Enrique and María returned to their apartment on schedule and Armstrong told them of his intention to remain in Mexico City a while longer. They noticed the curious melancholy in him, but did not question him about it in any detail. Nor would he have told them, even if prompted.
Armstrong moved out the next day, transferring his meagre belongings to a room in a seedy hotel overlooking La Calle de Bucareli. From there he was able to gaze out of a fifth-floor window in his cuartito and keep watch on the Café la Habana opposite. His remaining connection to the affair was with Felipe López, the man who had the mind of Lovecraft, and he could not leave without seeing him one last time.
He had no idea whether San Isidro was alive or dead. What was certain was that it was inconceivable that he attempt to make contact with him. Were San Isidro dead, it would arouse suspicion that Armstrong had been connected with his demise, and were he alive, then Armstrong had little doubt that he’d want to exact revenge.
Days passed, and Armstrong’s vigil yielded no results. There was no sign of López and he had no way of contacting him directly, no phone number, and no address. He was fearful that the Mexican police might call upon him at any instant, and scanned the newspapers daily in order to see if there were any reports mentioning San Isidro. He found nothing at all relating to him and recalled what he’d been told about the authorities having been paid off with blood money over decades.
When Armstrong left his room it was only to visit the local Oxxo convenience store in order to stock up on tortus de jamón y queso, Faros, y tequila barato. The last of these items was most important to him. He spent most of the time pouring the tequila into a tumbler and knocking it back, while sitting at his pigeon-shit stained window, hoping to see López finally enter the Café la Habana in search of him. All he saw was the endless mass of frenzied traffic, drivers going from nowhere to anywhere and back in a hurry, oblivious to the revelation that separated him from such commonplace concerns, and which had taken him out of the predictable track of everyday existence.
And then, twelve days after he’d rented the room in the hotel, he finally saw a slightly stooped figure in a grey suit making his way towards the Café la Habana. It was López; there could be no doubt about it.
López was seated in a table in the corner of the Café, reading a paperback book and sipping at a cup of coffee. As Armstrong approached he saw that the book was a grubby second-hand copy of Los Mitos de Cthulhu por H. P. Lovecraft y Otros. The edition had a strange green photographic cover, depicting, it appeared, a close-up of a fossil. López immediately put down the volume once he caught sight of Armstrong.
“San Isidro seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth,” he said, “I’ve been endeavouring to contact him for the last two weeks, but all to no avail. I admit to feeling not a little concern in the matter. Have you crossed paths with him of late?”
Armstrong could not take his eyes off the man. Could “The Sodality of the Black Sun” have succeeded? Was the creature that conversed with him now actually the mind of Lovecraft housed in the body of some Mexican occultist called López? God, what a disappointment it must have been for them, he thought. What irony! To go to all that trouble to reincarnate the consciousness of the great H. P. Lovecraft, only to find that after his return he denied his own posthumous existence! But why keep such a survival alive, why allow the existence of the last word on the subject if it contradicted their aims? It made no sense.
“I’m afraid,” said Armstrong, “that San Isidro has vanished.”
“I don’t see . . .” said López.
“Not all of Lovecraft came back did it? I don’t think they salvaged the essence, only a fragment. A thing with his memories, but not the actual man himself. Some sort of failed experiment. You’re the one who’s been leaving me those warning notes, aren’t you?” Armstrong said, interrupting.
“You presume too much, Mr Armstrong,” replied López, “and forget that I have not, at any stage, asserted that I believe myself to be anything other than the misguided individual called Felipe López.”
“That’s just part of the deception!” Armstrong said, getting to his feet and jabbing his finger at López, “that’s what you know Lovecraft would have said himself!”
“How on earth could I be of benefit to the designs of an occult organization such as The Sodality of the Black Sun if I deny the very existence of supernatural phenomena? You make no sense, sir.”
