I am Providence

by Nick Mamatas

  And a few minutes later, also on Facebook, he sent me a private message: “Hey P, I don’t even care about the bust issue. It’s a stupid idea to make a statue anyway. Do you want to be a part of my next project—a collection of stories about Arkham, Massachusetts?”

  Of course I said, “Sure,” but things got in the way and I never managed to get my story done. By “things” of course I mean my couch and Internet porn and hunger pangs.

  You would think I would have instantly cottoned to the idea that Arkham was the Cudmore anthology, except that to really understand Lovecraftiana, one has to understand just how much material is produced each year. Dozens of anthologies, hundreds of short stories, a handful of novels, a bunch of games and art, roomfuls of useless verse, and hard drives packed with unlistenable “dark” music. In any given month, there’s something with the word Arkham on it being produced. Arkham may well be the most written-about fictional city in the world. What helped is that outside of some 17th century homes, and the college, and the river, and the sanitarium, it was a blank slate. So, why not drop Sherlock Holmes down in Arkham, or have Einstein visit Miskatonic University to give an anachronistic lecture on dark matter, or gift its main street with a number of goth night clubs, or host a gang war between the Crips and the Bloods there?

  I didn’t realize that Arkham was Cudmore’s work until the morning shift in the morgue, when they turned him over to look at the blow to the back of his head that had knocked him out. Someone had done some pretty perfect slicing on his back. The medical examiner referred to it as “scarification, possibly ritualistic,” but when he described the rectangular patches that had been sliced from Cudmore’s back, I knew almost everything.

  Yes, for all the good it does me.

  A great big piece of foolscap paper is called a folio. In the olden times, folios were books made from these great big pieces of paper. Fold them into fours, that’s a quarto. Fold them into eights, that’s an octavo. I’m oversimplifying, and I don’t even think modern printers work the way I just described, but the terms stuck. Anyway, an octavo edition is generally a pretty small book. A pocket dictionary, for example. I never picked up and read Arkham as the horror small press rule of thumb is this—the fancier the physical object, the worse the actual text between the covers—but the case was small and the book thus even smaller. Arkham was Cudmore’s project, and made from the skin off his back.

  So who removed the skin for him?

  He’s right next to me, dead as I am. Deader, perhaps, as his frontal lobe took a beating, as did his little lizard hindbrain. Is he trapped like me, waiting for the last chemical reactions to finally fizzle out? Is he still in there, but at severely reduced circumstances, crying like a child, without either reason or ruthless instinct? I suppose that will be me soon enough. There’s no reason to suspect my brain will turn off like a light switch. More like a sponge drying in the sun.

  A Lovecraftian story, a strange tale, a plain old ghost story, we read them for any number of reasons, but there’s one obvious one—we get to indulge the fantasy that there is something beyond death. If only there were. Even if the soul were nothing but a low-power radio transmitter and receiver, I could be chatting right now with my old frenemy Cudmore, he of the asparagus-shaped head. Fiction tells us about survival after death, but also of community after death. We believe it too—we make sure mama is buried next to papa when she passes, we spread the ashes of our dear dog over the city park, even though it’ll all just be washed away in a week by the rains.

  We visit Swan Point and try to find a trace of the real Lovecraft there, though he is ninety years gone.

  There’s nothing like that. I can tell. I am dead enough to know. It’s like being the only person in a room adjacent to an entirely empty room. I don’t have to peek in to know what’s on the other side. I have other senses, the senses only the dead have, and I know whose are better as the dead know. I know that there is something going on in what’s left of Cudmore’s head, but what it is I don’t know. There is no way I can reach out to that little flickering light in his tenderized brain, but if I were a merciful person I’d reach over and snuff it out between my fingers.

  That wouldn’t even make me a murderer. It would be doing Cudmore a favor.

  Death, it changes you.

