There is no real social progress. That’s the basic thesis. Inequality is embedded in our species. There will always be struggling masses, propping up an elite. So maybe, the argument goes, in this scientific age, we should formalize all that. There is talk, at a level higher than governments, of perpetuating the Cold War as a means of social control. . . . And better yet, what about drawing down a menace from space itself—a source of unending, undefinable peril, to cement that control for good?
That’s the theory. A quiet war, but an unending one, with them in charge, forever.
And given all that, should I have set off that damn nuke?
Opinion is split. On the one hand, me. On the other hand, all the experts.
The Lovecraft people were up in arms. We were somewhere over the Pacific when the atomic bomb went off. The detonation was visible as a brilliant flash in that strange, eclipse-shadowed sky. Most people thought it was some kind of solar effect. And the crew of the SSRN Seaview saw it, from their station at 48o S, 127o W. Captain Crane’s log reported “massive disturbances” in that part of the deep ocean in the Pacific, after our bomb exploded. Meanwhile, back on land, asylums went crazy as patients all over the world appeared to suffer from simultaneous psychoses, and thousands of sleepers awakened suddenly from the worst nightmares they had ever experienced . . .
But that, I guess, is a story yet to be told.
In the aftermath of the mission I met Peabody’s niece, who she mentioned once. Just a kid, bright as a button, as she said. Jocelyn, she’s called. I think she’ll go far. When you see kids like that, you think there’s hope for humanity yet.
But there’s another eclipse coming. I can’t help but look up at the stars and wonder what is going to happen between now and then.
Next for me, however, is Mars.
Next year I’ll be part of a British-American crew going in search of the crazy Brit who’s been stranded alone up there since 1956. This time I’ll be part of a properly equipped crew. A real expedition. But nobody will know about it. That’s another thing I learned from Peabody—there are more secrets and lies in the world than there is truth. Far more.
Well, soon Old Arkham is going to be a secret too. They’re building a reservoir here, to feed the growing towns, industry. Old Arkham and its blasted heath will be lost beneath the waters, taking its mysteries with it.
An invisible country. Or a mask over the horror. Maybe I’ll come back to see it one day.
But I sure as hell won’t be drinking the water.
EPILOGUE
The Shadow Across 110th Street
AFTER THIRTEEN HOURS, THE power came back on.
One moment, the large hall of Mordecai Vault’s Undertaking Parlor on West 116th Street was lit only by the weak, wavering beams of cop flashlights . . . the next, overheads flickered and buzzed and harsh light filled the room.
She saw bodies—twisted, broken, rent apart, bled-out—strewn around. Men and women. All black. It looked like the whole congregation had been hit. The Harlem Hounfor was the voodoo cathedral of New York City. Damage was done to the sacred space. Bullet holes in the walls, of course. Trestle tables and pews smashed to splinters, with blood and other stuff mixed in. A live goat nuzzled the open chest of a dead man whose face was chalked to look like a skull.
The obeah man. So this was Mordecai Vault.
She knew an autopsy would confirm Brother Vault’s heart was missing. Powerful juju—the heart of a sorcerer. There’d be buyers if it came to auction.
She didn’t believe this was just about that, though.
Along with light came music—drumming, a wind instrument, wave sounds, organ tones. That only lasted a few seconds, until someone found the switches that turned off the bank of tape machines. She was surprised Vault used prerecorded music in rituals. Sign of the times.
“Special Agent Gauge,” said a florid-faced cop.
“Lieutenant Brake,” she acknowledged.
“So, where were you when the lights went out?” he asked.
“At the opera. Macbeth. They say it’s unlucky.”
“I thought you were overdressed for a crime scene.”
Agent Whitney Gauge was still in evening wear—black silk jumpsuit by Valentino, with a deep V cut-out back, sleeveless fitted bodice with bias front draped at the neckline, and cuffed, straight-legged pants pleated and darted into a V-shaped waistline.