López’s lips had narrowed to a thin cruel line upon his face and he was pale with indignation. His voice had dropped to a threatening whisper.
Everyone in the Café la Habana had turned around to stare, stopped dreaming over their pipes, newspapers and games of chess, and paused, their attention drawn by the confrontation being played out in English before them.
“The Old Ones are only now being born, emerging from your fiction into our world,” Armstrong said. “The black magicians of The Sodality of the Black Sun want literally to become them. Once they do, the Old Ones will finally exist, independent of their creator, with the power to turn back time, recreating history to their own design as they go along.”
“You, sir,” said López, “are clearly more deranged than am I.”
“Tell me about the notebook, Lovecraft, tell me about your Dream-Diary of the Arkham Cycle,” Armstrong shouted.
“There is no record of such a thing,” López replied, “there are no indications that such an item ever existed amongst Lovecraft’s papers, no mention of anything like it in his letters or other writings, no evidence for . . .”
“Tell me whether history is already beginning to change, whether the first of the Old Ones has begun manipulating the events of the past?”
As Armstrong finished asking his question he saw a shocking change come over López’s features. Two forces seemed to war within the Mexican’s body and a flash of pain distorted his face. At that moment the whites of his eyes vanished, as if the darkness of night looked out through them. But then he blinked heavily, shook his head from side to side, and finally regained his composure. As he did so, his usual aspect returned. The change and its reversal had been so sudden that, despite how vivid it had been, Armstrong could have just imagined it. After all, his nerves were already shredded, and he jumped at shadows.
“I can tell you nothing. What you are suggesting is madness,” López said, getting to his feet and picking up the copy of the book on the table. He left without looking back.
Armstrong did not return to London. He acquired a certain notoriety over the years as the irredeemably drunk English derelict who could be found hanging around in the Café la Habana, talking to anyone who would listen to in his broken Spanish.
However, he was never to be found there after nightfall or during an overcast and dark afternoon. At chess, he insisted on playing white, and could not bear to handle the black pieces, asking his opponent to remove them from the board on his behalf.
TOM PICCIRILLI
Loss
TOM PICCIRILLI LIVES IN Colorado where, besides writing, he spends an inordinate amount of time watching trash cult films and reading Gold Medal classic noir and hardboiled novels. He is a fan of Asian cinema, especially horror movies, bullet ballet, pinky violence, and samurai flicks.
Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels including The Cold Spot, The Midnight Road, The Dead Letters, Headstone City, November Mourns and A Choir of Ill Children. A four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, he has also been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the International Thriller Writers Award and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire.
As the author reveals: “With ‘Loss’, I wanted to take some of my deepest fears and seamiest emotions and filter them through a tale so offbeat and darkly humorous that I couldn’t help but grin at the worst side of myself.
“Loneliness, jealousy, self-pity – they all rear their heads here. It’s easier to take stock of your character flaws and twist them into engaging, quirky source material when you’ve got a house fu
ll of the dead and a literate monkey in the mix.”
THE LAST TIME I SAW the great, secret unrequited love of my life, Gabriella Corben, was the day the talking monkey moved into Stark House and the guy who lied about inventing aluminium foil took an ice-pick though the frontal lobe.
I was in the lobby doing Sunday cleaning, polishing the mahogany banister and dusting the ten Dutch Master prints on the walls. At least one of them appeared authentic to me – I’d studied it for many hours over the last two years. I thought it would be just like Corben to stick a million-dollar painting in among the fakes, just to show he could get away with it. I imagined him silently laughing every time he saw me walking up from my basement apartment with my little rag and spritz bottle of cleaner, ready to wash a masterpiece that could set me up in luxury for the rest of my life.
And it was just like me to keep wiping it down and chewing back my petty pride week after week, determined to drop into my grave before I’d pull it from the wall and have it appraised. The chance to retire to Aruba wasn’t worth knowing he’d be snickering about it for the rest of his life.