  I have become gossip. I’m considered the more important nerd by the police; Cudmore is just a man-shaped clue as to the facts and perpetrator of my demise, and this despite the fact that Cudmore has money, has friends, has a poor old mother who flew up the Eastern Seaboard to identify him and sign for his belongings—she is gossip too, as she has a similarly malformed head, which the medical examiners snickered over after she left, in tears. Ah, it’s not as though she could have cried any more if they called her names and stuck their tongues out at her.

  I hate myself and I hate that the life beyond death is nothing but a small and shrinking echo chamber in my own brain, but I wouldn’t wish being a police medical examiner on anyone, not knowing what I know now. Imagine a thirty-year career of guffawing and sneering at corpses, only to find out afterward that while you cut them open or fondled their genitals or mocked their loved ones that some of them could hear you. Seventy-two hours in hell, knowing you deserved it.

  Tracy killed Cudmore. She confessed to it. Or, should I say this: Chloe confessed to killing Cudmore in order to keep her master, Ms. Phantasia, from being accused of it. Which isn’t to say that Ms. Phantasia killed Cudmore, is it? Perhaps he was just worried about being found guilty for the crime of looking like a vampiric drag queen in a town where New England liberalism only goes so far.

  The police have also decided that Cudmore killed me, because he’s into skin, and the slicing of it off bodies. Circumstantial evidence, especially given that Cudmore sure as fuck didn’t reach around his own back to slice off the covers for the five-unit run of Arkham.

  Cudmore died with his eyes closed. The last thing he recalls is probably a few blades of grass, maybe a leaf, coming right at him. I died with eyes wide open, the lids torn from them along with the rest of my visage. Seeing too much is almost as bad as seeing nothing, but only almost. Was it Cudmore, was it Cudmore?

  I had taken the steps down to the basement, near the fitness room, the pool, and the laundry. When I was alive, I was sure that nothing was worse than having to ride an elevator with a bunch of nerds. They’re all so self-conscious that they strike up conversations, make jokes (“Let’s press all the buttons!”), they sing songs about the elevator. Of course, someone would ask what was in my box.

  Then what happened? Where was I? In the basement, by the laundry. The buyer was initially anonymous. I have a reputation as someone to tell a secret to…if you want everyone to know about it. Arkham was hot property as its provenance was obscure, and folks worried that the tattoos on the cover would one day be traced back to some murdered stripper or other. I wasn’t to expect anyone in particular until I got here.

  I thought the deal was that nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars would be enough to keep my mouth shut. The killer had other plans with which to keep me quiet, obviously.

  Either I was early, or the killer was late. God, I hope the killer was late. What could be more humiliating than having to wait around to be murdered? Who was it, who was it? It’s just a shadow to me, though everything else in the room in my mind’s eye is fairly clear. White washer/dryers in vertical stacks against both walls. A flickering fluorescent light. A vending machine for soaps and a couple of carts. Everything smelled like chemicals and superheated human sweat. The door behind me opened.

  It was David Cob who gave me the details of the sale at his party. Was he there, in the laundry room? Some large shadowy figure was, but virtually everyone at the Tentacular everyone is large, except Cudmore. Ranger is a pretty large and tall guy. Phantasia wears those giant boots. Fucking Norman, a giant in every direction. Even Bhanushali is a husky sort, though she is so short. She could never loom over me, despite my own height b
eing just average.

  Hey, Asparagus Head! Who killed me? Did you set me up with that copy of Arkham? If only there were a community of the dead. There would be no reason to keep secrets anymore. Nothing can harm us now. Like I used to joke—if I could choose my own epitaph, it would be “Kill Me If You Can.”

  A community of the dead would be composed of excellent communicators. How many times have you kept from saying something to keep from harm, or have blurted out something stupid just to strike at someone first, before they could get to you? No need to do that, here in the land of the dead. If only I could talk to my old pal Cudmore, compare notes. We could figure out who killed him for real too. It surely wasn’t Tracy—she just had one of her little obsessive weirdo spasms and decided to tie herself to Phantasia, and the Tentacular, and even my death forever by inserting herself into it somehow. Now she’ll be in the papers, like a Manson girl or something, and there will be fan websites about her, and some post-riot grrl hardcore bands will name themselves after her, and she’ll be a mugshot forever, never growing older, never owning more than six things.

