and Noonan?”

  “None so far. But, Randolph, not every tragedy in the world has something to do with a breach into the Dreamscape. There is such a thing as a coincidence”’

  “You find that particular word reassuring, Lieutenant. I do not. Has Mr. Hughes answered any of my communications?”

  “He has not.”

  “Perhaps President Roosevelt would care to smooth the way for us. A phone call from him might make Hughes more cooperative. Roosevelt is in his second term now—what has he done for us? Has he even been informed as to how bad things might become?”

  “Mister Hoover decides what the president should know. The president is busy with things overseas. Germany annexed Austria only a few months ago—were you aware of that?”

  “Vaguely,” Carter replied, staring out the car window at the sky. “War is inevitable. Roosevelt must know that. I drea
m about it all the time. What if the Nazis have captured, or diverted, one of these, these . . . visitors?” He had straightened up, rolled down the window to look more intently at the sky.

  “Randolph, what are you seeing?” She pressed her face against the glass. A vague but expansive curtain of ever-changing red and green and blue light filled the sky.

  “In late January a brilliant aurora borealis described variously as ‘a curtain of fire’ and a ‘blood-red beam of light’ startled people across Europe, lieutenant. It was visible as far south as Gibraltar. If you check the records, I think you will discover we had a rather serious visitor from the Dreamscape around that time.”

  Once within the Monument, a private elevator took them down to the offices of the Human Protection League. Just inside the empty reception area they were met by FBI Agent Miles, Nathan Brady’s direct representative. He stuck out his hand. Randolph failed to notice. Dorothy pretended not to. Agent Miles’s broad face and flaky skin made him look vaguely ichthyoid. He also had a strangely off-putting odor. Dorothy didn’t like touching him.

  Miles put his hand away and stared at Randolph’s face, then at the pillowcase, then at the somewhat restored hand. He looked questioningly at Dorothy. Randolph wouldn’t look at him, but continued on into the interior offices while Dorothy stayed back. “Do we know if anything actually came through?” she asked. “I don’t want to upset him.”

  “Upset him? You people. What did he do this time?”

  Dorothy hesitated, but there was no point in hiding things. “He made a visit. A brief one, he says. He thought he was making the situation better.”

  “He’syour charge, miss. You should be watching him better.”

  “I’m mainly his assistant, Agent. I’m not really his babysitter. I understand my job. Speaking of, has your team found Lovecraft’s diary yet?”