I stared at myself in the buffed mahogany and listened to Corben and Gabriella arguing upstairs. I couldn’t make out their words from four flights away. He played the tortured artist well, though, and could really bellow like a wounded water buffalo. He roared and moaned and kicked shit all around. He used to do the same thing in college. I heard a couple of bottles shatter. Probably bourbon or single malt scotch. They were props he occasionally used in order to pretend he was a hard drinker. The journalists and television crews always made a point of saying there was plenty of booze around. I had no doubt he emptied half the bottles down the sink. I knew his act. I’d helped him develop it. For a while it had been mine as well.
Now Gabriella spoke in a low, loud, stern voice, firm but loving. It hurt me to hear her tone because I knew that no matter how bad it got with Corben, she would always stand by him and find a way to make their marriage work.
I kept waiting for the day when his hubris and self-indulgence finally pushed him into seeking out even more dramatic flair and he actually struck her. I wondered if even that would be enough to drive her away. I wondered if I would kick in his door and beat the hell out of him for it, and in a noble show of compassion I would let his unconscious body drop from my bloody hand before breaking his neck. I wondered if she would gaze on me with a new understanding then and fall into my arms and realize we were meant to be together. I often wondered why I wasn’t already in long-term therapy.
They owned the top floor of the five-storey building. They’d had a fleet of architects and construction crews come in and bang down walls and shore up doorways and put in flamboyant filigreed arches. In the end they were left with sixteen rooms. I’d been inside their place but never gotten a grand tour. I’d mostly stuck to the bathrooms and fixed the toilet when it broke. I imagined the library, the den, the sun room, the bedroom. I didn’t know of sixteen different types of rooms. Was there a ballroom? A music room? A solarium? I had a passkey to all the apartments in Stark House, even theirs, but I’d somehow managed to resist the temptation to comb through their home.
The other four storeys were inhabited by elderly, faded film and television stars, one-hit pop song wonders, and other forgotten former celebrities who’d become short-lived cultural icons for reasons ranging from the noble to the ludicrous. They were mostly shut-ins who every so often would skulk about the halls for reasons unknown or appear, momentarily, in their darkened doorways, maybe give a wave before retreating.
We had the guy who’d invented aluminium foil. We had a lady who’d given mouth-to-mouth to a former president’s son after a pile-up on 1-95 and saved his life. We had a performance artist/environmentalist who’d appeared on national television after soaking in a tub of toxic waste in front of the Museum of Modern Art twenty years ago. He was still alive even though there was only about forty per cent of him left after all the surgery. He rolled around the corridors with half a face, tumour-packed, sucking on an oxygen tube.
Corben shouted some more. It sounded like he said, “Radiant Face”. It was the title of his first book. He was going through his bibliography again. I sat on the stairs and lit a cigarette. The old loves and hates heaved around in my chest. I looked around the lobby trying to figure out why I was doing this to myself. Why I was no smarter than him when it came to bucking fate.
Our story was as flatly clichéd and uninteresting as it was honest and full of bone and pain. To me, anyway. Corben and I had been childhood best friends. We’d gotten our asses kicked by neighbourhood thugs and spent two nights in jail trying hard to act tough and be strong and not huddle too closely together. We nearly sobbed with relief the afternoon they let us out. We’d encouraged each other as neophyte novelists and helped one another to hone our craft. I’d taken thirty-seven stitches in bar fights for him, and he’d broken his left arm and gotten a concussion for me. We aced entrance exams to the same Ivy League University.
It was a righteous partnership that went south our junior year in college. We were both getting drunk a lot around then. It had something to do with an older woman, perhaps. I had the memory blocked, or maybe it just bored me too much too care anymore, but I couldn’t recall the details. Perhaps she was mine and he took her away, or maybe she was his and wound up on my arm or in my bed. However it played out it released a killing flood of repressed jealousy and animosity from both of us and we didn’t see each other again for thirteen years.