The matching jacket that completed the ensemble had got shredded when she wrapped it around her right forearm to take the opportunist’s knife away from him. Walking alone from the abandoned performance to Central Park West, she’d run into a dude who’d most likely been waiting for the power to go out city-wide so he could jump the first woman who passed his alley. Unlucky for him, Mr. Would-Be Rapo drew Whitney— first in her Unarmed Combat Class, and used to far more terrifying infractors than this random mook. She was six foot tall, even without the heels . . . her assailant was five-eight at most.
She took away the knife but let the creep have the jacket, which she told him to keep pressed against his bleeding neck while not moving. She guessed the paramedics would get around to him after approximately fifteen thousand more deserving patients got seen to. It was one of those busy nights. She had taken his driver’s license—what kind of amateur sex offender carries ID while prowling?—and would see about getting Peter Gerard Stallman busted if he was alive at the end of the week. Indeed, if anyone was.
There was an off-chance the Hounfor massacre was the first sign of the coming apocalypse they were always being briefed to expect. Some older agents had been contemplating the end so long she thought they’d welcome it. Otherwise, they’d wasted their careers when they could have been earning citations busting regular heads rather than probing the sort of arcane mysteries no one thanked you for solving. With Nixon still in the White House, Whitney wasn’t especially warmed by the prospect of a presidential medal of anything—so she was happy to stick at the job in comfortable obscurity.
“Our first thought was shoot-out in the dark,” said Brake.
Whitney shook her head. “Uh-uh . . . our vics, the congregation, were the ones with guns. This man here was shot . . . but by mistake, by that woman there . . .”
A concealed .38 pistol with a red chicken design picked out on the grip lay near a dead, middle-aged woman who wore only a thousand-bead necklace and a feathered headdress—she wondered for a moment where the woman had packed her piece. Whitney wasn’t that up on voodoo, but supposed she was a priestess.
The skull-painted corpse was the houngan, the high priest.
From what she knew, the goat had had a lucky escape.
All being normal, this morning should have seen the goat sacrificed and the voodoo worshippers happily exhausted from a night of abandoned dance and licentiousness sacred to Damballah and Erzulie Freda. Instead, something had come in here and killed the whole church.
She and Brake were the only white people in the room, living or dead. The three uniforms on the scene—two men and a woman—were all Negro officers. They were quiet—shocked rather than angry.
The big doors of the hall that served as voodoo temple and undertakers’ chapel were caved in, as if a mammoth had charged through. Part of the front wall was collapsed. Black teak coffins were crushed flat, red plush linings in strips. Maybe fifty or sixty dead.
Only three cops.
Any other time, the scene would be crowded. The 32nd Precinct would have every available uniform here, and call in reinforcements from the 28th. This would be the red ball case to end all red ball cases. But after last night, when city blocks went up in flames and whole streets were looted, the NYPD was spread thin over the whole island.
“They made a movie about the last big blackout,” said Brake. “The one in ’65. With Jerry Lewis. If they make a movie about this one, it won’t be a comedy. It’ll star Boris Karloff.”
“Karloff’s dead,” said Whitney.
“He’s always been dead,” said Brake. “But he com
es back. You and me, we know that stuff ain’t just the movies. That stuff happens.”
She looked around the room.
“These folks aren’t coming back. Not even as zombies. The murder was spiritual as well as physical. Brother Vault’s gone. His followers obliterated. No second chances. No return from the grave.”
Brake headed the NYPD’s Cults Unit. Whitney had worked with him before. When the yippies tried to levitate Cleopatra’s Needle by joining hands and chanting Beatles songs around it, they’d broken the circle before anyone had a chance to see whether the trick might work.
“Was this a crime of opportunity?” she asked. “I ran into one of those last night—more than one. Some sickos just mull it over and wait for the darkness before acting out their greasy fantasies.”
Brake shrugged.