  Oh, Cudmore, were you my final stalker? Did you know him? Got any clues? What did you think when they rolled you in here and then immediately started talking about me? How does it feel, being a footnote in my far more interesting murder, what with my missing face and dozens of potential suspects, while you’ve been all wrapped up with a sweet little confession?

  Damn, son, if your head had been shaped like mine, you might just be alive today.

  One thing we had in common, Asparagus Head, was our love of classic B-cinema. “X”—The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, with Ray Milland, directed by Roger Corman? An essential film for anyone interested in science fiction, existentialism, and cheesy gimmicks. Specterama! At the end, Milland can see everything, the whole universe, which is mostly great swirling darknesses and in the center a cosmic eye staring down at all, and so he plucks out his own eyes. And remember how at one late-night screening in some hotel or other, we all shouted that apocryphal final line, “I can still see!”

  That’s what death is like. Except that I have a little blind spot right at the time of my death. But like Milland in that movie, my vision is getting better and better. I’m afraid though, that the moment I remember exactly what happened, I’ll cease to exist. This is one last cogitation, one last thought, before the brain surrenders. I won’t need to gouge out my eyes—I can’t do so anyway—my brain will gouge itself out.

  So, what are you thinking, Cudmore, if you are thinking? Any regrets? Who played you? Did you ever like me? I presume you knew that there’s no way you’d get Arkham back in your hands, even if you lived. Maybe it was a real present after all. Then they go to you, or maybe you just let it slip that I had a copy, and then the killer decided to kill you too so you wouldn’t ID him. Or her.

  I suppose this extended moment of consciousness has me hopeful, despite it all. Is this three days in Hades, like Jesus Christ on the cross? Will I continue to exist? Is Hell me here with nobody to talk to but Cudmore, or me here with nobody to talk to, not even Cudmore?

  I can’t wait to finally, actually die.

  14. The Other Gods

  “Why shouldn’t I bury you deep?” Detective Amato asked, without looking up from his keyboard. He was a two-finger typist, and his tongue poked out of his mouth as he worked.

  “Lawyer,” Colleen said. She was allowed the privilege of sitting at Amato’s desk rather than an interrogation room, and wasn’t even cuffed. He was the big baby in the suit she had seen around the hotel a couple of times.

  “Wrong answer,” Amato said. Now he looked up. “That’s why I should bury you deep. You can have a lawyer by, I dunno, Tuesday, maybe? And forget that comfy bench outside—we’ll put you in the holding cell with the other ladies if you want to play lawyer. We got you for a violation. You could go now, if you cooperate. I want to know about the corpses downstairs, I want to know what the hell is going on in that hotel.”

  “Why haven’t I met you before?” Colleen asked. “It’s all been uniformed cops and revolving door arrests.”

  “You weren’t at the scene, standing over…” He took off his glasses and squinted at the monitor, “Panossian, with a scalpel, or…Cudmore, with a rock. I can’t be everywhere at once, and frankly until the second body turned up we didn’t think the murder had anything to do with…” Another squint. “The Lovecrafters.”

  “Lovecraftians.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Amato snapped. He glared at Colleen for a moment, and then quickly typed something, jabbing the backspace bar a few times, and then filling in the word while muttering to himself, “Love. Craft. Ee. Uhns.”

  What kind of cop was Amato? Colleen was surprised, and appalled. He looked like a living TV prank, as if Panossian would show up any second, carrying his face in his hands. Then Amato, wearing his father’s comically oversized dress shirt and tie, would drop the act and smile his big baby-face smile and say “Gotcha!” He was maybe thirty, or a very well-preserved forty, thin with close-cropped black hair cut into a toddler’s bangs. No wedding ring, and no personal effects on his desk save a Boston Red Sox schedule pinned to a wall, and a plastic wrapper from a vending machine Danish crumpled into a ball by his mouse.