We settled in to write our novels. His career caught on with his second book, a thriller about a father chasing down the criminals who stole the donated heart on ice the guy needed for his son’s transplant. I liked the book in spite of myself. When it sold to the movies it became a major hit that spawned several sequels. He ripped himself off with a similar novel that dealt with a mob hit-man chasing a crippled girl who needed to get to the hospital within thirty-six hours to get the operation that might let her walk again. It aced the bestseller list for six months. Corben got a cameo in the movie version. He was the kindly doctor who sticks the little metal prod in the girl’s foot and makes her big toe flinch.
My own books sold slowly and poorly. They received a generous amount of praise and critical comments, but not much fanfare. I brooded and got into stupid scrapes trying to prove myself beyond the page. I couldn’t. Corben assailed me in every bookstore, every library, every time I checked the bestseller list. I wrote maudlin tales that sold to literary rags. I won awards and made no money. I took part-time jobs where I could find them. I delivered Chinese food. I taught English as a second language, I ran numbers for a local bookie until he got mopped up in a state-wide sting. I kept the novels coming but their advances and sales were pitiful.
There were women but none of them mattered much. I never fell in love. I wrote thrillers, I wrote mysteries featuring my heroic PI King Carver. I didn’t copy Corben but I was surprised at how similar our tastes and capabilities were. I thought my shit blew away his shit.
Thirteen years went by like that, fast but without much action. I lucked into the job as a manager/handyman of Stark House. I lived in Apartment “A”, a studio nearest the basement. So near it was actually in the fucking basement. It was the basement. I hadn’t sold a novel in almost two years. I kept writing them and sending them to my agent. The rejection letters grew shorter and more tersely formal as time went on. I’d lost what little momentum I might’ve ever had. Eventually all the manuscripts came back and I stacked them on the floor of my closet hoping I might one day have the courage to burn them.
Maybe I had been waiting for Corben, or maybe he’d been waiting for me.
We used to walk past Stark House when we were kids and discuss the history of the building. It had always accommodated misfits of one sort or another. There were rumours about it a little more cryptic and wondrous than the rumours about every other building.
In the late nineteenth century it had been owned by a family of br
illiant eccentrics who’d turned out scientists, senators, and more than a few madmen. A number of murders occurred on the premises. Local legends grew about the shadow men who served the politicians. They said the Stark family carried bad blood.
In the early twentieth century the place had been converted to apartments and became home to a famous opera singer, a celebrity husband and wife Broadway acting team, and a bootlegger who’d made a fortune from prohibition. They said there were secret walls. I searched but never found any. The place still called to life a certain glamour nearly lost through time. The wide staircase bisecting the lobby gave the impression of romantic leading men sweeping their lovers upstairs in a swirl of skirts, trains, and veils. The original chandelier still hung above as it had for over a hundred years and I waited for the day it tore from its supports and killed us all.
I knew Corben would eventually try to buy the building. I was lucky to have gotten in before him. Even his wealth couldn’t purchase Stark House outright. When he and I finally met face to face again after all those years, neither one of us showed any surprise at all. We didn’t exchange words. We shared similar blank, expressionless features. He must’ve mentioned something to his wife later on because I caught her staring at me on occasion, almost as if she had plenty of questions for me but didn’t want to trespass on such a mystery-laden history.
It made perfect sense to me that I would fall in love with Gabriella Corben virtually the moment I met her.
Upstairs, Corben screamed, “Wild Under Heaven! Ancient Shadows!” I never quite understood what kind of point he was trying to make when he ran through his list of titles. Gabriella spoke sternly and more stuff got knocked over. I heard him sob. It gave me no pleasure hearing it. Finally a door slammed and another opened. The corners of the building echoed with the small sounds of the lurking outcast phantoms slinking in and out of shadow. The old-fashioned elevator buzzed and hummed, moving between the second and third floors. I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, and she was there.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 Page 53