“That’s what the local cops thought. Lots of scores got settled last night. But it didn’t only happen here. So far as we can put it together, two minutes after the lights went out—and ConEd still haven’t told the Mayor why that happened, and why the phones went down, too—something came in here and laid the big hurt on Brother Vault and his followers. At the same exact time, all over the city, others got it the same way. The Temple of the Seven Golden Fists in Chinatown—none of their chopsocky helped keep out whatever it was. In the Village, the Children of Aquarius were torn to pieces. Montresor Mountmain’s Chapel of Satan in Hell’s Kitchen is up in flames. The penthouse of the Pyramid Building on Wall Street was sheared off, taking the Financial Wizards with it. The golem sweatshop in the Garment District is a mess of writhing clay—the dybbuk who ran the place drowned in it. We could wind up the Cults Unit tomorrow. Our whole damn Watch List is out of business.”
“But you won’t . . .”
“Nature abhors a vacuum. Especially a spiritual vacuum. What was done last night just made a hole in water—more water will rush in. This was a power play. A night of long knives. Someone was behind it—not just the mindless things let loose here and at the other places—but someone with a brain and an idea and a game-plan.”
The cop was right.
Something was slouching toward Manhattan to be born.
“What about the Esoteric Order of Dagon?” she asked.
Brake looked like he had a sour taste in his mouth. “That’s an old name. We’ve got files on them, but they’ve been off the scene since before there was a Cults Unit. Your Bureau pretty much shut them down in the ’40s, I heard. Here in Harlem, a wealthy colored man called John Bronze went to war with the Esoteric Order. He was one of those vigilantes we’re not supposed to approve of. Son of a genius inventor and a seven-foot-tall Waziri warrior princess. Had a bunch of misfit pals. A jazzman who could call-up spirits with his horn. A heavyweight champ raised from the dead. A snake dancer, Nubia Dusk. Bronze wound up marrying her. All shudder-pulp stuff.”
Whitney knew all about Mr. Bronze. The Bureau had a fat file on him. And she knew who was running his family business these days. She was hardly ever off magazine covers . . .
“You should check all the old places the Esoteric Order of Dagon hung its shingle. They were big once. They may still be big, but in new packaging. I’ll have a list of affiliates teletyped over. They tie in with the Olde Fellowes, Starry Wisdom, GEIST, and one or two of those white supremacist science fiction fan groups. All bastards under their pointy hoods. We hear whispers that the Esoteric Order is back. My guess is they’ll have active premises in the city. Uptown and down. And if none of them got this treatment, then . . . well, then we’ll have something interesting to chew over.”
“Is all this your case, Special Agent?”
“Do you request help, Lieutenant? We’re like vampires, you know. You have to invite us in . . .”
“. . . and put up with you never leaving?”
Whitney shrugged. Her shoulders ached. Her feet hurt too.
She’d walked practically the length of Manhattan in heels.
What was the collective noun for mass murders? She didn’t really want to know.
“Lieutenant, ma’am . . .”
It was the woman officer. Her badge gave her name as Terrell.
She was hesitant about speaking up. Whitney could guess why. Not many women on the NYPD. Not many black women among them. Even in Harlem, Terrell would be stuck with the sort of things male cops thought female officers were for—holding hands, fetching coffee, smiling at fumbled passes, typing detectives’ reports for them. Only on a day when everyone with a badge—including the station janitor—was out on the streets would Terrell be padding around a room full of bloody dead folk.
“What is it, Officer?” Whitney asked.
“That’s not Brother Vault,” said the woman.
Brake looked again at the dead man with the skull-paint. A crushed top hat lay under his shaved head. Brake peered closer, but didn’t touch the corpse.
“It looks like him,” he said.
“Uh huh,” said Terrell. “It’s his cousin. Brother Vault is over there, with his head caved in. He wasn’t houngan no more. There’s been a succession . . .”
“And you know this because . . .?”
“Because I live in Harlem, Lieutenant. Everybody knows there’s been a changing.”
Whitney looked at Brake, who showed empty hands.
“The Cults Unit’s stretched at the best of times,” he said. “We don’t get federal funding. Or opera tickets, unlucky or no. Last we took a census, Mordecai Vault was Heap Big Voodoo Chief. The 32nd know it’s their job to pass on intelligence like this.”