  “Listen, don’t be a fucking smartass,” he said. Colleen just looked at him. She had things to say—It’s okay, I won’t tell the teacher you said bad words immediately popped into her head—but she kept them to herself. “I spent a lot of time with the FBI, trying to determine if this was a serial murder. Ritualistic, a marginalized victim, unusual circumstances, but nothing came up. Then this second murder, entirely different, perhaps even just an assault gone wrong. Hit someone with a rock and kill him, a good lawyer can plead it down to manslaughter.”

  “Are you supposed to tell me all this stuff?” Colleen said. Amato twisted his face to shout again, but then just raised a finger to his lips and shushed her.

  “I know you’ve been sneaking around, ‘Buffy,’” he said. “And I know that like most people who sneak around, trying to solve a crime, you’ve probably come across something interesting, and like most people who sneak around trying to solve a crime you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re going to get hurt, or hurt someone. You might end up taking up a third space in our morgue. But you know something. So, tell me what you know.”

  “I know...” Colleen started. “That Panossian was not well-liked. He liked to wind people up. He was an okay writer, so people put up with him to a certain extent. And, if I’m honest, I know that virtually everyone else I met this weekend has some kind of strange personality problem or other. My guess is that whoever has the book, or wanted the book, is the murderer.”

  “You mean the book with a cover made from the skin of Victim Number Two, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Well...” Colleen stopped. Amato nodded, like one might to a child struggling to remember the letters after L-M-N-O-P. “The book is the connection. Panossian had the book with him; then it was gone when his body was found.”

  “Could someone have found the book and the body, and decided to take the book and not mention the body to anyone?” Amato said. “Let’s just say we found a lot of DNA right outside the laundry room...” He looked back at his computer monitor. “Of course, he was found right outside a laundry room.”

  “I suppose that is possible,” Colleen said.

  “Great, we agree. So ignore the book for now. Who wants to kill Panossian?”

  “I don’t know if anyone at the Summer Tentacular is capable of murder, really,” Colleen said. “Not unless it’s about the book. I can imagine someone killing for a priceless, rare object, and even trying to make another one with Panossian’s own skin, but—”

  “Who?” Amato said.

  “Who...would kill for the book?”

  “That’s right,” Amato said. “I’m talking motive only. Forget how they might have hidden the book, or if they were a
round to kill Charles Cudmore, just think: based on what you know of the men and women in your little subculture, from your online interactions with them, their creepy horror novels, what they said at your conference this weekend, who is highly interested in a book made from human flesh?”

  “I don’t know, I mean...” Colleen said.

  Amato looked through his Danish wrapper for any spare crumbs, and, finding one, plucked it into his mouth. “Funny. One of our officers was at a panel, one on the topic of women, and she reported that there was a lengthy digression about skin-bound books by...” Another squint, another click of a mouse. “A guy named Harry Chandler. Sounds like crime fiction!”

  “Hiram,” Colleen said.

  “Gotcha,” Amato said. “Hiram Chandler, who you were later found with, not far from where Cudmore was found dead, stalking some other attendees of your conference, who were themselves engaging in shenanigans to...dig up a cat named...Jesus?”

  Amato glanced over at Colleen, but she wouldn’t correct him on the cat’s name. He winked at her.

  “So, you see my problem, don’t you? At best you’re flailing around, trying to determine who killed your friend, but you don’t even keep notes and so crucial facts slip your mind. So, you associate with an obvious person of interest, making it more difficult for us to do our work.

  “At worst, you and he worked together to kill Panossian and steal both his book and his face.” He tapped the fingertips of his left hand against the desk, sort of a tiny rimshot.

  “But I’ve been in and out of this police station all weekend,” Colleen said. “You cops searched my room, and now someone else is in the room so even if you found anything, it could be Armbruster! If I wanted to get away with murder, I wouldn’t have—”