Whitney noticed Terrell’s lips tightening.
“Did you have a special reason for pointing out our mistake, officer?” she asked. “Do you know who that is?”
Terrell nodded, solemnly.
“Sebastian Cutter. Brother Cutter.”
Whitney looked again at the dead man.
“A short reign as voodoo king, then?”
“Sure enough,” said Terrell. “But that ain’t what you need to know about Brother Cutter. You need to know who he’s married to . . . separated from, but still married to. Then you need to hide, because she’s going to take this bad . . . and this place, this terrible place, won’t be the worst we see this week. Before it’s over, we’ll look back at this and think it was . . . nothing.”
The cop spoke evenly, as if giving evidence—but she was scared, and also a little excited. Some folks waited with an eagerness they could never admit to themselves for city-wide power cuts . . . for a woman walking by an alley alone . . . for a time-locked bank strongroom to pop open when the clocks shut down . . . for rain of fire on Central Park . . . for tentacled star-beasts of the Apocalypse in Times Square.
Brake was perplexed.
“Okay, Terrell, I’ll bite," he said. “Who is—who was—this dead guy married to?”
Terrell smiled, like a cultist naming the angel who was coming to smite the wicked and drown the world in blood.
“Her," Terrell said, looking past Whitney and Brake at the smashed-in door.
A woman—tall enough to look down on Whitney, heels or no—stood there, framed as if for a magazine cover. As an Olympic decathlete, fashion model, political activist, and Top 40 recording star, she’d been on more newsstands than Watergate and the Moon landings put together. Her leopard-skin wrap didn’t quite conceal the red leather shoulder holsters that held her father’s famous eleven-shot bronzed automatics. Her crimson dress was slashed to the navel and thigh, belted with gold links, which matched her necklace and nose-stud. Her spherical Afro was a giant black dandelion clock around the face of an African goddess. Her emerald eyes were coldly furious.
“. . . Nefertiti Bronze.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Claiborne Hancock, Iris Blasi, Katie McGuire, Michael Fusco-Straub, Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Douglas Klauba, Lisa Morton, and Michael Marshall Smith.
“Prologue: Howard’s Way” copyright © 2017 by Angela Slatter.
“Shadows Over Inns
mouth” copyright © 2017 by Brian Hodge.
“Ec’h-pi-el” copyright © 2017 by Reggie Oliver.
“The Armies of the Night” copyright © 2017 by Reggie Oliver.
“The Olde Fellowes” copyright © 2017 by Michael Marshall Smith.
“Randolph Carter, Secret Agent” copyright © 2017 by Steve Rasnic Tem.
“The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of . . .” copyright © 2017 by Peter Atkins.
“Junior G-Men vs. the Whisperers in Darkness” copyright © 2017 by Richard Gavin.
“At the Hills of Hollywood” copyright © 2017 by Jay Russell.
“Arkham House on Haunted Hill” copyright © 2017 by Thana Niveau.
“The Color Out in Space” copyright © 2017 by Stephen Baxter.
“Epilogue: The Shadow Across 110th Street” copyright © 2017 by Kim Newman.
STEPHEN JONES was born in London, England, just across the River Thames from where his hapless namesake met a grisly fate in Hazel Heald’s story “The Horror in the Museum.” A Hugo Award nominee, he is the winner of four World Fantasy Awards, three International Horror Guild Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, twenty-one British Fantasy Awards, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Horror Association. One of Britain’s most acclaimed horror and dark fantasy writers and editors, he has more than 145 books to his credit, including Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, and Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth; H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror (with Dave Carson), H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, Hallowe’en in a Suburb & Others: The Complete Poems from Weird Tales, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, and Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre, along with the Zombie Apocalypse! series, and twenty-eight volumes of Best New Horror. You can visit his web site at www.stephenjoneseditor.com or follow him on Facebook at Stephen Jones-Editor.
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